Twenty-Two: The View from a Distant Star

The butterfly of yellow metal, Tam’s butterfly, is sitting on the table next to me as I write. I got it out about two hours ago, after one of those uncomfortable meals where nobody wants to say anything but nobody wants the silence, either, so each of us tried to say nothing in as many words as possible, and failed. Berry and I spent all day tracing cables, more to have something to do than for any better reason, and we found two more rooms full of machinery with lights on and the low hum of electricity doing something making itself heard in the air; we got back upstairs to find Eleen and Tashel Ban still hunched over their work, and the last meal of the day mostly ready.

So we ate, and tried to find something to say, and then I came here to the room Eleen and I are sharing and sat down to write. I knew it was time to tell the rest of Tam’s story, but all I did for what seemed like a long time was look at the blank paper and think about what happened, and remember what are still some of the best and worst times I’ve ever had. Finally, I picked up the pen and got ready to write, and damn if it wasn’t then that I heard footsteps in the hall outside.

It was Eleen, and if an alien from some other world had suddenly popped out of the computer and shaken her hand I don’t think her face would have been more astonished or more delighted. “Trey,” she said, and tried to say something else, and couldn’t; and then just said, “You’ve got to come.”

So I came. Tashel Ban was tapping in his precise way on the other doors, letting people know, so by the time we got back to the computer everyone else in our little group was either heading that way or already there. “You found something,” Berry said, which was what I was thinking too.

“If I ever ignore one of your suggestions again,” Tashel Ban told him, “swat me with a stick.”

Berry blinked, then: “The program?”

“That’s the one. There were about a hundred program files we tested, and one of them turned out to be a recovery program. So we’ve got our first readable text.”

“What does it say?” This from Thu.

“Have a look.” Tashel Ban waved a hand at the computer screen.

We all crowded around the screen. This is what it said:

28 Mar 2109
To: Executive Committee Members
From: Donna Katzhaber VC Security

Foley and Benedetti got back from Kansas City last night. A full report will follow after debriefing; the short version is that right now there’s no central government able to receive our report, much less do anything about it. Our covert team in KC has been unable to get anything detailed about the progress of the war in the southeast or the Japanese refugee situation on the Pacific coast; they’re running short on almost everything and want to return here while the roads are still open. We’re going to have to figure out soon how much of an operation we can keep going here without outside help, whether there’s any point to doing so, and what if anything we’re going to tell the SR team and support staff.

DK

I’d be willing to bet that every one of us read it through twice, except for Anna, who glanced over it, nodded, and said, “I knew the Kitzhabers.”

“Friends of your parents?” Tashel Ban asked her.

“I think so. I used to play with their daughter, before we left.” She didn’t say anything else. That’s the way her mind and memory work these days, not much more than the odd scrap of recollection coming up when something reminds here, though if I make it to her age and can still think and remember as well as she can, I’ll be glad.

“So what does it mean?” I asked Eleen.

“2109 in the old calendar, that’s just over three hundred fifty years ago,” she said. “The Third Civil War was going on then, so it’s no wonder they couldn’t find a government.”

“That’s the war with the three presdens?” Tashel Ban asked.

“Yes. The rest, well, we’ll see what else we can get out of the computer.”

“I wonder what the report was,” Berry said then. “The one the letter mentions.”

Tashel Ban glanced sideways at him, nodded after a moment. “I was wondering that myself. We may just try to find it next.”

“Not tonight, I hope,” I said. I was thinking about the haggard look on Eleen’s face.

“No,” said Tashel Ban. “No, not tonight.”

It wasn’t too much later that I got Eleen tucked into our bed and sleeping, but I had too many thoughts and memories running through my head to sleep, so after her breathing settled and slowed I crawled out from under the blankets and sat down at the table again. The yellow metal of the butterfly glinted in the light of the little pale lamp I turned on; after a bit, I started to write, since I had something to write about besides Tam.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to go on and tell the rest of the story, when most of it was just about the happiest time in my life. All that first rainy season we got together once or maybe twice a week, and when the rains stopped and it was time to head back out to the Shanuga ruins we said our goodbyes with plenty of tears and laughter. I missed her like anything the first month or so, but I was getting to be one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices by that time and had plenty of work to do, and so I didn’t have a lot of time to sit and fret.

For all that, I didn’t know what to expect when the clouds piled up again over Chanuga at the end of that dry season and we hauled our gear and our finds back to the house on the street with no name and got ready for the rains. Half of me was sure she’d come to the tavern where we used to meet once the rains came pouring down, and half of me was sure that I’d never see her again, and between the one and the other, I must have been one mother of a mess to deal with those last few days of work. When the rains finally came, I made myself stay away from the tavern for an hour or so, just to try to prove to myself that I wasn’t as tied in knots about it all as I knew I was, and then headed for it when I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. I turned the corner and just about bumped into Tam and Shen as they splashed their way across from the street outside the gate.

We were laughing and kissing right there in the pouring rain while Shen blushed and tried to find something else to look at, and about the time she gave up we drew back out of one more long kiss and headed into the tavern with Shen right behind us. Over three glasses of small beer we talked and caught up on eight months away from each other, and I did my level best to make room for Shen in the conversation, but it wasn’t easy; all I wanted to do was look at Tam and hear her voice and, well, I could go on but don’t really need to. They’d both filled out more than a bit, Tam more than Shen, and weren’t half so coltish as they’d looked the year before, so there was plenty for me to look at, too. Before they went back inside the walls and I went out into the rain, feeling quite a bit giddier than the beer would explain and got into a good rousing fight with some burners’ prentices, we’d made plans to meet again within a few days, and it was straight to the little rented rooms that time.

Not much had changed in her life, though her family had finally gotten around to noticing that she’d done her best to get a baby started, and gone from being angry at her to being sad and pitying, which irritated her even more. All through the rains that year, when we weren’t busy with each other’s bodies, she asked me questions about the ruinmen and what I knew about the people and the trades outside the walls, or spun fine stories about what she might do after her twenty when her life would be her own to make. Me, I had my own ideas about that; I knew that some of the misters in the ruinmen’s guild had women they lived with, with everything to make a marriage except the blessing from the priestesses you don’t get without children, and I’d begun to think about becoming a guild mister someday and sharing that life with Tam.

Her stories weren’t anything like so ordinary. She liked to daydream about adventures, going to Genda or Nuwinga, sailing on the sea, and yes, one time she spun a fine story about the two of us finding Star’s Reach and learning what it was that the people from other worlds wanted to say to us, although for the life of me I don’t remember what she decided that was. I thought they were fine stories, and I was still young and silly enough that it didn’t occur to me that there wasn’t a bit of reality in any of them. I knew, because she’d told me, that she’d wanted a baby, wanted the place in Circle that would have been hers if she could have a healthy child, but it hadn’t occurred to me that her stories were one of the ways she was consoling herself for the life she wasn’t going to get, though I knew perfectly well that I was one of the others.

But the rains ended, as of course they had to sooner or later, and we said our goodbyes with more tears and more laughter, and I went off to the Shanuga ruins again and spent eight more months digging and hauling metal and tracing cables. We worked hard that season, harder than usual, for Gray Garman’s luck landed us with a big heavy windowless building of concrete and stone and steel, and we tore it right down to its roots to get at the metal that ran all through it. Night after night I went to bed aching in every muscle, but we all ended the season with plenty of money, and when the clouds piled up and we hauled our tools back home I couldn’t have been happier.

So when the rains came, I went to the tavern sooner rather than later, and waited for Tam. I was still waiting a couple of hours later, and finally I couldn’t stand it and went outside and there was Shen, all by herself, huddled and miserable in the rain, trying to work up the courage to come inside.

I knew right away that something was up, but I took her into the tavern and got her a beer. She wouldn’t meet my eyes at all, just looked at the table and sipped the beer, and finally said, “Trey, Tam’s about to have a baby.”

I stared at her for a long time, realized that my mouth was open, tried to say something and had it come out like a gurgle or something. I guessed right away what had happened, of course, and Shen confirmed it: “They think it’ll come in a week or two.”

“Did she—” I wanted to ask if she’d had any other lovers, and couldn’t, but Shen caught what I was trying to say, and finally met my eyes. “Just you.”

Of course I understood what kind of a mess Tam was in. If word ever got out that the baby was fathered by a ruinman’s prentice, the old women in red hats would get together and quietly agree that Tam wasn’t going to get into Circle no matter how many healthy babies she had, and there would be sixteen kinds of trouble for her from every side as well. So I swallowed and nodded, and promised I’d say nothing to anybody. Shen told me a few more things, none of which I remember now, and then scurried back to the gate with a promise that she’d come in two weeks if there was news.

Those were the longest two weeks I’ve ever had. When they were over, Shen showed up looking even more huddled and miserable than before. I met her outside the tavern, and was startled out of my skin when she looked up at me with red wet eyes and asked if we could go someplace private instead of the tavern. That pretty much meant one of the little rented rooms, so there we went. Since there was nowhere else to sit we sat down on the narrow little bed, and then all at once Shen burst into tears. I put an arm around her to comfort her, and she tensed for just a moment and then went limp against me, clinging to me while she cried.

It took a while before she could say much of anything, but finally she told me that Tam had had her baby, and it was a fine healthy little boy. So Tam was in Circle, paraded through the streets to the Circle hall with her mother and all the other women in the family beaming and laughing along with her. Whenever she mentioned Circle she started crying again, and I held her and stroked her hair and only then realized what she was trying not to say.

“You could follow her,” I said.

She looked up at me then. In a whisper: “I’ve never had my blood come. And I’ve been trying to start a baby since before Tam.”

So I held her and stroked her hair some more. I don’t think either of us was expecting what happened next; still, we both had an empty place in our lives where Tam used to be, and as Plummer said to me more than once, human beings don’t have to make sense. Still, when we were done, Shen kissed me and thanked me, and then got a little bag out from somewhere in the wet heap of her clothes.

“She wanted you to have this,” she said. “She told me to tell you—to say that now you’re going to have to be the one that sprouts wings and goes into the world.”

I knew what it was before Shen was done talking, but of course I had to open the bag and look at the little yellow butterfly, and I did some crying of my own then. Still, I kept it, and that’s why it’s sitting on the table next to me right now.

Shen and I got together a couple more times after that, mostly because there wasn’t anybody else either of us could confide in, and then she went to the priestesses and became a postulant. I think she’d hoped that I might give her a baby the way I’d given one to Tam, but that didn’t happen, and with that door good and closed the priestesshood was probably the best choice she had. I got a letter from her a few months later, when she’d been accepted at the mother house in Nashul, and another about a year after that, when she’d been sent to her first posting up in Misota. She sounded happy in the letters; I hope she’s still happy, wherever she is now.

I wonder if either of them, Tam or Shen, will ever hear about me and about how I found Star’s Reach, and guess that the butterfly came with me. I wonder about the child I’ve got in Shanuga, who I’ll never see and whose name I went out of my way not to learn; I can’t think that Tam will ever be fool enough to let him know who fathered him. And I wonder why I’m fool enough to sit here late at night, when I could be sleeping next to Eleen. A few rooms away from me, there’s a computer full of messages from some other world, and if I were looking at all this from some distant star I’d probably not even notice the three little lives that got tangled up together for a couple of years, and the fourth that got started as a result. Still, Plummer’s right; human beings don’t have to make sense.