Twenty-Eight: Tashel Ban’s Story

“To start with,” said Tashel Ban, “it might help if I told you my right name is Dashiell Hammett Vanderlin, thirty-first of the name. Not that I go by that outside of Nuwinga, and only there with the right people, if you know what I mean.”

Berry’s eyebrows had gone way up at the name, and that and what little I’d heard about Nuwinga gave me a pretty good guess. I sipped whiskey and said, “Well enough to wonder what somebody with a name like that is doing digging up radio plans over here in Troy.”

He grinned. “Three older brothers, and every one of them has pupped their own brats. I don’t use that last word lightly, either.” He laughed, and so did Berry and I. “I could have gone to sea, or I could have settled down on our estates near Ammers and done the gentleman farmer, or I could have gone up to Lebnan to mix with the politicians and drink myself to death like my uncle Raymun.” A shrug. “None of those appealed much. So I went to Rutlen instead. That’s where we have our Versty, the way you have yours down at Melumi.”

This time it was my eyebrows that went up. “You’re short a couple of things that you’d have to have to get into Melumi.”

“True. In Rutlen, though, they let men in to study, if they’re of good enough family and pay more than I want to think about.”

I nodded and took another sip. Outside the window of the little room where we were sitting, the night was closing in.

“The thing is,” said Tashel Ban, “the Vanderlins have a habit of pupping oddities now and then. My great-great-aunt Aggie was a sea captain, one of the best, and sailors who wouldn’t take ship if there was any other woman on board would kill for a berth on the Flying Gull—that was her ship.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Berry.

That got him a glance. “A lot of people have. Broke up on the rocks somewhere along Genda’s north coast long before I came along, though of course the family has another by the same name now. But Agatha was one of our oddities. We had another who crossed over to the Arab countries, took up their religion, and tried to bring it back with him.” A little sharp shake of the man’s head; I gathered that the project didn’t go well. “We had another who took it in his head to go west to the Neeonjin country—I don’t think anyone knows to this day what happened to him.

“And then there’s me. I took an interest in radio, early on, though that’s not the sort of thing a gentleman’s son does in Nuwinga. Here in Meriga, you’ve got a radioman’s guild, as I recall.”

I didn’t know much about them, since that wasn’t one of the guilds that has to build its hall outside city walls, along with the ruinmen, the burners, and the other crafts nobody likes to be around. In Shanuga the radiomen’s hall is right in the middle of town, tall and narrow like a rich family’s house, and it’s got a whole forest of antennas up above the roof so the radiomen can talk to people all over Meriga. Still, guilds are guilds; the radiomen have their misters and prentices, and they’re just as closemouthed about their guild secrets as we are about ours.

I nodded, and Tashel Ban went on. “We don’t in Nuwinga, or not quite. With us it’s a government thing. You pass tests and get licenses; there are different tests and different licenses, and the top of them all is master radioman, which has a test they haven’t changed since before the old world ended. Last I heard there are a hundred twenty-six people in Nuwinga who’ve passed that test, and I’m one of them.” He sipped some whiskey. “And I passed it when I was fifteen years old.”

“So you’re good,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s not the point. What do you do when you’ve decided to put your life into radio work, and you get the thing most radiomen spend their lives trying to get before you’re old enough to grow a beard?”

That interested me. “You tell me.”

“I haven’t the least idea what anybody else would do,” Tashel Ban admitted. “Me, I decided that I was going to find out things that not even the master radiomen know, things that got lost when the old world went down. There’s a lot that nobody knows about radio any more, and I don’t just mean how they made chips—you know about those?”

I did. When you’re salvaging an old building that wasn’t looted too thoroughly during the last years of the old world, you’re almost certain to find electronics of one kind or another, computers or radios or other things that nobody even has a name for these days. Unless they were old when the old world ended, or made in the troubled years right before everything stopped, what’s inside is mostly pieces of stiff plastic studded with electronic things of various kinds, about half of them like square black centipedes with lots of metal legs. Those are chips. Most of them don’t work any more, and some of the ones that work are so complicated that not even the radiomen can figure out what to do with them, but if you get some that work you’re in luck, because nobody can make them any more and the radiomen will pay good money for them. “I’ve salvaged a fair number of them,” I said.

“So I’d guess. But there were ways of doing things, back before chips were invented, that could probably be done today if anybody knew how. Not just vacuum tubes—we make those, and I think you make them here in Meriga too, though there again there are a lot of tricks that have to be learned over again. There are layers up in the air that radio waves bounce off of, and they used to use those to talk to people on the other side of Mam Gaia; the layers aren’t the same as they were in the old world, and nobody’s sure why, but if we could figure out how the layers work now we could stay in touch with ships no matter how far away they sail; we could find out what’s happening in places nobody from Nuwinga or Meriga have been for four hundred years—plenty of other things, too.”

“I wonder, Sir and Mister,” said Berry then, “if it might turn out better for everyone if some of those things stay lost.”

Tashel Ban turned and gave him a good long look. “That’s something I think about,” he said after a while. “Along with the other master radiomen. Where do you cross the line between the technologies that help people and don’t hurt Mam Gaia, and the technologies that might lead us back down the road to the same mistakes the old world made? I don’t know the answer. I do know that radio’s a way to help people talk to each other when they can’t get close enough for voices to carry, and getting people to talk is a good thing much more often than not. So I’m guessing that figuring out more ways for people to talk over longer distances isn’t going to cross that line.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, but my mind jumped all at once from there to the thing I was looking for. “And if we’re talking about the distance between one star and another, do you think it’s the same?”

Tashel Ban was silent for a long moment. “I think so.” he said finally. “The same, and even more so. If it’s true—if they actually did get radio messages from somebody living on a world around some other star, whether they figured out how to read the messages or not—just knowing that there’s someone else out there, that we’re not all alone in all of the universe, sitting here on Mam Gaia’s belly in the middle of a great big dead emptiness where nobody anywhere else will ever think a thought or follow a dream or figure out something about the way the universe works, well, right there that’s something. And if there’s anything more, there again, it’s hard to think of a way that talking can hurt us.”

He downed another swallow of the whiskey. “But I’d give pretty much anything you care to name to be there when Star’s Reach gets found, if it ever does. It’s been well over thirty years since I passed my master radioman’s test, and I’ve found a few things and learned a few things since then, but I’d like to do one more thing on the grand scale, and helping find Star’s Reach would count. If you’ll have me, that is. I know this is a ruinman’s thing, and it’s also yours, if I’ve heard right.”

I nodded. “I’m not going to make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll keep that in mind.”

He considered that, nodded. “Fair enough.”

“The one thing I’m not sure of is how to find you, if it turns out all this leads anywhere.”

He gave me one of his owlish looks again. “That’s not hard. Get a letter to the Nuwingan embassy in Sisnaddi and they’ll have it to me soon enough; they know where I am.” Then, with an odd little smile: “I mentioned my uncle Raymun, didn’t I? The one who drank himself to death? He was presden of Nuwinga when he did most of the drinking. Our presdens don’t all come from one family the way yours does, but the job doesn’t stray too far, and I’ve had better than a dozen ancestors in the Gray House.”

We talked for a while longer, though I don’t remember about what, since I’d had a fair bit of Gendan whiskey by then, and then stumbled back to our room—well, I stumbled, at least, since Berry hadn’t had more than a few sips of the whiskey. When we got back to our room and the door was closed, I sat down on my bed and asked Berry, “What do you think of him?”

He was a prentice and I was a mister of the ruinmen’s guild, but by then he didn’t bother with the sir-and-mister business unless there was someone around who needed to be impressed by it, and I’d have laughed if he did it. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s likable enough, and I think he can be trusted, but I’d worry about what would happen if there’s a lot of the wrong kind of technology at Star’s Reach. He might not just stand by while we scrapped it.”

“If we get there,” I reminded him.

He grinned. “If we get there. I have to keep telling myself that.”

That night seems long ago and far away now, as I sit here in Star’s Reach and write these words that maybe nobody will ever read, and look up now and again to see Eleen asleep in our bed, after another hard day trying to get an old computer to give us the secrets of a world so far away it takes light more than ten years to get here from there. I’ve got my own printout of the briefing paper in front of me right now, setting out what the people here knew about the Cetans and their world two hundred years ago. I read it twice straight through when Tashel Ban finally got copies printed for all of us, and part of me just wants to keep reading it over and over again, until the hazy orange skies and brown oceans and the Cetans themselves are as real to me as Mam Gaia and her human children on this side of the sky.

It rains gasoline on Tau Ceti II. The Cetans need to keep themselves from drying out but they can’t go back into the ocean without breaking up into the couple of hundred plastic-sheet things that are their ocean phase, so they build pools and channels to catch the rain so they can bathe in it most of the time. That’s the first thing they ever built, they say, the way that huts to keep the rain off were the first thing humans ever built, and before then they lived in hollow places where the rain gathers the way we once lived in caves. When I was reading the briefing paper, both times, I stopped at the bit where it talked about that, and just stared at the words for a long moment. It’s a funny thing, that something that reminds me just how different we are from the Cetans makes me think of them as people like us.

We went from caves to huts to Troy Tower and Star’s Reach. They went from hollows in the rock to pools and channels to—what? We don’t know. The people here at Star’s Reach two hundred years ago didn’t know, though they’d seen something in one of the messages from Tau Ceti II that made them think the Cetans built something or other on a big scale. They certainly know how to build and power a radio as big as the one here at Star’s Reach, which is no small job. It’s occurred to me now and again that they may be smarter than we are, enough smarter to have missed making the mistakes that sent the old world to its end. Mind you, it’s also occurred to me now and again that they may be sitting in their pools of gasoline and wondering if we’re smarter than they are, and missed some troubled time in their history that we probably can’t even imagine. It’s the kind of thing that I used to wonder about when I was younger, and used to stare up at the stars and think about what might be out there; it’s almost frightening that now we’re starting to find out.