Twelve: The Way of Ruins

One of the things that makes this story hard to tell in a straight line is that it has a lot to do with ruins, and ruins don’t do things that way. They have their own stories, but they don’t tell them from beginning to end, the way that Eleen and Tashel Ban say I ought to tell the story I’m trying to write here. Ruins take their time; they know how to wait, seeing as they’ve had plenty of practice at it; they say a word here and a word there, and it’s pretty good odds that you won’t figure out what they mean by those words right away.

The ruin in Shanuga where I found the dead man’s letter and nearly got reborn was like that. It told me everything I needed to know to walk straight here, to Star’s Reach. Still, I didn’t figure out what it meant until I’d been to Melumi, and gone hunting in the Arksa jungle for a place that wasn’t there, and spent most of a year in Sisnaddi half buried in the old archives, and went looking for the Deesee I’d dreamed about, and all the rest of it. It took me all that to figure out that a single word I’d noticed and then half forgotten was the one thing I needed. Every ruin I’ve ever gotten to know has been like that, and Star’s Reach is like that doubled, tripled, and with whiskey poured on top.

If I’d had any doubts about that they would have gotten laid nicely to rest earlier today. We’ve been searching the whole underground complex here level by level and room by room, looking for the place old Anna remembers, where her mother and father and the rest of the last handful of people who used to live and work here had their living quarters, their books and records, and the old machines they’d managed to keep running or cobbled together out of old parts. As far as we can tell, the door where we got into Star’s Reach most of a month ago let us into a part of the complex that hadn’t had anybody in it for most of four hundred years, and it took us quite a bit of searching to find our way into the places where people stayed after the old world ended.

We haven’t found the place where Anna was born and her parents lived, not yet, but we found something else almost as important. There’s a big corridor on the fourth level, wide as a road, that runs most of the way from one end of the complex to the other; all the stairways either open onto it or connect to corridors that do, and the boxes the ancients used to go up and down from floor to floor when they didn’t want to use the stairs – there’s a word for those, but I forget what it is – those are all close to that corridor too. The first time Berry and I found it, we walked all the way to the end of it, and didn’t notice much of anything except the doors and corridors that opened off it. We must have walked down it again half a dozen times, doing a rough search of the fourth level to get some sense of where things were and to look for signs that people had been there in the last hundred years or so, and it wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back from the last of those that he noticed that the long blank wall along one side of it, toward the middle of the complex, had a little black screen on the middle of the wall, just sitting there doing nothing in particular.

He stopped and looked at it, and called me back to it, and it wasn’t until then that we noticed that the long blank wall had seams in it. I guessed what it was, then, about half a minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I tried to figure out where the door probably was.

Everyone else came with her, which I’d expected. Anna hobbled up to me, blinked at the screen, and said, “Yes. Yes, of course. I wonder if it will still recognize me after all these years.” She put her right thumb flat against the screen and rolled it back and forth a bit, and damn if the thing didn’t suddenly turn from black to green.

Then the rumbling started. I thought for just a moment that it might be an earthquake, and it certainly shook the corridor like one, but it was just old gears that hadn’t moved for a century or more. As we stood there and watched with our mouths hanging open, a section of the blank wall slid back a good half a meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side. Everything inside it was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked forward and found ourselves in one of the secret places of Star’s Reach.

The ancients had a lot of places like the one we entered, and no one, not even Plummer, has ever been able to tell me why. They’re like mazes, with flimsy walls of metal and some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get to them, going up about shoulder high; in every nook of the maze there’s a desk, and usually a chair, and if you’re lucky there’s an old computer sitting on or under each desk, or at least some pieces of one that can be stripped for the metal and parts. Sometimes there are other things too. Ruinmen love finding places like that, because you can break up the flimsy walls and take apart the desks and chairs and things without worrying about bringing the ceiling down on you, and the metal’s worth quite a bit even if there aren’t any computers left. What made so many of the ancients spend their days in places like that is another question, and one I can’t even begin to answer.

I didn’t have to wonder what the people who used to work at Star’s Reach were doing in their maze, though. It was a big one, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Shanuga; a lot of the computers had been stripped for parts, but the hulks were still there and so were the wires, linking each one to the others, and to dusty shapes on a table along one wall. “Printers,” Tashel Ban said; he went down the row of them, pushing something on them, and little red lights started blinking on the sides of a couple of them. Above the printers were shelves, and on the shelves were books of a sort; they were each a good six or eight senamees across, with covers on both ends, but the paper in the middle had been punched and fastened together with a bit of flimsy metal instead of being properly bound. That’s what we found out when Eleen pulled one down and opened it.

“What is it?” I asked.

She couldn’t say a word, just looked at me as though somebody had walked up behind her and hit her over the head, so I went and looked over her shoulder. I’d guessed by then what the books had to be, but seeing what was on the page was something else again –

DATE RECD 04232112

197606348 671934867 130486713 496710396 713673104 975132348 240618946 720394352 797062309 475102346 713949751 309486723 094896713 049571304 9867039475 246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 67049587 624390567 249567495 876340958 673098465 139048671 309844327 372348749

– and so on for page after page after page. Every page had DATE RECD and a number on the top, and I could guess well enough what that meant.

By the time I was up to noticing much of anything beside the page, everyone else had gathered around, and they were staring at the numbers with open mouths pretty much the way Eleen and I were doing. After a long moment, Tashel Ban turned and walked down the row of shelves and printers, pulled down another book, and opened it. “Same thing,” he said. “There must be a couple of hundred of them.”

That’s how we found one of the things we came to Star’s Reach to find, the reason Star’s Reach itself was built: the messages from some other world around some other star that came to the old world, our old world, right when it was falling apart. We might have found them days earlier or days later, but that’s the way of ruins; they choose their own time to tell you things.

We searched the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much else there, just the maze with its desks and stripped computers, and the long table with the printers and the books above it. Then we went back and checked every single one of the books – yes, there were a couple of hundred of them, 226 to be precise – to make sure they were all just the same strings of numbers, and none of the people who sat at those computers had managed to turn the numbers into words and read the messages. Anna says that she thinks they managed it, at least partway; that’s what her mother and father and the rest of them were doing, up to the time that they left Star’s Reach for good, but if that happened none of it got left there in the room we had found.

Eventually we finished searching and came back to the room where we’re staying. Eleen took the very first book off the shelf and brought it with her. She says she wants to try to figure out if there’s a pattern in the numbers, and I’m sure she’ll give that a try, but I think one of us would have brought one of the books back with us even if she hadn’t come up with that reason. You don’t come this close to the old world’s biggest secret and then just leave it sitting on a shelf, even if you can’t figure out a blessed thing of what it means.

Still, as I sit here at the desk in the corner of our room and smell dinner cooking, what keeps coming to mind are some of the other times that ruins have handed me a secret, and for some reason the one that I remember best just now is a place that isn’t a ruin yet, but will be sometime pretty soon: the archives down deep in Sisnaddi Core, where I spent most of a year. They’re in one big room filling most of one of the underground floors of Core, and it’s pretty dark because the light shafts from above have to come down a long way and there isn’t enough electricity for more than a few lamps, so it was easy enough, when I was there, to think that I was in a ruin.

I suppose I was, in a way. Everything they had in the archives, I found out one day, was what got gathered up from Deesee and hauled inland to Sisnaddi when the ice broke up in a place called Greenland and slid into the sea, and the seas rose fast and hard everywhere around the world. It was done in such a rush that everything got jumbled up together, and the archivists were still trying to sort things out when they weren’t looking things up for jennels at the presden’s court who wanted some bit of fancy stuff from the past to pad out a proclamation or the like. A lot of the books went to Melumi, but the records of the old presdens and their courts – or as much of them as could be gotten out of Deesee before the sea came rushing in – all stayed in Sisnaddi Core in that one big room, shelves after shelves of it reaching away as far as you could see.

I learned that because I’d already learned the way of ruins, and didn’t try to push the archives or the archivists to give me what I wanted right away. After I’d been at the archives for a few weeks, one of the archivists let me know in that quiet, offhand way of theirs about the little corner under a light shaft where people gathered for lunch every day. Every day there’d be a big pot of soup or something brought down from the kitchens of the presden’s court way up above, and after a big formal dinner there might be other things, pastries or cabbage rolls or what have you. One time down came a suckling pig without a single slice cut out of it, and we all feasted like dons in Meyco. There, sitting with the archivists and the handful of other people who were searching for something, was where I learned most of what I found in the archives; and when there didn’t seem to be any way forward after all, and I went to Deesee and finally found out the one thing I needed to know, it’s because I spent all those noon hours eating soup with the archivists that I was able to go to them and tell them what I’d learned, and walk out of there with the secret of Star’s Reach not three hours later.

That’s the way ruins are, and that was just as true of the ruin I should be writing about at this point in my story, the old empty nuke south of Lebna in Tucki, where Berry and I spent the night with Cob and his prentice Sam. For some reason I didn’t sleep well that night, and so at one point when I woke in the darkness I happened to hear Berry and Sam talking in quiet voices off in the next room. I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, and didn’t particularly try; there was another secret there, and you could say it was hidden in that ruin, but it wasn’t one that was meant for me. So I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. After a while I dozed off, and dreamed about Deesee, and Tam, and the ruins at Shanuga, and voices out of the night sky whispering words that nobody here on Mam Gaia’s round belly would ever understand.