Twenty: When The Rains Come

Nobody travels during the rainy months unless they haven’t got any choice in the matter, and even those that have to travel don’t get far. Once the rains start, most roads end up waist deep in water or worse, riverboats tie up at the nearest town and get covered with tarps to keep from getting flooded and sunk, and everybody who doesn’t live in a city core gets used to being soaked right to the skin pretty much all the time. If you’re traveling and the rains catch you, you stay wherever you are, with whoever else happens to be there, and you do what you need to do to get along; if that means a baby gets started or somebody’s life gets turned upside down, well, that’s what happens.

Still, I’d made plans, that first year of the quest for Star’s Reach, when I had no idea yet what kind of a mess I’d fallen into. I’d planned to get to Melumi before the rains came down, so that Berry and I could spend a couple of months learning everything that was known about Star’s Reach. I admit that was maybe half an excuse for wanting to spend some time at Melumi, which I’d heard about since I was almost too small to know what books were, but there was some reason to it, and maybe some hope; if the scholars at Melumi could figure out all the funny words on the letter I’d found, one of them might point us in a direction nobody had looked before, and then we’d be on our way.

The first part of the plan, the part that I’ve already written down in this notebook, worked fine. With some help from Plummer and Jennel Cobey, we got to Melumi a few days before the rains, and got settled into a couple of rooms in the building, the dorm as they call it, that they have for guests and visitors. I still had most of the money Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga, so the cost of staying in the guests’ dorm until the rains ended wasn’t going to be a problem; it turned out to be even less of a problem than I thought, because when I went to talk to the old woman who ran the dorm about paying, she told me that Jennel Cobey was covering it. I still tried to be careful with what I had left, knowing it might have to see us through a mother of a lot of travel before our search was over.

We’d been at the dorm maybe two days, and the sky was getting full of gray clouds, when a messenger came from the library to tell us that the translation was finished. Berry and I followed the messenger back across the big open square at the center of the Versty, ducking past scholars in gray robes and visitors staring goggle-eyed at the tall brick buildings, and ended up in a little room with a table and chairs and not much else in it. The messenger – she was a young thing, not much more than fifteen, with black hair pulled back tight from her face and eyes that looked a little frightened all the time – motioned for us to sit down and then left, closing the door behind her. A few minutes later the door opened again and Eleen came in.

I recognized her after a moment from our arrival at Melumi, and said something polite, I don’t remember what. She replied with something just as forgettable, and then sat down across the table from us and handed us a sheet of paper. This is what it said:

TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH
This was the highest level of secrecy; only people who were allowed to know about Star’s Reach could see it.

PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV 34
There is only this one page. It was sent on the eleventh of November, 2034, in the old calendar, late in the afternoon.

FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI
It was sent by a Jennel Burkert, who was in charge of (something about) talking with beings who live on other worlds.

TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF ORNL
It was sent to the people who were trying to talk with beings who live on other worlds, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was near Orrij in Tenisi.

1. (TS/SR) PROJ DIR LUKACS REPORTS EVAC COMPLETE FROM NRAO AND LANGLEY. ALL RECORDS AND STAFF SAFE. WRTF OPERATIONAL AND CETI INCOMING.
The TS/SR means the same thing as the Top Secret/Star’s Reach at the beginning. Someone named Lukacz, who was in charge of something, said that everything and everyone had been gotten out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which was in the mountains on the border between Jinya and Meriga, and Langley, which was close to Deesee and is now under the sea. (Something) was working and talk from beings who live on other worlds was coming in.

2. (TS/SR) POTUS/DNS/DCI ADVISED THAT PROJECT ONGOING DESPITE CRISIS.
The Presden and the two jennels who commanded Meriga’s spies had been told that even though there was trouble, the work hadn’t stopped.

3. (TS/SR) TRANSPORT FOR ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF TO FOLLOW ASAP. INSTRUCTIONS VIA FEMA/GWEN WHEN SITUATION PERMITS.
Someone was trying to get everyone working on that out of the place near Orrij and take them to (something). As soon as it was possible, they would be told what to do by a special radio system the Presden used when there was trouble.

CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E X4
Jennel Burkert ordered the message to be kept secret because it had scientific knowledge in it that nobody else was supposed to know. It was not going to be made public even after ten years because it showed how the Presden planned to deal with certain kinds of trouble.

TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED
Means the same as the first line. This had to be put on everything that was this secret.

I read through it twice, and then handed it to Berry. “Thank you,” I said to Eleen. “This is going to be helpful. Well, except—”

She folded her hands in front of her and waited without saying a word.

“The thing called WRTF.” Berry had already finished with the paper by then, and he handed it back to me. I took it, and tapped where the letter said ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF. “That’s where the people who were working on this thing were going, wasn’t it? That might be Star’s Reach, the place I’m trying to find.”

She tilted her head to one side, considering. “Possible,” she said after a moment. “It’s not in the books of acronyms, though.”

Back then I had no idea what an acronym was, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Is there any other way to find out what it means?”

“Maybe. It could take weeks or months, and there would be a fee, of course.”

That seet me back for a moment, and then I remembered what Jennel Cobey had said. “The jennel will pay for that,” I told her.

Her eyebrows went up, and I could just about see her move me from a box in her mind marked “scruffy young ruinman” to another, not too far away from it, marked “scruffy young ruinman who knows somebody rich and powerful.” After a moment: “Then I can certainly do that.” She stood up. “Is there anything else?”

“Well, one thing. We want to spend the rains reading as much as we can about Star’s Reach. Is there somebody I can talk to about doing that?”

That got another pair of raised eyebrows, and I went into a third box, this one marked “scruffy young ruinman who maybe isn’t as dumb as he looks.” “I can make the arrangements,” she said. “It will take a day or two to find you a cubicle.”

“That’ll be fine,” I told her. “And there’s another thing.”

She folded her hands again and waited.

“The word on the back.” I’d remembered it the day before, sitting in our room in the guests’ dorm and staring at nothing in particular while evening closed in. “The one in gray writing.”

“The word in pencil,” Eleen said. “Curtis. It’s a name, a common one back then. Probably the name of the person who received the message.”

I thought of the dusty room deep in the Shanuga ruins where I’d found the letter, and the dead man in the heavy clothing of an Old World soldier who was sprawled on the table next to it. Curtis, I thought, imagining someone calling him that when he was still alive. It all seemed to make sense, and because it seemed to make sense I didn’t ask the question that might have gotten me to Star’s Reach years sooner than I did.

She asked if there was anything else, then, and when I said there wasn’t, smiled and nodded and left the room, and before I could do much more than draw in a breath the messenger was back to lead us out of the library. So Berry and I followed her, crossed the square back to the guests’ dorm, and managed not to say anything to each other until we were safely in my room with the door shut.

There were two chairs and a table in every room in the dorm, all of them exactly the same, and all probably salvaged from the same ruin. I put the translated letter down on the table. Berry settled into one of the chairs and leaned forward. “WRTF,” he said, spelling out the letters. “I figured that out about half a minute before you said it, Mister Trey.”

“That that’s what we have to know?”

He nodded. “That WRTF might be Star’s Reach.”

“What else could it be?”

He glanced up at me. “Someplace they were going first, before heading to Star’s Reach.”

“Oh.” He was right, of course. “Well, we’ll hope it turns out to be Star’s Reach.”

He grinned. “Even if it isn’t, if we know where they went from Tenisi, that’s a clue, and there might be other clues there.”

That cheered me up a bit. I sat down next to him and we spent a couple of hours going over the letter and trying to figure out if it was telling us anything we weren’t hearing. Later that day I took the translated letter up the stairs to the top floor of the guests’ dorm, which is where rich and important guests got to stay, and spent an hour or thereabouts talking it over with Jennel Cobey.

He read the thing over, tapped one finger on the letters WRTF, and said, “That’s the key. We’ll have to ask the scholars to find out what it means.”

“Already done, Sir and Jennel,” I said. “The scholar I talked to said it would take a while—weeks or months.”

He nodded once, as though that settled something. “With the rains so close, that’s hardly a problem.” To one of his servants: “Creel, have somebody take care of the fees.” Then he turned back to me and started peppering me with questions about the letter and the ruins it mentioned; I was glad that Berry and I had been over it earlier, because I would have been pretty fairly lost otherwise. Still, when I went back down to my room I was about as pleased as I could be, and Star’s Reach felt almost close enough to touch.

The next day I had other things to think about, because the rains started. There were a few spatters on the windows when I first got up, and a couple more flurries a bit later on, but about an hour before noon the skies opened up and the rain came down in great gray sheets. Any other plans Berry and I might have had went to wherever it is that might-have-beens spend their days, for the first day of the rains isn’t a day to get anything done. We dropped what we were doing and headed outside into the warm wet air and the warm streaming water.

There’s about three hundred years of history behind that. After the old world ended but before the seas finished rising, there was a long time when most of Meriga was dry as an old bone. There were places where it didn’t rain a drop for years on end, and even the places that did get rain got just a bit of it, and not regularly enough to matter. It was a hard and hungry time, and a lot of people died. After that Mam Gaia decided that we’d taken enough punishment, or at least that’s what the priestesses say; the seas rose a whole lot more, and the rains came sweeping in for the first time the way they do every year now. Everybody danced and partied in the falling rain, so the story goes, and everybody still dances and parties the day the rains come, all over Meriga.

Everyone from the Versty was heading into the town, and we followed them. I don’t have the least idea what Berry did, since I did what most people do when the rains come; I let myself get lost in the crowd and end up wherever I happened to end up. In my case it was a string of bars along a narrow little street off one side of the Melumi town square, getting really thoroughly drunk on cheap whiskey and dancing in the rain with local girls who felt like being a little daring, or maybe just this once didn’t care that I was a ruinman.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a half dozen or so of the young scholars from the Versty came into whatever bar I was in, and one of them was Eleen. We danced, and then spun away with other partners, and then ended up dancing together again. She was about as drunk as I was, and not as good at keeping her feet, so when that dance ended we stumbled our way over to a booth over to the side, and one thing led to another. One thing fairly often leads to another on the first day of the rains, but to this day I’m not exactly sure how we ended up at a rooming house a couple of blocks away, in a narrow little upstairs room with a narrow little bed, going at it like a couple of cats in heat and then curling up around each other, wet and drunk and happy.

The next morning I held her head while she threw up into the chamberpot, helped her get something close enough to presentable to pass muster at the scholars’ dorm, and got her back there. I wasn’t in the world’s best shape myself, but we’d matched each other drink for drink there for a while, and there’s a lot less of her to handle the alcohol. Me, I dragged myself back to my room in the guests’ dorm, slept for most of the day, and woke up thinking that the thing with Eleen was just one of those things that happens when the rains come, over and mostly forgotten once the whiskey wears off. I was wrong, but I wouldn’t find that out for a couple of years, and both of us had a long hard road to travel first.