Twenty-Seven: On Gasoline Oceans

We did it. Well, to be fair, Eleen and Tashel Ban were the ones who did it, and they were just following a trail marked out by the people here at Star’s Reach a couple of hundred years ago, and what they did mostly depended on some others a very long way away from here who might or might not be people at all; but the thing is, it’s done.

I was hauling paper up from a storeroom on the seventh level when it happened. The paper’s in big metal bins down there, and you have to open a bin and then go into another room for a while while the inside of the bin airs out; the ancients used to pump bins like that full of nitrogen, to keep the paper from turning brown, and you can pass out if you breathe too much of it all at once. So I came trudging up the stair to the big room where the one working computer is, expecting nothing much, and found everyone clustered around the screen with the kind of look on their faces you see when people are watching somebody getting born or getting reborn.

I put down the paper and went over, and they made room for me. This is what I saw:

second planet of the system, about .71 AU from the star. The planetary mass is 1.3 times that of Earth, and Tau Ceti II thus has both a higher temperature and higher gravity than our world. We are still trying to interpret the Cetans’ description of the composition of their atmosphere, but a plausible theory is that it consists mostly of methane and hydrogen sulfide, with other hydrocarbons and noble gases making up the rest. Most of Tau Ceti II’s surface is apparently covered by oceans of liquid hydrocarbons, scattered with low-lying island chains, on which the intelligent phase of the Cetan population lives.

I suddenly noticed that my mouth was wide open, and shut it. A moment later, I managed to say, “You found it.”

Eleen glanced back over her shoulder at me, beaming. “Yes. This is everything they’d been able to figure out about the aliens by 2240—that’s about two hundred years ago now.”

“I think,” said Tashel Ban, who was sitting at the keyboard, “that there are other briefing papers, some older, maybe some more recent. The note we found earlier was from 2109 in the old calendar, and there was a briefing paper then, too.”

“I wonder what they meant by ‘the intelligent phase of the Cetan population,’” Berry said then. His eyes hadn’t left the screen for a moment.

“Let’s find out,” Tashel Ban said, and tapped the key that made the text scroll down.

Just now, as I write this, I barely remember what the rest of the briefing paper said. All of me that wasn’t struggling with unfamiliar words was caught up imagining a place that neither I nor any other human being is ever going to see, a place with hazy orange skies that smell like rotten eggs and oceans of gasoline, where living things that look like sheets of old world plastic slither over each other in the shallows and now and again crawl up onto the land, bunch together with a couple of hundred others, and turn into a creature with a mind that can send a radio message to us. That’s what the Cetans are like, or so the paper said, and it said something else I’m sure I remember right: they have just as hard a time understanding us and our world as we have understanding them and theirs.

We went through the whole briefing paper a screen at a time, came to the end, and then sat there, stunned, for a long moment. Finally Tashel Ban pushed his chair back from the keyboard, turned to face Thu, and said, “Anything there that’s too much for our agreement?”

Thu considered, and shook his head once. “Nothing.”

“Anyone object if I print out a copy for everybody?”

No one did, and he nodded and went to coax the one printer we’ve managed to get working into working through six copies of the paper without jamming.

I haven’t mentioned the agreement between Thu and Tashel Ban yet, mostly because the place in my story where they made it doesn’t come until a few months back. That was in Sanloo, where all of us—well, all of us but Anna, who we didn’t know about yet and who joined us in Cansiddi—gathered to wait for Jennel Cobey. We rented rooms in a cheap tavern near the riverfront, one of those tall narrow places that look as though they’d been crammed into not enough room between a couple of other buildings. We had a little common room, some sleeping rooms that were even smaller, three blurry windows that looked out at another tavern across the street, and a single lamp, and for most of two weeks that’s where we were, with three meals a day you could more or less risk eating, and our nerves stretched to the breaking point as we thought about what we were about to try to do.

We didn’t have anything to do but wait and make plans, we did a lot of talking about what might or might not be at Star’s Reach, and Thu and Tashel Ban ended up over and over again on opposite sides of the same quarrel. Tashel Ban thinks that people might be able to have some of what they had in the old world again, without hurting Mam Gaia in the process; Thu is sure that if people decide that they can do that, they’ll turn out to be wrong, and damage Mam Gaia the way they did in the old world; they both think there might be something in the messages from the aliens that might make that happen, some secret to making the machines work without the oil and coal and gas the old world used to make them work, but they’ve got opposite ideas about what that would mean and what we ought to do if it turns out that way.

They were in the middle of one of those arguments, about a week before the jennel finally got there, and their voices and tempers were rising pretty fast. Right in the middle of it I got out my pry bar and brought it down flat and hard on the middle of the ugly little iron table in the common room. Tashel Ban jumped at the sound; Thu stopped in the middle of a word, and just looked at me.

“You know,” I said, “that’s probably the tenth time you’ve both gotten angry about that, when it’s still empty breath. I want the two of you to agree right now not to bring it up again until—” I held up one finger. “—we get to Star’s Reach, if we do—” I held up a second finger. “—and we find the messages from the aliens, if we do—” I held up a third finger. “—and we figure out how to read them, if we can—” A fourth finger. “—and there’s something about technology in them, if there is. If either of you can’t agree to that, there’s the door.”

I could get away with that because the contract I’d made with Jennel Cobey for the sponsored dig was in my name alone, and either one of them might have tried to push back against me but they weren’t fool enough to try that with a jennel. After a moment, Thu said, “And if all those things happen, what then?”

I’d already thought of that. “Then the two of you can settle it in the circle.”

The room got about as quiet as an upstairs room in a tavern can get. That was partly because the two of them are probably pretty close to a match – Thu’s stronger and quicker but Tashel Ban has better training – partly because nobody was fool enough to think that it would stop at first blood if it went to the circle, and partly because it wasn’t just their quarrel; Eleen was pretty definitely on Tashel Ban’s side, and Berry was more or less on Thu’s, and I was somewhere in the middle trying to decide between the two. After what seemed like a long time, though, Tashel Ban glanced sidelong at Thu, sizing him up, and said, “That ought to work for me.”

“I accept as well,” Thu replied, with just a hint of a smile.

They’ve gotten to know each other quite a bit better since then, on the journey here and since then as well, and they’ve both been as careful as can be about the agreement. Still, I wonder what will happen if it turns out that the aliens sent us some bit of knowledge that could undo the end of the old world. The Cetans, I ought to call them, since that’s the name the people who were here before us gave them. The Cetans have a name for themselves, but the briefing paper says they talk with magnetic fields instead of sounds and nobody was able to figure out anything about the bits of their own language they sent us, so I don’t imagine I’ll ever know what that name is. The Cetans seemingly can’t figure out the first thing about our language either, if that helps any.

Tashel Ban is still printing out copies of the briefing paper as I write this. The printer has been jamming on almost every page, and I can hear him swearing even though he’s two rooms away. I don’t know most of the words; hot language in Nuwinga isn’t the same as hot language in Meriga, even though their language otherwise is close enough to ours that you can catch the sense of it most times. I’d probably know more, except that I’ve never been to Nuwinga and Tashel Ban’s usually more careful about his language than he’s being tonight. I don’t blame him. I imagine all of us want another look at the briefing paper, another glimpse of those gasoline oceans and plastic-sheet creatures, even if the best we can do is to stare at the words and try to picture something human minds aren’t made to picture.

Last night, when I wrote down the part of my story where Berry and I got to Troy and met Tashel Ban, I’d expected to go straight on to the rest of what we did in Troy in the couple of weeks it took us to find out that there hadn’t been a thing at Skeega that might lead us to Star’s Reach. As I think of it now, though, we didn’t do that much. Mostly, we dug through the old files and papers from the Skeega guild hall, which got torn down and sold for scrap metal a hundred and fifty years ago when the ruins on that side of Mishga had all been stripped right down to bare soil.

The one thing that happened that deserves more than that short a comment was that we got to know Tashel Ban, at least a little. He’d suggested that we talk about Star’s Reach, and I thought about it for a while and asked Berry for his thoughts on the matter, and decided to go ahead and discuss the matter, and see if anything would come of it. He was staying there at Troy Tower, just as we were; if you’re not a ruinman you usually don’t get to do that, but there are exceptions now and then, and people from other countries are one of them, if they’re polite and have a good reason to be there.

No other country I’ve ever heard of has the same kind of ruinmen’s guild we have in Meriga, though of course every other country has people who tear down ruins for the metal and stone and anything else valuable; in Meyco it’s the dons who do that, in Genda and Nuwinga it’s the government, in the coastal allegiancies it’s anybody who has a mind to try it, and if anybody knows how they do things over in the Neeonjin country it’s news to me. I guessed, though, that Tashel Ban might be with the Nuwinga government, since they deal with ruinmen in Meriga now and again; I was wrong, but as it turned out, not too far wrong.

Anyway, Berry and I went to talk to him one night after dinner, when the old ruinmen were sipping chicory brew and talking among themselves about digs long before my time and places I’d never been. We came over to where he was sitting, and after a few words, he said something about a bottle of Genda whiskey up in his room, which was true enough but mostly a way to get us someplace private. That’s how the three of us ended up sitting on salvaged chairs four floors up in Troy Tower as the sun went down, the fireflies came out, and a last line of pilgrims with candle lanterns cupped in their hands wove their way through the trees down below, headed off to the big shrine just outside Troy town where they’d doubtless spend the night praying.

“That must have been quite something,” Tashel Ban said. We’d been talking about the day I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins. “Whether or not it gets you to Star’s Reach.”

I nodded. “Whether or not. I’m certainly going to give it a try.”

“All you can do.” He leaned forward a little. “I’d be interested in hearing your plans, if you have any, about what you’ll do if you manage it.”

“I haven’t made any yet,” I admitted. “Figuring out if I can get there comes first.”

“Fair enough.” Then, after a long moment. “The thing is, it’s more than just another ruin, or it might be. By the time it was built, the ancients were using power cores, and up to their ears in eye-oh-see planning.”

“Eye-oh-see?”

“Interruption of continuity,” he said, and that’s when I realized he was spelling out letters. “That’s the name they used for everything falling to bits, except they thought it would all come back together again later on. The plan was to have everything they thought was really important set up to survive IOC for a good long time. They had quite a few IOC bases in Deesee and the other cities of the coast, though of course that didn’t work out very well once the seas rose, and some other things in allegiancy territory and other places where it didn’t do them much good. Still, Star’s Reach was probably planned and built the same way, which means it might not be a ruin.”

“Four hundred years is a good long time,” I said, and sipped at the whiskey.

“Granted. I don’t mean there’ll still be people there—but the machinery might still be working. It might still be possible to talk to other worlds, or at least to listen. And the radio gear itself—it’s going to be so far beyond anything we’ve got nowadays that if it’s taken apart, even if whoever buys it doesn’t just sell it for scrap, it’s a good question if anyone will ever be able to get it working again.”

That was the first time it had ever occurred to me that there might be more at Star’s Reach than cracked concrete and broken machines and maybe a few browned papers to tell us something about what the aliens were trying to say to us. I considered that for a long moment, until Berry broke the silence. “You said you were studying radios, Sir and Mister. Did you mean the kind at Star’s Reach?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’d drop anything else for a look at those. And if they’re anything short of scrap, you’re going to need a master radioman to do much of anything with them, and that’s what I am. You’re familiar with those?”

“Not at all,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment with that owlish look of his, then: “And of course you don’t know me from the next fool off the street, either. Do you have time to hear a little story? It’s my own, and it might make a bit more sense to you why you’d be better off having me with you if you ever find this thing, and why it matters that it might be more than a ruin.”

“I’ve got plenty of time,” I said, and looked at Berry, who grinned back at me. “Go ahead.”

He took a good swallow from his whiskey glass, and began.