Three: Stories to the Dark

I must have been eight years old when I first heard of Star’s Reach, for my father told me the story, and that happened not long before he was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. It was a night sometime in the spring of that year, and we were out on the porch of the little two-room shack where we lived then, my father, my mother and me, enjoying the cool air after a hot damp day and a dinner of rice and greens and a rabbit my mother snared that morning. My mother had her spindle with her, and her arm rose and fell as she drew cotton out into yarn for weaving; my father sat back in his chair and puffed at a clay pipe; I lay on my belly right on the edge of the porch and stared off across the garden in front of our house toward the dark soaring shadow of the forest and the stars above it. Fireflies danced between me and the forest, and I made believe that some of the stars had come down to hover and play in the still air.

My mother’s voice, high and soft, and my father’s, measured and rumbling, wove in and out of each other behind me. I had other things to mind just then, notably the fireflies, and so didn’t hear a word of it until my mother let out a sharp little yelp. That made me roll over and sit up, facing them.

“No,” she was saying. “Maddy’s boy?”

“The one,” said my father. “Came back to the farm yesterday evening sicker’n a dog. They had a doctor come out, and then a priestess, but he was already too far gone.”

“Do they know...”

“He’d been out to the ruins. He was babbling about Star’s Reach before he died.”

A long moment of silence went past. “Then it was his own fault,” my mother said, in a hard brittle voice that wasn’t like her at all. “People who go messing around in those places deserve what they get.”

My father said nothing. After a while I asked, “Pappy, what’s Star’s Reach?”

“Never you mind,” my mother told me in the same brittle voice, but my father said, “He’ll hear it soon or late, Gwen. Might as well be the true story, and not whatever lies sent young Calley off to die.”

She let out a sharp sigh, but did not argue. My father took a long slow draw from his pipe, let the smoke trickle out, and said, “The stars are suns like ours, just a lot farther away. They teach you that at school yet, boy?”

“Yep,” I told him; the priestess who taught us had said something about it that very week.

“Good. Those suns have worlds turning around ‘em, the way Mam Gaia turns around our sun, and in the old days they thought there were people on some of those other worlds. Not people like us. A-lee-in, they used to call ‘em: that means different.”

“Different how?” I wanted to know.

“That’s just it. Nobody knew. You know the spyglass Cullen has?” I did, and wanted one of my own desperately just then. “In the old days they made spyglasses big as this farm and chucked ‘em up in the sky so they could see the stars better, and even through those, the other worlds were smaller’n a pinprick. They’re that far away. But the people who live on those worlds, if there are any, aren’t Mam Gaia’s children. Maybe they’ve got purple skin, and eyes like bugs, and big claws to git you with.” His hands turned into claws and lunged toward me, and I squealed with laughter and rolled back out of reach.

“Back in the old days they tried all kinds of ways to figure out if there were people on those other worlds,” my father went on. “Finally, so the story goes, somebody figured that they probably used radios, same as we do, and started listening. Of course the other worlds are so far away the signal’s less’n a whisper by the time it gets to us.”

“Like the Sisnaddi station,” I said. We had a little crystal radio, and sometimes at night, if you jiggled the thing just right, you could just hear the big station at Sisnaddi playing patriotic music and talking about the news.

“Like that, but so much fainter you can’t imagine it. So they built antennas big as towns and radios bigger’n this house, and when those didn’t do the job, they built even bigger ones. Finally, just about the time the old world ended, they built the biggest antennas and radios of all, at a place called Star’s Reach, and the story is that they did it. They got a message by radio from one of those other worlds, circling one of the suns out there.” His gesture swept across the stars.

He said nothing for a long moment, and finally I asked, “What did it say?”

“Nobody knows.” He took another draw from the pipe, breathed out a plume of smoke that scented the night around him. “They got the message, the story says, and it got passed around to all the people they had in those days to figure things out, but nobody could work out what it meant. Then the old world ended and the lights went out forever and that was the end of it.

“But it wasn’t really the end of it.” His voice went low, and dead serious. “Because ever since the old world ended, people have gotten so caught up in that story that they’ve gone off into the ruins looking for Star’s Reach, hoping they can find the message and figure out what it means. And it kills them, the way it killed Calley. He must have gotten too close to something nuclear, and it poisoned his bones and his blood. There’s plenty of that, and plenty of other poisons that choke you or blind you or get in through your skin and leave you twisting like a half-dry earthworm before you die, and plenty of pits you can fall into and old rotten towers to fall on you and squash you like a bug.

“And here’s the thing. Nobody’s ever found Star’s Reach, or anything to show that Star’s Reach was ever a real place. It might just be a story. They used to tell lots of stories, in the old days, about those other worlds and what might be out there. The whole business about Star’s Reach might be one of those, and Calley and all the others who went looking for it and died were chasing something that never existed at all.”

“Wicked,” said my mother then. I turned to face her. None of us were more than shadows in the dim light just then, but even now I’m half sure I could see her shoulders and her face drawn up in hard unfamiliar lines. “That’s what they are, the ones who try to dig up the secrets of the old world. What’s dead is dead, for good reason, and there’s nothing good to be gotten from dabbling in the corpse.”

“I don’t see you turn up your nose at metal from the ruins,” my father reminded her.

“If the priestesses hadn’t blessed it first I’d do without,” she said. “But I’m not talking about the ruinmen. They’re doing Mam Gaia’s work, tearing down what’s left of the old world and selling us the metal so we can leave the trees to grow. It’s the people who won’t let the old world stay dead, those are the ones I mean. They deserve what they get.”

My father did not answer. After a while, I lay down on the porch again and tried to lose myself in the darting of the fireflies and the slow wheeling of the sky. It was no use; my father’s story would not leave my mind. A message from another world seemed just then to be written out across the night sky, blazing in starry letters I could never quite read. The fireflies had changed as well; they had stopped being stars, wandering or not; their pale gleam made me think of the way that the eyes of ghosts are supposed to glow, and then they were the eyes of the ghosts of all the people like Calley who died looking for Star’s Reach, looking up at the a-lee-in letters they could no more read than I. I shivered, though the night was warm enough, and tried to forget what my father had said.

I thought about that night and the pale ghost-eyes looking up at the stars that morning in the Shanuga ruins, as we stood staring at a piece of paper that everyone from the scholars at Melumi to backwoods farm boys like Calley sunna Maddy had been chasing after for more years than I could count. In the flickering light of Gray Garman’s lantern, I suppose we all must have looked a little like ghosts ourselves.

“Well,” said Garman again, and the moment passed. “Trey, you got some resin?”

The scholars at Melumi brew a resin that can be sprayed out of a bulb onto old paper, to keep it from going to bits. Garman taught me years ago always to carry some when searching a ruin, in case something written turned up that was worth selling. I pulled a bulb out of the sack at my belt and squirted the resin in a fine mist all over the paper. Pungent scent of the solvent wrestled with the dust and concrete smells of a fresh ruin, and lost. I turned the paper over once the resin was dull and dry, and was most of the way through spraying the other side—an even coat, not too much, just the way I’d been taught—when I noticed the writing there.

It was one word only, in the pale gray writing they made sometimes in the old days: CURTIS. I glanced up at Garman, saw no more understanding in his face than must have showed in mine. For lack of anything useful to say, I finished spraying the paper and put the bulb away.

“You got a choice, Mister Trey,” Garman said then. “One find from this room is yours by right, but this—” His gesture indicated the paper. “—is two. You can have it, or you can have the finder’s rights to what’s on it, but damn if I’m giving you both.”

The paper would be worth hundreds of marks, maybe more, to the scholars at Melumi, enough to set me up as a ruinman with prentices of my own. Finder’s rights might be worth much more or much less; they meant that if anyone followed the paper’s lead to a site, I had rights to a share of it. Among the better sort of ruinmen, it also meant that other misters would give me first shot at finding whatever the paper might lead toward, and start looking for it only when it was pretty much clear that I had failed. I knew which one I ought to choose, and I knew which one I wanted to choose, and damn if I could decide between them right then. “That I’m going to have to think about,” I told him.

He grinned and cuffed me on the shoulder. “You take your time. Mam Kelsey up top can make an honest copy, and that’ll be needed one way or the other.” To the prentices: “First of you to find a way out of here other’n that rope gets a mark.”

That sent them scurrying, and soon enough Berry won the mark by finding a half-hidden door into a part of the ruin we’d explored days before. From the other side, you couldn’t see it at all; that was common enough for the old shelters. Prentices around the campfire at night used to wonder aloud what scared the people of the old world so much that they hid so many doors and laid so many traps. They may be asking the same question around their fires tonight, though now I think I could give them an answer.

(To be continued...)