Eighteen: What the Wind Said

This morning I was putting my tools in order for the day’s work and thinking about the last part of the journey to Melumi when I heard running in the corridor outside the room where we’ve had our camp since we arrived here. It turned out to be Tashel Ban, and that made me sit up; like most people from Nuwinga, he doesn’t move any faster than he has to.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Found a door.” He was panting hard. “In the computer room. Stairs, and—a smell.”

I knew right away what he meant, as much from the look on his face as anything. Ruinmen get used to the smell of people who’ve been dead a long time, but most other people don’t, and it’s probably a good thing; these days, when you find dead people from the old world, what killed them may not have gone away.

So I loaded the last of my tools into my belt and put it on, and by the time I’d turned around to see where Berry was he had his belt and his leathers on as well. Tashel Ban gasped his thanks, still panting, and stepped out of the way, and Berry and I headed down the corridor. We didn’t run; ruinmen don’t run when they’re in a ruin, or at least those who do don’t live long enough to bother remembering; but I won’t say we dawdled much.

There were lamps burning in the computer room. Tashel Ban and Eleen had been working on what was left of the old computers, with as much help as old Anna could give them, while the rest of us kept searching for the place where the last people at Star’s Reach had lived and done their work. Eleen and Anna were both there, but I didn’t need to do much more than follow their glances to find the door Tashel Ban had mentioned. There was a big metal bookcase pulled away from its place against the wall, and the door was behind it, half open.

“We pulled down some of the books from the shelf,” Eleen explained, “and the shelf moved.”

“So you looked behind it.”

“So we looked behind it.” She smiled her quick little smile. “And figured out right away that it was work for you and Berry, not for us.”

“You didn’t go up there?”

“Not after smelling the air.”

I’d smelled the same thing as soon as I came into the room: like dust, but not quite, and with just a hint of old decay. “Good,” I said, and glanced at Berry, who was already tying on a cloth dust mask. “Let’s see what’s up there.”

I could have said a lot more, and so could Eleen, but there’s an odd thing that happens with us, and I think it happens with a lot of people in the crafts, ruinmen and scholars and soldiers and all of us. There are plenty of times when Eleen and I are two people who sleep together and are trying to figure out whether they love each other or not, but when there’s work to be done she’s a scholar and I’m a ruinman and we stop being much of anything else. So I put my mask on, and we went to the door; Berry got out an electric lamp and I pulled out my radiation counter, and we started up the stair.

The steps looked like they’d been cut out of the concrete long after Star’s Reach was built, but we still made good and sure the steps weren’t trapped with live wires, and we sniffed the air for the thunder-smell that tells you there’s electricity close by. There wasn’t, and the counter clicked slow and soft, nothing more than what you’d get from background radiation, which was comforting in its way. The stair ran more or less straight, and we’d climbed up more than a level, probably close to two, before we saw the dim gray light up at the top of it.

The stair climbed four levels in all, right up to the topmost level of the complex, and then opened out into a room, a large one. The light came from big skylights of glass block set into the ceiling. We looked around, and that’s when we saw the bodies.

There must have been forty of them, all laid out neatly in a row with their heads close to one wall. There wasn’t much more to them than skeletons and scraps of dried skin, and they were dressed up in old world clothing that would go to dust if you touched it too hard. I stared at them for a moment, and then scanned the room one more time for radiation and got out the poison probe. That went off at once – some kind of chemical toxin, not enough to hurt anyone unless they got stupid but enough to watch out for. On a hunch, I walked over to the bodies with the probe on, and had the needle swing left to right as I went; when I set the sensitivity high and put the business end of the probe close to what was left of one mouth, the needle slapped right over against the pin.

“They poisoned themselves?” Berry asked, his eyes big and round.

“Looks like it,” I said.

We searched the rest of the room, found two doors off it, and searched the rooms beyond them. No question, we’d found the place where Anna’s people had spent the last years of the history of Star’s Reach; there were bedrooms and a kitchen, and a big space under skylights where withered sticks in tubs of dry dirt showed where they’d grown vegetables. The room we’d found first had computers in it, a bunch of them, and other machines I didn’t recognize. It also had one thing more that we didn’t find until we’d almost finished: a heap of black ashes that had probably once been paper.

I sent Berry down to get the others. By then everyone else was in the computer room, and their footfalls came echoing up the stairs like the sounds you’d hear from a clumsy drummer. Eleen got to the top first, and let out a little cry when she saw the bodies; Tashel Ban swore under his breath; Anna drew in a sharp breath and then started to cry. Thu, who came up last except for Berry, was the only one who didn’t make a sound; he glanced at the bodies, then at me, nodded once and walked over to where I was standing.

We ended up hauling a couple of shelves from the computer room below and using them to carry the bodies half a dozen at a time to the nearest door that led outside. The rains arrived a couple of weeks after we did, and the gray dusty desert we’d crossed to get to Star’s Reach was all covered with flowers. A wind was gusting over the plains, pushing big masses of white cloud with it. We laid the bodies out decently beneath the sky. Since we didn’t have a priestess and Anna was still weeping, Eleen recited the litany for the last people of Star’s Reach, while the wind blew what was left of their clothing into dust and sent scraps of dry bone scattering out among the flowers.

Afterwards, when Anna could talk again, we sat with her in the room where her people had lived and died, and Eleen asked her what she remembered.

“I just don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long, long time ago. We left at night, I remember that; everything was dark, and my mother and I went with a few other people to one of the doors and sat outside, waiting for my father and one other man. It was a long time before they came back, and then we started walking in the dark. But I don’t remember much of what happened before that, not to anyone but me and my mother and father.”

She leaned forward, then, and stared at nothing any of the rest of us could see for a long while. Then: “There was shouting. Before my mother came and started gathering up my clothes and things, and telling me we had to leave. There was shouting; I could hear it down the corridor as I played in our room. That wasn’t something that happened, and I wondered what it meant.” Then, blinking and looking at us: “That’s all.”

Tashel Ban had gone to the heap of ashes while she was speaking, and came back then. “Paper,” he said, “and quite a bit of it. Unless something turns up elsewhere, that may be their records.”

“The computers might have something,” Eleen said without too much hope.

We spent the rest of the afternoon searching the rooms we’d found, or rather Berry, Thu and I did, with what help Anna could give us. That wasn’t much, though none of us could blame her. Not long after we started searching, she found the room that had belonged to her family, with things nobody had taken the time to pack scattered around, and among them a little stick-figure drawing of herself and her mother and father, with her own name written in a child’s block letters down at the bottom. She tried her best not to weep, but didn’t manage the thing, and even though she wiped her tears and came to help us search after a while, her thoughts were elsewhere.

Tashel Ban and Eleen were working at the computers all the while, figuring out if anything was left in them to read. We’d been searching the rooms for a few minutes when Eleen let out a whoop like nothing I’d ever heard from her. It turned out that the room still had power coming to it from power cores somewhere down below, and they’d been able to get one of the computers to turn on and the screen to light up. After that they were silent for a long while, except for muttered words now and again as they worked.

Meanwhile we found everything we were going to find in the other rooms, which was quite a bit as far as salvage went, but next to nothing that could help us in our quest. Anna’s people had taken what they could carry, but the dead ones left everything behind, clothes in the closets, pots and knives in the kitchen, tools next to the place where they’d grown their vegetables, and everything else you might expect fifty people to have in the place where they and their ancestors had been living for many years. One room had most of a wall covered with shelves, and most of those full of books with brown brittle pages and cracked covers that used to have bright colors on them; all of them came from before the end of the old world, though, and the papers we wanted to find weren’t anywhere among them.

By the time we’d finished searching I was about as discouraged as a man can get. It didn’t matter just then that I’d done the thing that every ruinman in Meriga had been dreaming of doing for four hundred years, and found the biggest and most famous ruin of them all; it didn’t matter that I could pretty much count on being the most famous mister in the ruinmen’s guild wherever I finally settled, and rich as a jennel besides. I wanted to know what the people from that other world had been trying to say to us right when the old world ended, and it seemed unfair after coming all that way and getting so close, to have those messages turn out to be long strings of numbers nobody could read, and a heap of black ashes nobody would ever read again.

I wandered into the place where Anna’s people used to grow their vegetables with those thoughts in my head. The skylights of glass block overhead let in evening light, and just then something, probably a big ball of tumbleweed, went rolling past in the wind. I thought about the wind blowing the dust of Anna’s people out across the plains, and all at once I realized that the wind was saying something.

They found something, it said. They found something in that message from the stars, and swallowed poison and died. Are you sure you want to find it too?

I left the dead sticks in their tubs and went back out to the main room. The others had gathered there already, following some call I hadn’t heard.

“They tried to erase all the computer files,” Eleen said, “but they didn’t know enough about computers to do it. It’s as though they had a library, and instead of burning the books, they just tore all the covers off the books and mixed them together so you can’t tell which book is which, or even where one ends and another begins.”

“But the pages are still there?” Berry asked.

“The pages are still there.” Eleen rubbed her eyes. “Tashel Ban’s going to try to get one of the printers to work; we’ve got plenty of paper in the storerooms and two cartridges that we think are unused. If we can get a printer going, we’re going to print out everything that might be a document, and try to piece them together and make sense of them.”

The wind was on the other side of the glass blocks and a mother of a lot of concrete and steel, but damn if I didn’t hear its voice, saying the same thing it said to me in the place with the dead plants. Still, I knew what my answer had to be, and I knew it was the same answer every one of us would give. Whatever it was that Anna’s people found, we couldn’t stop without finding it ourselves.