Nineteen: Daughter of Foxes

It’s been three days now since we found the place where the last people at Star’s Reach died. Since most of our work will be there from now on, and there’s no point walking half the length of the complex to get there, we moved all our things there from the room where we stayed since we first got here more than a month ago. More to the point, all of us but Eleen and Tashel Ban hauled bundles and boxes and kegs halfway across Star’s Reach. Eleen and Tashel Ban worked on the computer; they’re still working, and whether they manage to get it to talk to them will settle whether or not we came all this way for nothing.

So we shouldered the bundles and boxes and kegs, and tried to make as little noise as we could when we crossed from the stair to the sleeping rooms and kitchen through the big room where they were working. Late this morning we got everything hauled and stowed away, and after Thu and I cooked up a meal for everyone – it would have been my turn and Eleen’s, but we shuffled the schedule – Berry looked at me across the table, and I looked at him, and we decided that we had something better to do than wait there while Eleen and Tashel Ban worked and muttered.

We spent the rest of the day tracing cables. That’s something ruinmen do whenever they find bundles of cables running through a ruin, or the marks that show where cables used to run; if you know how to trace them and luck’s with you, they can lead you to metal worth salvaging and sometimes to things that are worth quite a bit more. We didn’t have salvage in mind, of course, but there were cables in bundles running from half a dozen rooms in the place we’d found over to a closet and then down through the floor, and that was a temptation not many ruinmen can resist. Me, I mostly just wanted to do something other than wait and think; Berry, once we were away from the others, said he thought they might lead to other places where records might have been kept, which made sense.

Still, there’s another point to tracing cables, which is that it’s a game. When I was growing up in the Tenisi hills, there was a game all the children knew how to play with stones. You set them out in a triangle, leaving one gap, and then move one stone over another to the empty space. Any stone you leap over gets taken out of the triangle; you can’t move a stone except by leaping over another next to it. If you end up with just one stone left, you win, and if you have more than one left, you lose. On winter nights, we used to play it by the hour. Tracing cables is like that, and the prentices I knew in Shanuga used to play it just as passionately.

I’m good at it, and Berry’s better than I am; I won’t say it was easy, but we won. It took us all afternoon to do it, and we nearly lost the trace when it dropped two full levels inside a concrete wall, but toward evening we scrambled down a narrow staircase eight levels down and found the machines at the other end. There was a whole bank of them, big consoles with switches and lights, and three of them were lit up like the one we found earlier: lit up and waiting, for what we still don’t know. Half the floor of the room was steel grate, and we could see further down the big gray cylinders the ancients made, turning out their steady trickle of electricity. There were a lot of them, more than I’d ever seen or heard of in a single place.

We searched the room, scanned it for radiation, and shone a light through the doors that opened out from it into other parts of the eighth level, and then started back up the stairs. We got back to the upper computer room, as we’d all started calling it, just about the time the evening meal was ready; we were winded from the climb but exhilarated, and ready to tell our good news to anyone who would listen.

As it happened, though, it was the only good news anyone had. Eleen and Tashel Ban hadn’t had anything like the luck we had, and whatever was in the computer was still tangled up around itself and impossible to read, maybe for now, maybe forever.

“There’s still some chance,” Tashel Ban said, gesturing with a piece of bread. He was sitting back, long and lean, in one of the big padded chairs we’d found scattered around the living area and dragged into the space we’d set aside as our common room. “The data’s in there, no question of that. The question is getting it out in some form we can read.”

“Were there machines to do that?” Berry asked. I gave him a startled look; the idea hadn’t occurred to me, and it sounded like a good one.

“There were programs,” Tashel Ban said after a moment. “I don’t think anybody knows how they worked. There are maybe fifty people this side of the oceans nowadays that can make a computer do anything at all, even when it’s in good order, and maybe five who can fix one that’s not working if the problem’s a simple one.”

“This is not simple, I gather,” said Thu.

“I wish I could tell you.” Another gesture with the bread, short and sharp, put a period on the end of his words. “Maybe something simple, maybe it’s not.”

“If there was a program that could fix the files,” Berry said then, “could you find it?”

I think all of us stared at him then. “I might,” Tashel Ban said after a long moment. “Maybe.” He didn’t say another word during the meal, either, just stared at his soup as though it was a computer screen and he could make the beans and salt pork spell out messages from the stars by thinking at them hard enough. Eleen mostly just looked tired. Once we’d finished the meal, they went back to work, and I went to the room where we’d found the shelf full of old books and pulled out out at random.

Its pages were brown and brittle and the cheap paper cover was going to bits, but we’d brought enough resin from Melumi to preserve a building full of books, and so I took it with me into the sleeping room Eleen and I are sharing, got a bulb from my pack, used a sharp knife to cut the pages loose from what was left of the binding, and squirted them with resin on each side as I read it. That’s the way you save a book, if you’re a ruinman and can’t be sure of getting the thing to a scholar before it crumbles away to nothing, and I told myself that that’s what I was doing. Now of course what I was actually doing was trying to keep my mind off the chance that we might have come all this way to Star’s Reach and gotten this close to the messages from the stars and failed, right at the last step, but saving an old book seemed like as good a thing to do as any.

So I sprayed every page front and back, and read it in the process, but I’d be lying if I said I understood the thing. It was all about people from other worlds who were coming to ours in ships that looked like a couple of plates stuck together, and how the government was hiding it, but any day now something would happen that the government couldn’t hide and there we’d be, and the aliens – I finally found out how that word is spelled, after all these years – would save us or something.

Any day now, I thought. I looked back at the page early on where it says when a book got made, and that one had been sitting on shelves for fifty years before the old world ended and ours was born. What do you do when any day now was five hundred years ago?

By the time I’d finished the book and wrapped up the pages for safekeeping, it was late, but I didn’t feel a bit of sleep in me. I pulled out the notebook where I’m writing this, but couldn’t think of what to say. I could hear the faint clatter of keys on the computer keyboard from the room where Eleen and Tashel Ban were still working. Then, after what seemed like a long while, silence.

Then footsteps, soft as the foxes she claims for her kinfolk, coming to the room. Eleen came in a moment later. “Trey? I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Any luck?”

“Maybe.” She sat down next to me on our bed. “Maybe. Berry might just be right.” She leaned against me; I could feel the tiredness in her. Then: “What did you find?”

She meant the book I’d sprayed and wrapped, which was sitting on a little table near the bed. “Not too sure,” I said. “One of the old books. Somebody saying there were aliens visiting our world back in the old days.”

“Flying saucers,” she said.

“Something like that.”

A little, tired laugh. “Funny. They’ve got all the records about that at Melumi. The old Merigan government made the whole thing up, so they could hide tests of airplanes and things they didn’t want other countries to know about. Every few years there’d be another round of them, and they always looked like whatever stopped being secret five or ten years later: round silver balls when they were testing balloons, black triangles when that’s what the planes looked like, that sort of thing. They kept it going right up until the old world ended.”

“Well, nobody told whoever wrote this book.”

“Funny,” she said again. “I wonder why it’s here.” The last couple of words weren’t much more than a mumble, and I just about had to undress her and help her into bed, she was that close to falling asleep right there.

Afterwards, when I’d written about the last three days, I sat there for a while and looked at her, wondering if she’s right and somehow, back in the difficult years after the old world ended, some dozen-times-great grandmother of hers really had married a fox and had whatever’s halfway between children and cubs. I thought about the long road we’d traveled to get here, and of course I ended up remembering how we first met, which was what I was going to write about next before Tashel Ban came running with the news.

It was when Berry and I got to Melumi the first time, of course, riding along with Jennel Cobey and getting a glimpse of what it’s like to live when you don’t ever have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. That started the morning after I’d met the jennel, when a couple of his servants showed up at the door of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall with horses for themselves and one each for me and Berry, and led us jingling and clattering through the streets of Luwul to the one big bridge that still crosses the Hiyo River. We met the jennel and the rest of his party there, close to a hundred servants and soldiers on horseback, and a bunch of horses with nothing on their backs but packs and bundles.

The jennel greeted me in what certainly sounded like fine spirits, then caught sight of Berry. For just a moment he looked about as startled as a man can look, and then smoothed the look off his face as though it had never been there, nodded politely and said a few words to me that didn’t mean a thing. I’ve never known anybody but Plummer who caught on as quickly as Jennel Cobey did, and I used to think that he might have guessed at a glance that Berry was a tween. These days I’d guess differently, but that belongs later in this story.

So we rode north through Inyana with the jennel. He had people riding ahead of him, so that every night we stopped someplace where there were beds and hot meals for the jennel and his advisers and officers and friends, which meant us. A couple of days when we were riding, he sent a servant to get me to ride up near the head of the line with him, and he asked me questions about the ruinmen and Star’s Reach; a couple of evenings when he wasn’t yet busy with the harlot or two that his servants found for him pretty much every stop along the way, he sent for me to join him at dinner. The rest of the time, Berry and I rode together well back in the line, had our meals with the servants and soldiers, and had a quiet room to ourselves wherever we stayed. It was pleasant enough, the way a dream can be pleasant, and felt nearly as unreal.

We got to Melumi late one afternoon more than a week after we’d left Luwul. There were big heaps of cloud looming up dark in the sky behind us, warning of the approaching rains, and a rising wind set the tree branches dancing. We’d been riding all day through Inyana farmland, and finally came to a little town no different from any of the others we’d passed, except this one was Melumi and had the big brick buildings of the Versty back behind it and women in gray scholar’s robes everywhere.

The Versty used to be bigger than it is nowadays. I learned that later, but when I first saw it I don’t think I would have believed it if somebody told me. There were six huge buildings made of salvaged brick—the library, the school, the offices, and the three buildings – dorms, they call them, though I don’t know why – where scholars, students, and visitors sleep and eat. We rode into the big paved square in the middle of it all, and while the servants and soldiers went to the dorm for visitors, the jennel and Berry and I rode up to the offices, got down off our horses, and went inside.

The jennel’s people had ridden ahead, of course, so the scholars were waiting for us. There were three of them, all with gray hair pulled back tight around their faces and lips pulled back tight across their teeth. There was a Versty official too, someone of high enough rank to chat comfortably with a jennel, and half a dozen junior scholars or senior students a little older or younger than I was, but it was the three scholars who mattered and just then they were the only ones I noticed. We exchanged a few words and then I handed the copy of the letter over to them, and Jennel Cobey startled the stuffing out of me by handing them the original as well.

We could have given them each a pound of gold or a dead rat, and I don’t think their faces would have moved any more than they did. One of them turned to one of the girls and held out her hand, without a word, and the girl handed her a hand lens; the scholar sat down and went over the original so slowly I think she must have looked at every fiber in the paper. The other two took the copy and read it, word by word, glancing at each other now and then; one would make a little nod or shake of the head to the other, and then they’d go on reading. The three of them were at it for more than a quarter hour, and then all of a sudden they turned to the official. Two of them nodded and the other, the one who’d used the lens, said, “Authentic.”

The official beamed, and handed the original back to the jennel. “Well. Not that we doubted your word, of course.” Cobey allowed a bit of a smile, but didn’t say anything.

“Can you tell us what it means?” I asked then.

All at once three pairs of cold clear scholar’s eyes were looking at me, with exactly the same expression they would have turned on the dead rat. After a moment, one of them turned to one of the junior scholars, and said, “Eleen, you’ll prepare a translation.”

That’s when I noticed Eleen: thin and bony, with lighter skin and redder hair than you usually see this side of Genda. She made a little curtsey to the scholar and glanced at me briefly with no particular interest, and then took the copy and left the room. I glanced after her, then turned back to the scholars and didn’t give her a second thought.