Twenty-Nine: The Other Side of the Stars

It’s been close to a week now since I last wrote down any of my story. That wasn’t because anything big happened, mind you. Tashel Ban and Eleen are still spending most of their waking hours trying to talk the computer into handing over everything it’s got about Tau Ceti II and the Cetans, and the rest of us are taking turns cooking and washing, running paper up from the bins on the deep levels, and then every so often running over to the computer and staring at some file they’ve gotten readable.

No, what happened was that I got distracted. I’ve mentioned more than once that I’ve been keeping busy spraying resin on the old world books about aliens we found here, one page at a time, and reading them pretty much for lack of anything better to do. The day after I wrote down what I remember about Tashel Ban’s story, I pulled down the last book on the top shelf. I’d left it for last, since it’s about three fingers thick and all the paper’s gone brown as Misipi water and frail as a bug’s wing. What I didn’t know until I cut the binding loose and went to work on it was that it wasn’t an alien-book like the others; it was a story.

More exactly, it was a mother of a story, a mother with babies and then some. I forgot that I was supposed to be spraying the pages so many times that I finally just gave up and read the whole thing through to the end, then read it again when I went back through to spray the pages I hadn’t done yet. Once I was done I showed it to Eleen, and her eyes went round; she’d heard of it, most scholars in her field have, but everybody thought all the copies had gotten lost around the time the old world ended. That happened to a fair number of books, and especially stories like this one. They were a particular kind of make-believe story set off in space somewhere, and not many people wanted to read about that any more when the old world was grinding to a halt.

Nowadays I think a lot of people would like it. For all that it’s set in space, you can just change a couple of words here and there, and anybody in Meriga with the brains Mam Gaia gave geese ought to be able to figure out what’s going on right away. The hero’s the son of a jennel, or close enough that the difference doesn’t matter, and there’s a bitter quarrel going back a long way between his father and one of the other jennels. So the other jennel, who’s got the morals of a Jinya pirate, works up a plot to get the presden to send our hero and his father and mother and their servants off to the deserts out west—well, of course it’s some other planet on the other side of the stars, but it might as well have been Kansiddi—where they can be ambushed and killed by the other jennel’s men and the Presden’s soldiers. Our hero and his mother get away into the desert, though, and meet up with the desert tribes the way we did a couple of days west of Kansiddi, and the story goes on from there. Of course the desert tribes here in Meriga ride horses instead of big worms, but it’s a make-believe story and you’ve got to make allowances for that.

Eleen’s reading it now. She probably ought to be sleeping instead, but that’s her call; in a little while she’ll doze off over the book and then I’ll get her tucked in and sleeping. I’d meant to write about how Berry and I left Troy and went to Skeega, and how we found out we were still being hunted, but just now my head is still too full of sandstorms and knife duels for that: too full of those, really, and something else besides.

This afternoon I finished reading the story the second time through, got all the pages coated with resin front and back, and tied them up in a bundle once they were dry. All the alien-books I’d treated and read were back in the room where I’d found them, bundled and stacked in a spare box I’d found; so they’ll be in good order when it’s time to pack them for the trip to Melumi. I didn’t put the story in the box, since Eleen wanted to read it, but I wandered into the room anyway and looked at the shelves full of books that were left, reading what I could off the spines. I thought I might be able to find another story, or at least something besides another alien-book. Before I got very far, though, I heard somebody moving in the hallway behind me, and looked back over my shoulder.

It was Anna. I said something friendly, I forget what, but she just looked at me for a long time, and then came a step or two into the room. “You’ve been saving those,” she said.

I nodded.

“Have you read any of them?”

“All I’ve treated so far.” I gestured at the box.

“What do you think of them?”

I wasn’t at all sure what to say to that, and her face gave me no clue; the wrinkles around her eyes might as well have been a mask. “I don’t know what to think,” I said finally.

She tilted her head and gave me one of her sidewise glances. “Good,” she said. “That’s a useful habit.” Then, after a moment: “May I tell you a secret? You’ll need to promise not to tell it to anyone else, though.”

That was tempting enough that I nodded. “Ruinman’s bond.”

Anna smiled, an odd slight smile I couldn’t read at all. “The secret is this: those books are the reason Star’s Reach is here. Well, part of the reason, but a very important part.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Will you tell me what the reason is?”

Her smile tightened, and I couldn’t read that either. “Keep reading, and you’ll find it,” she said. A moment later she was out of the room, and I heard her footsteps whisper away down the hall.

I stood there and looked at the door for a good long moment, and then shook my head and turned back to the books on the shelf. Despite what she said, I was still hoping to find a story instead of another alien-book, or maybe something else that would explain what she was talking about. It occurred to me that she might have meant that there was one book, or a couple of books, hidden in among the alien-books and the stories, that explained something or other about Star’s Reach or Tau Ceti II. So I pulled out a dozen books one at a time and flipped through a few pages of each, and every single one of them turned out to be an alien-book.

It doesn’t take more than a quick glance at a few pages to figure that out. You start reading and pretty soon you find something about aliens kidnapping people and doing things to them, or about a place called Roswell, or another place called Area 51, or—well, there are about a dozen things in all. It’s always those same things, and how the government’s trying to hide them, and sometime really soon the government will fess up or the aliens will land and then we’ll all know the truth. There’s never anything about gasoline oceans and rotten-egg skies, or creatures with a free-swimming ocean phase and an intelligent communal phase on land, and nothing we’ve learned about the Cetans makes me think they fly around in spaceships shaped like dishes, or that they got off their world at all, the way a few of us did for a little while back in the old world.

Still, wishing wasn’t going to turn the alien-books into stories about desert planets or anything else, so I took one back into the room Eleen and I share, cut the pages loose from the spine, and got to work. I could hear Tashel Ban pounding at the computer keyboard at the other end of the hall—he always sounds as though he’s attacking the keys, where Eleen types soft and quick so you can hardly hear her at all—and someone, probably Berry, busy in the kitchen. I tried to pay attention to what the book said, but mostly I sat there and sprayed pages with resin and thought about Anna.

She was the last one to join us on the journey out to Star’s Reach, and we didn’t even know she existed until we got to Kansiddi. That seems like a long time ago, though it was only a few months. We’d left Sanloo the day after Jennel Cobey and his man Banyon showed up, heading pretty close to due west on the army road from the Misipi to the Suri River. That’s a road that reminds you every step of the way that you’re nearing the borders of Meriga. You come up out of the Misipi valley where it’s all green and full of trees, like most of Meriga is, and the trees start thinning out as the land gets dry. Day by day, as we walked west and the pack ponies the jennel brought trudged along with us, the land dried out and the wind picked up. It was as if we were walking back in time, going back to before the rains came and saved Meriga from the long drought.

Finally you’re in desert, and then a while after that you come to Kansiddi. There’s a big fort there full of soldiers, since the desert tribes like to cross the Suri and go raiding for horses when they can, and the Meycan Empire has outposts off to the south, far but not far enough. Other than the fort, the stores and taverns and harlots and all that cater to the soldiers, and some merchants who aren’t supposed to trade with the desert tribes but do anyway, there’s not much to Kansiddi, just low brown buildings and dust and the Suri River itself, which is a mass of brown water and floating junk when the rains come and a long streak of mud and pools and mosquitoes the rest of the year. It really did come to mind when I was reading about the town on that desert world in the story I mentioned.

I’d have worried about getting through Kansiddi in one piece if we hadn’t had a jennel with us. As it was, all the soldiers took one look at Jennel Cobey and jumped as though Tashel Ban had wired their whatnots to a battery and thrown the switch. We went to the fort and talked to the cunnel there—well, mostly the jennel talked—and then we rented rooms in one of the two decent places in town. Other than a visit to the ruinmen’s guild hall Berry and I made the next day, we stayed right there at the tavern while the jennel’s man got the guides and gifts we’d need to cross part of the desert and not get our throats cut by the tribespeople. So there we were, even more keyed up than we were in Sanloo, and one evening I went down to get a tall glass of whiskey from the bar when I heard something like an argument out by the front door.

Even though it was one of the two best places in town, they had fights in the bar pretty much every night we were there, and I don’t mean people yelling at each other for a bit; they hauled a corpse out the first night we were there, after some soldiers got into it over a card game and were too drunk to take it to the circle the way they should have. So I didn’t pay much attention to the voices I heard out front, until I got close enough to realize that it was one of the big toughs they keep to guard the door telling someone else that they weren’t going to bother the jennel or the ruinman or any of those people. That meant us, and I was bored and curious enough to go over and see who it was.

So I crossed the bar from the stair to a place where I thought I could see the front door without being spotted, ducking around the tables and a few puddles of beer the barmaids hadn’t mopped up yet. About the time I got close enough to see that the other person was an old woman with a spray of white hair like feathers on the head of an eagle, though, she looked past the tough and in a voice I could have heard half a klom away said, “Ruinman, you’re trying to get to Star’s Reach. I was born there.”

The tough stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then started laughing, a big rumbling good-natured laugh, the kind you don’t expect to hear from somebody who makes his living knocking spare teeth out of unruly drunks. I walked over to the door, looked at her, and said, “Prove it.”

“I can’t, of course,” she said. “But there are locks there that only open to a fingerprint.” She held up one finger. “If they still work, they’ll recognize this.”

That caught my attention right away. The ancients had locks like that, and you find them in ruins now and again; of course there’s no way to get them open except with a pry bar, or maybe a barrel of gunpowder, because whatever fingers were supposed to open them have been topsoil for more than four centuries now. The thing is, next to nobody outside the ruinmen’s guild knows about them, the same way that next to nobody but ruinmen know about the kind of trap that almost killed me the day we found the letter about Star’s Reach. She might have found out about them some other way, but it made her story a little less unbelievable than I thought it was at first.

The tough turned to me. “Sir and Mister,” he said, “This woman, she’s old Anna, who does laundry and sewing for some of the officers up at the fort. If she’s from Star’s Reach, I’m the Presden’s one and only virgin daughter.”

That got me laughing, too. “Tell you what,” I said. “Upstairs there’s a scholar from Melumi who knows everything anybody knows about Star’s Reach. If this Anna’s lying, we’ll know right away, and you can chuck her out the door once we chuck her down the stair.” I turned to Anna, who looked at me with her head tilted just a little and a look on her face that might have meant anything. “And if you are lying, you probably want to turn right around and leave now.”

“I’ll gladly talk to your scholar,” she said, without a bit of hesitation in her voice. The tough shrugged and stepped out of the way, I motioned with my head, and Anna and I crossed the bar and went up to our rooms.

Everybody was there in the common room we’d rented except Banyon, who was still out getting guides, and every eye in the place turned toward us the moment they realized there was somebody else with me. “This is Anna,” I said by way of explanation. “She’s made a pretty remarkable claim.”

“What the ruinman means,” she said at once, “is that I was born at Star’s Reach. I hear you’re trying to get there.”

That got a moment’s dead silence. Jennel Cobey glanced from me to Anna to Eleen and back to me; the others looked at each other; Eleen looked straight at Anna and said, “That’s quite a remarkable claim. Would you care to say more about it?”

“My mother,” said Anna, “was a linguistic analyst, and my father was a software engineer. Both of them were E-6 technical specialists.”

Eleen’s eyebrows went up, so I knew the words meant something. “And you?”

“I was five years old when we left. We and a dozen others were the last ones to leave; that’s what my parents told me.”

“Can you lead us there?” This from the jennel.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long time ago.” Then she explained about the fingerprint locks, and I explained that that was why I’d brought her up, and then everybody started talking at once, asking questions and then not waiting for the answers, until finally I held up both hands and we got down to some serious talk.

That was how Anna joined us. There was still a lot we didn’t know about her then, and I wonder if there’s still a lot we don’t know about her even now. Or maybe just one thing: she knows something we don’t, or thinks she does, about Star’s Reach, why it’s here and why we’re here. If that’s hidden in the alien-book I sprayed and read and tied up in a bundle this afternoon, I didn’t find it; there were just more of the same stories about a place called Roswell and flying saucers and how sometime very, very soon the saucers were going to land and prove all the doubters wrong. Maybe it’s something obvious, but even so, it might as well be on the other side of the stars from me.