Twenty-Four: Whisper from the Sky

We were just finishing up breakfast this morning when something started howling above our heads, like a machine doing its best to imitate an animal and not quite failing. Thu and I were both on our feet so fast that the chairs we were sitting on went clattering across the floor, and then a moment later Tashel Ban jumped up, sending a third chair flying, and ran for the computer in the other room. I followed him. Something I couldn’t read was flashing across the screen when I got there; a moment later, as the others followed me into the room, Tashel Ban started pounding at the keyboard, and the howling suddenly stopped.

His fingers kept going at the keyboard for a while, and then he sat back and let out the little grunt that means he’s got something fixed. “What was that about?” I asked.

He glanced back over his shoulder at me. “We’re getting a message.”

I heard Eleen draw in a quick sharp breath behind me, but it took me a moment to figure out what he meant. “From the aliens?”

“That’s what it looks like.” He tapped a few more keys, and the screen went blank for a moment, and then things started appearing on it, one letter or number at a time.

DATE RECD 03192471
512160734 212396027 883760386 957860278 679386673 028671846 671690739 126820368 387316713 698036416 290569348 949037662 486768902 689037693 967386841 543759822

It went on like that for a long time, starting at the top and then marching down the screen, while we all crowded around and watched, and didn’t make a sound.

I’ve noticed that there’s a difference, at least for me, between what I think is real and what I know is real, and sometimes something slides from one to the other fast enough that you can feel the world flowing around it, like water in a river around the hull of a boat as it crosses from shore to shore. That happened the first season I went with Mister Garman and the other prentices to the ruins south of Shanuga, and the gray skeletons of the old buildings turned from dim shapes at a distance to real concrete and rusted metal that could make me rich or kill me if I got stupid; it happened the first time I was with a girl, and the morning not two years ago that I got to the top of that last ridgebefore the Lannic beaches and looked off across the blue rumpled sheet of the sea, and saw the Spire rising up out of the water, pale and stark and only a few hours from its fall, though I didn’t know that just yet.

It happened, too, when we arrived at Star’s Reach. We’d been walking since first light, knowing that if the maps and the records from the Sisnaddi archives were right we’d get to the site sometime that day. We were well into the desert by that time, with high thin clouds sweeping by overhead , flat gray sandy emptiness all around us, and the track of an old road leading us north of the old highway to the place we were going. When we got to what was left of an old metal fence, we all looked at each other, but there are plenty of old fences here and there in the desert and we all knew it. When we got to the remains of the second fence, with barbed wire on top of it and a gatehouse for armed guards, I started to let myself wonder if we might have found the place; but it was about a quarter hour later, when we got close enough to see the low blunt shapes of the antenna housings sticking up out of the sand like teeth, and found a door half buried in sand in a hollow too regular to be Mam Gaia’s work, that Star’s Reach stopped being a dream and turned into a place, a real place, right in front of me.

And of course that’s what happened, at least to me, as we stood there around the computer and watched the numbers march down the screen, as close as nobody’s business to the pages and pages of numbers we’d found in the computer room on fourth level. I’d been thinking all along about people, alien people, out there somewhere on another world circling another star, but there was a mother of a lot of difference between that and actually seeing a message that some alien had sent to us, tapping it out with its claws or whatever on something that probably wasn’t anything I’d recognize as a keyboard, and maybe looking up at the sky with six eyes and wondering what kind of weird creatures on the distant planet Earth were listening in. Even now, as I write this, the thought makes my head spin, and right there, trying to listen to a whisper from the sky that none of us could read yet, was like it must have been the day that people here on Mam Gaia’s round belly figured out that the world wasn’t safe and steady as they’d always thought, but whirled through space around the great burning fire of the sun.

The message went on for a while, and then stopped, and the computer printed out:

MESSAGE REPEATS – KEEP PRINTING? Y/N

Tashel Ban hit a key, and the words vanished; the numbers stayed there on the screen, like ghosts.

“Of course,” Eleen said. “They’ll have sent it multiple times so it gets through.”

“I wonder how long it’s been since the last one arrived,” Tashel Ban said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find that out.”

There wasn’t much else to do but wonder, though, so while Eleen copied down the numbers in a notebook, Thu and I went back to the table and cleaned up the breakfast dishes. Later on, while Eleen kept doing something at the computer, Tashel Ban showed Berry and I his way of tracing cables: not just following the wires, but tracking the signal going through them with a device he had. It had earphones and a box with dials on it, and let him hear what was going on in any wire he could get the box up against. With that, we traced the message from the aliens down to the room with the machines on the lowest level, and then up again, all the way to first level and through the roof to the antennas. There was a door to the outside not too far away; I’m sure they knew as well as I did that there wasn’t anything to see, but we climbed the stair and went outside anyway. The sky above us was mostly clear, with long curling mare’s tails of cloud drifting by high overhead. I watched them go past, and wondered what the alien out there who was trying to talk to us could see if it looked up at its sky.

We went back down, Tashel Ban got back to work, and since I had nothing useful to do, I took another book down from the shelf of old brown brittle books about aliens, and got to work on it with the resin. It was a lot like the first one, all about aliens coming to visit us in machines that looked like two plates stuck together, and a lot of angry words about how the government was hiding it all from people. I thought about what Eleen had said about that, how it was all something the government cooked up to hide things they were doing, and wondered what it had been like for the people back in the old world who thought the aliens were right there overhead but the presden wouldn’t admit it.

That kept me busy until dinner, and since Eleen and Tashel Ban went right back to work on the computer, I came back to the room Eleen and I are sharing and started writing. If we hadn’t had a message from the aliens come through, I would have started right in on the story of how Berry and I left Melumi at the end of the rains and headed off to Troy. That’s the next part of my story, but since we got the message from the aliens, it seems like something that happened to somebody else a long time ago, or something that happened to that six-eyed alien I imagined beneath its strange sky, tapping out a message to us with its claws and wondering about us the way we’re wondering about it.

Back then at Melumi, as the rains finally stopped and the sun got a chance at last to peek down through the clouds and find out what had gotten itself washed away this time, it didn’t feel that way at all. Berry and I still went over to the library most days, since there wasn’t much else for us to do until the roads dried out enough to be fit for travel, but I’m pretty sure he spent a lot of time staring past the books and thinking about Troy, Skeega, and the transport base we hoped to find there, and I know I did. We spent a couple of evenings with Jennel Cobey talking over what we’d found and what our plans were; he’d mentioned early on that he and his men would be riding to Sisnaddi as soon as the roads allowed, because of something political, but he wanted to know everything we’d found out about the base near Skeega. I told him, too; that was part of our Dell’s bargain, and I guessed – correctly, as it turned out – that he was going to toss some money our way to make the trip a bit easier.

Finally we had two weeks of clear weather, and one of he jennel’s riders came galloping back to the Versty late one afternoon to say that the roads were open and people were starting to move again. Berry and I had dinner with the jennel that evening, since we both planned on leaving first thing in the morning and of course we’d be taking different roads. “This is all very promising,” Cobey said as we finished up the meal. “I know it may turn out to be a dead end, but if you find anything...”

“We’ll let you know soonest, Sir and Jennel,” I said.

“Thank you, Sir and Mister.” The titles had become a bit of a running joke between us. He leaned back in his chair, glanced from me to Berry and back again. “I wish I could come with you. Digging for clues to Star’s Reach sounds a great deal more useful just now than tackling another round of political nonsense, but...” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, it can’t be helped.” Then, to one of his servants: “Creel, this glass is getting empty. You’ll fix that, I trust.”

By the time Berry and I got downstairs to our room in the guest’s dorm, quite a few empty glasses had gotten filled, and I was a bit less steady on my feet than I like. Still, we had packing to do, and got to work trying to fit too much gear and clothes into a couple of packs that didn’t have room for it all. We’d been at it for maybe half an hour, and I was starting to wonder if clothes breed when they’re left in a chest for too long, when somebody knocked at the door.

It was a messenger from the Versty, the same thin scared-looking girl who’d come to bring us to the library when Eleen finished with the dead man’s letter, back before the rains began. “Mister Trey,” she said with a nervous little curtsey, “if you’ll come with me. They’ve found something.”

That startled me. I turned to Berry and said, “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

He looked as surprised as I probably did, but nodded and said, “I can finish up here, Mister Trey.”

So I followed the messenger down the stairs, across the brick courtyard, and into the library. That late in the evening, it was dark inside, with an electric light here and there glowing pale as fireflies do before night finishes settling in. One of the little rooms off the corridor had the door half open and a light on inside, and that’s where the messenger took me; it was empty when I got there, but not much more than a minute after the messenger left me there, the door swung wide again and Eleen came in.

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” she said: a question, though it didn’t sound like one.

I nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“Then we were doubly lucky. One of the scholars happened across a stack of old government records from just before the end of the old world, and there was a reference in it.” She handed me a slip of paper. This is what it said:

Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility

“It’s west of Memfis,” she said, “in Arksa.” Then: “The records we found mention radio gear, a lot of it, being shipped there about two years before the date on the letter.”

I stared at her. “Radio gear. So that might be Star’s Reach.”

“It might, or it might not. But I thought you’d want to know.”

I glanced down at the slip of paper again, trying to fit a second WRTF into the plans Berry and I had made. “Yes. And thank you. You’ve been a good bit of help in all this, and I’m starting to think we may actually find the thing.”

She smiled, then all at once startled the hay out of me by throwing her arms around me and kissing me good and hard. “That was for luck,” she said then, “and this – ” She kissed me again.

If she’d stayed close against me much longer I might have tried to take things a good bit further than a kiss, but she pulled away then, and hurried out of the room without saying another word. I listened to her footsteps as they whispered down the corridor into silence, then looked at the slip of paper one more time, and walked slowly out of the library.

The stars were coming out as I crossed the brick courtyard, and I wondered if someday I’d have the chance to hear whatever it was that someone out there among them was trying to say to us. That’s happened now, and Eleen and Tashel Ban are trying to figure out if there’s a way to turn the rows of numbers into whatever the aliens are trying to say with them, and I wonder how many more things that I’d never expected to see might just end up becoming real before we leave Star’s Reach.