Star's Reach

Thirty-Four: The Things We Can't See

2012-01-21T21:05:00.001-08:00

Earlier this evening Eleen and I were in bed together, and talking. It’s been a while since we had the chance to do that or, well, much of anything else but sleep in the same bed. She’s been working with Tashel Ban day after day on the computer, as often as not from first light to late in the evening. The rest of us finally sat the two of them down two days ago and told them that it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if they worked themselves to death, and they agreed to take it a little easier.

Well, to be a little more precise, we made them take a couple of days off. Berry, who’s been learning how to run the computer from Tashel Ban, promised that he’d keep an eye on it in case anything happened, and the rest of us bullied the two of them into going to bed. I don’t know how long Tashel Ban slept, since he wasn’t the one I was supposed to bully, but I can say for a fact that Eleen didn’t do much yesterday but eat and sleep, and she slept pretty late today, too. During the day, since Berry was still standing guard over the computer, she spent some time with me in the room where all the alien-books are. Her idea, which I should have come up with myself but didn’t, was to go through all the books at once, and sort out the alien-books from anything else we found.

I figured it wouldn’t do her any harm to sit and read a bit, so I hauled books and we sorted them, and by the time dinner came around we had one really big pile of alien-books and another, much smaller pile that was mostly stories, with a few other things we couldn’t figure out. I put the books from the small pile on the top shelf, and all the alien-books on the ones below, so I’d be able to pick something different to spray and bundle up when the thought of leafing through one more book about Roswell and people being kidnapped and how the government was going to have to ‘fess up any day now was just that little bit more than I could take.

At dinner Tashel Ban and Thu swapped stories about Jinya pirates they’d tangled with, and everyone else ate and drank and hoped that we wouldn’t find anything that would force the two of them to take care of their argument the old hard way, knife in hand, in a chalk circle four meedas across. Afterwards we lounged around for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then Eleen and I went to the room we share and things pretty much followed from there.

Afterwards we lay curled up around each other, feeling warm and comfortable and not saying much for a while. I was hoping Eleen would fall asleep, because I was pretty sure she still needed more rest, but instead she shifted and said, "All those books about flying saucers."

"What about them?"

"I can’t help thinking about the people who spent their lives waiting for the aliens to land, back in the old world. There were millions of them, you know."

I didn’t, not until then. "The government had that many people fooled?"

"It was more than that." She moved, settled on her back. "There’s a thing called the Big Bang effect."

"That sounds fun," I said, and kissed the nearer of her breasts. She laughed and said, "Not that kind . In the old world, right up until a few years before it ended, scholars believed that the whole universe started out with a big explosion: the Big Bang."

I gave her a puzzled look. "How could that be the beginning? If there’s an explosion, you have to have something to explode first."

"I know. That’s what they thought, though, and they had reasons for it. Did you ever hear something go by you fast, making noise?" She moved a hand past my head and whistled, and the whistle dropped from high to low as the hand went by.

"Sure."

"That’s called the Doppler effect—the way the sound is higher in pitch when it’s coming toward you, and lower when it’s moving away. The same thing happens with light, and when scholars studied the stars, they found that the light from the stars is redder—lower in pitch—than it would be if they were still. So they figured all the stars are flying apart, like bits of stuff from an explosion. Do you see?"

I nodded. "But..."

"There’s more. There was also a theory about the way the universe was put together, written by one of the most famous scholars back then, a man named Einstein. There were many ways to make the math in the theory work out, but the simplest way only works if the universe is getting bigger." I gave her a baffled look, and she went on: "Again, think of an explosion. Something small gets much bigger."

"But.." I tried again.

She put a hand over my mouth. "And some scholars figured out that outer space had just a bit of heat in it, more than they thought it should have, and they decided that the heat was left over from the explosion. So everyone thought, well, the stars are moving away from us, and the theory of relativity works best in an exploding universe, and here’s the heat from the explosion—it’s got to be true."

She took her hand off my mouth, and I said, "But none of those proves that."

"Of course not." Then, smiling: "Why not?"

"Because something else could have caused each of those things."

"Exactly." She kissed me, then said: "If A causes B, and B shows up, that doesn’t prove that A must have happened—not unless you know for certain that A’s the only thing that can cause B. People forget that. They forget it all the faster if A can cause B, and C, and D, and all three of those things show up—it’s easy to think that A’s got to be the cause. If things come up that don’t fit the model,people don’t weigh things evenly; they don’t say, B and C and D suggest that A happened, but E and F and G and H suggest that it didn’t. They take each piece of contrary evidence one at a time: here’s E, but E by itself doesn’t outweigh B and C and D, and neither does F by itself, and so on. So you can end up with far more evidence against a theory than for it, but nobody notices, because they’re taking the evidence for the theory all together, and the evidence against the theory as though each piece stands all by itself. That’s what scholars nowadays call the Big Bang effect."

"So how did they figure out that the Big Bang didn’t happen?"

"Somebody figured out that there’s another effect that makes starlight look redder when it comes from further away. It wasn’t the Doppler effect after all. Then somebody else took a second look at Einstein’s theory, and it turned out that some puzzles that nobody had been able to solve were easy to work out once you realized the universe wasn’t getting bigger. The heat had other explanations, too, but nobody had time to figure out which was right, because that’s as far as they got when the old world ended."

"There must have been a mother of a lot of embarrassed scholars."

"It was much worse than that." Her face went somber. "The Big Bang was the foundation of most of what had been worked out in half a dozen sciences. People spent their entire lives working on theories that depended on it—and suddenly there they were. I don’t think any of them killed themselves, but there were scholars who kept on insisting that it was all wrong and the Big Bang was real until they went back into Mam Gaia’s belly. It was that or admit that they’d wasted their lives."

I’d realized a while earlier where she was going with all this. "And the people who believed in the aliens, they made the same kind of mistake."

"Yes, but there was even more reason for them to make it. I was taught that the people who believed in flying saucers thought the aliens were about to land and solve all our problems for us. When the old world was ending, most people hoped that something like that would happen—that somebody would somehow fix everything, so that the old world didn’t have to end. So every light in the sky, and every story about—what was that place in the desert?"

"Roswell."

"Yes. Every story about Roswell, every faked picture and faked sighting the government put into circulation, and everything else, had to add up to aliens visiting Mam Gaia, or the last scrap of hope they had was gone." She shook her head. "So they waited, and waited, and waited, and the flying saucers never landed. For all I know some of them are still waiting, the way the Old Believers wait for their god to come back."

I thought I could name at least one who was still waiting for the aliens, but right then Eleen turned to face me and reached for me. "Waiting?" she asked.

"Not any more," I told her, and I didn’t, either.

Afterwards, we curled up again, and a little after that she fell asleep. I waited until I was sure she was good and deep, then slipped out of bed and got some clothes back on.

The hallway outside the room we share was as hushed as it must have been in the years between when Anna’s people left it and when we arrived. I closed the door as quietly as I could and went down to the room where the alien-books were. It was dark and empty. I turned on the light, and noticed that there was a gap in one of the shelves where I’d put the alien-books earlier that day. It was just about wide enough for one large book. I looked at the gap for a moment, and wondered who else was reading about aliens—Anna, or one of the others?

After a bit, I pulled down one of the stories from the top shelf and tried to read it. It was another of those make-believe stories set on other worlds, like the one with the worms I mentioned a while back; this one was about someone who figured out how to predict the future, and the future he saw coming was the fall of an empire like Meyco’s, except this one covered the whole galaxy. It was a good story, too, and I’ll go back and read it tomorrow, but just then my mind kept on wandering off and I finally put the book down and just sat there on the floor with my chin in one hand.

I was thinking about Eleen—about how we met, which I’ve already written about, and how we met again in Sisnaddi after I’d come back from the Lannic shore where I’d found the one thing I needed to know to find Star’s Reach and watched the Spire fall and run for my life from the wave that came after it. I’d come back along the same road through the mountains, past Cumlun and Pisba and then down the Hiyo to Sisnaddi, every step of the way on foot because all the money I had in the world just then was barely enough to keep me fed, never mind pay my fare on a riverboat.

The ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi isn’t part of Sisnaddi Core, of course. It’s a bunch of big shapes like mushrooms that rise up out of the tumble of buildings west of Core where the chemists, the burners, and the other guilds nobody lets inside the city walls live and do their work. What that meant is that I walked all the way around Core to get to the ruinmen’s hall, signed myself in, put up with the pitying looks from the old ruinmen there who were sure I was wasting my life chasing Star’s Reach, and went to the big west doors of Core just as soon as I’d washed up and gotten something to eat. Not three hours later I was back out the west doors of Core with a scrap of paper in my pocket that told me where Star’s Reach was and how I was going to get there.

I could have gone back to the ruinmen’s hall and showed it to the old men there, but I knew they wouldn’t believe I’d found anything that mattered, so I went to the big tavern right outside the west door with every intention of spending the last of my money getting thoroughly drunk. They probably would have had to carry me back to the ruinmen’s hall that night, too, except that I walked in the door and nodded to the barmaid and found myself staring straight at Eleen, who was sitting over by the side of the room at a little table with a glass of cheap whiskey in front of her and a look on her face that told me everything I needed to know right away.

After I got over the surprise of seeing her, I went over and stood in front of the table until she noticed me and looked up. She didn’t say anything at all, not at first, just looked at me.

"Mind if I join you?" I asked.

That got me a smile. "Not at all." She waved at the chair across the table from her.

She was still wearing a scholar’s gray robe, but the only reason a scholar from Melumi would be in a cheap tavern in Sisnaddi was if she’d failed and been sent away. I knew that, and she knew I knew it, and so neither of us had to say anything about it at first, which was probably for the best. "Did you have any luck finding Star’s Reach?" she asked.

"Not yet." I wasn’t ready to tell her about what I’d just learned. "Both the places you found for me turned up empty—not that that’s your fault."

"Thank you for saying that." She tilted her head, considering me. "Are you still looking for it?"

"Not bright enough to quit," I told her.

That got a laugh, and she reached past her drink with both hands, and took hold of mine. "Good."

So I got a glass of whiskey to match hers; I got a little drunk and she got a little more drunk, and talked about nothing in particular, and the end of it all was that I didn’t get back to the ruinmen’s hall that night. We stumbled up the stairs to the sleeping room she’d hired with the last of the money they’d given her when she left Melumi, and spent that evening pretty much the same way we spent this one.

The next morning, I told her about what I’d learned in drowned Deesee and what I’d found in the archives, and said, "I’m going to need a scholar to come there with me, and I’d like it to be you."

She thought about that for a moment. Then, bitterly: "I’m a failed scholar."

"That’s what ruinmen always hire."

She blinked, and then straightened a little. "I didn’t know that."

"It’s not like scholars who are still in the Versty will camp with us in the ruins, you know."

She blinked again, and I could just about see her thinking through what it meant to have a place in the world again, not to mention work that could pay her keep and maybe a lot more. "I suppose not." Then: "Trey, if you’re willing to take me, I’ll go. I’ll go anywhere." She put her arms around me. "Among other things, you’re good to spend time with, you know."

Of course I kissed her then, and since she wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I, things went pretty much the way you’d expect from there.

We’ve been together ever since then, all through the months of negotiating with Jennel Cobey, getting in touch with the others in our party, traveling west, getting here, surviving those last horrible moments out in front of the door, and then doing what we came here to do. Even now, though, I’m not sure whether we love each other or whether we were just two lonely people who needed each other for more reasons than one. I can point to B and C and D, that’s for sure, but is A what’s behind them all, or something else? The priestesses say that behind the things we see there’s another world we can’t see, and everything here is like a shadow or a reflection of something there. Maybe they’re right, but sometimes I wonder whether there can be anything in that other world that’s harder to see than the inside of another person’s heart.

Thirty-Three: In The Stream Of Time

2011-12-26T05:10:00.000-08:00

When you’re a farm boy growing up in the Tenisi hills and you think of riverboats going up and down the Misipi, one of the words that comes to mind is fast. There’s plenty of reason for that; riverboats are the fastest things people have in Meriga these days, barring a lake schooner or a big square-rigged merchant ship with a good wind helping out, and when you’ve walked along the banks of the Misipi and watched one riverboat after another show up out of the distance behind you, roll right on upstream past you, and vanish in the distance ahead, it’s hard to think of them as slow.

When you’re on board a plain working boat, though, it’s hard to keep that in mind, because you don’t spend much time racing along with the current. Certainly we didn’t do much of that on the way to Memfis. Every few hours through the day, some little town came into sight, the Jennel Mornay puffed up to the levee and sat there for a good long while as things got offloaded and a few people clattered down the landing stage, and then bales and barrels and sacks got hauled on board by the roustabouts to go downriver to Sanloo or Memfis. Once that was done, it was back out into the river, but that still meant that maybe one hour in three went into pulling up to the levee, pulling away from the levee, or sitting there with nobody but the roustabouts doing much of anything at all.

Come evening, whatever little town came next was where we stopped for the night. They say that riverboats used to travel by night a long time ago, but these days there’s too much danger from snags and sandbars. A good pilot might risk a night run when the moon’s full and there’s money to be made, but usually the risk’s not worth taking, and so come evening the boats tie up at the nearest town. The ship’s officers eat dinner in the main cabin with the passengers who can afford cabin fare, the crew eats down on the main deck with the passengers who can’t, and everybody but whoever’s on watch goes to sleep until first light tells the engineer it’s time to heat up the boiler again.

Thinking back on the trip down the river, it occurs to me that that’s one of maybe three times in my life that I haven’t had work to do for a good long time. The first time was during the few months between when my mother and I went to Shanuga after my father didn’t come back from the war, and when I got taken on as a ruinman’s prentice; the second was on the riverboat heading for Memfis; and the third time—well, that’s here and now, because even though I’m sitting in the biggest ruin that’s left in Meriga, there’s not that much for a ruinman to do just at the moment, other than turn the pages of old books about aliens, and wonder what Eleen and Tashel Ban are going to find next, and tell the story of how I got here in the pages of a notebook that nobody’s probably ever going to read.

I didn’t even have that much to do on the way downriver to Memfis, and Berry was mostly down on the main deck, making friends with the engineer and watching the steam engines run. I’d have done the same thing at his age, and might have done it even at mine if I didn’t have as much to think about as I did. Still, there it was; I had a lot of time to myself, and spent most of it standing on the walkway that ran along the outer edge of the cabin deck, thinking and watching the Ilanoy forests and fields roll by.

That was when I understood, deep down, just how small Meriga is nowadays compared to what it was back in the old world. By that I don’t mean just that it lost all the land it did to the Meycans and the Neeonjin and the coastal allegiancies and Nuwinga, or the half a continent or so between the Suri River and the Neeonjin country that nobody lives in any more because it’s all dust and sand. What I mean is that even the land that’s still inside Meriga’s borders these days fits Meriga the way my father’s overalls would have fit me when I was five years old. There’s just not that many people in Meriga, not compared to how many there used to be, and it shows.

I saw that over and over again as the banks of the river rolled past. We’d come to some town with a hundred buildings or so, the sort of lively market town you find all through Meriga where farmers bring their crops in for sale and buy what they need from the blacksmith, the leatherworker and the bulk goods store, and one glance from the walkway around the cabin deck showed the traces of the same town back in the old world, when it was ten or twenty or fifty times bigger. Sometimes, too, we’d pass long stretches of riverbank where there wasn’t a town at all any more, and there would be the marks of an old town, all overgrown with trees or sticking out here and there in the middle of a pasture.

The two big towns we passed on the way down to Memfis, Yoree and Sanloo, made the point even harder to miss. Yoree’s a town of decent size, and Sanloo’s one of the dozen biggest cities in Meriga, but if you look at either one from the river you can see that they’re both tiny next to what they used to be. The main ruins in both of them got stripped down to the ground a long time ago, since they’re the kind of riverside towns that are where they are for a reason. Still, if you know what to look for, and any ruinman does, the lines of the old streets and what’s left of the foundations of old buildings go as far as you can see upriver and down.

Now and then, too, we’d come to a place where the ancients tossed a bridge right across the river; there would be big cracked shafts of concrete rising up from the water, and what was left of ramps going up on either side. Sometimes, when the road that used to run to the bridge still gets some use, I could see a ferryman’s house on one side or the other and a square-bowed boat tied up next to it, or scooting across the river like a water bug with the ferryman sculling for all he was worth at the stern. Still, more often than not what was left of the bridge would just be sitting there in among the trees and the water reeds with nothing else anywhere in sight, cracked and streaked with long red lines of rust, and only there because it wasn’t yet worth a ruinman’s time to get out there with a raft, crack the concrete open, and haul what was left of the rebar to a metal merchant. If the people on the Jennel Mornay had been the only people left alive anywhere on Mam Gaia’s round belly, I don’t think what was left of those bridges or the empty places that used to be towns could have looked any more lonely.

So that’s what I was thinking about as one day turned into another and the Jennel Mornay’s big stern wheel churned the green water into foam. Finally one evening we got to the place where the Ilanoy flows into the Misipi. It was just after dinner, which was bean soup, brown bread, and the cheap yellow beer they make up and down the Misipi Valley, which I hadn’t yet gotten used to then, and we’d eaten it the way all the cabin passengers on the Jennel Mornay ate every meal they got, which was sitting at long iron benches on either side of a long iron table running down the middle of the main cabin, with the thrum of the steam engines down below making the plates and mugs rattle loud enough that talking wasn’t too easy.

About the time I finished my soup, the whistle sounded up above us, three times, long and slow. Slane was eating with us, as he usually did, and looked up suddenly. “When you finish that,” he said, “you might want to step outside. There’s something worth seeing.”

I’d figured out already that what Slane didn’t know about traveling on riverboats wasn’t worth worrying about, so I downed the last of my beer and got to my feet. “Which side?”

“Right hand side’s the best.”

I guessed what he was talking about by then, and went outside the way he’d said. Berry was right behind me, since some things are even more interesting than a steam engine. It was as nice an evening as you could ask for, with puffs of clouds scattered over the sky like loms grazing in a field. The Ilanoy was good and wide by then; the land to the left—to port, I ought to say, since it was on a boat—was the same sort of thing we’d been passing for days, bluffs with wetland trees and water reeds all along their feet, but the land to starboard was low, with trees rising up just high enough that I couldn’t see past them to whatever was on the other side of them. Then the land to starboard wasn’t there any more; the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded again, three more times, and all of a sudden we were out on the Misipi.

I’ve never seen another river half so big. It was wider than a lot of lakes, with brown water rolling up out of the southwest just at that point—it bends a lot, and when the Misipi decides to bend, there’s not much that can argue with it. The far bank was a low line of green in the middle distance at first, and then we pulled away from the Ilanoy bank toward the deep water more or less in the middle. There were two more riverboats paddling south toward Sanloo within sight of us, and four of them paddling north, maybe headed all the way up to Meeyaplis. One of them whistled back to us, but there was more than enough river for everybody, and pretty soon they were out of sight to the north and we were passing others, steaming upstream past us as we steamed down.

After a while Berry said his goodbyes and scampered back down to the main deck, and a couple of other people who’d come out when the whistle sounded went back inside. I walked forward to the front of the cabin deck, where I could see the whole river in front of me and both banks off in the middle distance, and just stood there taking it in. Sanloo was another day or so downriver, Slane had told me earlier, and Memfis a few days further beyond that; I knew I needed to start thinking about what would happen once we got to Memfis—dealing with the local ruinmen’s guild, trying to find the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility, and if we were lucky, juggling all the details of running a dig, which I’d never done before by myself, much less with one of the most powerful jennels in Meriga looking over my shoulder and paying the bills—but that wasn’t what was on my mind just then. So I stood there at the rail and watched the river and the banks move past.

It was getting toward night before we got to the next town, which was Altan, over on the Ilanoy side. There were already lamps being lit there, so I could see it a good ways off, but the sky was still light enough that I could see something else: a line of concrete pilings like broken teeth, rising up out of the Misipi on either side. I blinked, looked again, and said some language hotter than I usually use; it hadn’t occurred to me that even the ancients would have put a bridge over a river that big.

“There were once dozens of those, as it happens,” Plummer’s voice said next to me.

I hadn’t heard him walk up, but somehow that didn’t surprise me. I glanced at him. “On the Misipi?”

“Exactly. All of them gone now, to be sure; the last were here and at Rocalan, and they were destroyed during the Third Civil War. A pity; I don’t imagine anything of the sort will ever be built again.”

“Does anyone even know any more how they were made?”

“There are books on the subject at Melumi and Sisnaddi, and a few other places.”

He was watching me with that same odd look, as though he was waiting for me to say something in particular, so I thought for a long moment before answering. There was more than that to make me pause, though, because Melumi’s got the Versty and Sisnaddi’s got the government archives, and I’d never heard about any other place with a collection of books worth noticing. He was, I suddenly guessed, trying to tell me something. What?

“If the books tell how it’s done,” I asked him, “why won’t a bridge like that ever be built again?”

Maybe it was the right thing to say. His voice went quiet, so that I had to strain to hear him. “Building a bridge is a simple thing for a nation that already has the factories, the machines, the steel, the fuel—especially the fuel. And it’s an obvious thing if there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars, and people who want to drive the cars from one side of a river to the other side and back again every day. If the factories and the machines are gone, and the steel has to be cut by hand out of old buildings by your colleagues, and the fuel and the cars and most of the people are gone as well, it’s neither obvious nor simple. A bridge like this would cost every mark the government—” He said the word the old-fashioned way, rather than saying it “gummint” the way everyone else does nowadays. “—takes in taxes over ten years, and do no more good for anyone than a ferryman and his boat.”

I thought about a conversation we’d had earlier, on the way to Proo. “Well, but don’t they spend plenty of money on canals?”

“True. That takes men with shovels and men with trowels, earth and stone and mortar, and all of those can be had for a very modest sum these days. You know the price of steel, I believe. How much would it cost to bridge the river here with steel beams?”

I did know the price of steel, and even trying to guess the cost made my head hurt. “Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. And I guess there are books in Melumi and Sisnaddi and those other places that tell how to build canals, too.”

“Among other things,” Plummer said.

Right then I was sure I knew what he was trying to tell me. My thoughts set off running in half a dozen directions at once, but I managed to get them settled enough not to blurt out something like an idiot. “Maybe you can tell me this,” I said finally. “If nobody’s ever going to build a bridge like that again, what’s the value of the books that tell how it’s done?”

Plummer didn’t say anything for a long time, then: “When I was a boy, which was rather a few years ago, there was a book for children I read often, about a boy who made a little boat and put it in the river, hoping that it would travel all the way down to the sea. Did you ever read that?”

I was surprised enough that I turned to face him. The lamps of Altan were spots of light mirrored in his eyeglasses. “I used to love that book!”

“Did you ever make a little boat like the one in the story, and put it in the river?”

“Yes. I used to wonder what happened to it.”

“One never knows.” He turned away, looking out into the gathering dark on the river. “Knowledge is much the same. It comes down the stream of time to us, and perhaps turns up on the bank, and we can put it back in the water and send it on its way, or leave it on the bank to rot. The difference, of course, is that there is no sea: just a river flowing out of sight, and perhaps the chance that somewhere further downstream the little boat will be of use to someone, for reasons we will doubtless never know.”

He looked back toward me, then, and I could just see his smile in the last of the light. “An interesting subject to think about. We’ll talk more another time.” With that, he turned and went back into the cabin. I stared after him, and waited a long moment before following.

I didn’t sleep well that night, because I knew what he was talking about. There were stories and rumors I’d heard since I was small about people, maybe in Meriga, maybe somewhere else, who had knowledge from the old world that nobody else had any more. Half the robot stories my father used to tell me, and more than half the ones the prentices used to tell each other in Gray Garman’s house, had somebody mixed up in them who had an old book he wasn’t supposed to have, or something like that, and of course one part of the reason that ruinmen live outside the city walls and get uneasy looks from good folk is that a lot of people wonder if we know more than we ought to.

Now of course I knew that the right thing to do was to go talk to a priestess as soon as I had the chance and tell her what Plummer had said to me, and of course I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. You don’t become a ruinman and dream about Deesee and go searching for Star’s Reach if you think everything from the old world ought to stay buried forever, and no doubt Plummer knew that perfectly well. Still, between wondering what Plummer and his nameless friends might be offering me, and wondering what they might ask from me in return, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and when I finally did, damn if I didn’t have a dream about Deesee like the ones I had when I was a boy: the vast empty streets and the water’s surface shimmering overhead as I hurried to meet somebody whose name I didn’t know at the base of the Spire.

I woke up before the sun came round Mam Gaia’s belly to shine on us. Berry was sound asleep and I didn’t wake him; I washed up quietly and got dressed and went to see if Plummer was awake yet. I went to the door to his cabin, and found it just a little open; when I nudged it a bit further, I could see at once that the cabin was empty and the bed hadn’t been slept in.

I admit I laughed, at myself as much as anything, guessing that he’d slipped off the boat as soon as it docked in Altan; I’d have done the same thing in his place, I realized right away, just in case I’d misjudged the person I’d talked to. I wondered how long it would be until he showed up again.

The empty cabin didn’t have any answers for me. After a moment I went aft to the kitchen, where they were boiling up a big pot of soup for breakfast, and begged an early cup of chicory brew.

Thirty-Two: A Different World

2011-11-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

“There was a long argument about that in the old world,” said Eleen. We were supposedly eating lunch, but nobody was paying much attention to the bread and soup, and Tashel Ban wasn’t even pretending; he was over by the printer, muttering bits of hot language under his breath when the thing tried to jam.

“About numbers?” Berry asked.

“About math.” Scholars usually say “mathematics,” but Eleen stopped that about the second time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that math was universal, so every species would end up understanding it the same way. The other side said no, mathematics are just the way our brains work, and so every species would have its own math. In the old world, most scholars agreed with the first side, but the other side was right—at least about the Cetans.”

“But how did that stop them from figuring out what the Cetans were saying?” I asked.

“Because the first messages we sent them were all about numbers.” She rapped her knuckles on the table: once, twice, three times, five times, seven times. “What do those have in common?”

“They’re prime numbers,” Berry said at once. Eleen gave him a startled look, and he went on, as though he was embarrassed: “My teacher at Nashul Core taught us about those.”

“Good,” Eleen said. “Yes, and that’s one of the things they sent the Cetans, because they figured that any intelligent species ought to recognize them—but they didn’t. Meanwhile they were sending us the equivalent in their math, expecting us to recognize them, and we didn’t. It took a hundred years before anybody on either side realized that the problem was that we think in numbers and they don’t.”

I tried to get my thoughts to fit around that one. “They can’t even count on their fingers?”

“Cetans don’t have fingers.”

“Well, but—”

“But that’s just it. We’re born with so many fingers—five, most of us—and we live in a world where things come in nice neat packages you can count: four oranges, ten wild dogs trying to eat you, things like that. They don’t. If a Cetan wants to grab something—” Her hand mimed flowing outwards. “—it grows as many fingers as it needs, and when it doesn’t need them, they go away. Everything that matters to them is like that. That’s why their math starts from flows, not from numbers.

“We’ve got math that can handle flows; it’s called calculus, and there are maybe a hundred people in Meriga who can do it, but we’ve got it. They’ve got math that can handle numbers. It’s very advanced math to them—as far as anyone could figure out, they got there by imagining what happened when a flow got slower and slower, until it approached what we call zero—but they can do it. It took close to a hundred years for both sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were finding in the other side’s signals were what the other side thought was very simple, basic, easy math.”

“Their technology is the same way,” Tashel Ban said, coming to the table with a stack of papers in his hands; the printer had finally given up jamming and done its job. “After the math issue got sorted out, the people here tried to explain to the Cetans how we build radios, and asked them how they did it.” He handed me my copy, and I glanced at the words on the top of the front page: BRIEFING PAPER 4: OVERVIEW OF CETAN MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY. “Turns out they mix up something the consistency of thick paint out of complex metal salts and start putting it down in layers on a base, sprinkling in other compounds here and there, and letting it dry a bit more or less as they go. When it’s done, it’s a solid mass that takes in radio waves and electricity, and puts out the magnetic fields they talk with, but nobody on this planet could figure out the details. The interesting thing is that they couldn’t make sense of our circuits either—the way we split up current into different resistors, capacitors, tubes, and so on doesn’t make any sense to them, and their math can’t follow it.”

“Can their radios,” Thu asked then, “do anything ours cannot?” Everyone else at the table looked at him. He hadn’t spoken yet in the discussion, because he didn’t need to; anything we found out about Cetan technology brought us closer to the choice between his alternative and Tashel Ban’s. That wasn’t a choice any of us wanted to make in a hurry, if we had to make it at all.

Tashel Ban answered after a moment. “Not that anything has mentioned. Electrons and radio waves work there the way they work here—at least, that’s the theory, and there’s nothing to suggest otherwise. It’s just the way they understand radio, and the math behind radio, that doesn’t make sense to us at all.”

“Nor should it,” Eleen said. “It’s a different world.”

That happened this afternoon, and I spent most of the rest of the day reading the paper she and Tashel Ban found somewhere hidden away in the computer. At this point I’ve read enough papers from the Star’s Reach project that I can follow them pretty well even when I don’t know what they’re talking about, and this was no different; I couldn’t tell you a thing about most of the technologies the paper mentioned, but there were two things that came through. One was that the Cetans can do pretty much the same sort of things that we can, but trying to figure out how is the sort of thing that makes scholars jump in the river and drown themselves.

The other thing was that the Cetans don’t seem to do the things that the old world did and we don’t do any more. The scholars who wrote the paper weren’t sure whether that’s because they hadn’t figured out how, or because there’s no way to do those on Tau Ceti II, or because Cetans have more common sense than human beings do, but the Cetans don’t seem to have cars or airplanes or anything like them, they get their electricity from sunlight and wind and water—well, gasoline, but there it’s the same thing—the way we do, and they aren’t lobbing any false stars up into the sky or building nukes or anything like that. Why is hard to say, because Eleen’s right; it’s a different world.

The funny thing is that the part of my story I want to tell next involved those same words, and it happened when we got to Proo. That’s where the Cago Canal ends and the Misipi Canal starts up toward Rocalan and the upper Misipi, and it’s also where the riverboats that work the Ilanoy River pick up passengers and freight for the run down to Sanloo and Memfis. We had two days in Proo, partly because there were fifty or sixty canal boats waiting to be unloaded there, and we had to wait our turn; and partly because the riverboat Plummer wanted to take hadn’t finished its run upriver. So Berry and I slept on the boat, visited the town, drank beer with the other boatmen, hauled and carried cargo once it came our turn, and generally got along fine.

The captain of our boat—no, I never did ask his name, or hear anybody else say it—waved me into the cabin after we’d finished loading up for the trip back to Cago. “You know,” he said, “you and that boy of yours did well. There’s not much to be made walking a mule down the towpath, but if you ever need someplace to lie low and stay fed the while, you could do worse.” With a motion of his head toward the foredeck: “You run with him, you’ll need to lie low now and then.”

He meant Plummer, of course. I would have given him a handful of marks just then to find out what he knew about Plummer, because I was already pretty sure that there was a lot more to the man than the traveling medicine seller he claimed to be, but something in the captain’s face told me that asking any questions was a bad idea and getting any answers wasn’t going to happen any time this side of forever. So I laughed and said, “I noticed that.” We talked a little more, about nothing in particular, and then I went back on deck and got to talking with some of the other boatmen about nothing in general.

That was the day before the Jennel Mornay got to Proo. That was the name of the riverboat Plummer wanted to take, and in case this ever gets read by somebody from the Neeonjin country , I should probably say that Jennel Mornay was a famous soldier on the Presden’s side in the Third Civil War. He was a tough old cavalryman with mustaches out to here, who fought his way downriver from Rocalan to Sanloo in the face of everything the Western Allegiancy could throw at him, which was a lot, and when he was done the final battle at Memfis was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I got to know his face on the trip down the river, because they had a big painting of him in the main cabin.

Still, that’s getting ahead of my story a bit. That morning, the morning the Jennel Morney came, we said our goodbyes to the canalboat captain and went with Plummer to the Proo levee where the riverboats docked. It wasn’t quite solid people from the water right up to the warehouses, but that’s because there was plenty of cargo too. There were three big packet boats already sitting with their noses to the levee, roustabouts loading and unloading barrels and sacks and crates, and passengers getting on or off their boats. Everybody was talking or yelling, the crew chiefs were blowing on their whistles loud enough to make their brains spray out their ears, steam was hissing from the boats and you could just hear, under it all, the churn-churn-churn of the big stern wheels keeping the bows pressed tight up against the shore.

Plummer pointed and said something neither Berry nor I could hear, but we both figured out at the same time that “follow me” was part of it. That meant heading through the middle of it all and most of the way out the other side, to the end of the levee where the warehouses were small and rundown and the roustabouts, who were mostly just sitting around, looked like they’d had a lot of better days. Finally Plummer stopped and so did we; the noise was still loud enough that we could barely hear each other, so we stood there and waited for a while until finally Plummer pointed again.

That’s when I first saw the Jennel Mornay, and after looking at the packet boats, well, let’s just say it was a bit of a disappointment. The plan was the same—one paddlewheel astern, one smokestack around the middle, boxy pilothouse on top of boxy cabin deck on top of boxy freight deck—but it was half the size and twice the age, and showed it. I didn’t know yet that most of the river trade runs on smaller boats like the Jennel Morney, and they don’t make enough money for the white paint and the big crews and all, but if you grow up in the Tenisi hill country and the only riverboats you ever hear about are the big white-painted ones with the fancy carvings all along the roof, let’s just say that a boat like the Jennel Mornay is not going to impress you, and leave it at that.

Still, we shouldered our bags and got in line dutifully behind Plummer, I paid our fare—you can work for your fare aboard a canal boat, but riverboats burn peanut oil and that doesn’t come cheap—and we crossed the landing stage, which I found out a few days later is what they call the ramp that gets swung over from the bow for passengers to board. A rickety stair led up from the freight deck to the cabin deck, where the purser looked at our tickets and waved us over to a couple of cabins over on the port side. They were cramped little rooms and I wouldn’t call them clean, but Berry and I slept in much worse on the long road from Shanuga to Proo, so we didn’t complain. We got our bags stowed and locked the cabin door and went back out to see whatever there was to see.

There were twenty cabins and maybe fifty people to fill them, and at least as many more who couldn’t afford cabin fare and would be sleeping all anyhow down on the freight deck, in among the barrels and sacks and wooden crates the roustabouts were hauling on board to replace what other roustabouts were hauling off. From the walkway that went all around the cabin deck, I could see most of Proo, the little bustling town near the water and the ruins reaching far back into the farm country behind it. The pilothouse of the nearest of the big white packet boats, which went up almost twice as far above the water as the Jennel Mornay, seemed to be looking down with the kind of raised eyebrow look a Circle elder gives a ruinman who’s made the mistake of crossing her path. After a few more minutes, the packet boat let out a whistle, the paddlewheel at the stern slowed, stopped, and then started turning the other way, pulling her stern first out into the river. It was a gorgeous sight, everything a Tenisi farm boy could hope for in a riverboat; it’s just that this particular Tenisi farm boy was on the wrong boat.

Still, when the last of our cargo was on board and the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded, it was still a sight to watch as we pulled away from the levee, backed out into the river, turned and started downstream. Ugly little thing though it was, the Jennel Mornay handled well, and before long we were churning down the river at a fair pace.

Plummer came out onto the walkway about the time Proo got lost behind a bend of the landscape behind us. “A pleasant day,” he said, “made even more pleasant by the number of kloms I would otherwise have had to walk. I hope the two of you find the boat agreeable?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that it looked like it got put together out of what was left over when the other boatbuilders had taken their pick. Still, he must have seen it in my face, and laughed his dry little laugh.

“There are advantages,” he said, “to a riverboat that doesn’t attract rich passengers. Even so, I trust that neither of you play cards or dice.”

“Not usually.”

“I recommend avoiding it altogether here. I’ve heard that someone once brought honest dice on board a Misipi riverboat, and the Misipi itself rose up and refused to let the boat pass until they were thrown overboard and replaced by the usual kind.”

A man standing against the rail near us heard this, and burst out laughing. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then, turning: “Well, Mam Gaia’s bright green underthings! Plummer. Good to see you again.”

Plummer beamed. “Likewise. This,” he said to Berry and me, “is Slane, an old friend of mine. Slane, Trey and Berry are more recent friends. You’re headed to Memfis, I would guess.”

“Or wherever.” He looked me up and down, glanced at Berry, blinked, and looked again. “You?”

“I have business in Sanloo,” said Plummer. “These two? Memfis and points west.”

By then I’d taken as good a look at Slane as he’d taken at me. He had the sort of clothes that seem expensive but aren’t, and the sort of look that seems casual but isn’t; if he had dice in his pocket, and I guessed he did, the river probably wouldn’t rise up and stop the Jennel Mornay.

“Fair enough.” To Berry and me: “You two been to Memfis?”

“Not yet,” I told him.

He seemed to think that that was funny, and cuffed me on the shoulder. “Good. That’s good. You’ve heard of Dell, haven’t you? Memfis is Dell’s home town. Fact is, he’s a good friend of mine.” He laughed again. “You’re from, where, Joja or east Tenisi?”

“Shanuga,” I said, impressed despite myself.

“I rarely miss a voice. Well, Trey from Shanuga, the Misipi Valley’s a different world, and Memfis makes the rest of the Misipi Valley look like the Tenisi hills. It’s an easy place to get into trouble. Still, don’t you worry; you’re a friend of Plummer’s, you’re a friend of mine—and Dell’s.” Another laugh, and right then the whistle sounded up above the pilothouse—we were coming up on some little town, I forget the name of it, where the Jennel Mornay had a stop to make—and his laugh got caught up in the screech of the whistle and spread from one bank of the river to the other.

Thirty-One: Mule's Pace

2011-10-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

I’d decided not to tell Plummer that Berry and I had someone following us, but we got to talking about the trip west from Troy, and the moment I mentioned the road we’d taken along the northern edge of Inyana he gave me one of his sidelong looks and said, “I take it you had unwelcome company.”

“More or less,” I admitted.

“Riders? I recall some difficulty with them on the road to Luwul.”

“No, just one man on foot.”

Plummer considered that for a moment. “If you would like to lose him, there might be a way. Still, all in good time. Where are you going next?” I told him, and he nodded once. “If the two of you have any interest in company on the trip, there might indeed be a way. Sanloo’s the next place I need to be.”

“How’s the medicine business?” Berry asked him then.

“Oh, prosperous as always. I’m pleased to report that the good folk of Hiyo and Inyana are less hostile to fine natural elixirs than their Tucki equivalents.” He sat back, glanced past me just for a moment, and then smiled. “We should talk about that later, however,” he said, and his hand moved: one finger on the edge of the table, and then four. “Tomorrow, perhaps?”

We said our goodnights, and he got up and went to the stairs out front. Berry and I finished our dinners and got up, and I made sure to turn around a little more quickly than usual. Sure enough, somebody was leaving through a door at the back of the common room, and I couldn’t be sure but it certainly looked like our black rider.

Up in our room, Berry and I looked at each other for a long moment. “The only question I’ve got,” Berry said finally, “is whether Plummer’s showed up by chance or not.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I’m inclined to trust him, though I know that might be a big mistake.”

“I know.” Then: “But it probably wouldn’t hurt to have that conversation.”

We waited a while, until the hall outside our room was dead silent, and then I went to the door and opened it as casually as I could, as though I was headed to the washroom. No one was watching. One, four meant room fourteen, and that wasn’t too far away from our room; the trick was to make sure nobody realized both of us were going someplace, and that’s something every ruinman’s prentice knows how to do. Whenever two or three or half a dozen prentices want to go somewhere in their mister’s house where only one was supposed to go: you walk soft and match your footsteps to the others who are with you, so the mister and the senior prentices only hear one set of footsteps. Now of course they did the same thing when they were younger, so it’s a bit of a game; if you do it well enough to fool them, you can usually get away with whatever it is, even if they find out about it later on.

This was no game, but Berry and I both knew the way of it, and went down the hall right in step with each other, past Plummer’s door as far as the washroom, then went back to the door slow and soft as air so nobody would hear us. I tapped on the door—one, four—and a moment later Plummer opened it, beamed, and waved us silently in.

We made plans in a whisper; Plummer left the room to get the things we were going to need, and came back most of an hour later with a big cloth bag. Berry went to get our gear, making less noise than your ordinary mouse; the two of us changed our clothes, and then we climbed out Plummer’s window into the stableyard behind the inn and followed him into the night. After that most of what I remember was hurrying through dark alleys, trying to keep close to Plummer, as he led us on a zigzag path that seemed to go on for kloms and kloms.

Finally we stopped. I could see next to nothing but stars sparkling above us; the moon was down, and a dim light came from a little window in what looked like a low flat-roofed shack just ahead. Plummer whispered to Berry and me to wait, and then went to the shack and tapped on what must have been a door. The light vanished; I heard the door creak open and then shut again. In the silence that followed I heard an odd faint sound that finally turned into the murmur of moving water.

The door creaked again, and then Plummer was motioning us forward. I found my way through it by feel, and let myself be guided to a bench by someone I couldn’t see. Berry came through the door, black against the dim starlight, and then whoever it was pulled the door shut again. A moment later, light: a dim lamp in the middle of the ceiling, revealing a tidy little room with a stove in one corner, shelves and cupboards here and there, a table in the middle and a little window in each wall.

“Well,” said the fourth person in the little room, a stocky gray-haired man in rough work clothes. “You’ll do, no question. You’ve all eaten? Fair enough. Get some sleep while you can; we’ll be going at first light.” He made a gesture toward a low door like a hatch. I thanked him—I was pretty tired by then—and stooped to get through the door; on the other side was an even smaller room with four bunks, stacked two to a side, with a straw-filled mattress and a blanket on each. That was enough for me; I found a place for my gear, got settled in one of the bunks, and fell asleep right away.

When I woke up, it took me a long moment to remember why I was sleeping in clothes that weren’t ruinman’s leathers. About the time I got awake enough to figure that out, I noticed that there was a good bit of light coming in around the sides of the door, and remembered what the man had said about starting before the sun was up. The other three bunks were empty, and I wondered for a moment whether Berry and Plummer had somehow managed to leave me behind.

Then I noticed that the room was moving—rolling just a bit from side to side. I rubbed my eyes and laughed, and went to the door. The room on the other side was empty and the door to the outside was open, but that didn’t worry me; I could see the green bank of a canal sliding slowly past a few meedas from the door.

Outside the cabin, the sun was splashing its light down on the canalboat, the water of the canal, and the banks and farms to either side. The man who’d welcomed us last night was on the towpath up ahead, next to a gray mule who plodded along the way as patient as only mules can be; the towrope ran back from the mule’s collar to the front end of the boat—the bow, I should say; I learned that word and half a dozen other bits of boat talk over the days that followed. The cabin I’d taken for a shack the night before was right up near the aft end, a little stable for whichever mule wasn’t working was just behind the bow, and between them was the long low body of the boat, lined with hatches that let into the hold.

Plummer was sitting on the roof of the cabin when I came out, saw me, and slid down from his place with a grace you don’t expect from an old man. “Good morning!” he said. “If you’re considering food, there’s bread and soup in the kitchen—the galley, I should say—and some quite acceptable apples.”

I thanked him and said, “Where are we?”

“Our captain,” and he motioned with his head at the man beside the mule up ahead of us, “calls it the Calsag channel. If I gather correctly, it runs from Lake Mishga south of Cago out to the main Cago Canal west of here, which will take us to the Ilanoy River and the first steamboat south.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you again—this is pretty clever.”

“Most people react to being followed by hurrying.” Plummer gestured ahead, to where the mule and the captain plodded slowly on. “Most people who follow others, if they lose their target, count on that, and hurry to catch up. Fall behind, and most of the time you won’t be found.”

Even though he was looking away from me, it felt like he was watching me as he said that. I had no idea why, or what he wanted me to say or not say. “You do that a lot?”

“Now and again.”

“I guess selling medicine’s a risky business.”

That got me a quick unreadable look back over his shoulder. “It can be.”

The conversation didn’t go anywhere else, so I went back inside and had some of the bread and soup and one of the apples, and washed up. Afterwards, I went out again just as we got to a lock. There was a line of canal boats waiting there, so we joined it, and sat there while two boats at a time went up and two more going the other way came down.

The captain came aft as soon as he’d gotten the mules settled in the stalls up front. “Morning,” he said. “You ever handle a mule?”

“You find me anybody from the Tenisi hills who didn’t,” I told him, “and I’ll buy you a drink.”

That got me a nod and the kind of quick half-smile one working man gives to another. “Fair enough. When we get going again, I’d like you to spell me; your boy hasn’t worked with mules, but he’s good on the rudder—and so’s our other passenger.”

I remembered just in time that Plummer’s friends didn’t use names. “Sure. Anything I ought to know?”

“Just keep Sal on the towpath and we’ll be fine.”

By the time we were in the lock, I’d gone forward, gotten introduced to Sal the mule, sorted out which of us was boss, and got her harnessed up. Once we were ready to move again, Sal and I headed down the towpath, and pretty quick she settled into the same steady plod as the other mule, whose name was Josey. I got to know both of them pretty well over the days that followed, because that’s how I paid my way down the Cago Canal. Night and day, the boat kept moving at mule speed, a couple of boatlengths behind the boat ahead and in front of the boat behind, and night and day the captain and I spelled each other, four hours on and four hours off.

The only breaks in that slow pace were when we lined up at a lock, on the one hand, and when we pulled into a wide place to load or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the canal, on the other. That was a break only in a manner of speaking, because it was me and Berry who did the loading and unloading, and none of it was particularly light. We hauled out kegs of nails and wood screws, crates of shovel and hoe and rake heads, all the metal parts and machinery for a wind turbine some farm family had saved up their marks to buy, and boxes that had stocky brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with barrels of apples, bottles of cider, and sacks of grain from Ilanoy farms. Still, what ruinmen haul on the job is no lighter.

All considered, it was a pretty good time, and the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about canal boats before I’d started the trip gave it a bit of interest, too. There aren’t a lot of canals down in Tenisi, but they’re all over the northern part of Meriga, from Neyork west all the way to the Misipi River. I asked Plummer about that once, when we were sitting on the roof of the cabin and Berry and the captain were doing their half of the work.

“The canals” They’re quite old,” he said. “They came before the old world, or what most people remember as the old world. Most of them were abandoned when fossil fuels came to power everything, and had to be dug out and fitted with locks again. That started after the Third Civil War, and it’s still going on; if I recall correctly, there are two canals being reopened in Hiyo as we speak.”

“That was generous of them,” I said. “The ancients, I mean.”

He glanced at me, took a long swig from his whiskey bottle. “As far as anyone knows, they never thought twice about it. They no longer needed the canals, and—” A shrug. “That was that.”

“No, I meant it. At least they dug the things out in the first place.”

“I suppose that’s—“ Plummer stopped halfway through the sentence, and a moment later I saw why. There were soldiers, a long line of them, crossing a big stone bridge up ahead of us. We got off the roof—you have to get down most times when a canal boat goes under a bridge—and watched the soldiers march past as we got closer to the bridge.

We were almost under it when the end of the line came past, and there was a captin on horseback right at the back. He glanced at us, looked up and down the boat, then looked straight at me. “You with the hat,” he said. (I was wearing one, a cheap straw hat I’d bought for a couple of coins in one of the little towns along the way.) “Care to make a better wage than you’re getting now? The jennel’s looking for soldiers.”

We had enough soldiers in Tenisi that I knew what to say. “Born with a bad foot, sir and captin. I can just about keep up with a mule.”

He considered that. “Too bad. If you have any friends who might be interested, tell them Jennel Tarl’s hiring, a hundred marks for signing even if they’ve never touched a gun before.”

“I’ll tell ‘em, sir and captin,” I said, and the man nodded and spurred his horse after the line of marching men.

The damp black shadows under the bridge slid over us then. After we came out the other side, I got back onto the roof of the cabin and looked over my shoulder. “I wonder what that was about.”

“Something we’ll see quite often in the next few years, I fear,” Plummer said. He drank more whiskey. “An aging Presden and no heir in sight is a recipe for trouble, and that means soldiers: for the loyal, for the ambitious, for those who simply hope to survive. And when she dies...”

He wasn’t looking at me that time, either, but I had the same feeling again as though he was watching me, seeing how I would react. I didn’t have the least idea what to say, and I didn’t really want to say much of anything, either. What Plummer had said a bit earlier about the Third Civil War suddenly made me notice that my time was a lot better than fifty or a hundred years ago or, well, pretty much any time since the old world started to come crashing down; not that far back, there hadn’t been long lines of canal boats moving iron and apples and grain from one side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been enough iron and apples and grain, or much of anything else, for a lot of people all through that time. When Sheren died and left the Presden’s office for others to fight over, I wondered, would it be back to that? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but the idea was hard to chase from my mind. As I write all this, here at Star’s Reach, it still is.

Thirty: The Face Beneath The Hood

2011-09-30T20:33:00.001-07:00

It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I said, to finish going through the records from the Skeega ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something or other that mentioned the White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most of what was at Troy Tower that we got the records from the seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.

It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron bars inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got around to the job. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.

That was the most exciting thing about that stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little rebellions catching fire here and there across the middle of the country and there weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stamp on all of them. That’s all it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and a bunch of long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of it burned toward the end of the Second Civil War, and it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any good.

After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing. “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”

Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”

I thought about routes for a bit, and added up the money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—

“You know,” I said then, “if we go from here to Cago, we could do part of it a lot faster by boat.”

His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”

“Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat from there.”

That got me an open mouth, and then another grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”

“Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”

That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner that night, shared another glass of Gendan whiskey with Tashel Ban that night, got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.

We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable; all the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s that much cheaper and safer than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to and from market, with the occasional player or elwus going from town to town just to add a bit of color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were being followed.

That happened just west of Isselannee. We took the wrong fork of the road there, and got most of the way to Anarba before we had the chance to ask a local farmer for directions and found out that we’d made a mistake. That meant a couple of hours on rough farm roads going south, but we finally made it back to the straight road to Cago and got to a little town, a place called Leen, just before sunset. Leen has all of one place where travelers can spend the night, a big farmhouse that’s probably going to give it up and become an inn in a few more years. It’s already got a big sign out front, and the front room and dining room have been knocked together into a space big enough to feed a pretty large party; it’s just a matter of time before the tavern goes in and the fields get sold or leased to somebody else.

I hired Berry and I a room there, we got the road dust off us, and then we went down to the big room out front and saw about some dinner. The place was still enough of a farmhouse to cook up a meal that would make a fieldhand comfortable after a long harvest day, and so the two of us were sitting back and feeling very full when the door banged open and a man came in: just a plain traveler in dusty clothes, with the kind of bland ordinary face you’d have a hard time remembering from one day to the next. The woman who ran the place went over to him, and I could hear about every third word as he hired a room and got a meal ordered. All the while he was talking to her, though, he kept looking past her, across the room, at Berry and me.

That’s when I realized that I’d seen his face before, though I couldn’t remember where. He might have noticed that I was watching him, because he stopped looking at me, and then a minute or two later he was on his way up the stairs to his room. The woman who ran the farmhouse went back to the kitchen. I turned to Berry, and his face had that blank look he gets when he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s noticed something.

“Sir and Mister,” he said very quietly. By that time, as I think I mentioned earlier, he only used my title for other people’s benefit, or for a joke, or when he wanted to say something important.

I figured I knew this time which it was. “The man who just came in.”

A quick nod. “He’s following us. We passed him on the road to Anarba today.”

I considered that for a long moment, and coukdn’t think of any good reason why somebody else would make the same double-back we did, and end up at the same place. I nodded and said, “We can talk in a bit,” and he nodded back and put his attention into finishing up the last of his dinner.

Once we got up to our room and the door was locked, Berry said, “I don’t think he was following us before Troy, but I can’t say for sure.”

“The roads from Melumi were pretty crowded, but I don’t think I saw him,” I said.

“If he wasn’t—” He didn’t go on, but I knew what he was thinking. The roads in Meriga are about as safe these days as they’ve been since the end of the old world, but every so often you hear of someone with valuables being robbed or worse, and noticing that you’re being trailed by some member of a gang who simply makes sure you’re where they want you to be is supposed to be one of the few warnings you’re likely to get.

All of a sudden, I thought of the riders who had followed us north to Luwul—the Black Riders, we’d called them, after the characters in the stories about Freddy and Sam. I’d wondered when I was a child what kind of a face the Black Riders had beneath their hoods. I don’t think I ever thought back then that it might be a bland, forgettable face, but as I thought about it there in the farmhouse in Leen, the idea was hard to shake.

“Then we’ll dodge Black Riders again,” I said, and got a grin and a laugh from Berry.

We didn’t travel by night this time, though. The southern part of Mishga is too settled for that; it’s not like Tucki, where you’ve got plenty of forest between one farm and another and so plenty of places to hide during the day. Instead, we left the farmhouse early the next morning, without seeing our Black Rider, and got in among a bunch of farmers from the little towns nearby who were on their way to the market at another small town whose name I forget that was twenty kloms or so down the road. We stuck with them right to the market town, and didn’t leave the town the next morning until we’d found another group of travelers who were going the way we were.

That’s more or less how we traveled all the way to Cago. The first few days we didn’t see any trace of the man we’d spotted at Leen, and I’d just about begun to wonder whether the whole thing was a mistake, when Berry caught sight of him on the edge of the crowd at the market at Jonsul, and let me know where to look. He was turning away by the time I found him, but it was the same man, I was certain of that.

We caught sight of him again every two or three days from there to Cago. Once we got near the Inyana border, just to be sure, we veered off on a side road when we were sure no one was looking and crossed down to another road running the same way across the very northern edge of Inyana. Sure enough, by the time we got to Sowben, there he was again, looking down from a window as we got into town at the end of a long day walking alongside a wagonload of metal from an old airport outside of Elcart that the ruinmen there had sold to a local metal merchant.

By that time we were close enough to Cago that there wasn’t much point in making any more detours. Berry and I kept on the Inyana road, staying with the metal merchant’s wagon and talking shop with him and his prentices, partly because there’s safety in numbers and partly because they were good company and it was pleasant to spend time with people who knew most of the same things we did and shared in another part of the same work. Still, that meant that our Black Rider had no trouble at all keeping track of us. We spotted him a couple of times in the days that followed, never more than a glimpse here and there; to this day I don’t know if he hadn’t realized that we were onto him, or if he knew it, and showed himself to us now and then just to keep us on our toes. We kept waiting for a gang to show up, but none ever did.

Finally one morning we got to the edge of the Cago ruins, and the road veered south a bit to stay clear of them. Cago was a big city in the old world, the biggest still above water anwhere in Meriga, and even though ruinmen had been digging into the ruins there about as long as they’d been busy anywhere but Troy, there are still plenty of buildings and a few of the old towers standing there, following the curve of Lake Mishga for kloms and kloms. It’s the only place I know where you can get an idea of what the drowned cities of the coast must have been like before the seas rose, just ruin after ruin as far as your eyes will reach.

Most places in Meriga, the roads stay as far away from the ruins as they can, but east of Cago you don’t have much choice unless you want to go deep into Ilanoy farm country. The road there runs practically right up under the ruins, and Berry and I and the metal merchant and his prentices had a fine time talking about the buildings we passed and what the local ruinmen found the last season and all, while most of the other people on the road hurried along and gave the ruins nervous looks over their shoulders, as though they thought a robot or something was about to come lurching out from between two heaps of brick that used to be factories and butter all of us across the pavement.

We walked most of a day alongside those ruins, and weren’t to Cago yet by the time the sun went down. There was a town called Monster right alongside the road where we were when things started getting dark; the metal merchant had friends in the business a little further on and wanted to get to their place that night, but Berry and I were tired, and so we said our goodbyes and went to find a place to stay in Monster. There was only one, a big comfortable inn, and it still had rooms to hire, so I handed over some coins and we did the usual, upstairs to our room to wash off the road dust, downstairs to the big room to get a meal. The room was a cramped little place without a window and the food was not half so good as what we’d been getting in Inyana farmhouses along the road, but I didn’t mind; I was tired, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of bread and bean soup and a place to sleep on the ground.

We’d gotten there later than most, and the common room was mostly empty when we got there. We sat down and called for our dinners, and I was about halfway through mine when all at once Berry nudged me hard in the side with one of his elbows. I tried not to let anything show on my face, which wasn’t too easy, since Berry has sharp elbows; still, nobody seemed to have noticed when I looked up from my food and gave the room a lazy glance. I expected to see our Black Rider, and didn’t. It took a moment before I realized that the only face in the room that was turned toward me was one I recognized, and a good long moment after that before I could put a name to it.

By then he had seen me as well, and came over to the table where Berry and I were sitting: an old man, lean and stooped, with just a trace of white hair around his ears and eyeglasses as round as moons. “A very good evening to you both,” he said. “I hope you won’t mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” I told him, and waved at a chair. “It’s a long way from the road to Luwul, Plummer.”

That got me a smile I couldn’t read at all. “True indeed,” he said, and sat down across the table from me. “A very long way.”

Twenty-Nine: The Other Side of the Stars

2011-08-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Twenty-Eight: Tashel Ban’s Story

2011-07-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

“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.

Twenty-Seven: On Gasoline Oceans

2011-06-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Twenty-Six: The View From Troy Tower

2011-05-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

It took us another day to reach Troy after we left the town where they buried the blacksmith alive. The road was busy, since there’s a ferry across from Genda at Troy and a lot of trade crosses there, and so Berry and I had plenty of company on the way. The day was clear and cool, with a few stray clouds and a sharp wind blowing out of the west, and the road veered down slowly toward the water. Before long we got close enough to see the white sails of the lake schooners heading up to Troy or down to Leedo and the ports further east. From where we were, in among farm wagons and a herd of loms on their way to market, the thought of sitting on board a schooner and letting the wind do all the work was pleasant enough, but thinking that didn’t keep us from making good time.

There’s a place where the road to Troy tops a low hill, and I heard later that people who travel that road a good deal get used to travelers stopping dead in their tracks right at the crest. That’s certainly what Berry and I did, at least until a lom bumped into me from behind and reminded me that getting out of the way was probably a good idea. I did, and so did Berry, and then we stood there for a long moment and stared at the distant gray shape, taller than anything else in Meriga, that jutted up above the trees off in the distance.

That was Troy Tower. It used to have another name, back in the old world, but I don’t think even the ruinmen who tend it remember what that was. There used to be a couple of dozen like it, too, just in Troy, and dozens more in every city in Meriga, and the drowned cities of the coast used to be one of them right next to another for kloms on end, or that’s what people say. Now there’s just one of them, and it belongs to the ruinmen.

Troy is where the first ruinmen’s guild got started, as I wrote a while back. Every one of the other towers and factories and buildings got stripped right down to the foundations by those first ruinmen, but they left Troy Tower alone at first, and later on started using it as a guildhall and a place for records and the like. Nowadays there aren’t many ruinmen there, just the few who keep the Tower standing and take care of what’s in it, but it’s still a place that every ruinman wants to visit if he hasn’t been there already. Pilgrims come there all through the dry season, too. Troy Tower isn’t a holy place, pretty much the opposite in fact, but the pilgrims come and look at it and say their prayers and plant a tree somewhere in the space where Troy used to be, back in the old world, before the ruinmen rooted every scrap of the city out of the ground.

There’s something in one of the priestesses’ litanies about how we water the trees with our tears, and some of the pilgrims do just that, though I don’t know that it does the trees any more good than plain water. The pilgrims haul plenty of that up from the shore, too; there are racks of wooden buckets down near the water north of Troy town, and once the rains are over you can pretty much count on seeing at least a few pilgrims fetching buckets, filling them, and going around to water any young tree that doesn’t look as though its roots got wet that day, murmuring a prayer for blessings or forgiveness or something all the while. How many of them get their prayers answered I’m not about to try to guess, but there are certainly a lot of healthy young trees around Troy, and that’s something.

We certainly saw a lot of trees, at any rate, as Berry and I got moving again and followed the road right up to Troy town. It’s not a big city these days. Maybe a few thousand people live inside the walls, and there’s maybe a hundred soldiers in the fort next to the ferry, which faces across the water toward the bigger Gendan fort on the other side. We didn’t have any reason to go inside the walls, and so we turned off the road right outside the gate and found the path that went straight to Troy Tower.

From the hill on the road the Tower looked too big to be real. From right up underneath it, it looked even bigger, but it was as real as a building can get, all gray and brown stone and windows soaring up to bump against the bottom of the clouds. We both stood there staring up at it for what seemed like a long time, and then walked up to the door at the foot of it. There was a big archway there, and back in the old world there had been a row of doors beneath it, but most of them had been walled up, and the one that was still open was a plain wooden door with a little window in it, like the ones you’d find down at Troy town in buildings two stories tall and ten years old. I almost laughed when I saw the door; imagine a horse with an ant’s feet or a jennel wearing the kind of straw hat poor farmers teach their children how to weave, and that’s about how that little piece of our world looked, there at the foot of the old world’s last big tower.

We knocked on the door and waited, wondering about the people wearing feathers who were carved into the stone here and there. After a little while, the door opened and an old man in ruinman’s clothes looked out. He brightened up when he saw us, and after we’d given him the words and signs ruinmen use to test each other, he wanted to know all about who we were and where we’d come from. Once I said my name, of course, he knew exactly who we were and what we were there for, but we could have been on our way to crack concrete in Caga for all he seemed to care. His name was Jorey; he showed us around, introduced us to the dozen or so old ruinmen who lived there, and found us a room.

The guild hall and sleeping rooms were all on the first six floors, it turned out. The records were above that, and then there were empty floors, dozens of them, all the way up to the top. At the top, Jorey said, there was a place where you could see everything for kloms around, and the elevator would get there if the wind turbines had charged the batteries enough. That sounded worth seeing, so after we’d stowed our gear in our room on the third floor and had a meal, I asked about the elevator.

It was the only one of a whole row of elevators that was still working. The wind had been blowing pretty well, Jorey told us, well enough that it would get the two of us to the top, but he wasn’t prepared to bet on a third. So he showed us how the thing worked, and we went inside, pushed the button, and waited. A moment later the thing lurched and started up; Berry looked as calm as though he’d been standing on solid ground, and though I didn’t feel anything like that – the jerks and rattles as the elevator climbed were enough to frighten anybody – I wasn’t going to let on that I was nervous.

Finally, after I don’t know how long, the elevator sighed to a stop and let us out. There was almost nothing on that level; the ruinmen had stripped away everything that wasn’t actually holding the tower up, to lighten the burden on the girders further down, so we stepped out onto a bare metal floor that boomed like a drum beneath our feet, and the only thing there, except for bare metal walls, was a stair going up. We went up, and came out into a little room of glass and iron beams at the very top of Troy.

From there, you could see just how huge the city used to be. Even though every other building was gone, the pattern of the old streets was still there, reaching out to the edge of sight in every direction but east, where the water broke the pattern. On the far side was Genda, and the streets started right back up there too, wherever the Gendan town and fort didn’t cover them. I stood there and tried to imagine what it had been like in the days when Troy Tower was just one of the towers at the center of town, and Troy town as it was now was a little corner of town beside the water, next to a ferry that they probably didn’t need in those days. The Shanuga ruins were big, or I’d thought so, and I’d climbed up on some of the tallest ruins still standing to get a look at them more than once, but Troy was bigger than big. Like the tower, it was so big it was hard for me to remember that it was real.

Troy was an important town in the old world. It wasn’t as big as Caga, which is the biggest ruin above water anywhere in Meriga, or the drowned cities of the coast, which would be one big ruin reaching from halfway up Nuwinga all the way down to Deesee if the seas hadn’t risen, but it’s where the ancients built their cars, and built them by the million. There was even a war fought over it, or so I heard once from a storyteller in Sisnaddi. An army from somewhere else in Meriga spent ten years trying to capture it, and they finally did, by some trick or other. The man who thought up the trick was called Dizzy, if I remember right, and after the war was over it took him ten more years to get back to his home in some town up in Neyork, I forget which one.

Later on, when we were digging in the wrong place down near Memfis, I heard some other stories about Dizzy. They said that he played one of the brass horns the players use down there, and that he was one of the best ever, right up there with another player called Sashmo; some of the players knew tunes he’d come up with, and even though I don’t know the first thing about that kind of music I could tell that they were good. I figure Dizzy must have gone down that way before he got home, and learned to play the horn. One time when Plummer and I were traveling together, I said something about Dizzy, and Plummer told me that there were two different people with the same name. Maybe so, but I still wonder sometimes. After spending so much time on the roads myself, walking alongside elwuses and traders and puppet-actors and all, it’s just too easy to imagine Dizzy wandering the same way I did, stopping at every village to play his horn and catch coins in an old battered hat as he made his long slow way back home.

I didn’t know about Dizzy yet when Berry and I stood there at the top of Troy Tower and watched afternoon turn to evening, and I don’t know that I’d have thought of him if I had known. All I could think of was how big Troy used to be and how little it was now. Berry went around the room a bit at a time, leaning on the rail and staring outward with an expression on his face that I couldn’t read at all. Me, I just stared. I don’t think either of us said five words to the other all the time we were up there, but finally the sun got pretty close to setting and we looked at each other and decided to go back down. So we went down the stair to the little room with the metal floor and got onto the elevator, and it clanked and rattled downward and finally let us out on the fourth floor where we’d started. We had dinner with the other ruinmen, and made an early night of it.

The next morning we got up about the time the sun did, got some breakfast, and I asked Jorey about the records. “Skeega?” he said. “Yes, those’ll be here. Every ruin that used to be in Mishga, plus most of the states all around; if there isn’t a guildhall any more, the records are here.” He turned to one of the other old ruinmen. “Shar, where’s the papers from Skeega?”

“Ninth floor,” said Shar, looking up from his breakfast. “Northeast part, over against the light well.” I’d already learned that each floor in Troy Tower was shaped like a letter H, so that even the rooms in the middle could get some light and air, so I knew what he meant.

“Ninth floor,” Jorey repeated. “You’ll have some company there, I think. Shar, isn’t that fellow from Nuwinga working on that floor?”

“That’s right,” said Shar, and went back to work on his breakfast.

That had my curiosity up, no question. Nuwinga used to be part of Meriga back before the Second Civil War, and these days it’s about as close as Meriga has to a friend among countries, but I’d never met anyone from there; Nuwingans are great sailors but they don’t travel by land a lot, and Shanuga’s kind of hard to reach by ship.

So I had more than one thing in mind as we trudged up the stairs to the ninth floor – it had to be the stairs, because the wind had died down overnight and there wasn’t enough electricity to work the elevator. The ninth floor, it turned out, was about a dozen big rooms that were full of old metal cabinets, and the cabinets were full of papers and records and journals from something like three hundred years of digs all over one side of Mishga. We didn’t have too much trouble finding the papers from Skeega, but when we found them it turned out they weren’t arranged in any order we could figure out, just lined up in the cabinets, drawer after drawer and row after row of them.

There was a table and some chairs over against one wall, so we had a place to work, and I knew enough about how ruinmen keep their records that it wasn’t too hard for me to sort out what was worth looking at from the rest, and show Berry how to do the same thing. That was about the only thing going for us that first day, though. If the man from Nuwinga was anywhere around, he didn’t show himself or even make a noise, and we went through more paper than I want to think about, looking for the letters WRTF or the words they might stand for, and finding absolutely nothing.

We stopped for lunch around noon, then went right back up and kept at it until the sun got low enough that we didn’t have enough light to work by. The next morning we went up again, and settled in for another day of turning pages. Before long we were both so deep in the work that I don’t think either of us heard the man from Nuwinga until he said, “I hope you won’t mind an interruption.”

Berry and I both looked up from the papers we were reading. He was standing by the door, a short stocky man in clothes that weren’t quite the same as anything you’d usually see in Meriga, though it would take some telling to say just how. He had a square craggy face and big hands, and he talked about half as fast as people talk in Tenisi.

“Not a bit,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”

“If you happen across something that has to do with radios, could you give me a shout? I’m in the room across the way.”

Berry and I looked at each other, and then I said, “We’ll do that. We’re looking for something that has to do with radios ourselves, actually. I’m Trey sunna Gwen.”

The man gave me a blank, owlish look for a moment, and then his eyebrows went up. “You’d be the ruinman who found the letter about Star’s Reach.”

“That’s the one.”

He thought about that, then: “We should talk about that some evening. There’s not much about radios that I don’t know. The name’s Tashel Ban, by the way.” Then: “Well, we all have work to do.” He turned and went out the door.

That’s how I met Tashel Ban. I didn’t know a thing about him other than what he’d said, of course, and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it would take more than a ruinman’s skills to make sense of Star’s Reach if we found it. If somebody had told me that a few years after that I’d be standing inside Star’s Reach next to him, watching him talk a computer into turning a bunch of gibberish into a note that someone here wrote for someone else more than a hundred years ago, I’d have been surprised; if that same someone had told me that the person standing next to me as I watched him tap at the keyboard would be Eleen, the scholar from Melumi I’d bedded half by accident when the rains came, I’d have been startled; if I’d been told that the other people in the room, other than Berry, were the last king of Lanna and the last living person born at Star’s Reach, well, my mouth would have been open wide enough to catch rabbits. Of course that’s the way it turned out, but we all had long and strange journeys of our own to travel before any of that happened.

Twenty-Five: Ripples from an Old Stone

2011-04-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

We decided to go on to Troy and Skeega first anyway, since we were closer, and for all we knew there was just as much chance of finding the way to Star’s Reach there as in Arksa. Berry and I opened our eyes about the time the stars were shutting theirs, shouldered our packs, and headed north out of Melumi about the time the sun came up. We’d said our goodbyes the night before and didn’t have a bill to pay at the guest dorm, so there wasn’t anything between us and Troy but a long walk.

We had a fair bit of money this time, though, partly from what Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga that I hadn’t had to spend yet, and partly from a plump little sack of coins Jennel Cobey had one of his people run down to us before we left. Since the letter was safe in the jennel’s hands and the copy was safe in Melumi, I figured nobody would be following us and we didn’t need to run and hide the way we’d done on the road north from Shanuga. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet, and so we went by the main road north to Naplis and then northeast by Fowain and Leedo to Troy. Most nights we stayed at inns or farmhouses that put out a sign to let travelers know they could get a bed and a breakfast, and there are ruinmen’s guild halls at Naplis, Fowain and Leedo, so all in all we had an easy time of it.

We also had a chance to ses a bit of the fellowship that you get on the main roads all over Meriga, which we missed on the backroads we’d used to get to Melumi in the first place. There are a lot of people who live on the road. Probably half the people in Meriga are farm folk who hardly ever go more than a few kloms from where they were born, and most of the rest work in crafts that don’t cover a lot more ground than that, but Plummer told me once that maybe one person in twenty makes a living by traveling, and most of them take to the road just as soon as the mud isn’t too bad and stay on it until the rains come down. Before we’d gone more than a day or two, certainly, the road we were on had plenty of travelers – farmers and traders with oxcarts loaded with goods, pilgrims on their way to one or another of the famous local shrines, messengers on horseback with ribbons tied around their right arms to show which jennel or cunnel they served, players with their instruments and actors with their costumes and props on the way from one town to another, drifters and grifters and people who had no particular reason to be on the road but just couldn’t stand the thought of staying put one more day.

For all that they’re on the road for every reason you can think of and some you probably can’t, travelers on the main roads more often than not treat each other like ruinmen treat each other, which is to say, pretty well. Oh, there are exceptions now and then, but if an oxcart gets a wheel stuck in the mud you can bet that anybody who’s nearby will come help give it a shove, and if the sun goes down and there isn’t an inn or a farmhouse in sight, whoever finds a good place to camp first builds a fire and waves to anyone else nearby to come on over, and before long there’ll be twenty or thirty people sharing whatever food or drink they happen to have with them, and keeping watch by turns through the night.

Not that there’s much to worry about on the roads nowadays. There are plenty of stories about the bad times after the Third Civil War, when gangs of soldiers who’d been turned loose after the fighting used to wait near the roads and kill anyone they could catch, but one of the presdens in my grandfathers’ time, I think it was, made it his job to hunt them all down and had troops of cavalry galloping all over Meriga until the roads were safe again. These days the worst thing that’s likely to happen to you is getting cheated by a dishonest innkeeper or beaten up in a tavern fight. There are some pretty doubtful characters on the roads, people you wouldn’t want to trust around your henhouse or your pretty daughter, but I only saw one time that somebody on the road stole something from somebody else who was traveling, and he got stripped naked and tossed into a patch of poison ivy for his pains.

That was a couple of years later, though, and halfway across Meriga. On the way north to Troy that year, I didn’t see anything like that. From Melumi to Naplis, Berry and I mostly walked alongside farm carts hauling grain from last season’s harvest to the Naplis grain markets, and the farmers were good honest folk, about as likely to steal something as they were to sprout wings. After Naplis, we got onto the main road from Sanloo up to Troy and the Genda border, and that meant a livelier crowd, but I can’t say they were less honest, and they were a good bit more friendly. Farm folk are no more comfortable around ruinmen than most people are, but plenty of road folk get the same treatment, and to them, ruinmen are just like anyone else on the road.

A day out of Naplis, we ended up walking with an elwus named Cash and his motor, a quick little man named Morey. Cash was was a quiet, lanky sort with sandy hair, though you wouldn’t know that when he put on his white elwus costume and his black wig and glasses and went up on stage, wiggling and singing songs and cracking jokes in that funny voice all the elwuses use. Berry and I got to see his act maybe twenty times, since that’s about how many farm towns we went through between Naplis and Leedo, and putting on a show at every farm town is how elwuses make a living. Cash was good, better than most of the elwuses we used to see in the Tenisi hill country where I grew up; he’d dance around and make like he was singing into the short black stick elwuses carry in one hand while Morey pedaled away at the mechanical box that played the music. Cash would always finish the show by saying, “And Ah’d like to thank Morey, mah motor,” and Morey would always say “Pro-motor,” drawing out the “pro.” I think it was a joke of theirs, though I never did learn the point of it.

They were good company on the road; they knew which inns were honest and which farmhouses had the best breakfasts, and when we camped together and Morey showed up first thing in the morning with a bunch of eggs from nowhere in particular, Berry and I didn’t ask any questions. After a drink or two, Cash used to tell stories about his travels, and Berry and I would tell ruinmen’s stories, and Morey would sit back and sip his whiskey and say nothing at all. Now and then we’d fall in with a bunch of players or actors who were going from farm town to farm town the way Cash and Morey were, though the next morning either they’d take a different route or we would. It happened once, at a little town called Poyen about halfway between Fowain and Leedo, that we arrived by one road just as a bunch of players showed up by another. It turned out they knew a bunch of elwus-tunes, so for once Cash got to do his singing and dancing with a band and a couple of other singers to back him, and it was quite a show. The farm folk loved it, and tossed a lot more money into Morey’s hat than usual, but split two ways it wasn’t as much as Cash or the players would have made on their own, so the next morning they left on their road and we left on ours, and it was back to Morey and the mechanical box.

When we got to Leedo, though, their road led east along the lakeshore and ours led north to Troy, so we said our goodbyes. I hated to see them go, but the way things turned out, it was probably just as well.

North of Leedo the main road runs a ways inland from the lakeshore, past pine woods and little farms and the very occasional town. Berry and I got to a town one afternoon fairly late, and had just decided to stop there for the night, when we came up to a crowd around the town hall. Somebody turned and looked at us, and called out, “Hey! A ruinman!”

The whole crowd went silent and turned to look at us. For a moment I was wondering whether Berry and I were going to have to dodge a riot, but nobody moved . Then somebody went into the town hall, and somebody else came out of it. The crowd let him past, and he walked right up to us: a soldier with a ribbon on his sleeve. “Sir and Mister?” he said. “Cunnel Darr wants to talk to you.”

We followed him through the crowd and into the town hall, which was big and plain and echoed like the inside of a drum. It took a bit for my eyes to get used to the dim light, and so I ended up bowing to somebody I couldn’t see while the soldier said, “Sir and Cunnel.”

“Good,” said the cunnel. I straightened up from the bow, and more or less saw him, a gray hard-faced man half bent from old age. “Your name, ruinman?”

“Trey sunna Gwen, Sir and Cunnel,” I told him. “Mister of the Shanuga ruinmen’s guild.”

One of the old man’s eyebrows went up. “Well.” Then: “You’ve come at a useful time. This man—” He motioned to one side of the hall with his head. “—was caught drilling a gas well.”

“Sir and Cunnel!” shouted the man, who was bald and burly and had shackles on his hands and feet. “I swear to you it’s not anything of the—” The cunnel moved one hand in a short sharp gesture like a knife cutting meat, and one of the soldiers next to the shackled man cuffed him into silence.

“A gas well,” the cunnel repeated, “or something that looks very much like one. I suppose you can tell one way or the other, ruinman.”

Of course I could, and I said so. Toward the end of the old world, when people were trying anything they could think of to keep their machines running, underground gas was one of the things a lot of them tried. Some of it went into pipes that ran across the countryside, and it’s a lucky ruinman who finds what’s left of one of them, for the metal and the machinery are usually worth plenty; some of it went into tanks on trucks, and those are worth finding, too; and some of it, especially toward the end, went straight from the ground into machinery in a building built right there on the spot. If the pipes are still there and the gas hasn’t all leaked away, one of those can blow you from here to Mam Gaia’s other side if you get careless or just plain unlucky, so any ruinman with a brain in his head knows how to test for gas and how to deal with a gas well that’s still got gas in it.

That’s how Berry and I ended up following the cunnel and his soldiers, a priestess, the prisoner, and most of the people who were milling around the town hall when we got there, out of town a mile or so to a rundown barn not far from a blacksmith’s shop at the end of a road. Inside the barn, next to a heap of gear of the sort you’d use to drill a well for water, an iron pipe with a heavy valve on the top of it stuck out of the ground.

The cunnel waved me over toward the pipe, and I nodded, got what I needed from my bag, and tested it. It’s an easy thing if you know where the gas might be. There are little strips of paper that turn blue if you get them wet and put them where there’s gas, and I had a little bottle of the strips; I took one out, spat on it, used it to make sure the thing wasn’t leaking gas with the valve closed, and then nudged the valve just a bit, to get the little faint hiss that tells you you’re not far from risking your life, then tapped it shut. By the time the hiss stopped the paper was bright blue.

“Sir and Cunnel,” I said, “it’s gas, all right.”

“It was an accident!” the prisoner shouted then. “We didn’t know we were going to hit gas. I was drilling for water—”

The cunnel gestured again, and a soldier cuffed the man across the face. “Of course,” said the cunnel in a bored voice. “Everyone drills for water inside a barn, and then just happens to forget that a well that finds gas has to be reported to the local magistrate. On pain of death. You do know that, of course.”

The prisoner fell to his knees. “Please, Sir and Cunnel, you must—”

Again the quick, bored gesture and the cuff across the face. “Must,” said the cunnel, “is not a word I am used to hearing.” He turned to the crowd. “Does anyone have any doubt of his guilt?

It wasn’t a pointless question. If anybody had said yes the cunnel would have had to call up a jury on the spot and hold a trial; that’s the law in Meriga; but nobody said a word. After a moment, the old man nodded once and said, “You know the penalty. Get some shovels, now.” He turned to me then and said, “Thank you, ruinman.”

It was as clear a dismissal as I’ve ever heard. “Sir and Cunnel,” I said, bowing, and left the barn as quickly as I could, so fast that Berry had to trot to keep up. Behind me I could hear the shovels biting into the ground, the priestess chanting a litany, and the man sobbing as they dug a pit to bury him alive.

I heard the details later, after we got to Troy. The man was a blacksmith, and one of his helpers had gone to the cunnel with word of the secret gas well. Maybe it was the price of charcoal for his forge, or maybe he wanted to be able to smelt alloys that a charcoal furnace won’t touch and add them to the iron in his tools to get a reputation. The helper didn’t say, but it was probably one or the other of those; it usually is when they catch a blacksmith using fossil fuels, which they do somewhere in Meriga every few years or so. Sometimes it’s someone from another craft, and they’ve got their own reasons, but those don’t matter; if they get caught, they get buried alive. I know the reasons for that as well as anyone, but knowing it isn’t the same thing as remembering the way the blacksmith’s voice sobbed and babbled as the scrape of the shovels and the slow patient drone of the litany marked the last minutes he’d ever have on the outside of Mam Gaia’s round belly.

We didn’t stay the night in that town after all; we kept walking until the sun went down, and just about the time we started looking for a camping place, Berry spotted a bright flash through the pines up ahead, and we hurried up the road by the day’s last light and found a dozen travelers sitting around a fire and starting to share out dinner. They welcomed us cheerily enough, and we settled into a place around the fire with a couple of traders up from Naplis and a troupe of actors who saw what was going on in the town we’d just passed and decided, sensibly enough, that there’d be no one interested in their play that day. We had a pleasant night and a good breakfast the next morning, and started toward Troy as soon as it was light enough to see the road.

It occurred to me as I was writing all this, here in my little room at Star’s Reach, that Cash the elwus and the blacksmith whose name I never did find out were both copying something from the old world. There were elwuses back before the old world ended, or at least that’s what I’ve always heard, just as there were plenty of people who used fossil fuels, back when there was more of them than little pockets of gas or little stripes of coal hidden away in the rock here and there.

There’s a difference, of course. Copy the elwuses and if you’re good at it, you get enough coins tossed into your motor’s hat that you can keep yourself comfortable; copy the people who used fossil fuels, and odds are you get buried alive. Here at Star’s Reach, we’re copying something else from the old world – I sometimes wonder if anybody ever does anything in Meriga nowadays that isn’t just ripples in a pond from some stone the ancients tossed into it – but whether it’s going to get us a hatful of coins or a shovelful of earth across our faces is hard to say.

Twenty-Four: Whisper from the Sky

2011-03-22T20:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Twenty-Three: In the Places of Memory

2011-02-28T20:00:00.000-08:00

It was a couple of days after the rains started that a messenger came from the library to tell us that they’d found a cubicle for us and we could start reading about Star’s Reach. If it hadn’t been right after the beginning of the rains, I’d probably have spent the time before the messenger came pacing around the dorm at Melumi and making life miserable for Berry, but I had one mother of a hangover to get through, and it did a fair job of keeping my mind off Star’s Reach for a little while. Still, by the time the messenger came, I was eager to start, and Berry and I went splashing across the brick square at the center of the Versty just as soon as we could.

The messenger led us in through the big double doors of the library and told us to wait there in the big empty room just inside. Before we could ask much of anything she was gone through one of the little doors on the far wall, and so Berry and I stood there and waited, steam rising from us in the warm damp air, looking up at the windows to either side. I don’t know what they were made of; they looked like somebody had taken pieces of colored glass or something and fit them together into a picture, all red and yellow and green and blue with clear bits here and there to set the other colors off. It was really something to look at, and so that’s what I did.

Click of the door told me that somebody had come for us. I turned, and saw Eleen standing there. I’d been wondering since the hangover stopped making thinking hard just how she’d react when we next met, after the way we spent the first day of the rains, and guessed that she would look embarrassed but say nothing about what happened. I was right, too; her skin was light enough that you could see the blush, but all she said was, “If you’ll follow me.”

So we followed her, through the door and down a long hallway lined with doors and finally to a big room lit with watery light from tall windows along one side. The wall under the windows was divided up by short walls that jutted out a little way into the room, and between each pair of walls was a table and a couple of chairs. Just across from the row of cubicles, for that’s what they were, was a long counter, and beyond that was the library itself, shelves and shelves and shelves full of more books than I’d ever imagined in one place.

Eleen led us to the cubicle third from the far end, and waved us to the chairs. “This is yours,” she said. “When you’re ready for books, go to the counter and ask the librarians; they’ll get them for you. I’ve talked to them about what you’re looking for, so they should have something ready.”

“Thank you!” I said. She smiled and nodded, and turned to go.

“Good luck finding that acronym,” Berry said then.

That got him a startled look over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, and left the room.

We went to the counter right away, and one of the librarians, a plump old woman with glasses so thick they made her eyes look huge, came over. “You’re the ruinmen looking for Star’s Reach,” she said, as though it wasn’t a question she needed to ask.

“Yes.”

“Ah. Just a moment.” She went over to another part of the counter, reached underneath it, and pulled out close to a dozen books in a teetering stack. Berry and I both thanked her, took the stack back to the cubicle, sat down, stared at each other for a long moment, and then started looking at the books.

We figured out right away that Eleen hadn’t made things easy for us. I’d wanted to read about Star’s Reach, and so she’d had the librarians find books that had something to say about Star’s Reach, but what they had to say wasn’t in any particular order and much of it was in words longer than I was used to reading back then. After a bit, Berry whispered a suggestion and I nodded, and he went to the counter, talked to the librarian for a bit, and then left the room and came back maybe a quarter hour later with a couple of notebooks and pens. We spent the rest of the day copying out everything we could find on Star’s Reach into those notebooks; the light through the windows got too faint to read before we were done, and so we gave the books back to the librarian and did what we could to keep the notebooks dry while we crossed the brick square to the guests’ dorm in time for dinner. Afterwards, back in our room, the two of us went over what we’d found, Berry helped with the words I didn’t know, and we tried to figure out anything we could about Star’s Reach.

That’s how we spent the next day, and the day after that, and pretty much all the days we were in Melumi while the rain pounded down and life did what life in Meriga usually does during the rains, which is to say, not very much. Now and then there were breaks in the routine, when Jennel Cobey had us come up to his room and tell him what we’d found so far, or when the library was closed for some Versty function that nobody but the scholars could go to, but the rest of the time, Berry and I were copying things out of old books in the daytime and trying to figure out what it all meant at night.

By the time the clouds started to thin and the rain went from pouring down every single day to skipping a day now and then, we’d filled a couple of notebooks each, but I don’t think either of us knew much more than we did when we started. I won’t say that all of it was a waste; the librarians found us a couple of books about how people in the old world went looking for life on other worlds, which was at least interesting, and they also brought us any number of things written by scholars at Melumi who read every scrap of paper left from the old world that mentioned Star’s Reach or anything like it, which saved us a bunch of searching but didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

Everyone pretty much agreed that if the Star’s Reach project actually existed, which none of them were exactly sure about, it started out using the big radio telescope in the hills between Meriga and Jinya, the one the letter I found called NRAO, and the people who were trying to figure out what the aliens were saying were at the place near Orrij in Tenisi the letter also mentioned. Most of the scholars insisted that the whole thing had been shut down when the Second Civil War broke out, or maybe when all the ice on the place called Greenland slid off into the sea and a lot of the coastal cities went under water; some of them thought that all the people and equipment might have gone somewhere else, but they didn’t have the least idea where.

One evening toward the end of our stay in Melumi, Berry and I got to the end of a couple of hours of trying to make some kind of sense of the latest things we’d copied, and both realized at right around the same moment that we hadn’t gotten anywhere. I got up and went to the window; the clouds were breaking apart off to the west, and stray beams of orange sunlight were slanting down over the Versty and the town off past it, reminding me that we didn’t have that much longer before we’d have to choose a direction to go. Berry stayed at the table, propping his chin in his hands.

“I hope she finds something about WRTF,” he said after a long moment.

I turned around. “So do I.” Then: “If she doesn’t, we can go to Orrij and the radio telescope place, and see if the records have anything.”

It was a long shot, and we both knew it. The ruins near Orrij had been stripped to the bare walls around the time the old world ended, and ruinmen had finished the job more than a century back; as for the NRAO, it was right in the middle of the fighting in a couple of campaigns in one of the civil wars, I forget which, and ruinmen had been there, too, long before I was born. If anyone took the time to copy out papers from the ruins into the local guild records, which sometimes happened, there might be something about WRTF, but more likely there’d be nothing of the kind.

Still, Berry nodded. “Worth a try, Mister Trey.”

I think it was two days later that we got something better, and it wasn’t anything the librarians brought us. Berry and I were in our cubicle as usual; the only sounds in the whole library, it seemed just then, were the rain drumming on the windows above us, the scratch of pens on paper, and every so often a rustle and tap as one of us handed a book to the other and tapped a finger on a passage worth a second look. That’s why I noticed, long before anybody came into sight, footsteps in the corridor coming toward us fast.

It was Eleen. She caught sight of us, and motioned for us to come with her. A few minutes later all three of us were in one of the little rooms off the corridor, and she was handing me a small piece of paper. On it were these words:

White River Transport Facility

I realized what the words meant before I’d even finished reading them. “You found it.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I know where it is, too, or nearly. There was a White River in most of the old states, but this one’s in Mishga, the old state of Michigan, near Muskegon – that’s Skeega nowadays.”

I nodded, and tried to stay calm while I wrote down the name of the town in my notebook. “Somewhere near Skeega.”

“That’s what the book said.” She drew in an uneven breath. “We’re not quite finished searching, but this is the only WRTF that’s been found so far.”

I thanked her, and she nodded and left the little room. Neither Berry nor I had any patience left for the books then; we went back to the guest’s dorm, across a brick square that was only a little wet with drizzle, and went straight to our room to talk. Jennel Cobey would hear the news soon enough; until then, this was ruinmen’s business.

“Transport facility,” Berry said as soon as the door was shut.

“Meaning they may have gone somewhere else from there.”

“That’s my thought. I hope there are records.”

I grinned. “Best in the world. Skeega’s right across Mishga from Troy.” Berry’s eyes went wide, as I expected, and before he could say anything I went on: “So we’ll have to stop at Troy on the way.”

He let out a whoop, and at his age I would have done the same thing. Troy’s where the ruinmen started, and if there’s a ruinman in Meriga who hasn’t been there and doesn’t want to go, I’ll eat my boots for breakfast. Back five hundred years or so it was a big city full of factories and towers, but even before the old world ended it fell on hard times, most of the people left, and most of the factories and towers and houses and all fell into ruin. The story has it that people started making their livings by stripping the ruins for raw materials and selling them, and as time went on and the people who were doing that figured out that they’d be better off if they worked together, the first ruinmen’s guild was organized. The last ruins in Troy were stripped down to the ground so long ago nobody alive remembers it, and there are only a few ruinmen there now, but the guild hall is still there and they’ve got records of most of the digs in Mishga and the parts of the country nearby. Melumi is where the scholars and most of the other people in Meriga keep their memories, but Troy is where we keep ours.

Now of course Berry and I both knew that our chances of finding out where the people in the Star’s Reach project went from Skeega weren’t that much better than our chances of figuring out the same thing by digging through the records in Orrij and NRAO, but at least we had another chance at it, and the chance to visit Troy into the bargain. The watery sunlight that came in through the window now and then, bringing its reminder of the approaching end of the rains, seemed much more promising than it had a few days before, and I began to hope – well, not that I would actually find Star’s Reach, but that the search wouldn’t come to a dead halt quite as soon as I thought. There was a much longer and stranger road ahead of me than I had any idea just then, but I didn’t know that yet.

Twenty-Two: The View from a Distant Star

2011-01-26T01:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Twenty-One: The Yellow Butterfly

2010-12-25T19:40:00.000-08:00

Writing about how I met Eleen got me thinking again about Tam, and a part of the story of how I got here to Star’s Reach that I meant to write earlier and didn’t. It’s even more out of place here than it was when I was explaining how I became a ruinman and how Berry and I left Shanuga, but it’s got to go in here somewhere, and – well, Eleen and Tashel Ban are muttering to themselves over a computer screen three rooms away, and the rest of us are trying to find something to do while they figure out whether we all came here to find a message from the stars or just to salvage Meriga’s last big heap of undiscovered scrap metal, so it might as well be now.

It might as well go here, too, because I met Tam pretty much the same way I met Eleen, at the beginning of the rains. I was sixteen then, and one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices. We’d just finished hauling everything back from the Shanuga ruins at the end of the digging season, racing the rain clouds as they marched up from the south. That was hard work, and there was plenty more of the same just ahead, getting all the tools and gear cleaned up and repaired for next season and getting them packed away in the cellar and the attic where they belonged.

Still, the end of a season’s always a glad time unless the season’s been a mother of a mess, and this one had been pretty good. We’d only had three prentices get reborn that year, and two of them brought it on themselves, getting cocky enough to take one too many stupid risks. The building we stripped had plenty of metal, and it also had a bunch of old broken computer gear in a room we had to dig our way into, three levels down into the underplaces where looters hadn’t gotten, back when the old world was ending. Best of all, I’d found a couple of metal chairs buried in rubble, and small finds like that are a prentice’s to keep or sell if he wants to; I sold them for the metal, and ended up with a nice bit of money in my pocket.

So I was feeling pleased with myself that day, as we sorted out the shovels and picks – this one’s fine, that one needs filing, that other one needs a trip to the blacksmith – and the clouds we could see outside the windows turned from white to gray to dark gray to that inky blue-black that means Mam Gaia’s about to cut loose on you good and proper. It took an effort to pay attention to the tools, and when the thunder finally rolled and a first flurry of fat raindrops spattered against the windows, we gave up trying and pounded down the stairs to the street.

The younger prentices stayed right there around the ruinmen's houses, splashing each other with water and getting into half-playful scuffles with the other misters’ prentices. The half dozen of us who counted as senior prentices, though, headed toward the town gate and the buildings clustered just outside it. We couldn’t go in, not without some good reason the guards would believe, but there were taverns where a boy of sixteen could get small beer if he was polite to the tavernkeeper, and shops where you could buy any number of little useless things, and prentices from some of the other crafts that were outside the walls; and there were also girls.

That’s one of the things about being a ruinman’s prentice. Most of the crafts only take boys as prentices—well, boys and tweens, who count as boys according to Circle and the priestesses; with girls, there’s always the chance they can have healthy babies, in which case they go into Circle and whatever time the mister’s put into their training goes dancing down the wind. Mind you, there are crafts that will take women past their twenty, but the ruinmen aren’t one of them. What that means is that if you’re a ruinman’s prentice, nine months of the year you’re someplace where the only woman you’re likely to see is one failed scholar three times your age. When I was ten, that didn’t matter to me a bit, but by the time I was sixteen it was starting to feel like an inconvenience.

So when the senior prentices go to the buildings piled up around the little southern gate of Shanuga that nobody else likes to use, girls are one of the things on their mind. You find them there, too, and not just the ones who can be hired for the afternoon for a dozen marks or so. There are crafts besides ours that have their place outside the walls for the same reason we do, because other people think they’re dirty or shameful or toxic; some of those are family trades, and the girls from those families won’t get into Circle no matter how many babies they have, so when they get old enough to get interested in boys they make friends with prentices from the ruinmen, the chemists, the burners, and so on. You also get girls who aren’t born healthy but whose families, for one reason or another, won’t let the birth women put a pillow over their faces when they’re born; there are trades that take them young and train them, the way the crafts take and train prentices, and most of those are outside the walls too.

Now and then, though, you also find girls from good families who come there because they want to feel like they’re being wild and taking risks, and that’s more or less what happened on the day I was talking about. Conn and I were inside one of the taverns with a couple of glasses of small beer we’d wheedled from a friendly barkeeper, having spent a good two hours splashing and shouting and getting into a friendly fistfight or two with a couple of prentices from the burners – there’s an old rivalry there, since they burn the bodies of dead people and we handle a lot of bodies from the old world. There we were, and the rest of the tavern was full of wet happy people, but it was a bit quiet for the day the rains come, and after a while I saw why. There were two girls sitting at a little table up against the wall in a quiet corner, one looking excited and embarrassed and the other just looking embarrassed, and from the clothes they were wearing nobody in the tavern had any reason to doubt that their mothers could buy the tavern and everyone in it with spare change from their pockets and not notice the difference.

I turned my chair so I could look at them, and after a while Conn noticed where all my attention was. “You’re not,” he said with a big grin, all but daring me.

“You watch me,” I told him, and got up.

So I walked up to the two of them and asked if they’d like a beer. The one who was just embarrassed, a little dab of a thing with a good bit of brown in her hair, gave me a look like I’d offered to cut her throat, but the other one, the excited one, smiled and said “Sure.” I managed to wheedle three more glasses out of the barkeeper, which took some doing; carried them back over and asked, “Mind if I sit?”

They didn’t, or at least the one I was interested in didn’t. Her name was Tam, short for Tamber, and the other one’s name was Shen; they’d been good friends since, oh, always, and was I really a ruinman’s prentice? So I sat, and we talked, and talked, and talked some more. It was starting to get dark outside by the time Shen insisted that they had to get back home, and would Tam please listen and come? So they left, and I left a little later, feeling pretty thoroughly dazzled by my luck. Conn followed me – he’d been doing something else in the tavern the whole time, probably toss-the-bones, and probably winning, as he usually did – and proceeded to push me into the deepest puddle he could find. So we had another fistfight, one of the kind where both parties are laughing too hard to do much damage to anybody but themselves, and stumbled back up the stairs of Mister Garman’s house late enough that we got a week’s worth of the grubbiest cleaning chores Gray Garman could find for us.

I figured that was the last I’d see of either of them, but it didn’t work out that way. A week later, I think it was, I was back at that same tavern, and damn if she didn’t walk in the door, spot me, and come right over to the table where I was sitting. She was alone this time, and we talked again for what must have been a couple of hours; she had someplace she had to be at sunset, and I made good and sure she left the tavern in plenty of time, because I’d started to get hopeful and didn’t want to make it any harder for her to get outside the gate again. That time, before she left, we’d already settled when and where we’d meet next.

I think it was the fourth time we met, or it may have been the fifth, before one of us worked up the courage to suggest going somewhere less crowded than a tavern, and I honestly can’t remember which of us made the suggestion first. There were places outside the gate where you could take a girl, or a girl could take you, and a mark or two would buy a bed that wasn’t too dirty and a couple of hours of privacy. That’s what we did, and things proceeded from there. Afterwards, though, she nuzzled her face into my shoulder and suddenly started to cry, and after she’d finished crying I asked why; we talked, and I began to figure out what she was doing in a cheap rented bed with a ruinman’s prentice.

She was from one of Chanuga’s important families, as I’d guessed, with a mother who was a big name in Circle, and grandmothers and great-aunts who wore the red hats that only Circle elders get to wear. Of course they’d expected her to follow after them, and let her know once she’d gotten old enough that she needed to get a baby started, and she’d gone out and found a likely boy and done the thing, except that there wasn’t a baby. Of course that meant she had to keep at it, and she’d done that until every boy in Chanuga’s wealthy families got to thinking of her as free for the taking, and there still wasn’t a baby on the way.

That was when she realized that she wasn’t going to follow her mother and her grandmothers into Circle. She told them so, and there was a big fight with the grandmothers and great-aunts and everybody involved, and at the end of it all Tam’s mother told her that if she didn’t have enough sense and pride to do the right thing by her family, then she might as well go off to the ruinmen. “She used to scare my brothers when they were little and misbehaved,” she told me, laughing through the tears, “by telling them she was going to send them to be ruinmen’s prentices. I couldn’t believe that she’d say that to me, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed at her.” Then, three days later, the rains came and she teased and bullied Shen into coming with her to the nameless street where the ruinmen live, where she met me.

“I can’t exactly get you into the ruinmen’s guild, you know,” I told her.

That got another laugh. “I know that. Still – Trey, I’ve got just over three years before my twenty, and then I’ll have to find a life for myself, you know. I need to know what it’s like out here, outside the gate where you live. And —” She pressed her face into my shoulder again and said something that I couldn’t figure out at all; so I eased her back from me a bit and she said it again, and we did some kissing and then pretty soon we were going at it again.

“I want to be a butterfly,” she said later. I made a wing-flapping motion with my hands, and she laughed. “No, I mean it. You know how butterflies start out as little green worms, and spend all their time on one tree, until finally they turn into a whatsit and then hatch out and go fluttering off into the world?”

I’d learned that much from the priestesses. “Yes.”

“When I have my twenty, I’ll hatch out, and then I want to fly.”

It was late by the time she left to go back into the city, and later still before I got back to Mister Garman’s house, but nobody made a point of it this time and I made sure to get my share of the work done and then a bit for the next few days. I had a lot of thinking to do. Even then I wasn’t quite slow enough to think that Tam had met me and fallen giddy in love, and that was all there was to it. Partly, I guessed, she was getting back at her mother and grandmothers and great-aunts by doing something that would have them turn gray with horror if they ever found out, and partly she was right about finding something else to do with her life. Once she got to her twenty – her twentieth birthday, that is – if there hadn’t yet been a baby or any sign of one on the way, the door to Circle would swing gently shut and her family would close up around itself with her on the outside. That’s the way Circle works, and if you want to know why, I’m not the person to ask; one of the old women in red hats might be able to tell you, but probably won’t, because Circle has its secrets and holds onto them good and tight.

Still, after thinking all that through a couple of times on a couple of nights where I didn’t get much sleep, I decided that none of it mattered, because whether or not she was in love, I was, and I’d just take my chances. We’d arranged to meet again a week later, and a day or so before them I went up to one of the little shops outside the gate where they sell little trinkets and things. I knew what I wanted to find, and found it after most of an hour of looking through little bins and cases of bright bits of cheap metal, the sort of thing that boys give to girls and girls to boys.

There’s an alley back behind the tavern where we first met, and the grubby little place with rooms and beds for rent has a door that opens onto it. That’s where we met, with rain pelting down from a sky the color of cold iron, and we laughed and kissed, scampered into the rooming house and hurried up the stairs to the room I’d already rented; we’d settled on that as much to have a quiet place to talk as for the obvious reason. We were both soaked, as everybody is during the rains, and so of course we had to get our wet clothes off and hanging on the pegs next to the door; she sat on the bed, brown and plump and glowing in the dim light, and smiled up at me.

“Close your eyes,” I told her, “and hold out a hand.” I put what I’d found into her palm. “Go ahead and look.”

She looked at her hand and then at me, and her eyes were round and wet. “Trey,” she said. “Oh, Trey.”

There wasn’t much I could say in response, and we didn’t do much talking for a while after that. Later, when she was lying on her back and I was propped up on one elbow, looking at her, I took the gift and perched it on her nose: a little butterfly of yellow metal. “That’s your butterfly,” I said, “and it’ll take you someplace you can’t even imagine.”

She laughed, moved the butterfly to her lips and kissed it, and then set it on the bedside stand and pulled me down to her.

I have the butterfly out on the table where I’m writing these words. It’s one of the few things I took with me when I left Shanuga to start looking for Star’s Reach, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever get rid of it, even though our roads went veering off in different directions all those years ago. If we survive this and make it back to Meriga, I don’t doubt that she’ll hear the news, but I wonder if she’ll ever guess that her butterfly made it here. I hope she does, but one way or another I’ll never know.

Twenty: When The Rains Come

2010-11-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

Nobody travels during the rainy months unless they haven’t got any choice in the matter, and even those that have to travel don’t get far. Once the rains start, most roads end up waist deep in water or worse, riverboats tie up at the nearest town and get covered with tarps to keep from getting flooded and sunk, and everybody who doesn’t live in a city core gets used to being soaked right to the skin pretty much all the time. If you’re traveling and the rains catch you, you stay wherever you are, with whoever else happens to be there, and you do what you need to do to get along; if that means a baby gets started or somebody’s life gets turned upside down, well, that’s what happens.

Still, I’d made plans, that first year of the quest for Star’s Reach, when I had no idea yet what kind of a mess I’d fallen into. I’d planned to get to Melumi before the rains came down, so that Berry and I could spend a couple of months learning everything that was known about Star’s Reach. I admit that was maybe half an excuse for wanting to spend some time at Melumi, which I’d heard about since I was almost too small to know what books were, but there was some reason to it, and maybe some hope; if the scholars at Melumi could figure out all the funny words on the letter I’d found, one of them might point us in a direction nobody had looked before, and then we’d be on our way.

The first part of the plan, the part that I’ve already written down in this notebook, worked fine. With some help from Plummer and Jennel Cobey, we got to Melumi a few days before the rains, and got settled into a couple of rooms in the building, the dorm as they call it, that they have for guests and visitors. I still had most of the money Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga, so the cost of staying in the guests’ dorm until the rains ended wasn’t going to be a problem; it turned out to be even less of a problem than I thought, because when I went to talk to the old woman who ran the dorm about paying, she told me that Jennel Cobey was covering it. I still tried to be careful with what I had left, knowing it might have to see us through a mother of a lot of travel before our search was over.

We’d been at the dorm maybe two days, and the sky was getting full of gray clouds, when a messenger came from the library to tell us that the translation was finished. Berry and I followed the messenger back across the big open square at the center of the Versty, ducking past scholars in gray robes and visitors staring goggle-eyed at the tall brick buildings, and ended up in a little room with a table and chairs and not much else in it. The messenger – she was a young thing, not much more than fifteen, with black hair pulled back tight from her face and eyes that looked a little frightened all the time – motioned for us to sit down and then left, closing the door behind her. A few minutes later the door opened again and Eleen came in.

I recognized her after a moment from our arrival at Melumi, and said something polite, I don’t remember what. She replied with something just as forgettable, and then sat down across the table from us and handed us a sheet of paper. This is what it said:

TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH
This was the highest level of secrecy; only people who were allowed to know about Star’s Reach could see it.

PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV 34
There is only this one page. It was sent on the eleventh of November, 2034, in the old calendar, late in the afternoon.

FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI
It was sent by a Jennel Burkert, who was in charge of (something about) talking with beings who live on other worlds.

TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF ORNL
It was sent to the people who were trying to talk with beings who live on other worlds, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was near Orrij in Tenisi.

1. (TS/SR) PROJ DIR LUKACS REPORTS EVAC COMPLETE FROM NRAO AND LANGLEY. ALL RECORDS AND STAFF SAFE. WRTF OPERATIONAL AND CETI INCOMING.
The TS/SR means the same thing as the Top Secret/Star’s Reach at the beginning. Someone named Lukacz, who was in charge of something, said that everything and everyone had been gotten out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which was in the mountains on the border between Jinya and Meriga, and Langley, which was close to Deesee and is now under the sea. (Something) was working and talk from beings who live on other worlds was coming in.

2. (TS/SR) POTUS/DNS/DCI ADVISED THAT PROJECT ONGOING DESPITE CRISIS.
The Presden and the two jennels who commanded Meriga’s spies had been told that even though there was trouble, the work hadn’t stopped.

3. (TS/SR) TRANSPORT FOR ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF TO FOLLOW ASAP. INSTRUCTIONS VIA FEMA/GWEN WHEN SITUATION PERMITS.
Someone was trying to get everyone working on that out of the place near Orrij and take them to (something). As soon as it was possible, they would be told what to do by a special radio system the Presden used when there was trouble.

CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E X4
Jennel Burkert ordered the message to be kept secret because it had scientific knowledge in it that nobody else was supposed to know. It was not going to be made public even after ten years because it showed how the Presden planned to deal with certain kinds of trouble.

TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED
Means the same as the first line. This had to be put on everything that was this secret.

I read through it twice, and then handed it to Berry. “Thank you,” I said to Eleen. “This is going to be helpful. Well, except—”

She folded her hands in front of her and waited without saying a word.

“The thing called WRTF.” Berry had already finished with the paper by then, and he handed it back to me. I took it, and tapped where the letter said ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF. “That’s where the people who were working on this thing were going, wasn’t it? That might be Star’s Reach, the place I’m trying to find.”

She tilted her head to one side, considering. “Possible,” she said after a moment. “It’s not in the books of acronyms, though.”

Back then I had no idea what an acronym was, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Is there any other way to find out what it means?”

“Maybe. It could take weeks or months, and there would be a fee, of course.”

That seet me back for a moment, and then I remembered what Jennel Cobey had said. “The jennel will pay for that,” I told her.

Her eyebrows went up, and I could just about see her move me from a box in her mind marked “scruffy young ruinman” to another, not too far away from it, marked “scruffy young ruinman who knows somebody rich and powerful.” After a moment: “Then I can certainly do that.” She stood up. “Is there anything else?”

“Well, one thing. We want to spend the rains reading as much as we can about Star’s Reach. Is there somebody I can talk to about doing that?”

That got another pair of raised eyebrows, and I went into a third box, this one marked “scruffy young ruinman who maybe isn’t as dumb as he looks.” “I can make the arrangements,” she said. “It will take a day or two to find you a cubicle.”

“That’ll be fine,” I told her. “And there’s another thing.”

She folded her hands again and waited.

“The word on the back.” I’d remembered it the day before, sitting in our room in the guests’ dorm and staring at nothing in particular while evening closed in. “The one in gray writing.”

“The word in pencil,” Eleen said. “Curtis. It’s a name, a common one back then. Probably the name of the person who received the message.”

I thought of the dusty room deep in the Shanuga ruins where I’d found the letter, and the dead man in the heavy clothing of an Old World soldier who was sprawled on the table next to it. Curtis, I thought, imagining someone calling him that when he was still alive. It all seemed to make sense, and because it seemed to make sense I didn’t ask the question that might have gotten me to Star’s Reach years sooner than I did.

She asked if there was anything else, then, and when I said there wasn’t, smiled and nodded and left the room, and before I could do much more than draw in a breath the messenger was back to lead us out of the library. So Berry and I followed her, crossed the square back to the guests’ dorm, and managed not to say anything to each other until we were safely in my room with the door shut.

There were two chairs and a table in every room in the dorm, all of them exactly the same, and all probably salvaged from the same ruin. I put the translated letter down on the table. Berry settled into one of the chairs and leaned forward. “WRTF,” he said, spelling out the letters. “I figured that out about half a minute before you said it, Mister Trey.”

“That that’s what we have to know?”

He nodded. “That WRTF might be Star’s Reach.”

“What else could it be?”

He glanced up at me. “Someplace they were going first, before heading to Star’s Reach.”

“Oh.” He was right, of course. “Well, we’ll hope it turns out to be Star’s Reach.”

He grinned. “Even if it isn’t, if we know where they went from Tenisi, that’s a clue, and there might be other clues there.”

That cheered me up a bit. I sat down next to him and we spent a couple of hours going over the letter and trying to figure out if it was telling us anything we weren’t hearing. Later that day I took the translated letter up the stairs to the top floor of the guests’ dorm, which is where rich and important guests got to stay, and spent an hour or thereabouts talking it over with Jennel Cobey.

He read the thing over, tapped one finger on the letters WRTF, and said, “That’s the key. We’ll have to ask the scholars to find out what it means.”

“Already done, Sir and Jennel,” I said. “The scholar I talked to said it would take a while—weeks or months.”

He nodded once, as though that settled something. “With the rains so close, that’s hardly a problem.” To one of his servants: “Creel, have somebody take care of the fees.” Then he turned back to me and started peppering me with questions about the letter and the ruins it mentioned; I was glad that Berry and I had been over it earlier, because I would have been pretty fairly lost otherwise. Still, when I went back down to my room I was about as pleased as I could be, and Star’s Reach felt almost close enough to touch.

The next day I had other things to think about, because the rains started. There were a few spatters on the windows when I first got up, and a couple more flurries a bit later on, but about an hour before noon the skies opened up and the rain came down in great gray sheets. Any other plans Berry and I might have had went to wherever it is that might-have-beens spend their days, for the first day of the rains isn’t a day to get anything done. We dropped what we were doing and headed outside into the warm wet air and the warm streaming water.

There’s about three hundred years of history behind that. After the old world ended but before the seas finished rising, there was a long time when most of Meriga was dry as an old bone. There were places where it didn’t rain a drop for years on end, and even the places that did get rain got just a bit of it, and not regularly enough to matter. It was a hard and hungry time, and a lot of people died. After that Mam Gaia decided that we’d taken enough punishment, or at least that’s what the priestesses say; the seas rose a whole lot more, and the rains came sweeping in for the first time the way they do every year now. Everybody danced and partied in the falling rain, so the story goes, and everybody still dances and parties the day the rains come, all over Meriga.

Everyone from the Versty was heading into the town, and we followed them. I don’t have the least idea what Berry did, since I did what most people do when the rains come; I let myself get lost in the crowd and end up wherever I happened to end up. In my case it was a string of bars along a narrow little street off one side of the Melumi town square, getting really thoroughly drunk on cheap whiskey and dancing in the rain with local girls who felt like being a little daring, or maybe just this once didn’t care that I was a ruinman.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a half dozen or so of the young scholars from the Versty came into whatever bar I was in, and one of them was Eleen. We danced, and then spun away with other partners, and then ended up dancing together again. She was about as drunk as I was, and not as good at keeping her feet, so when that dance ended we stumbled our way over to a booth over to the side, and one thing led to another. One thing fairly often leads to another on the first day of the rains, but to this day I’m not exactly sure how we ended up at a rooming house a couple of blocks away, in a narrow little upstairs room with a narrow little bed, going at it like a couple of cats in heat and then curling up around each other, wet and drunk and happy.

The next morning I held her head while she threw up into the chamberpot, helped her get something close enough to presentable to pass muster at the scholars’ dorm, and got her back there. I wasn’t in the world’s best shape myself, but we’d matched each other drink for drink there for a while, and there’s a lot less of her to handle the alcohol. Me, I dragged myself back to my room in the guests’ dorm, slept for most of the day, and woke up thinking that the thing with Eleen was just one of those things that happens when the rains come, over and mostly forgotten once the whiskey wears off. I was wrong, but I wouldn’t find that out for a couple of years, and both of us had a long hard road to travel first.

Nineteen: Daughter of Foxes

2010-10-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

It’s been three days now since we found the place where the last people at Star’s Reach died. Since most of our work will be there from now on, and there’s no point walking half the length of the complex to get there, we moved all our things there from the room where we stayed since we first got here more than a month ago. More to the point, all of us but Eleen and Tashel Ban hauled bundles and boxes and kegs halfway across Star’s Reach. Eleen and Tashel Ban worked on the computer; they’re still working, and whether they manage to get it to talk to them will settle whether or not we came all this way for nothing.

So we shouldered the bundles and boxes and kegs, and tried to make as little noise as we could when we crossed from the stair to the sleeping rooms and kitchen through the big room where they were working. Late this morning we got everything hauled and stowed away, and after Thu and I cooked up a meal for everyone – it would have been my turn and Eleen’s, but we shuffled the schedule – Berry looked at me across the table, and I looked at him, and we decided that we had something better to do than wait there while Eleen and Tashel Ban worked and muttered.

We spent the rest of the day tracing cables. That’s something ruinmen do whenever they find bundles of cables running through a ruin, or the marks that show where cables used to run; if you know how to trace them and luck’s with you, they can lead you to metal worth salvaging and sometimes to things that are worth quite a bit more. We didn’t have salvage in mind, of course, but there were cables in bundles running from half a dozen rooms in the place we’d found over to a closet and then down through the floor, and that was a temptation not many ruinmen can resist. Me, I mostly just wanted to do something other than wait and think; Berry, once we were away from the others, said he thought they might lead to other places where records might have been kept, which made sense.

Still, there’s another point to tracing cables, which is that it’s a game. When I was growing up in the Tenisi hills, there was a game all the children knew how to play with stones. You set them out in a triangle, leaving one gap, and then move one stone over another to the empty space. Any stone you leap over gets taken out of the triangle; you can’t move a stone except by leaping over another next to it. If you end up with just one stone left, you win, and if you have more than one left, you lose. On winter nights, we used to play it by the hour. Tracing cables is like that, and the prentices I knew in Shanuga used to play it just as passionately.

I’m good at it, and Berry’s better than I am; I won’t say it was easy, but we won. It took us all afternoon to do it, and we nearly lost the trace when it dropped two full levels inside a concrete wall, but toward evening we scrambled down a narrow staircase eight levels down and found the machines at the other end. There was a whole bank of them, big consoles with switches and lights, and three of them were lit up like the one we found earlier: lit up and waiting, for what we still don’t know. Half the floor of the room was steel grate, and we could see further down the big gray cylinders the ancients made, turning out their steady trickle of electricity. There were a lot of them, more than I’d ever seen or heard of in a single place.

We searched the room, scanned it for radiation, and shone a light through the doors that opened out from it into other parts of the eighth level, and then started back up the stairs. We got back to the upper computer room, as we’d all started calling it, just about the time the evening meal was ready; we were winded from the climb but exhilarated, and ready to tell our good news to anyone who would listen.

As it happened, though, it was the only good news anyone had. Eleen and Tashel Ban hadn’t had anything like the luck we had, and whatever was in the computer was still tangled up around itself and impossible to read, maybe for now, maybe forever.

“There’s still some chance,” Tashel Ban said, gesturing with a piece of bread. He was sitting back, long and lean, in one of the big padded chairs we’d found scattered around the living area and dragged into the space we’d set aside as our common room. “The data’s in there, no question of that. The question is getting it out in some form we can read.”

“Were there machines to do that?” Berry asked. I gave him a startled look; the idea hadn’t occurred to me, and it sounded like a good one.

“There were programs,” Tashel Ban said after a moment. “I don’t think anybody knows how they worked. There are maybe fifty people this side of the oceans nowadays that can make a computer do anything at all, even when it’s in good order, and maybe five who can fix one that’s not working if the problem’s a simple one.”

“This is not simple, I gather,” said Thu.

“I wish I could tell you.” Another gesture with the bread, short and sharp, put a period on the end of his words. “Maybe something simple, maybe it’s not.”

“If there was a program that could fix the files,” Berry said then, “could you find it?”

I think all of us stared at him then. “I might,” Tashel Ban said after a long moment. “Maybe.” He didn’t say another word during the meal, either, just stared at his soup as though it was a computer screen and he could make the beans and salt pork spell out messages from the stars by thinking at them hard enough. Eleen mostly just looked tired. Once we’d finished the meal, they went back to work, and I went to the room where we’d found the shelf full of old books and pulled out out at random.

Its pages were brown and brittle and the cheap paper cover was going to bits, but we’d brought enough resin from Melumi to preserve a building full of books, and so I took it with me into the sleeping room Eleen and I are sharing, got a bulb from my pack, used a sharp knife to cut the pages loose from what was left of the binding, and squirted them with resin on each side as I read it. That’s the way you save a book, if you’re a ruinman and can’t be sure of getting the thing to a scholar before it crumbles away to nothing, and I told myself that that’s what I was doing. Now of course what I was actually doing was trying to keep my mind off the chance that we might have come all this way to Star’s Reach and gotten this close to the messages from the stars and failed, right at the last step, but saving an old book seemed like as good a thing to do as any.

So I sprayed every page front and back, and read it in the process, but I’d be lying if I said I understood the thing. It was all about people from other worlds who were coming to ours in ships that looked like a couple of plates stuck together, and how the government was hiding it, but any day now something would happen that the government couldn’t hide and there we’d be, and the aliens – I finally found out how that word is spelled, after all these years – would save us or something.

Any day now, I thought. I looked back at the page early on where it says when a book got made, and that one had been sitting on shelves for fifty years before the old world ended and ours was born. What do you do when any day now was five hundred years ago?

By the time I’d finished the book and wrapped up the pages for safekeeping, it was late, but I didn’t feel a bit of sleep in me. I pulled out the notebook where I’m writing this, but couldn’t think of what to say. I could hear the faint clatter of keys on the computer keyboard from the room where Eleen and Tashel Ban were still working. Then, after what seemed like a long while, silence.

Then footsteps, soft as the foxes she claims for her kinfolk, coming to the room. Eleen came in a moment later. “Trey? I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Any luck?”

“Maybe.” She sat down next to me on our bed. “Maybe. Berry might just be right.” She leaned against me; I could feel the tiredness in her. Then: “What did you find?”

She meant the book I’d sprayed and wrapped, which was sitting on a little table near the bed. “Not too sure,” I said. “One of the old books. Somebody saying there were aliens visiting our world back in the old days.”

“Flying saucers,” she said.

“Something like that.”

A little, tired laugh. “Funny. They’ve got all the records about that at Melumi. The old Merigan government made the whole thing up, so they could hide tests of airplanes and things they didn’t want other countries to know about. Every few years there’d be another round of them, and they always looked like whatever stopped being secret five or ten years later: round silver balls when they were testing balloons, black triangles when that’s what the planes looked like, that sort of thing. They kept it going right up until the old world ended.”

“Well, nobody told whoever wrote this book.”

“Funny,” she said again. “I wonder why it’s here.” The last couple of words weren’t much more than a mumble, and I just about had to undress her and help her into bed, she was that close to falling asleep right there.

Afterwards, when I’d written about the last three days, I sat there for a while and looked at her, wondering if she’s right and somehow, back in the difficult years after the old world ended, some dozen-times-great grandmother of hers really had married a fox and had whatever’s halfway between children and cubs. I thought about the long road we’d traveled to get here, and of course I ended up remembering how we first met, which was what I was going to write about next before Tashel Ban came running with the news.

It was when Berry and I got to Melumi the first time, of course, riding along with Jennel Cobey and getting a glimpse of what it’s like to live when you don’t ever have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. That started the morning after I’d met the jennel, when a couple of his servants showed up at the door of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall with horses for themselves and one each for me and Berry, and led us jingling and clattering through the streets of Luwul to the one big bridge that still crosses the Hiyo River. We met the jennel and the rest of his party there, close to a hundred servants and soldiers on horseback, and a bunch of horses with nothing on their backs but packs and bundles.

The jennel greeted me in what certainly sounded like fine spirits, then caught sight of Berry. For just a moment he looked about as startled as a man can look, and then smoothed the look off his face as though it had never been there, nodded politely and said a few words to me that didn’t mean a thing. I’ve never known anybody but Plummer who caught on as quickly as Jennel Cobey did, and I used to think that he might have guessed at a glance that Berry was a tween. These days I’d guess differently, but that belongs later in this story.

So we rode north through Inyana with the jennel. He had people riding ahead of him, so that every night we stopped someplace where there were beds and hot meals for the jennel and his advisers and officers and friends, which meant us. A couple of days when we were riding, he sent a servant to get me to ride up near the head of the line with him, and he asked me questions about the ruinmen and Star’s Reach; a couple of evenings when he wasn’t yet busy with the harlot or two that his servants found for him pretty much every stop along the way, he sent for me to join him at dinner. The rest of the time, Berry and I rode together well back in the line, had our meals with the servants and soldiers, and had a quiet room to ourselves wherever we stayed. It was pleasant enough, the way a dream can be pleasant, and felt nearly as unreal.

We got to Melumi late one afternoon more than a week after we’d left Luwul. There were big heaps of cloud looming up dark in the sky behind us, warning of the approaching rains, and a rising wind set the tree branches dancing. We’d been riding all day through Inyana farmland, and finally came to a little town no different from any of the others we’d passed, except this one was Melumi and had the big brick buildings of the Versty back behind it and women in gray scholar’s robes everywhere.

The Versty used to be bigger than it is nowadays. I learned that later, but when I first saw it I don’t think I would have believed it if somebody told me. There were six huge buildings made of salvaged brick—the library, the school, the offices, and the three buildings – dorms, they call them, though I don’t know why – where scholars, students, and visitors sleep and eat. We rode into the big paved square in the middle of it all, and while the servants and soldiers went to the dorm for visitors, the jennel and Berry and I rode up to the offices, got down off our horses, and went inside.

The jennel’s people had ridden ahead, of course, so the scholars were waiting for us. There were three of them, all with gray hair pulled back tight around their faces and lips pulled back tight across their teeth. There was a Versty official too, someone of high enough rank to chat comfortably with a jennel, and half a dozen junior scholars or senior students a little older or younger than I was, but it was the three scholars who mattered and just then they were the only ones I noticed. We exchanged a few words and then I handed the copy of the letter over to them, and Jennel Cobey startled the stuffing out of me by handing them the original as well.

We could have given them each a pound of gold or a dead rat, and I don’t think their faces would have moved any more than they did. One of them turned to one of the girls and held out her hand, without a word, and the girl handed her a hand lens; the scholar sat down and went over the original so slowly I think she must have looked at every fiber in the paper. The other two took the copy and read it, word by word, glancing at each other now and then; one would make a little nod or shake of the head to the other, and then they’d go on reading. The three of them were at it for more than a quarter hour, and then all of a sudden they turned to the official. Two of them nodded and the other, the one who’d used the lens, said, “Authentic.”

The official beamed, and handed the original back to the jennel. “Well. Not that we doubted your word, of course.” Cobey allowed a bit of a smile, but didn’t say anything.

“Can you tell us what it means?” I asked then.

All at once three pairs of cold clear scholar’s eyes were looking at me, with exactly the same expression they would have turned on the dead rat. After a moment, one of them turned to one of the junior scholars, and said, “Eleen, you’ll prepare a translation.”

That’s when I noticed Eleen: thin and bony, with lighter skin and redder hair than you usually see this side of Genda. She made a little curtsey to the scholar and glanced at me briefly with no particular interest, and then took the copy and left the room. I glanced after her, then turned back to the scholars and didn’t give her a second thought.

Eighteen: What the Wind Said

2010-09-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

This morning I was putting my tools in order for the day’s work and thinking about the last part of the journey to Melumi when I heard running in the corridor outside the room where we’ve had our camp since we arrived here. It turned out to be Tashel Ban, and that made me sit up; like most people from Nuwinga, he doesn’t move any faster than he has to.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Found a door.” He was panting hard. “In the computer room. Stairs, and—a smell.”

I knew right away what he meant, as much from the look on his face as anything. Ruinmen get used to the smell of people who’ve been dead a long time, but most other people don’t, and it’s probably a good thing; these days, when you find dead people from the old world, what killed them may not have gone away.

So I loaded the last of my tools into my belt and put it on, and by the time I’d turned around to see where Berry was he had his belt and his leathers on as well. Tashel Ban gasped his thanks, still panting, and stepped out of the way, and Berry and I headed down the corridor. We didn’t run; ruinmen don’t run when they’re in a ruin, or at least those who do don’t live long enough to bother remembering; but I won’t say we dawdled much.

There were lamps burning in the computer room. Tashel Ban and Eleen had been working on what was left of the old computers, with as much help as old Anna could give them, while the rest of us kept searching for the place where the last people at Star’s Reach had lived and done their work. Eleen and Anna were both there, but I didn’t need to do much more than follow their glances to find the door Tashel Ban had mentioned. There was a big metal bookcase pulled away from its place against the wall, and the door was behind it, half open.

“We pulled down some of the books from the shelf,” Eleen explained, “and the shelf moved.”

“So you looked behind it.”

“So we looked behind it.” She smiled her quick little smile. “And figured out right away that it was work for you and Berry, not for us.”

“You didn’t go up there?”

“Not after smelling the air.”

I’d smelled the same thing as soon as I came into the room: like dust, but not quite, and with just a hint of old decay. “Good,” I said, and glanced at Berry, who was already tying on a cloth dust mask. “Let’s see what’s up there.”

I could have said a lot more, and so could Eleen, but there’s an odd thing that happens with us, and I think it happens with a lot of people in the crafts, ruinmen and scholars and soldiers and all of us. There are plenty of times when Eleen and I are two people who sleep together and are trying to figure out whether they love each other or not, but when there’s work to be done she’s a scholar and I’m a ruinman and we stop being much of anything else. So I put my mask on, and we went to the door; Berry got out an electric lamp and I pulled out my radiation counter, and we started up the stair.

The steps looked like they’d been cut out of the concrete long after Star’s Reach was built, but we still made good and sure the steps weren’t trapped with live wires, and we sniffed the air for the thunder-smell that tells you there’s electricity close by. There wasn’t, and the counter clicked slow and soft, nothing more than what you’d get from background radiation, which was comforting in its way. The stair ran more or less straight, and we’d climbed up more than a level, probably close to two, before we saw the dim gray light up at the top of it.

The stair climbed four levels in all, right up to the topmost level of the complex, and then opened out into a room, a large one. The light came from big skylights of glass block set into the ceiling. We looked around, and that’s when we saw the bodies.

There must have been forty of them, all laid out neatly in a row with their heads close to one wall. There wasn’t much more to them than skeletons and scraps of dried skin, and they were dressed up in old world clothing that would go to dust if you touched it too hard. I stared at them for a moment, and then scanned the room one more time for radiation and got out the poison probe. That went off at once – some kind of chemical toxin, not enough to hurt anyone unless they got stupid but enough to watch out for. On a hunch, I walked over to the bodies with the probe on, and had the needle swing left to right as I went; when I set the sensitivity high and put the business end of the probe close to what was left of one mouth, the needle slapped right over against the pin.

“They poisoned themselves?” Berry asked, his eyes big and round.

“Looks like it,” I said.

We searched the rest of the room, found two doors off it, and searched the rooms beyond them. No question, we’d found the place where Anna’s people had spent the last years of the history of Star’s Reach; there were bedrooms and a kitchen, and a big space under skylights where withered sticks in tubs of dry dirt showed where they’d grown vegetables. The room we’d found first had computers in it, a bunch of them, and other machines I didn’t recognize. It also had one thing more that we didn’t find until we’d almost finished: a heap of black ashes that had probably once been paper.

I sent Berry down to get the others. By then everyone else was in the computer room, and their footfalls came echoing up the stairs like the sounds you’d hear from a clumsy drummer. Eleen got to the top first, and let out a little cry when she saw the bodies; Tashel Ban swore under his breath; Anna drew in a sharp breath and then started to cry. Thu, who came up last except for Berry, was the only one who didn’t make a sound; he glanced at the bodies, then at me, nodded once and walked over to where I was standing.

We ended up hauling a couple of shelves from the computer room below and using them to carry the bodies half a dozen at a time to the nearest door that led outside. The rains arrived a couple of weeks after we did, and the gray dusty desert we’d crossed to get to Star’s Reach was all covered with flowers. A wind was gusting over the plains, pushing big masses of white cloud with it. We laid the bodies out decently beneath the sky. Since we didn’t have a priestess and Anna was still weeping, Eleen recited the litany for the last people of Star’s Reach, while the wind blew what was left of their clothing into dust and sent scraps of dry bone scattering out among the flowers.

Afterwards, when Anna could talk again, we sat with her in the room where her people had lived and died, and Eleen asked her what she remembered.

“I just don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long, long time ago. We left at night, I remember that; everything was dark, and my mother and I went with a few other people to one of the doors and sat outside, waiting for my father and one other man. It was a long time before they came back, and then we started walking in the dark. But I don’t remember much of what happened before that, not to anyone but me and my mother and father.”

She leaned forward, then, and stared at nothing any of the rest of us could see for a long while. Then: “There was shouting. Before my mother came and started gathering up my clothes and things, and telling me we had to leave. There was shouting; I could hear it down the corridor as I played in our room. That wasn’t something that happened, and I wondered what it meant.” Then, blinking and looking at us: “That’s all.”

Tashel Ban had gone to the heap of ashes while she was speaking, and came back then. “Paper,” he said, “and quite a bit of it. Unless something turns up elsewhere, that may be their records.”

“The computers might have something,” Eleen said without too much hope.

We spent the rest of the afternoon searching the rooms we’d found, or rather Berry, Thu and I did, with what help Anna could give us. That wasn’t much, though none of us could blame her. Not long after we started searching, she found the room that had belonged to her family, with things nobody had taken the time to pack scattered around, and among them a little stick-figure drawing of herself and her mother and father, with her own name written in a child’s block letters down at the bottom. She tried her best not to weep, but didn’t manage the thing, and even though she wiped her tears and came to help us search after a while, her thoughts were elsewhere.

Tashel Ban and Eleen were working at the computers all the while, figuring out if anything was left in them to read. We’d been searching the rooms for a few minutes when Eleen let out a whoop like nothing I’d ever heard from her. It turned out that the room still had power coming to it from power cores somewhere down below, and they’d been able to get one of the computers to turn on and the screen to light up. After that they were silent for a long while, except for muttered words now and again as they worked.

Meanwhile we found everything we were going to find in the other rooms, which was quite a bit as far as salvage went, but next to nothing that could help us in our quest. Anna’s people had taken what they could carry, but the dead ones left everything behind, clothes in the closets, pots and knives in the kitchen, tools next to the place where they’d grown their vegetables, and everything else you might expect fifty people to have in the place where they and their ancestors had been living for many years. One room had most of a wall covered with shelves, and most of those full of books with brown brittle pages and cracked covers that used to have bright colors on them; all of them came from before the end of the old world, though, and the papers we wanted to find weren’t anywhere among them.

By the time we’d finished searching I was about as discouraged as a man can get. It didn’t matter just then that I’d done the thing that every ruinman in Meriga had been dreaming of doing for four hundred years, and found the biggest and most famous ruin of them all; it didn’t matter that I could pretty much count on being the most famous mister in the ruinmen’s guild wherever I finally settled, and rich as a jennel besides. I wanted to know what the people from that other world had been trying to say to us right when the old world ended, and it seemed unfair after coming all that way and getting so close, to have those messages turn out to be long strings of numbers nobody could read, and a heap of black ashes nobody would ever read again.

I wandered into the place where Anna’s people used to grow their vegetables with those thoughts in my head. The skylights of glass block overhead let in evening light, and just then something, probably a big ball of tumbleweed, went rolling past in the wind. I thought about the wind blowing the dust of Anna’s people out across the plains, and all at once I realized that the wind was saying something.

They found something, it said. They found something in that message from the stars, and swallowed poison and died. Are you sure you want to find it too?

I left the dead sticks in their tubs and went back out to the main room. The others had gathered there already, following some call I hadn’t heard.

“They tried to erase all the computer files,” Eleen said, “but they didn’t know enough about computers to do it. It’s as though they had a library, and instead of burning the books, they just tore all the covers off the books and mixed them together so you can’t tell which book is which, or even where one ends and another begins.”

“But the pages are still there?” Berry asked.

“The pages are still there.” Eleen rubbed her eyes. “Tashel Ban’s going to try to get one of the printers to work; we’ve got plenty of paper in the storerooms and two cartridges that we think are unused. If we can get a printer going, we’re going to print out everything that might be a document, and try to piece them together and make sense of them.”

The wind was on the other side of the glass blocks and a mother of a lot of concrete and steel, but damn if I didn’t hear its voice, saying the same thing it said to me in the place with the dead plants. Still, I knew what my answer had to be, and I knew it was the same answer every one of us would give. Whatever it was that Anna’s people found, we couldn’t stop without finding it ourselves.

Seventeen: Dell's Bargain

2010-08-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Looking back over what I wrote last night, I realized that I’ve gone and talked about all kinds of things that people won’t know about unless they grew up in Meriga or spent a good long time there. Jennels, for instance. They don’t have those in Nuwinga or Genda, and Mam Gaia only knows whether they’ve got anything of the kind over in the Neeonjin country way off past the mountains and the dead lands of the west. In Meyco they’ve got dons, who are like jennels with attitude, but then Meyco’s an empire. a big one, and I think that comes with extra bragging rights.

Anyway, Meriga has jennels. We’ve got a couple of hundred of them, maybe, and a couple of thousand cunnels, who would have been jennels if somebody back along the line of their grandfathers had been firstborn sons and not second or third or whatever. Most of the jennels are heads of families that have been famous names in Meriga since the old world ended and ours was born; they own a lot of land and a lot of other things, they have soldiers and servants, and when the presden names somebody to take one of her armies off to the borders to fight, it pretty much has to be one of the jennels.

One of the archivists at Sisnaddi told me that that’s all the jennels used to be, commanders of the Merigan armies back before the old world ended, and all the rest of it came later. That would explain why they don’t have them in Genda or Nuwinga, since I don’t think either of those countries had a big army back then. Meriga did, which is why most of the ruinmen I’ve ever met know the look of the stiff heavy clothing soldiers wore in Meriga before the old world ended; you find a lot of bones in what’s left of that clothing, tucked away here and there in the old ruins.

The man looking over my shoulder as I examined the letter I’d found down deep in the ruins at Shanuga wasn’t wearing that kind of clothing, of course, but some of his grandfathers back four hundred years and more had worn it. The plain black stuff he was wearing might as well have been the same thing; you only see that on jennels, and then only on jennels who have enough clout at the presden’s court that they don’t need to announce who they are to all and sundry, just as the really big names in Circle aren’t the women in the fancy stuff and pearls but the ones in the plain green dresses and the plain long hair, who don’t talk much and don’t have to.

Jennel Cobey didn’t have to talk much, either. He stood there while I examined the letter I’d found down inside the Shanuga ruins, watching me as though he had all the time in the world.

“I’m curious how you came by this, Sir and Jennel,” I said finally.

He had a short sharp laugh like a dog’s bark. “I imagine so. Still, no mystery there; one of my people in Noksul heard about the letter as soon as word got out and contacted me by radio, and so I was able to get someone to Shanuga in time for the auction. Which was quite the lively event; your Mister Garman did very well out of it.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“The man I sent to Shanuga mentioned that you had the finder’s rights for it.”

“That’s right.”

He was still watching me, of course. “I hope you won’t feel insulted, Sir and Mister, if I say that you’ve taken on quite a task there.”

He meant, of course, that I was a brand new mister who probably didn’t even look my twenty years just at that moment. “If you’d had a chance at something like that, Sir and Jennel,” I said, “would you have turned it down?”

A moment later I knew I might just have said the worst possible thing, since of course he did have a chance at something like that, and could take it by nothing more difficult than having one of his people cut my throat. He paused, still watching me, and then broke into a slow smile. “Of course not,” he said. “Good. I think we have the basis for an understanding, then.”

He reached for the letter, and I handed it to him. “You want to find Star’s Reach,” he went on then. “So do I, badly. Still, finding it and digging down to it are your line of business, not mine. If I recall correctly, your guild sometimes does contract digs.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“And in this case?”

I considered that long and hard. A contract dig is one where the ruinmen are paid out of somebody else’s pocket, instead of getting by each season on whatever they made on finds from the season before. That’s not something most ruinmen will do unless the dig’s really worth it, because whoever pays the costs gets their money back before anyone else gets paid, and after that a share of the profits goes to the contract holder as well. On the other hand, a dig at Star’s Reach would cover almost any contract I could imagine with plenty to spare, and having someone else foot the bill for the digging would make it one mother of a lot easier for a brand new mister and his prentice to get a good crew together and do the thing the way it ought to be done.

“In this case, Sir and Jennel,” I said, “it’s a possibility.”

He nodded, then: “If you’re worried about your profits, don’t be. I’m perfectly willing to see the salvage go to the ruinmen and whatever records are there go to Melumi. That’s your business and theirs.” Seeing my expression: “You’re wondering why. I don’t need the money. Partly I want to find Star’s Reach for the same reason everyone else in Meriga dreams of finding it; partly –” He leaned a senamee or so toward me. “Partly, whoever finds Star’s Reach is going to become the most famous person in Meriga as fast as word can spread. That could be a real advantage to me in Sisnaddi.”

“Fair enough,” I said, though I didn’t have the least idea just then why it would be an advantage to him, or to anyone else.

“Then would it be fair to say that we have a bargain?”

I agreed, and we shook hands. “By the way,” he said then, “do you have any idea where it is?”

“Not yet, Sir and Jennel. That’s why I’m headed to Melumi.”

“Sensible. It was my destination as well. Would you be willing to ride with my party? I think I can promise you a faster trip and better accommodation than you’d have on your own.”

I agreed to that gratefully enough, and he said, “Good. We were planning on leaving tomorrow, if that’s suitable. I’ll have a horse sent – do you have prentices?”

“Just one.”

“Two horses, then, to the guild hall tomorrow morning.” He said a few more pleasantries, which I don’t remember just now, and then without ever having to say a word about it he dismissed me and I turned to find his servant waiting for me just inside the door.

All the way back to the ruinmen’s guild hall, I thought about what had just happened. Just about every ruinman I’d ever met would have called that the best bit of luck I could have had, and more than half of me thought the same thing, but the rest of me wasn’t so sure, because the bargain I’d made with Jennel Cobey felt a little too much like a Dell’s bargain.

That’s something else I ought to explain, because I know for a fact that people from outside of Meriga don’t say that or know what it means; I used the phrase once in front of Tashel Ban, and he gave me the owl-look he always gives when whatever somebody says doesn’t make the least bit of sense to him. Dell—well, you don’t mention him around the priestesses, because they don’t believe in him and don’t like it when other people do, either.

Dell’s not a human being, though he looks like one. He looks like a tall man with white skin, like people from Genda have, and he wears fancy clothing from the old world, with one of those strips of bright cloth tied around his neck that men used to wear back then to tell other people they were rich or something. Nobody knows where he lives, but if you want to find him, they say, all you have to do is go to a place where two roads cross right at midnight when the moon’s down, going with one eye closed and one hand tucked inside your clothes and hopping on one foot, and call him. Sometimes, they say, he shows up even if you don’t call him, if you want something badly enough, but if you go to the crossroads that way and call him three times, before you finish calling him the third time, he’s there waiting for you.

I never knew anyone who called him, but the story goes that you call him if you want something so bad that you think nothing else matters. If you do that, and tell him what you want, he’ll get it for you, but you have to promise to give him something else in trade for it. You don’t get to pick the something else, he does, and he doesn’t have to tell you what it will be when you make the bargain; sometime later, maybe years later, he just shows up and takes it, and you know as well as I do that it’s going to be the one thing in the world you care about more than the thing you got from him.

That’s a Dell’s bargain, and that’s what it felt like I had just made with Jennel Cobey. Now of course I hadn’t promised to give him anything but whatever fame he got from being the one who paid for the contract dig at Star’s Reach, but since he was a jennel he could pretty much show up and take anything he fancied whenever he wanted, the way Dell does. Still, I couldn’t think of any way I could have said no to him and been sure of leaving with an uncut throat, and there were plenty of good practical reasons to have said yes. That’s what I told myself, at least, as I balanced unsteadily on the horse and Jennel Cobey’s servants took me back through Luwul’s streets to the ruinmen’s guild hall.

Back at the hall, Mister Bron was glad to see me still breathing, and said so. Berry acted as calm and cool as though nobody’d ever said a word about heads on spikes, but once Bron and his prentices headed back to work at the ruins and Berry and I went to the room they’d given me up in the guild hall to get some rest and wait for the next meal, he threw his arms around me and clung there, shaking like a leaf in a good strong wind. I got him calmed down after a bit, and we sat and talked, or rather I talked about what had happened at the jennel’s house and he took it in with one hand curled around his chin and an expression on his face I couldn’t read at all.

When I mentioned what Jennel Cobey had said about the advantages of being the most famous person in Meriga, though, Berry nodded. “He’s right, you know. They say that the presden’s sick again, and if – well, when – she dies, it’s anyone’s guess who becomes presden.”

“Since there’s no heir.”

He nodded. “The jennels could have a lot to say about who gets chosen, and I’m sure they’ve all got their favorite choice in mind. If everybody thinks of Cobey Taggert as the jennel who found Star’s Reach, his choice would be hard to ignore.”

That made sense to me. “You know a fair amount about politics.”

Berry looked away. “A bit. My teacher in the Warrens used to talk about it all the time. Her mother was some kind of big name in Circle, though she never had children, and so she used to follow the news whenever we’d hear anything.” He didn’t seem comfortable talking about it, though, so I let it drop and we talked about something else until the dinner bell.

Sixteen: The Jennel's Letter

2010-07-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

“Word got here about two weeks ago,” said Mister Bron. He was one of the senior misters in the Luwul guild, a big burly man with one eye gone and a scar from whatever did it that ran halfway down his face. “Upriver from Duca with the boatmen, and then downriver from Sisnaddi the same way. We didn’t think too much of it, rumors being rumors, until we got a letter from Jennel Cobey.”

Berry and I were sitting in the big main room of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall, with Bron and a couple of other misters. We’d had a chance to wash up and get some food, but they still had dirt from the Luwul ruins on their leathers; they’d come back as fast as they could once word of our arrival got to them, and that didn’t take long. I wasn’t sure yet why one of the prentices at the hall had gone sprinting out to the ruins as soon as we’d gotten settled in at the hall, but it was pretty clear that we’d stumbled into a mother of a mess.

“Who’s he?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”

“No?” Bron’s eye turned to look at me. “Shanuga’s further out of the way than I thought, then. He’s a big name these days. Some kind of cousin of the presden, or so they say. He’s got a house here in Luwul. He’s usually either at the court in Sisnaddi or out on the borders with one of the armies, but the letter came from here and had his private seal on it, and it asked about you. By name.”

I blinked. “That’s a surprise.”

Bron laughed, a short deep laugh that seemed to come from somewhere down past the floor. “True enough.”

“What did it say?”

“Mostly that the jennel wants to talk to you as soon as you get to Luwul. I’ll let you see it, if you like.” He motioned to one of the prentices who were hanging back, listening but trying not to look like that was what they were doing. “Frey, get the letter from Marsh, will you?”

The prentice hurried off. Berry gave me a worried look, though it wasn’t half so worried as I was feeling right then. “What do you figure he means by that?’

“That’s what we don’t know.”

I thought about that for a long moment. People don’t trouble the guilds often, and they trouble ruinmen even less than they do the other guilds. Annoy the gunsmiths or the doctors or the radiomen, and they turn away your business from then on, which can be bad enough; annoy the ruinmen and you’re going to find out what kind of nasty things hang around in old ruins. I’d heard of two people who thought they could rob ruinmen and get away with it, and both of them had their hair fall out, took sick, and died a couple of months later. Not that anything ever got proved, you understand. Still, not even ruinmen could get away with doing something like that to a jennel, and especially to a jennel who had connections at the presden’s court.

I knew that part of what Bron was telling me was that if this Jennel Cobey sent for me, I really didn’t have much choice in the matter; even if Berry and I left the guild hall and tried to make a run for it out of Luwul, once it came out that we’d stopped at the hall, there would be six kinds of trouble to pay for. Ruinmen are supposed to protect each other no matter what, but “no matter what” in this case could be soldiers battering down the doors of the guild hall and sticking the misters’ heads on spikes over Luwul’s gates. There are times when you can ask for people to make good on their promises, and there are times when you know better.

The prentice came back with the jennel’s letter, then, and Bron told him to go wash up and get a clean shirt on. I didn’t listen too closely, because the letter took some reading; it was written in the long curving letters the presden’s court uses these days, and used all the old names of towns, which I didn’t know too well then. I made sure Berry could see it, in case he had to help me with it, and started reading. This is what it said:

To the misters of the Ruinmens’ Guild of Louisville, my greetings. A ruinman of Chattanooga, Trey son of Gwen, is traveling through this part of the country on his way to the scholars at Bloomington. If he comes to your guildhall, I will consider it a personal favor if you send tomy people here in town at once. I want to talk with him. General Cobey Taggert.

I looked up from the letter.

“You’d better send somebody to the jennel’s house,” I told him.

He nodded. “I don’t know of anything else we can do.”

“As for the letter, I’ve got two copies, one for Melumi and one that’s mine. I’d like to leave one here.”

Bron nodded again. “I see. Good. Yes, and we can get it to Melumi, in case.” In case you don’t come back was what he was too polite to say, of course.

So the prentice Bron sent to wash up went trotting off to Jennel Cobey’s house as fast as he could. I got out one of the two copies of the dead man’s letter I had with me, and handed it to Bron, then took the other one and handed it to Berry. He gave me a startled look, and gulped, but took it. We sat there and talked a bit about the ruins in Luwul and Shanuga, the way you find something to talk about when the thing everybody is thinking of is the thing nobody wants to mention, and Bron mentioned in passing that he had room for an extra prentice or two in his end of the ruins, which was his way of saying that Berry would have someplace to go if something happened to me.

By the time the prentice came back I was almost relieved. “Mister Trey,” he told me, “The jennel sent two of his servants and wants you to go with them.” I got up, shook Bron’s hand and Berry’s, and went down the stairs to the guildhall door.

I was half expecting soldiers, but the two men waiting outside the door were ordinary servants in the sleeveless shirts and knee-length trousers that people wear in the Hiyo valley, and they had three horses with them. “Trey sunna Gwen?” one of them asked.

“That’s me.”

They both bowed, just a little, and the one who’d spoken motioned at one of the horses and said, “If you’ll come with us, Sir and Mister.”

That’s the proper title for a guild mister, but nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly had ever used it for me before then. I was pleased, in an odd sort of way. The horse was another matter, for I’d never ridden one and only had the sketchiest idea how. Horses aren’t common nowadays; they like a drier climate than Meriga has now, and the old world left us with some diseases that kill two foals out of three every year, so if you’re not a cavalryman in the army or a servant or soldier of a jennel, or just plain rich, you don’t have much of a chance to ride one.

I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance this time, especially not if my head was going to be on a spike sometime soon. I walked over to the side of the horse, grabbed whatever you call the thing on the front of the saddle that you’re supposed to grab, got one foot into the stirrup and swung myself up. I had no idea what I’d do if the horse objected to the proceedings, but it just shifted its feet a bit and let me mount. Once I got myself settled, it swung its head around to glance at me with one eye, as though it wanted to ask if I was done yet.

The two servants popped up into their saddles with a mother of a lot more grace than I must have had, grabbed the reins and started down the street. I wasn’t sure what to do, but my horse was; it started off right away without bothering for me to guide it. I picked up the reins, too, and the horse gave me a second glance; I think it was wondering if I was going to do something stupid. I wasn’t. I figured the horse was probably smarter than I was, and let it do whatever it was going to do.

That’s how I rode through the streets of Luwul that morning: sitting in the saddle holding the reins as though I knew what I was doing, without the smallest baby kitten of an idea where we were going or what was going to happen to me when we got there. Luwul’s a bigger town than Shanuga, but most of it was pretty much the same: the big gray town walls made of old concrete chunks mortared together, the gate with a pair of tired guards looking down from their windows, the narrow muddy streets inside with tall narrow buildings rising up on either side, pigs and dogs and people all busy with their own affairs in the streets and the dim little alleys, smoke and smells and a hundred different noises all tumbling over each other in the sultry air.

I got to see plenty of Luwul, too, for the ruinmen’s hall was outside the south gate and Jennel Cobey’s house was on the river, which runs along the northern edge of the town. Plenty of Luwul got to see me, too; a lot of people in the streets looked up at me as I rode past them on the horse and then turned to watch me go. I wondered whether they’d heard about the letter from Shanuga, or if a ruinman on a horse was just strange enough to catch their interest. Still, as we got close to the jennel’s house, the people thinned out; the houses got bigger, too, and most of them were made of stone or old concrete instead of wood and plaster, with big gates and courtyards, and towers up above where men with guns could keep watch over the street and the river if they had to.

Jennel Cobey’s house was one of those, as big as any and bigger than most. We rode up to his gate, where a couple of his soldiers glanced at us and hauled the gate open, and then into his courtyard, where the servants swung down from their horses and waited patiently while I did the same thing. “This way, Sir and Mister,” said the same one who had spoken to me earlier, and motioned toward a door, so I followed him: through the door, up a stair, and along a corridor with tall windows along the one side looking out toward the river, and paintings on the other side of faces of men I didn’t recognize. The second servant was right behind me; I never heard him say a word then or later, but I could feel his gaze on my back the whole time.

Finally we stopped at a door. “Please to wait here, Sir and Mister,” said the servant who did all the talking, and went inside. I could hear his voice, though not the words, and then another voice; and then the servant came back through the door. “If you’ll follow me, Sir and Mister.”

I followed him into the room, and that was how I met Cobey Taggert. Thinking back on that first meeting now, after everything that’s happened, it’s hard for me to be sure how much of what I think I remember was reshaped by what followed. For most of five years, I would have said that Cobey was one of the best friends I had on Mam Gaia’s belly, and I still thought that right up until the moment when I realized that one of us was going to kill the other, there in the sun and the dust in front of the door to Star’s Reach; I traveled with him, shared hopes and discoveries with him, told him some of my secrets and guessed at a few of his. It’s hard to set that aside and reach back to the memory of our first meeting, untouched by anything else, but I’ll try.

He was younger than I expected, not ten years older than I was, with a mop of sand-colored hair and a narrow beard along the edge of his jaw, the sort of thing that was fashionable that year at the presden’s court. He was dressed all in black, the way jennels usually do, but the only sign of rank he had anywhere on him was the bone-handled gun that showed at his hip.

“Trey sunna Gwen,” the servant said, and ducked back out through the door; I heard it click behind me. “Sir and Jennel,” I said; if he was going to have his servants use my title, damn if I wasn’t going to use his.

“Mister Trey,” he said, and crossed the room to shake my hand. That startled me, though I tried not to show it. “Thank you for coming. I suspect you’re wondering why I sent for you.”

“That I am, Sir and Jennel.”

That got a sudden, lopsided smile. “The simplest explanation is right over here. If you’ll follow?”

He set off across the room. It was a big room, nearly as big as the main room of the ruinmen’s hall I’d just left, with tall narrow windows along two sides and bookshelves along a third. Heavy timbers framed the ceiling above, and a carpet nice enough that I regretted the state of my boots covered the floor. In the corner where the walls with the windows met, there was a table, and on the table was a flat box about as big as a sheet of paper.

He got to the table before I did, and lifted the lid off the box. “I think you’ll recognize this.”

I did, too. I bent over to give it a close look, and he motioned to me to pick it up, then stood back, watching me, as I examined front and back, the bits of gray dust stuck to it, the hint of fingerprints where I must have held the thing before the resin I’d sprayed on it had time to dry. The single word on the back was there, too, in the pale gray writing nobody nowadays knows how to make. I set the thing back in its box and turned to face the jennel, wondering how he’d gotten the letter I’d found beneath the dead man’s hand in the Shanuga ruins.

Fifteen: North to Luwul

2010-06-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

That was how I met Plummer. Of all the people who didn’t join me on the journey to Star’s Reach, he’s the one who put the most into the story I’m trying to tell in these notebooks, and to this day I’m not sure why he isn’t here. I’m not sure of a lot of things about Plummer. Most people you meet, you get to know them and a lot of the things about them that seemed funny or puzzling early on look like plain common sense as soon as you’ve been around them a while, but Plummer isn’t like that. The more I’ve learned about him, the more puzzled I get.

By the time we finished eating, the sun was up, and he settled down in a corner of the ruin and wrapped himself in an old shabby coat and went right to sleep. Berry and I weren’t anything like so confident of him as he seemed to be of us, and so we kept watches, turn and turn again, while the sun was up. Still, nothing happened; we were far enough off the road that if anybody went riding past, looking for us or otherwise, neither of us saw or heard it; Mam Gaia took her sweet time turning her face away from the sun, but finally dusk came rising up out of the east and the first stars came out, and Plummer woke up.

He hadn’t hardly moved the whole time, but all of a sudden he was dead awake. “I suppose wishing you a good morning is a little untimely,” he said. “You both managed to find some sleep, I trust.”

“Enough to get by,” I said. I’d taken the last watch and so was wide awake; Berry was still rubbing his eyes and blinking.

“Good. The next safe place I know of is perhaps twenty kil—kloms away from here; there should be food, and quite possibly friends, but first, of course, it will be necessary for us to get there.”

The comment about friends got my hackles up a bit, since we still didn’t have any way of knowing whether Plummer could be trusted or not. Still, we’d stayed with him and shared his food, and unless we hit him over the head and left him there in the ruin there wasn’t an easy way to go somewhere besides where he was going. So Berry and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything. As soon as we’d all had a little food, we shouldered our bags, and the three of us made our way through the dusk back down to the road to Luwul.

I’d worried as well that Plummer might talk on the way, and make it harder to listen for the people who might be following us, but once we left the ruin he didn’t say a word more than he had to. If you’ve ever watched an old fox come up to the edge of a road, listen and sniff until he was sure it was safe for him to cross, and then trot across it, no faster than he had to but no slower either, that was Plummer. Even in the faint light I could see his eyeglasses glint as he looked here and there or canted his head to catch a sound.

That night didn’t seem quite as long as the one before, though it was still a long slog down empty roads. For the first half of it we might as well have been a hundred kloms from anyplace; the road wound its way through forest, and even with the moon up we didn’t have a lot of light to go by. Later on, past midnight by where the moon was, we got back into farm country and had an easier time of it. Nothing but us moved anywhere on the road, and the scattered farmhouses we could see were dark as old ruins; even the wind hushed, the way it does sometimes in the hours before dawn, so that every sound our feet made on the road, no matter how quiet, seemed to hang there for a moment.

About the time the first bit of gray showed up off to the east of us, we got to a place where a narrow little farm track headed off to one side of the road. Plummer looked at it, tilted his head, then motioned down the track and said in a low voice, “This way. They are expecting me, apparently.” It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it did I looked around and tried to see whatever sign must have been left for him; I know what it was now, or at least I can guess, but right then I couldn’t see a thing. Still, I nodded, and Berry and I followed him down the track.

We were both more than half expecting him to lead us to another ruin, even though that didn’t square with what he’d said about food and friends. The track led right up to a little farmhouse well back from the road, though. Plummer motioned for us to wait by the gate, saying, “They will need to know that I’m not alone, or else – well, not to worry about that. A moment, please.”

He disappeared into the night, and a few minutes later I heard a door open and close. Berry gave me a worried look, and I could tell his hand wasn’t too far from his pry bar. I was too busy thinking to do the same thing, though I could have gotten mine out in a hurry if I’d had to. What Plummer had said about friends, and safe places, and throats being cut if the wrong things got said to the wrong people had me wondering just what Berry and I had stumbled across, and whether we’d been meant to stumble across it, and why. Certainly Plummer had figured out who we were quickly enough.

After a few minutes, the door opened and closed again, and a bit after that Plummer came out of the darkness. “All’s well,” he said. “If you’d care to come this way?”

So we followed him, to a meal and a place to sleep or a club across the back of the head, I didn’t know which. It probably would have served me right to get the latter, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Plummer led us into the farmhouse, through one door into a dark place, and then through another into a big comfortable room that didn’t have any windows to let the light of its one lamp out into the night. There was a table in the middle of it and a couple of sturdy wooden benches, and a couple old enough to make Plummer look young, who were putting food on the table. The woman, who was plump and sturdy and had her white hair tied back with a scrap of rag, nodded and smiled at us and scurried back out through another door into what I guessed was the kitchen; the man, who was lean and bent and walked with a limp, put the platter he was carrying down on the table and then shook our hands, saying, “Pleased to meet you. Nobody uses names here; I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit,” I said. “I hope it’s not a problem if I say thank you.”

“Not at all.” Pointing to a third door: “Washroom’s there if you need it.”

I did. When I got back there was a meal on the table and everyone else was sitting down to it, so I joined them, and noticed only after plates were being filled that nobody had called Mam Gaia’s blessing first. I stuck that bit of knowledge away with the rest of what I’d noticed about Plummer, and wondered what it meant, with the very small part of my mind that wasn’t thinking about pork sausage, potatoes, squash, and the unmistakable smell of pie coming in through the kitchen door.

There was talk around the table, as there usually is, but it had a very odd feeling to it. I used to get the same feeling when I was searching the archives in Sisnaddi, and eating lunch every day with the archivists; until I got to know them and learned something about their lives and their work, it was as if most of the conversation was happening somewhere I couldn’t hear, and the part of it that I could hear had big holes in it full of things I didn’t understand, people I’d never met, and words I didn’t know. The archivists didn’t mean to hide anything, they’d just been working and sharing meals together for so long that it never occurred to them that everybody else in the world didn’t spend their time talking about how to keep old high-acid paper from turning back into the wood pulp it was made of, say, or the games the jennels of the presden’s court played with one another for blood and money and power that sometimes trickled down the levels of Sisnaddi Core to make the archivists have to work extra hours for a week or two.

There in the room without windows, though, I was sharing food with people who knew how to hide things, and had reasons to do it. That’s the sense I had, clear as midnight stars, when we finally finished up the meal and the old woman showed Berry and me to the little room on the second floor where we slept through the next day. It wasn’t just that Plummer and the old couple were used to talking to each other and not to Berry or me; I guessed that Plummer and the old couple knew each other only just a little, if at all. It was that they had something to hide and were used to hiding it in the most graceful way, and so they talked back and forth about whatever it was in a way that they understood and Berry and I didn’t. It didn’t occur to me then that they might have wanted me to notice that, and to wonder about it.

At any rate, Berry and I went right to sleep. We didn’t bother to keep watch, since we wouldn’t have much of a chance to get away if Plummer and the old couple did plan on handing us over to somebody or other, and it had been quite a few days since we’d had a chance to sleep on real pallets with blankets and all. I slept hard, and if I dreamed about the ruins of Deesee that night I didn’t remember it when sunset came and the old woman knocked on the door to wake us up.

The old couple gave Plummer a sack of food for the road and wished us all a safe journey before we left, and as soon as it was good and dark the three of us slipped back to the road and headed north toward Luwul. When we were out of sight of it, Plummer turned to me and said, “By morning there will be no one in that house, and no sign that anyone has been there in weeks. In case you were wondering.” The moon was gleaming on his eyeglasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes; I think he wanted me to ask a question, but I didn’t know what question to ask, so I let it be.

That night we had to leave the road twice, once early on when a wagon came rumbling by and once later, a little before midnight, when the sound of hooves off behind us warned of horsemen coming our way. There were three of them, riding fast, and I thought again of Freddy and Sam hiding from the Black Riders. Still, that made me wonder who Plummer would be; he certainly didn’t look like Ergon, or anyone else from the old stories. I did find a place for him in the stories later, but that’s a story for another time.

The Black Riders, if that’s what they were, didn’t keep us from getting to the next safe place Plummer had in mind. That was another ruin, most of a klom away from the road in a little patch of forest between two farms. Like the one where we’d met Plummer, it had a roof to keep out weather, and Plummer showed us where somebody had stacked dry firewood; it was in a place you couldn’t see unless you knew where to look, with a bit of oiled cloth over it to keep the damp off during the rainy season. We didn’t need a fire; it was a fine clear day, pleasantly cool except around midday, the kind of weather most of Meriga gets more often than not in winter. I nodded and thanked Plummer, and wondered why he’d showed the wood to me.

So we hid there through the day, had a good meal on the old couple’s food before getting some sleep and another as the sun went down, and got ready for our last day on the road with Plummer. “By morning we will reach Luwul,” he said as we filled our packs, “and there our paths part for the time being. The ruinmen’s hall is on this side of the city, just outside the gates, which should be convenient for you. By the time you get there, however, I will be gone until our paths cross again.”

I thought he was joking, and laughed. Still, that’s the way it happened. We spent the night walking through farm country; the road went nearly due north by the stars, and we all kept an eye out for watchers and an ear listening for any sign of pursuit, but the only thing we saw was the slow turning of the stars and the only thing we heard was, toward dawn, the first roosters making noise and clattering and voices here and there as farm hands headed out for the earliest chores. The east turned gray, and then the rest of the sky did, and about the time the first glow of sunlight hit a few scattered clouds high up above us and the sky went blue, and the farms gave way to market gardens and then to rows of houses, I glanced toward Plummer and suddenly realized that he wasn’t there.

Berry hadn’t seen him leave either. We stood there like a couple of fools in the middle of the road, looking at each other, and then laughed and shrugged and kept going. There were wagons starting to rumble inwards from the market gardens to the city, but we’d already seen the ruinmen’s hall rising up over the roofs into the morning sky, and we decided to finish the trip as quick as possible and let the stout door of the ruinmen’s hall be our answer to anybody who was after us.

I’m not sure what it is about ruinmen’s halls. Other guilds either buy a couple of nice houses and tear out the walls between them, if they’re poor, or build something for the purpose toward the center of town if they’re rich. None of the other guilds would have the ruinmen in town, of course, which is why our halls are always outside the gates, but you’d think ruinmen would build the same sort of halls as the others. Not a chance; it’s always some improbable chunk of salvage from the old world, tipped up on end so it rises up above everything else and can’t be ignored.

Luwul’s was no exception. Some bright boys back in the days when metal was cheap had hauled half a dozen old airplanes from wherever they’d been left when the fuel ran out, cut off the wings and the tail sections, and propped them up on end in a circle as though they were all about to fly off together to the moon. That gave them six tall towers, and they used the wings and a lot of other salvaged metal to make walls to fill the spaces between the towers and floors every three medas or so; the rooms for traveling ruinmen were right there in the bodies of the planes, so you could look out the little oval windows next to your pallet and see the Luwul skyline.

So we didn’t have any trouble finding the hall, and we didn’t have any trouble on the way there, either. When we got there the sun was just up. The houses of the misters around the hall were empty and silent, of course, with digging to be done wherever the local ruins were, but the hall itself, like every ruinmen’s hall everywhere was always open and always had people in it.

The door was big and made of riveted metal, and it boomed when I knocked on it. After a moment it opened, and an old man in ruinman’s leathers stood there. He had a wooden leg, which explained why he wasn’t out at the ruins, and he gave me the same sort of dubious look I imagine doorkeepers at ruinmen’s halls must always give people who come knocking at sunrise.

“Trey sunna Gwen, a Mister from Sisnaddi,” I said. “This is my prentice Berry.”

The man’s face changed suddenly; he grabbed my arm and all but pulled me inside, and motioned Berry to follow. As soon as we were in, he shut the door hard, and dropped the bar back into place. “Mister Trey,” he said then. “We’ve heard about what you’re carrying. I’ll have a message sent to the misters; even if nobody saw you come here, there’ll be trouble soon enough.”

Fourteen: Plummer's Way

2010-05-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

We kept watch turn and turn about all the rest of that day, and got what sleep we could. Once the sun was down, we used the last bit of light in the sky to get back down to the road, and then got moving quick and quiet. We’d talked it over, and neither of us could think of better advice than the one Ergon gave Freddy and Sam in the stories: travel by night and not by day, and stay off the road when there was anybody else likely to be on it. A thin crescent moon was out; it didn't give us a lot of light, but what there was helped us find our way.

I’d spent more than a little of the day we hid in the ruin wondering what to do if we came to another fork in the road, but as it turned out I needn’t have worried; a few muddy tracks veered off one way and the other, but even by moonlight it didn’t take much more than a look to tell which way the main road went. Once we went past a farmhouse where one flickering light still showed in a window. Another time a dog somewhere off in the distance started barking, and that really had my hackles up, because wild dogs are not something two people can risk facing out in the open. Still, it must have been a farm dog yapping at the night wind; there was never more than the one bark, and it came from the same place, ahead of us, beside us, behind us, until we couldn’t hear it any more.

That was a long night, as long as the first one Berry and I spent out in the forest, and Berry and I didn’t say more than a handful of words to each other from dusk to dawn. Partly we both wanted to hear hoofbeats or footsteps as far away from us as we could; partly, I think, we were both remembering the black riders out of the stories and the terrible lonesome cries they made when they were hunting. If someone had asked me just then if I expected to hear that, I’d have denied it, but I think more than half of me was waiting for that.

Still, there was more to it than either of those. In the old world they used to shine bright lights all night long, so that people didn’t have to see the stars and feel small by comparison. Nowadays we don’t have anything like enough electricity to do that, and the priestesses would forbid such a thing even if we could do it; they say that we need to be reminded now and then of just how small and unimportant people are, and how big the universe is, so we don’t make the same mistakes the ancients did. If they’re right, Berry and I got a good double helping of Mam Gaia’s favorite lesson that night.

The sky was clear, and we were a long way from the nearest city; the moon was thin enough that it didn’t drown out more than a few small stars near it, so we got to see the Milky Way just as bright as it gets, and more stars than anyone this side of the old world could ever count. The moon crept across the sky, and all the true stars moved with it; a couple of false stars, the ones the ancients put up in the sky, cut across the sky following their own angled paths; and once one of them fell out of the sky in a sudden line of light that ended somewhere off to the east.

When I was small and my father was still alive, the priestess who visited us now and again used to say that when the very last false star finally dropped back to Mam Gaia, that would be the sign that people had worked off the debt we owed to the rest of life for what the ancients did. That’s not anywhere in the holy books, I learned that in Melumi, but even now that I know that, and know why the false stars got put up there in the first place, I still feel a little better whenever I watch one burn up in the air.

Anna was the one who taught me about the false stars. That happened much later in my story, just a few months ago, after the whole band of us who set out for Star’s Reach crossed the Suri River and left settled country behind for Mam Gaia alone knew what. We were maybe a week out of Kansiddi, and none of us really knew Anna very well yet, since Kansiddi was where she joined us; but that night I couldn’t sleep, and she was sitting up by the fire, and right about the time we got to talking, one of the false stars fell out of the sky, good and bright, off to the west of us.

“What is it your priestesses call them?” she asked me, meaning by that as she always did that they weren’t her priestesses.

“False stars.”

“That’s hardly a proper name for a satellite. They’re nothing like stars, you know.”

“I don’t,” I told her. “Where I grew up, we didn’t learn a lot about them.”

Anna nodded, after a moment, and gave me one of the odd sidewise glances that make her look a bit like a white-feathered bird. “No, I suppose you didn’t. They’re just machines, put up above the air so they can do their job better. The ancients must have put thousands of them up there for one reason or another. There were still a few in working order when I was a girl.”

“What sort of things did they do?”

“Some of them looked down at the earth and sent back pictures. Some of them listened for radio signals from the ground and sent them down somewhere else. A lot of them were put there to learn something about space, or the sun, or the stars, and send that back down to people on the ground. And then there were some that were part of the Star’s Reach project: long gone by my grandparents’ time, for they weren’t needed by then.”

I was looking up at the sky as she talked, and another false star came past, this one still following its path across the sky. I pointed to it. “There’s one.”

“Probably,” she said, with an odd little smile I couldn’t read at all. “It might be something else.” She never did explain what else it might be; maybe I’ll find out when we’ve searched more of Star’s Reach.

Still, the night when Berry and I walked under the stars toward Melumi, I didn’t spend much time thinking about false stars, and by the time the first whisper of gray showed up over the hills to the east I was tired enough that I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. We were well away from farmland at that point; the road wound through low hills thick with forest, and so we started looking for a place to spend the daylight hours as soon as we could see anything at all. Being ruinmen, the first thing we looked for was a glimpse of old concrete, partly because a good sturdy ruin might offer a bit of shelter and more than a bit of concealment, and partly because most people nowadays won’t go anywhere near a ruin unless they have to.

We both spotted the same bit of rough gray concrete at about the same moment, maybe half an hour before sunrise, when everything was getting light enough that I was starting to worry about being seen. It was maybe half a lom from the road, partway up a shallow slope; that was enough for us, and after a few muttered words we left the road and picked our way through the forest, trying to leave as little trace and make as little sound as possible in case somebody came along the road just then. That took a bit of time, and so it was nearly full light when we reached the ruin and ducked in through an empty doorway half full of earth and leaf-litter.

We were both inside before we found out that we weren’t alone in the ruin.

A sudden rustling, movement in dim light: steel gleamed blue. I grabbed my pry bar and jumped to one side, a trick I’d learned in the fighting circle. Berry flattened himself against the nearest wall and drew his own bar. For a moment, while I tried to get the shadows behind the knife facing me to turn into a human shape, nobody moved.

“Well, now,” said a voice with just a bit of waver in it. “And what do two ruinmen want with an old man minding his own business?”

I found my own voice after a moment. “Nothing at all. We were looking for shelter.”

“At sunrise, in the middle of the Tucki woods?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I pointed out.

He allowed a dry laugh. “I suppose you could.” Then: “If you’ll put those very threatening pieces of iron away, this—” The knife blade twitched in his hand. “—will also go away. It occurs to me that we may have interests in common.”

I guessed at what he meant. “Like not being seen.”

“Among other things.”

I lowered my pry bar; he lowered his knife; we both put our weapons back away; out of the corner of my eye I watched Berry do the same thing, though his face was still tense with mistrust.

“I have the advantage of knowing something about you,” the old man said then. The sun was coming up and putting light in through holes in the ruin, and so I could just about see him by that point, a lean stooped figure with a mostly bald head and eyeglasses round as moons. “Or I think I do. There’s certainly been quite a remarkable bit of talk about a ruinman and his prentice going to Melumi with a very important letter.” He waved a hand. “No, you don’t have to tell me if that’s you or not. Do you have anything in the way of food, by the way? I can contribute some very respectable ham and part of a loaf of bread. Also whiskey, if that’s of interest.”

It wasn’t, but the food was, and we’d been given some things by Cob the day before, so we managed to have a creditable meal there inside the ruin.

“My name’s Plummer,” the old man said as we ate, answering a question I hadn’t quite gotten around to asking. “Or one of my names. In my line of work, a man sometimes needs more than one.”

“Must be some line of work.”

By way of answer he pulled a glass bottle out of his pack and set it on the concrete between us. I didn’t have the least idea what it was, but Berry did. “Medicine?”

“Exactly,” Plummer said. “I make it and sell it. Entirely natural ingredients, of course, but these days half the people in Meriga think that anything other than plain dried herbs is an affront to Mam Gaia, and some of them are rather too fond of expressing that opinion with sticks and stones.”

“Which is why you’re hiding here,” Berry said.

“A regrettable fact.” Plummer shook his head and made a sad noise in his throat. “I had to leave Dannul in something of a hurry several days ago. Two the farmers there took exception to my presence at the market, and went to gather their friends and a selection of weapons. I had reason to think they might try to follow me past Lebna. So you find me here.”

I thought about that while I chewed on a piece of ham. “This is pretty far past Lebna,” I said when I’d swallowed. “Did you know there was a safe place here?”

Plummer gave me a long careful glance through those glasses of his. “I can answer that question,” he said finally, “but there’s an inconvenient detail attached. If you communicate that answer to someone who shouldn’t know it, someone will cut your throat. I don’t mean that as a threat, not at all; merely an observation of fact.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “Ruinmen know how to keep secrets.”

He beamed. “Good. You take my meaning.”

So Berry and I bound ourselves by the old words of the ruinmen’s bond, and Plummer nodded once, as though that settled everything. “This is one of, shall we say, several places of the same kind,” he said then. “They change from time to time, for safety, but they can be recognized by those who know how. There are two more on this road between here and Luwul.”

Berry and I glanced at each other. “This road goes to Luwul?”

“You were told otherwise, I gather?”

I told Plummer about the farmer at the fork in the road, and he let out a little sharp laugh. “Had you taken the other road, it would have led you in a circle back to Lebna. No, we are three days from Luwul by the road down there.” His gesture pointed back to the road Berry and I had followed all night. “I cannot recommend going back toward Lebna. If you happen to be minded to go through Luwul, though, and don’t object to company, I can point out the safe places on the way.”

Looking back on it, it’s clear enough that Plummer had planned all along on making that offer. I didn’t guess that at the time, though; I didn’t know him yet, though that would change. Still, I was wary. “And you wouldn’t mind company, I would guess.”

Again the long careful glance. “There are men, I’m sorry to say, who would beat a solitary old man without a qualm,” he said. “Most of them would think twice about it, however, if the old man was accompanied by two sturdy young ruinmen equipped with those iron bars of yours. So if you happen to be going my way...”

I glanced at Berry again; his look said “Whatever you decide, Mister Trey” as clearly as if he’d spoken it out loud. “We’ll go your way,” I said then. “For now.”

“Excellent.” Plummer gestured at the remains of the meal. “More ham? It really is quite good, I think.”

Thirteen: Hunted

2010-04-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

The next morning we all got up a little before the sun did, and I lent Cob a hand with the last pieces of metal that had to be loaded on the wagon while Sam and Berry got breakfast ready. It was a bright, clear day, good for travel. After we ate – it was good familiar ruinman’s fare, bread and bean soup and big mugs of chicory brew – Berry and I climbed on board the wagon and found places for our bags in among the metal, while Cob gave Sam instructions for the day and then swung up onto the seat in front and took the reins.

“Be a bit rough at first here,” Cob said over his shoulder as the horses started up the trail toward the road. “Hope you don’t mind.” He wasn’t lying, either. The wagon lurched and jolted its way up to the road, and Berry and I hung on as best we could. Finally we got onto the old road, and from then on it was pretty smooth going as wagons go. They say that the old roads used to be so smooth you could ride down one of them in one of their cars, faster than a horse can gallop, and not have to hang on to much of anything. I’m not sure I believe that; I’ve helped dig plenty of cars out of old ruins, and they all had handles on the inside for you to grab, and belts to keep you from being thrown out of your seat. Still, that’s what people say.

These days, of course, if a road’s still good enough to drive a wagon on it, that means either you’re very lucky or you’re on a road that’s been fixed up for the army not too long ago. We were lucky, or rather Cob was, because he had to get the metal from the old empty nuke out to buyers, and it would have been a mother to get done if there hadn’t been the road. As it was, Berry and I had to jump off a couple of times and help get the wagon across some difficult place or other.

Finally, though, we started passing farms, a few at first and then a lot of them, and the road got better in the rough sort of way that happens when country folk do it themselves. Some of the people in the fields waved to Cob, and he waved back, which surprised me; around Shanuga nobody but another ruinman will greet a ruinman, or give him the time of day. Then the fields gave way to houses and a scattering of shops around a big central market square, and we were in Lebna.

Cob drove the wagon straight to one corner of the market. There were a bunch of men sitting there playing cards, but they got up and put the cards away as soon as they saw Cob coming. Two of them were blacksmiths by the leather aprons they wore; I couldn’t place the rest, but I guessed they were craftworkers of one kind or another, looking for metal for their trades.

“Well now,” one of the blacksmiths said to Cob. “Got yourself some help, I see.”

He meant Berry and me, of course. “Nah,” Cob told him, “just a couple of ruinmen from Shanuga heading north.”

The whole bunch of them got very quiet, and I knew right then that word must have gotten out. The blacksmith who’d spoken turned to me, and said exactly what I thought he was about to say. “From Shanuga, eh? They say the ruinmen down there found something out o’ the usual.”

“News to me,” I told him. “What was it?”

“Some kind o’ paper about Star’s Reach.”

I used some hot language, then: “Come on.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Nothing like that turned up when I was there, but it’s been most of a month. Some folks have all the luck, I guess.”

I could see that the blacksmith didn’t believe a word of it, but he nodded after a moment, and went to look at Cob’s metal. Berry and I said our goodbyes to Cob and left him to his customers. There was a fair crowd there for the market, and plenty of sellers pitching everything from vegetables and ironwork to bolts of cloth and bottles of medicine, but we wove through the crowd got out of there just as fast as we could without seeming to hurry.

Lebna wasn’t that big of a town in the old days, and it’s a lot smaller now than it was; I’d spotted plenty of old concrete foundations in the pastures and open country we’d passed through on the way in. Still, the houses seemed to go on forever as Berry and I took a dirt road north out of town. It didn’t help that my mind was running full out the whole way. Word of the discovery couldn’t have gotten to Lebna without running down the Hiyo valley first. That meant that Luwul, where we’d hoped to cross the Hiyo River, would be full of the news, and so a likely place for trouble. We could go west or east and miss it, but I had no way of knowing which would be best, or whether either one might land us in an even worse place. That’s what ran through my mind, over and over again, while we kept walking and I tried not to imagine watchful eyes peeking out at us between the curtains of the houses we passed.

Finally we got into the farm country north of town, the houses got sparse, and loms out in the pastures turned their heads on their long necks to watch us go by. Forest filled the horizon like a green haze. once we got in among the trees, I knew, we’d have an easier time staying away from anyone who might decide to follow us, but they were still quite a ways off, and the road we were on wound from side to side as though it wasn’t in any kind of hurry to get where I wanted to go.

“Do you think—” Berry started, and then stopped; he’d seen the man up ahead just a moment after I did.

A farmer, for certain, or at least he looked like one; shirt and trousers of homespun, bare feet, straw hat, and a lazy look that could have had anything at all behind it. He could have been standing just like that, leaning up against a fence post, in the Tenisi hills where I was born. What got my hackles up, though, is that he just happened to be standing right where the road split into two, one branch going a little west of north, the other a little bit east.

“Afternoon,” I said to him as we came up to the fork.

“Afternoon,” he replied.

“D’you happen to know which road goes to Luwul?”

He nodded to the left hand fork. “That’s the one.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. You two have a good day, now.”

We passed him by, and headed along the road to the left. Pretty soon it veered further left, then swung straight again on the far side of a clump of trees. I glanced back to make sure we were out of sight of the ford, and then around to make sure nobody else might be watching. “Now,” I said to Berry, “we figure out the fastest way to cut back across to the other road without being spotted.”

That’s what we did, too. A little further on a creek cut across the road; it had willows growing along the bank, all thick with leaves, and there weren’t any farmhouses or people in sight beyond it. As soon as we were past it, we ducked into the field and hurried across, staying close to the willows. It got us some mud on our boots, but a quarter of an hour later we were on the other road, and luck or Mam Gaia or something was with us; there was nobody else on the road just then, and the forest was close by.

As soon as we got under the trees, I said, “Okay, now we find a place to hole up for the rest of the day, someplace where we can see the road and not get seen.”

Berry took this in. “You think somebody’s after us.”

“I think there’s too good a chance of it. Those people at the Lebna market guessed what we’ve got with us. Bet you a mark to a mud-turtle, too, that that farmer wasn’t just standing there to hold up the fencepost.”

He thought about that, then grinned. “And he’ll send them down the road to Luwul.”

“If we’re lucky,” I said.

Rumble from the road ahead warned us, and we ducked off the road and hid in the bushes until the wagon rolled past. By the time it was gone, both of us had spotted a bit of gray concrete ruin on a low hill not far from the road, and once it was safe to move, we scrambled through the underbrush and climbed up to it. It wasn’t much, part of two walls rising out of four hundred years of dirt and fallen leaves, but there wasn’t any sign that other people were in the habit of going there, and it had a good view of the road down below. I went to take a look, saw the wagon rolling out of sight toward Lebna and a couple of farm folk heading toward a distant house

“Look at that,” Berry said from the other side of the ruin. I went over and looked where he was pointing, and damn if the other road wasn’t right out in plain sight away in the middle distance.

“You know,” he said after a moment, “I bet this is what Freddy felt like.”

Now of course I knew what he was talking about, but if anybody ever reads this, what’s the chance they’ll know the first thing about Freddy and Sam, and all the other people in the stories we tell in Meriga? Maybe they will, for all that. Plummer told me that all those stories came out of a big book that was written back in the old world, over on the other side of the ocean where the Arabs live now, and somebody whose name I don’t remember thought that whole book up out of his own head. Maybe he was right about that, but it seems like an awful lot for one person to think up.

Nobody I know ever got any of the stories out of a book, either, and no two storytellers tell them quite the same way. Of course there’s always the ring, and Goll and the black riders chasing Freddy all over the countryside, and the war and Doom Mountain and all, and then Ergon gets elected presden and everybody settles down happily; none of that changes. Still, I knew one storyteller who told it so that Ergon marries Erin the elf-woman, who he was in love with since he was a boy, and another who told it so that Ergon falls in love with Eywin and marries her, so Erin ends up getting together with Ferrem. To this day I can’t decide which version I like better, and if one of them’s in the book and the other isn’t, I’m not sure I’d want to know.

But Berry was right. No matter who tells it, one of the best parts of the story is when Freddy and his friends are ducking and running through the woods with the black riders hot after them, and he was right, too, that we might be doing the same thing before long.

It was right about then that I saw something moving along the other road, the one to Luwul the farmer sent us down. Trees got in the way, and then all of a sudden they came out into a clear patch: five riders on horses, riding hard. Farmers don’t ride that way, and I didn’t know of any reason why soldiers would be in the middle of Tucki when there was no fighting anywhere nearby. That didn’t leave a lot of options.

“There’s your black riders,” I said to Berry. He’d seen them, too, and watched them with wide scared eyes until they were out of sight.

Twelve: The Way of Ruins

2010-03-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

One of the things that makes this story hard to tell in a straight line is that it has a lot to do with ruins, and ruins don’t do things that way. They have their own stories, but they don’t tell them from beginning to end, the way that Eleen and Tashel Ban say I ought to tell the story I’m trying to write here. Ruins take their time; they know how to wait, seeing as they’ve had plenty of practice at it; they say a word here and a word there, and it’s pretty good odds that you won’t figure out what they mean by those words right away.

The ruin in Shanuga where I found the dead man’s letter and nearly got reborn was like that. It told me everything I needed to know to walk straight here, to Star’s Reach. Still, I didn’t figure out what it meant until I’d been to Melumi, and gone hunting in the Arksa jungle for a place that wasn’t there, and spent most of a year in Sisnaddi half buried in the old archives, and went looking for the Deesee I’d dreamed about, and all the rest of it. It took me all that to figure out that a single word I’d noticed and then half forgotten was the one thing I needed. Every ruin I’ve ever gotten to know has been like that, and Star’s Reach is like that doubled, tripled, and with whiskey poured on top.

If I’d had any doubts about that they would have gotten laid nicely to rest earlier today. We’ve been searching the whole underground complex here level by level and room by room, looking for the place old Anna remembers, where her mother and father and the rest of the last handful of people who used to live and work here had their living quarters, their books and records, and the old machines they’d managed to keep running or cobbled together out of old parts. As far as we can tell, the door where we got into Star’s Reach most of a month ago let us into a part of the complex that hadn’t had anybody in it for most of four hundred years, and it took us quite a bit of searching to find our way into the places where people stayed after the old world ended.

We haven’t found the place where Anna was born and her parents lived, not yet, but we found something else almost as important. There’s a big corridor on the fourth level, wide as a road, that runs most of the way from one end of the complex to the other; all the stairways either open onto it or connect to corridors that do, and the boxes the ancients used to go up and down from floor to floor when they didn’t want to use the stairs – there’s a word for those, but I forget what it is – those are all close to that corridor too. The first time Berry and I found it, we walked all the way to the end of it, and didn’t notice much of anything except the doors and corridors that opened off it. We must have walked down it again half a dozen times, doing a rough search of the fourth level to get some sense of where things were and to look for signs that people had been there in the last hundred years or so, and it wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back from the last of those that he noticed that the long blank wall along one side of it, toward the middle of the complex, had a little black screen on the middle of the wall, just sitting there doing nothing in particular.

He stopped and looked at it, and called me back to it, and it wasn’t until then that we noticed that the long blank wall had seams in it. I guessed what it was, then, about half a minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I tried to figure out where the door probably was.

Everyone else came with her, which I’d expected. Anna hobbled up to me, blinked at the screen, and said, “Yes. Yes, of course. I wonder if it will still recognize me after all these years.” She put her right thumb flat against the screen and rolled it back and forth a bit, and damn if the thing didn’t suddenly turn from black to green.

Then the rumbling started. I thought for just a moment that it might be an earthquake, and it certainly shook the corridor like one, but it was just old gears that hadn’t moved for a century or more. As we stood there and watched with our mouths hanging open, a section of the blank wall slid back a good half a meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side. Everything inside it was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked forward and found ourselves in one of the secret places of Star’s Reach.

The ancients had a lot of places like the one we entered, and no one, not even Plummer, has ever been able to tell me why. They’re like mazes, with flimsy walls of metal and some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get to them, going up about shoulder high; in every nook of the maze there’s a desk, and usually a chair, and if you’re lucky there’s an old computer sitting on or under each desk, or at least some pieces of one that can be stripped for the metal and parts. Sometimes there are other things too. Ruinmen love finding places like that, because you can break up the flimsy walls and take apart the desks and chairs and things without worrying about bringing the ceiling down on you, and the metal’s worth quite a bit even if there aren’t any computers left. What made so many of the ancients spend their days in places like that is another question, and one I can’t even begin to answer.

I didn’t have to wonder what the people who used to work at Star’s Reach were doing in their maze, though. It was a big one, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Shanuga; a lot of the computers had been stripped for parts, but the hulks were still there and so were the wires, linking each one to the others, and to dusty shapes on a table along one wall. “Printers,” Tashel Ban said; he went down the row of them, pushing something on them, and little red lights started blinking on the sides of a couple of them. Above the printers were shelves, and on the shelves were books of a sort; they were each a good six or eight senamees across, with covers on both ends, but the paper in the middle had been punched and fastened together with a bit of flimsy metal instead of being properly bound. That’s what we found out when Eleen pulled one down and opened it.

“What is it?” I asked.

She couldn’t say a word, just looked at me as though somebody had walked up behind her and hit her over the head, so I went and looked over her shoulder. I’d guessed by then what the books had to be, but seeing what was on the page was something else again –

DATE RECD 04232112

197606348 671934867 130486713 496710396 713673104 975132348 240618946 720394352 797062309 475102346 713949751 309486723 094896713 049571304 9867039475 246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 67049587 624390567 249567495 876340958 673098465 139048671 309844327 372348749

– and so on for page after page after page. Every page had DATE RECD and a number on the top, and I could guess well enough what that meant.

By the time I was up to noticing much of anything beside the page, everyone else had gathered around, and they were staring at the numbers with open mouths pretty much the way Eleen and I were doing. After a long moment, Tashel Ban turned and walked down the row of shelves and printers, pulled down another book, and opened it. “Same thing,” he said. “There must be a couple of hundred of them.”

That’s how we found one of the things we came to Star’s Reach to find, the reason Star’s Reach itself was built: the messages from some other world around some other star that came to the old world, our old world, right when it was falling apart. We might have found them days earlier or days later, but that’s the way of ruins; they choose their own time to tell you things.

We searched the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much else there, just the maze with its desks and stripped computers, and the long table with the printers and the books above it. Then we went back and checked every single one of the books – yes, there were a couple of hundred of them, 226 to be precise – to make sure they were all just the same strings of numbers, and none of the people who sat at those computers had managed to turn the numbers into words and read the messages. Anna says that she thinks they managed it, at least partway; that’s what her mother and father and the rest of them were doing, up to the time that they left Star’s Reach for good, but if that happened none of it got left there in the room we had found.

Eventually we finished searching and came back to the room where we’re staying. Eleen took the very first book off the shelf and brought it with her. She says she wants to try to figure out if there’s a pattern in the numbers, and I’m sure she’ll give that a try, but I think one of us would have brought one of the books back with us even if she hadn’t come up with that reason. You don’t come this close to the old world’s biggest secret and then just leave it sitting on a shelf, even if you can’t figure out a blessed thing of what it means.

Still, as I sit here at the desk in the corner of our room and smell dinner cooking, what keeps coming to mind are some of the other times that ruins have handed me a secret, and for some reason the one that I remember best just now is a place that isn’t a ruin yet, but will be sometime pretty soon: the archives down deep in Sisnaddi Core, where I spent most of a year. They’re in one big room filling most of one of the underground floors of Core, and it’s pretty dark because the light shafts from above have to come down a long way and there isn’t enough electricity for more than a few lamps, so it was easy enough, when I was there, to think that I was in a ruin.

I suppose I was, in a way. Everything they had in the archives, I found out one day, was what got gathered up from Deesee and hauled inland to Sisnaddi when the ice broke up in a place called Greenland and slid into the sea, and the seas rose fast and hard everywhere around the world. It was done in such a rush that everything got jumbled up together, and the archivists were still trying to sort things out when they weren’t looking things up for jennels at the presden’s court who wanted some bit of fancy stuff from the past to pad out a proclamation or the like. A lot of the books went to Melumi, but the records of the old presdens and their courts – or as much of them as could be gotten out of Deesee before the sea came rushing in – all stayed in Sisnaddi Core in that one big room, shelves after shelves of it reaching away as far as you could see.

I learned that because I’d already learned the way of ruins, and didn’t try to push the archives or the archivists to give me what I wanted right away. After I’d been at the archives for a few weeks, one of the archivists let me know in that quiet, offhand way of theirs about the little corner under a light shaft where people gathered for lunch every day. Every day there’d be a big pot of soup or something brought down from the kitchens of the presden’s court way up above, and after a big formal dinner there might be other things, pastries or cabbage rolls or what have you. One time down came a suckling pig without a single slice cut out of it, and we all feasted like dons in Meyco. There, sitting with the archivists and the handful of other people who were searching for something, was where I learned most of what I found in the archives; and when there didn’t seem to be any way forward after all, and I went to Deesee and finally found out the one thing I needed to know, it’s because I spent all those noon hours eating soup with the archivists that I was able to go to them and tell them what I’d learned, and walk out of there with the secret of Star’s Reach not three hours later.

That’s the way ruins are, and that was just as true of the ruin I should be writing about at this point in my story, the old empty nuke south of Lebna in Tucki, where Berry and I spent the night with Cob and his prentice Sam. For some reason I didn’t sleep well that night, and so at one point when I woke in the darkness I happened to hear Berry and Sam talking in quiet voices off in the next room. I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, and didn’t particularly try; there was another secret there, and you could say it was hidden in that ruin, but it wasn’t one that was meant for me. So I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. After a while I dozed off, and dreamed about Deesee, and Tam, and the ruins at Shanuga, and voices out of the night sky whispering words that nobody here on Mam Gaia’s round belly would ever understand.

Eleven: The Gray Towers

2010-02-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

The old dream about Deesee kept on coming back to me, night after night, while Berry and I walked north out of Tenisi and started across Tucki. That was about the only interesting thing that happened for most of two weeks, though. The road we followed ran west and then north through forest, for the most part, with villages or scattered farms here and there when the soil was good or some farmer long since dead just up and decided that this was where he was going to build his house.

It’s a funny thing, but the further we traveled from cities and the poorer the folk we met, the better the welcome we got. Close to Shanuga, as I wrote earlier, we were lucky to get a place to sleep in a hayloft and a cold meal on the back steps, but as we got deep into Tucki, as often as not we ate at the table with the family and slept on a pallet by the fire along with everybody else. Nobody seemed to care that we were ruinmen. In fact, it was pretty much the opposite; half the time, when we stayed the night at some farmhouse, sooner or later the farmer or his wife would mention some scrap of ruin over one one corner of the property and ask if I thought there was anything in it that might hurt anyone. It happened fairly often that Berry and I went out the next morning at first light and followed somebody over to an old gray lump of concrete wet with dew, poked around it, scanned it for radiation and poisons, and left the farmer feeling a good bit easier.

Mind you, I could have skipped the morning walk and told every one of them what I’d find. Outside of the old cities, if you find a small ruin out by itself, just a bit of concrete sticking up out of the grass like a rotten tooth in a green gum, you can bet it’s nothing more than the foundation of a house or a shop from the old world, and anything dangerous got washed away a long time ago. It’s the big ruins that can still kill you, and nobody farms too close to those – the priestesses wouldn’t stand for it, the government would put a stop to it, and by and large nobody’s dumb enough to try it in the first place. So the ruins we checked on that trip north were no threat to anybody. I could have told the farmers as much without looking, but it made them feel better to have Berry and me out there in our ruinmen’s leathers sweeping the ground with radiation counters, and it seemed like a fair return for their hospitality.

So we made our way north. It happened now and then that we spent a day or two in country that didn’t have a single house anywhere in sight, and Berry and I got used pretty quickly to sleeping in the forest. Sometimes the cracked gray road beneath our feet was the only sign that any human being had ever come that way since that part of the world rose up out of the waters; sometimes we passed through what was left of some town the people of the old world put someplace that didn’t have good soil or running water or any of the other things people nowadays need and they seemingly didn’t. We must have walked through half a dozen of them: low gray shapes of concrete mostly overgrown with vines and the like, with mounds here and there where something big had tumbled down a couple of hundred years back. Most of the mounds showed traces of digging, and there was plenty of broken concrete that had been cracked open for the metal; clearly we weren’t the first ruinmen to come that way.

There came a stretch of the journey where we didn’t see a trace of anybody else for most of two days. We didn’t think much of it until late on the afternoon of the second day, when we crested a rise and found ourselves face to face with a couple of huge round gray shapes, cracked and crumbling at the top, that rose out of the forest like giant ghosts.

I knew from one look at Berry’s face that I didn’t have to tell him what they were. Without a word, I got out my radiation counter and scanned the road at our feet.

“Nobody said that there were nukes this way,” Berry said then.

“Might be an empty,” I reminded him. “I’m getting nothing but background.”

He gave me a dubious look, but followed when I started down the road.

I didn’t blame him for the look. There are safe ruins like the ones the farmers had in their fields, and there are dangerous ruins like the one in Shanuga where I nearly got reborn, and then there are nukes. There are some of them in Tenisi, and every one of them is a dead zone with a fence around it a couple of kloms out from the ruin and nobody living anywhere nearby, especially downstream. The priestesses put prayer flags on the fences, partly to ask Mam Gaia to heal the land there, partly because anybody who goes past the fence and messes with what’s inside is going to be too busy dying to have a lot of time for prayers.

I learned about nukes from Mister Garman, of course. Every ruinman’s prentice learns about them from his mister, since the only thing the priestesses will say about them is that they’re evil and if you go there you die; that’s true enough as far as it goes, but a ruinman needs to know more. What Garman taught me was that there are two things to fear when you’re dealing with a nuke. The first is the reactor building itself. The ancients didn’t exactly have a lot of time to shut them down properly when the old world ended, so the old fuel rods and everything are still there, but the machines that used to keep them cool and safe haven’t been working for more than four hundred years. Nobody knows what’s inside the old containment vessels nowadays, because the radiation has you doubling over and vomiting before you get much past the door of the building, and you die pretty quickly after that.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is the used fuel rods, which were stored right around the old reactors in pools of water. I read once in Sisnaddi, when I was searching the records there for anything about Star’s Reach, that the ancients spent years bickering about what they were going to do with the fuel rods and all the other waste they got from running nukes, and they ended up never doing much of anything at all with them except leaving them in the pools of water. Of course once the old world ended and there wasn’t anybody to make sure the pumps kept water flowing into the pools, things started going bad in a hurry; you got red hot fuel rods catching fire, or melting into a puddle and burning their way down to groundwater and leaching out into the ground, or simply turning into dust that blew here and there on the wind, and a mother of a lot of land around the old nukes ended up contaminated enough to kill you quick or slow. You can’t see the contamination, or taste it; unless you’ve got a radiation counter, you don’t have any way of knowing it’s killing you until you take sick and the doctor tells you that all she can do is send for the priestesses.

I had a radiation counter, and I wasn’t about to let something like that happen to me or Berry from being too brave to use it. As we went down the road, I kept the thing in my hand and listened to it click. It didn’t show anything above normal, and as we kept walking and the counter kept clicking mildly to itself, both of us got a little more confident. It didn’t hurt that the road didn’t seem to be heading straight at the cooling towers, either.

So we kept on walking, and the towers seemed to drift slowly to one side as we went. Finally we got alongside them; the counter still wasn’t showing anything but normal, but just then we noticed two things. The first was a cleared trail, fairly fresh, heading straight toward the towers from the road, with a pair of saplings tied together in an X marking the place where it hit the road: ruinmen’s sign, that. The second was a thin line of smoke rising from someplace close to the nearer tower.

Berry looked at me, and I looked at him. “You sure that counter’s working?” he asked.

“Checked it before we left Shanuga,” I reminded him.

“Maybe you’re right, then, Mister Trey.”

He meant what I’d said earlier about the nuke being an empty. That was something else Garman taught me, though I heard about it later, and in a good bit more detail, too, from Plummer one time. During the years just before the old world ended, the ancients tried to make up for everything else they were running out of by building lots of nukes. Most of those never got finished, and so about as often as not, when you see the big round towers rising up out of the forest, there’s nothing there but a bunch of old concrete. Most people won’t go near them anyway, just in case, but some ruinmen make a living out of breaking the empties down for the metal in them – sometimes a sparse living, if all they find are the iron rods in the concrete; sometimes a pretty good living, if all the wiring and pipes got put in, and if you’re very lucky some of the machines that they used to run the nukes.

We looked at each other again, and I shrugged, and we turned off the road and went down the trail past the crossed saplings.

Sure enough, the radiation counter never did pick up anything more than ordinary background, and the trail didn’t lead us up to a fence strung with prayer flags. Instead, we clambered down a dirt trail and came out of the forest under the shadow of one of the towers, and found ourselves just about face to face with a ruinman and his prentice loading chunks of old pipe onto a wagon. They looked at us and we looked at them, and then I greeted them with some of the old words that ruinmen use so other ruinmen know they’re members of the guild. That was all it took; the other ruinman gave us a nod and an assessing look. “You fellows looking for work?”

“On our way to a job in Cago,” I said.

“Well, drat.” He was getting on in years, with gray all through his hair and beard and a couple of nasty scars along his face. “We’ve got us a nice clean ruin here and not half enough hands to make the most of it. Name’s Cob.”

“Trey,” I said, and shook his hand. “My prentice here’s Berry.”

“Sam.” A motion of his head indicated his prentice, a boy about Berry’s age. “Surely you’re at least looking for someplace dry to spend the night.”

“Crossed our minds.”

He grinned. “Consider it done. Where you fellows from?”

So I told him, and we got to talking, and pretty soon Berry and I were helping him and Sam load the last of the pipe into the wagon, because that’s what you do if you’re a ruinman and you’re staying at somebody else’s site. By the time we were done, Cob had explained that he’d be taking the wagon down to Lebna, the nearest town, when morning came around, and offered Berry and me a ride that far. Of course we agreed, and helped him with a couple of other bits of lifting and hauling while the daylight was still good, because again, that’s what you do.

Later on, the lot of us ate stew and pan bread in a room Cob and Sam had cleared in the main building of the nuke, close enough to where the containment vessel would have gone that we’d all have been dead in minutes if they’d had the time to finish the thing and get it loaded with fuel rods. Berry and I told as much of the news from Shanuga as we could without mentioning Star’s Reach, and Cob had plenty of news about Tucki and some from Sisnaddi itself, which after all is just across the river from Tucki. They’d been driving the wagon down to Lebna every week or so to sell metal, buy supplies, and listen to the gossip, so some of it was pretty recent, too.

I don’t remember most of it. I was tired, and being around another ruinman made me a bit homesick for the Shanuga ruin’s and Gray Garman’s crew, but one thing I do remember. “They say Sheren’s taken sick,” Cob said. “Mam Gaia bless her, she’s been presden what, near twenty years now? I’d always figured she’d outlast me, and I hope she does. There’s going to be a mother of a mess when she goes, they say.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he meant by that. “Been a while since we had an election,” I said, guessing that might be it.

“And it might be longer before we have another one. There’s some who’d rather cast their vote with swords and guns.” He shook his head. “Damn fools. Like they’d gain anything by that.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. A moment later, though, I happened to look Berry’s way, and he was staring into the fire with an expression I’d never seen on him before, eyes wide and mouth shut tight and every line of his face holding something in. He noticed me looking at him, then, and put on a different expression, fast, but I’d seen the earlier one, and wondered about that for the rest of the evening.

(to be continued...)

Ten: Berry's Story

2010-01-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

I’ve been trying for two days now to figure out the best way to write about what Berry told me that night in the forest, and tore half a dozen pages out of the notebook before I realized I’d better work it out before I wrote another word. Part of the problem is that I don’t know who’s going to read this, if anyone ever does. For all I know we might die here at Star’s Reach, and Meriga could go under the way Sheren said it probably will as soon as she dies, and the next people to come this way might be from the Neeonjin country, or someplace even farther away that nobody on this side of the world has heard about for four hundred years. What can I write that they’ll understand?

Take Nashul City Core, where Berry said he’d been born and grew up. As far as anybody knows there were only eight of those ever built anywhere this side of the oceans. Four of them went under water when the old world died, and one of the others got blown from here to glow-in-the-dark in a war nobody even remembers any more, so there are just three of them left, Sisnaddi and Nashul and Pisba. Until I went to Sisnaddi for the first time, I didn’t have much of a notion of what they’re like, and most of the motion I did have was wrong as it could be.

The problem is that it’s just too easy for me to picture somebody who’s walked all the way over the mountains and the deserts from the Neeonjin country, with straw sandals on his feet and a couple of swords at his belt, like the Neeonjin man in a picture book I had when I was little. He turns on a light and sits down here at this steel desk, and opens this notebook all anyhow, and the first thing he reads is me going on about a gray thing big as a hill, twenty stories tall, with thousands of people living in it, and windows all over the sides, and wind turbines sticking up taller than the clouds in a ring around the top. He’d probably decide I was drunk or dreaming, and use the rest of the notebook to light a fire to cook his dinner with.

But the Cores are there, all three of them, and that’s what Berry started talking about first, that first dark night in the forest where the two of us sat and tried to pretend we weren’t scared of what might be moving around out there in the darkness.

“I was born in Nashul City Core,” he said. He was facing our little fire, turned half away from me, with his arms folded around his knees. “Born up high, they used to say, but raised down deep. My mother lived in one of the top levels. Her mother was a big name in Circle, big enough that whether my mother got into Circle mattered a lot to her and her allies. So my mother went playing, once she got to the age that girls do that.”

There’s another thing: Circle. You find Circle everywhere in Meriga and Nuwinga; they’ve got it in Genda and the coastal allegiancies, too, except it’s not quite the same, and nothing like as powerful; down in the Meycan Empire they don’t have it at all, and I don’t suppose anybody knows what mothers do or don’t do in the Neeonjin country, or anywhere else further off. Ask anybody who’s in Circle and they’ll tell you that it’s as old as the world, that women got together in Circle long before the old world, in the days when everyone lived in caves and made their tools out of rocks, if that ever actually happened. Maybe that’s so, but I never saw a word about Circle in anything from the old world, not even when I was in Sisnaddi for the best part of a year searching the archives in what I thought was the last chance I had to find Star’s Reach.

Now if I could sit down with that Neeonjin traveler over a meal and a couple of beers, I could tell him about Circle, or as much about it as a man is ever going to know. I’d tell him what I learned from Plummer, and talk about how back in the days after the old world died and ours was born, maybe one woman in a dozen was able to have healthy babies, and the ones who could banded together to help each other, when there was no other help from anywhere else. I’d tell him how those circles of women spread and linked up with each other, and linked up with the priestesses, too, until pretty soon every town and city had Circle, and if you wanted to make something happen, even if you were the presden, you pretty much had to hope that Circle wasn’t against it. There’s a reason why every presden Meriga’s had for the last two hundred years has been a woman.

“And you were what happened,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

I let out a whistle. “That must have caused a flutter or two.”

“That’s what they told me.” With a little laugh: “They were all set to bring my mother into Circle as soon as I was born, with the big ceremony and everything, and then I came out tween and the whole thing had to be hushed up in a hurry. They’d probably just have pressed a pillow over my face and solved the problem that way, except my mother’s family were Old Believers and she wouldn’t let the birth women do that.”

And then there are the Old Believers. I’d never yet met one of them, that night when Berry told me his story, though of course I’ve met them since. They don’t worship Mam Gaia and they don’t watch their dreams for messages from Her; they’ve got a god of their own who’s dead, except he’s not really dead, and they talk to him most of the time instead of listening for what he has to say. They say that in the old world most everyone believed the way they do, and one of them told me that what happened to the old world was their god’s doing and not Mam Gaia’s, or just what happens when you do enough dumb things for long enough and the results finally gang up and clobber you.

But the Old Believers won’t kill newborns, even those that are born horribly sick and won’t live for more than a couple of hours anyway, and there’s all kinds of other things they won’t do, and some things that we won’t do don’t bother them a bit. There are a few Old Believer families who are big names in Circle or in the army, but they mostly keep to themselves, in their own villages and their own cramped little quarters in cities, where they make and sell things that the priestesses say are wrong but people want anyway.

“So I ended up in the Warrens,” said Berry. “You know about those?”

“Just the name.”

“It’s where most people in City Core live, down inside. They found a woman who’d had a dead child and was willing to nurse me instead, and paid her to go live off by herself in a corner of the Warrens where nobody went much. So that’s where I grew up, and that’s most of what I remember of Nashul.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, so I said, “She was the one who taught you to read?”

That got me a quick glance, assessing. “Nah, I had a teacher who came down three times a week for a while. When she stopped coming, I was old enough to go into one of the Warren schools – they have them, to give the children something to do while their mothers and fathers are at work. I was seven by then, and Ranna – that’s her name – she told me that my mother had a healthy baby and had gotten into Circle after all, and so I’d better get used to living in the Warrens with everyone else.”

It took me a moment to catch what Berry meant. “If she hadn’t –”

“There’d be no reason to pretend I didn’t exist.” A shrug. “So she had her healthy baby and for all I know she’s a big name in Circle now.”

“Ouch.”

He went on as though he hadn’t heard. “So I went to Warren school for a while, and then it came time for me to prentice with somebody, and I got told that I could go into any trade I wanted, but it wasn’t going to be in Nashul. So I said I wanted to be a ruinman, and about six weeks later some men came and got me and everything I had and put it all in a wagon and drove halfway across Tenisi to Gray Garman’s house on the ruinmen’s street in Shanuga.”

I waited until I was pretty sure he was finished, and said, “I remember when you showed up and we had you shake the robot’s hand.”

That got me another glance, and then a sudden grin. “When we all went back upstairs and met Mister Garman, that was the first time I can think of when I really felt that somebody was happy to have me around.” Then: “Garman knew I was a tween, and a couple of prentices found out – when you sleep in a tent with somebody, it’s not too easy to keep your middle covered up all the time. But nobody made any kind of fuss about it. I was just another prentice.”

“And now you’re the prentice of somebody dumb enough he thinks he can find Star’s Reach.”

“And still pinching myself sometimes to make sure I’m not just dreaming that.” Then, suddenly serious: “But if you ever wondered why I can read and do numbers and talk like a jennel, when I’m Berry sunna nobody, Mister Trey, now you know.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. I’m glad you can read; that might just be a mother of a lot of help.”

He grinned again. “I’m hoping.”

We talked about some other things after that, though I don’t remember a word of it, and finally got sleepy enough that the night around our little camp didn’t seem half so threatening. So we wrapped up in our blankets, and I went to sleep thinking about Berry’s story, and Tam, who I haven’t written about yet and need to.

That might have had something to do with the dream I had. I was in Deesee again, walking down the wide empty streets with the fish swimming down them and the surface of the water all silver and rolling fifty meedas overhead. This time Tam was with me; she had her blue dress on, the one I tore once when we were playing, and her hair was tied up in a scarf, the way she used to do when she wanted to annoy her family. Sometimes as we walked, though, it wasn’t Tam but a woman I didn’t know, old and dark and wrapped up in clothes made of patches of every color you could think of. We walked down the street and turned to see the Spire soaring up from its low hill. Tam tried to say something to me, but all that came out of her mouth was bubbles of air that drifted up between us, so she pressed her body up against mine.

Right then I woke up. The first gray cold light of dawn was starting to filter down through the forest. Berry was sound asleep and still wrapped up in his blanket, but he’d moved up against me, no doubt for the warmth. I lay there and thought about Tam, wondering what she’d made of her life since she had her baby and got into Circle. I didn’t know then, and I’ll certainly never know now, but I still wonder about it sometimes.

(To be continued...)

Nine: A Night In The Forest

2009-12-30T20:20:00.000-08:00

North out of Shanuga, you can go on the main road east of the river up to Noksul, or you can go west of the river on what’s not much more than a farm track most of the same way, and then jump through the first good place the ridges will let you and head west to Nashul or north into Tucki. Berry and I took that second route, partly because Gray Garman said we ought to stay off of the main roads, and partly because Noksul’s a soldier’s town. That’s where my father went when he was called up for the war; it’s where the Army of Tenisi is, when it’s not playing tag in the mountains with raiders from the coastal allegiancies; and a town full of soldiers is not a place where you want to take something people might kill to get their hands on.

I was nervous about that last bit, I admit. I’d known since we found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins that even a copy of it would be worth a lot of money, and I realized not that much later that a lot of people would want it for reasons that didn’t have a thing to do with how many marks they could get for it, but it took a bit for it to sink in that one ruinman and his prentice might be fair game if the wrong people figured out what we were carrying. With luck and Mam Gaia’s blessing we could get ahead of the news and stay there, but it would take luck; the radio message to Melumi about our find would have been in code, but I knew as well as anyone that codes get broken, and of course one rider on a fast horse could spread the news far ahead of us.

We talked about that a little, while we walked; talked about the route we’d settled on, too, straight up through Tucki to Luwul and from there straight to Melumi; but mostly about nothing in particular, when we talked at all. More often we just walked. The day was clear and cool, the sort of dry season weather you long for when the rains set in and it’s one big sea of mud from wherever you are to wherever you want to get to, and the road was from the old world; it was rutted and cracked and most of the old paving was gone, but it still ran mostly straight and level, and here and there you’d walk on big gray slabs with just the last little trace of a broken yellow line down the middle.

All that country was full of farms. With Shanuga so close, there’s plenty of money to be made selling garden stuff and eggs and the like to the city markets, and the land’s rich enough you can do that and still grow plenty for a family on a pretty modest plot. Ox carts rolling into the city came by so often that Berry and I took to walking along one side of the road to stay out of their way. Other than that we mostly saw people working in the fields, and most of them took one look at our ruinmen’s gear and looked away.

We walked north until it was nearly full dark, and found a farm where the people were willing to give us a meal on the kitchen steps and a place to sleep in the barn in exchange for a couple of coins. Berry dropped off to sleep about as soon as we finished getting settled in the hayloft. I envied him that, as I lay there staring up into the darkness, thinking about Star’s Reach and how on Mam Gaia’s face I was going to figure out where it was if the scholars at Melumi couldn’t help me.

Still, I managed to get to sleep after a bit, and then the talk of farmhands going about the first chores in the gray morning woke me up. Berry and I washed our hands and faces at the pump in the farmyard, got some breakfast from the farmer’s wife, and started north before the sun was fairly up over the mountains off east of us.

That second day might as well have been the first, except that the farms were bigger, and grew less garden stuff and more corn. The one after that was sister to the first two, except that the fields started spreading themselves out and left patches of empty land between them. We passed places where low gray ragged shapes heaved up through the grass: foundations from the old world that nobody had bothered to dig out and break up for building material. A good bit of the poorer ground had been left in pasture, too, and herds of loms watched Berry and me incuriously as we walked by.

The loms reminded me of the hill country where I’d grown up. My father and most everyone else had some for wool, and for hauling loads to and from market; I’d been carried on a lom’s back often enough when I was too young to walk far, and fell in love a bit with the smell of their long straight wool and the way their heads swivel around on top of their long, long necks, as they taste the wind and listen and look.

They didn’t have loms in the old world. I read that in a book in Sisnaddi once, though I’m still not sure whether to believe it or not; farmers in Tenisi have been raising loms as long as anyone remembers, and they had to get them from somewhere. What the book said, though, is that in the old world, people got wool from a different kind of animal. They called it a cheap, I think it was, probably because there were so many of them they didn’t cost much. Cheap weren’t as big as loms, and they had short necks and wool that curled.

When the old world was dying, though, a disease came through and killed most of the cheap, and the scientists couldn’t get rid of the disease, so most of the new cheap that got born every year died of it. That meant you couldn’t make a living raising cheap, so the farmers just got rid of the last of them and raised something else, and that’s why we don’t have cheap any more. Of course the same sort of thing happened to a lot of other things back then, and it nearly happened to people, too. We were lucky, I guess, that nobody had to make a living raising us.

We managed to find a farmhouse to stay at that night, but the next morning, even the pastures and the loms got scarce, and from noon on there were no more farmhouses in sight. We’d talked a little about that, Berry and I, the morning we left the Shanuga ruins, and brought blankets and fire gear and the like with us for sleeping rough; we both knew perfectly well that there’d be plenty of that on the way to Star’s Reach. Still, I was nervous. You’d think that somebody who’d go crawling down a hole in the ground that nobody had been down for four hundred years wouldn’t blink at the thought of sleeping under a tree, but the fact was that I’d never actually spent a night out in the forest.

That’s what it came to, though. By the time the sun got near the top of the ridge to the west of us, we hadn’t seen another human being aside from each other in many hours, and there weren’t even any loms in sight. So we kept on going until the light started to fade, and then left the road and worked our way about halfway down from the road to the river. We found a bit of an old ruin there, a couple of low walls that came together in a corner and went up about as high as Berry was tall. The point of the corner faced toward the road, too, so we could build a small fire and not be seen if anyone was looking.

So I gathered some dry wood and Berry got water from the river, and by the time it was all the way dark we had a nice little camp in the corner of the ruin. We didn’t have a lot of food, just a bit of bread the farm wife had given us that morning and a couple of cakes of dried soup I’d begged from the kitchen at Mister Garman’s camp back at the Shanuga ruins, but we’d eaten well enough until then. Once we got a fire started, Berry tossed one of the cakes of soup into a tin pail of water on top, and it turned into something not half bad in short order.

So we ate some of the bread and drank the soup, and the night got darker. Wind made noise in the branches above us, and other things made their own little noises lower down. I tried not to show it, but I was on edge, and when a wild dog barked somewhere off in the middle distance, Berry and I both just about jumped out of our skins.

“Nervous?” I asked him.

“Yes.” Then: “I’ve never spent a night out in the forest.”

“Me neither.”

Even in the dim flickering light from what was left of the fire, I could see his eyebrows go up. “I heard you were a farm boy from the hill country.”

“True enough. Doesn’t mean we slept under trees, you know.”

That got me a quick glance, to make sure I wasn’t angry, which I wasn’t. “I grew up in Nashul,” he said after a moment. “In City Core.”

I let out a whistle. “No kidding. How’d you end up a ruinman’s prentice?”

“I – I’m a tween, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“Is that – ” He didn’t finish the sentence, not that he needed to.

I didn’t give him time, either. “Garman ever give you trouble over that?”

“Not once.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

His face said “thank you” better than words could have. I put a couple of sticks onto the fire, so neither of us had to say anything for a moment.

I don’t think they had tweens in the old world, either, or if they did I’ve never read anything about them. The priestesses say that they’re one of the things that happened to us because of the poisons that the people of the old world dumped everywhere they could think of. Some of those were fast poisons, and that’s part of why so many people died during the years just before the old world ended, and some of them were slow poisons, and that’s part of why there still aren’t a twentieth as many people as there were back then. Some of them, though, were the kind of poison that gets inside you and messes things up, not for you, but for your children and their children, and of course that’s another part of the reason why there are so few people nowadays compared to how many there were back then.

It’s because of that third kind of poison, the priestesses say, that so many women can’t have babies and so many men can’t father them, and that’s also why so many of the babies that do get born are sick from birth and die young. Still, you also get babies who are born different rather than sick. You get green children, for one. When they’re young, there’s something in their skin that feeds the little green one-celled plants the priestesses talk about so much, and so they turn a nice grass green a few weeks after they’re born and stay that way until they get into their teen years, and then the little plants go away and their skin turns brown again. Up in Mishga and Skonsa and Aiwa you get a lot of people with a coat of hair all over them like bears; down in the border country near Misipi you get a lot of women with four breasts instead of two: there’s a lot of that sort of thing.

Then there are tweens. There are more of them than the others, and they’re called tweens because they’re not really men or women but something in between. The two of them I’ve ever seen with their clothes off had something like a set of each kind between their legs, and little breasts you’d never notice under a shirt. The priestesses say that tweens count as men, meaning they can’t be priestesses or belong to Circle; most other people aren’t too sure what to make of them, and there are some places where they’re not always welcome. Even before Berry and I traveled together, that last seemed stupid to me, but then people do nearly as many stupid things nowadays as they did back in the old world.

I got the fire fed, and saw that Berry was watching me. “You know,” he said, “I should probably tell you my story – about where I came from and how I got to be Garman’s prentice.” He looked down. “Since I’m your prentice now, and there are some things you ought to know.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He drew in a breath, just a bit raggedly, and began.

(to be continued...)

Eight: The Road to Melumi

2009-12-14T19:47:00.000-08:00

The morning after the day I found the letter came way too early. I dragged myself off of my cot about the time first light came up in the east, found some cold water to wash with, and made myself about as presentable as somebody who hasn’t had time to sleep off one mother of a lot of beer is likely to get. The face that looked back at me from the little tin mirror over the washbasin wasn’t much different from the one that blinked back the morning before, but I felt different. At the time, I thought that was a matter of becoming a ruinman and a mister of the guild, or maybe squeaking past getting reborn by a senamee or two. Looking back, though, I think it was probably the beer.

Finally I got dressed in ruinman’s leathers and left my tent, and damn if Berry wasn’t right: there must have been twenty prentices waiting for me with hopeful looks. Some were just about as old as I was, and some were so young they must have signed on with their misters just before that season, but it took all of one look to tell me that every one of them was hoping I’d pick him and nobody else to be my first prentice. I had just about enough wits in my head to raise a hand before they all started talking at once. “Already chose my prentice,” I told them. “Sorry.” A couple of the youngest ones burst into tears, and all of them gave me the kind of look that makes you feel like you just stomped their puppy or something.

That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest, and I waited until they were leaving and walked a bit unsteadily over to Gray Garman’s tent. I’m sure the man slept sometime, but in all the years I worked for him I never saw him sleeping or washing up or anything. This morning was no different. He had his tent flap open, and waved me in when I stopped just outside. Berry was there already, clean and bright-eyed and doing his level best not to jump out of his skin with excitement, but Garman just looked me up and down the way he always did, waved me to a chair, and said, “You decided?”

He meant the letter or the finder’s rights to Star’s Reach: one a big chunk of easy money but nothing more, the other nothing more than a hope, maybe, but a hope of finding the thing every ruinman used to dream of finding. I sat down on the chair, looked at him, and said, “I keep on telling myself that I ought to have some brains.”

For once, Garman laughed. It was as dry as an old granny’s whatnot and as short as a dumb ruinman’s life, but it was still a laugh. If he’d suddenly sprouted feathers I don’t think I’d have been more surprised. “If I was twenty years younger,” he said, “I’d be telling myself that.” Then: “Berry says you picked him.”

“That’s right.”

Garman nodded once. “Good choice. He’ll be of use.” Berry lit up like a lamp; Garman didn’t say that sort of thing lightly. “The original’s going to Shanuga today for auction,” Garman went on, “but a copy needs to go to Melumi right quick; Mam Kelsey’s talked with them by radio and they want it. You headed that way?”

I hadn’t even begun to make plans yet, but it suddenly seemed like the best possible idea, not least because I guessed what Garman had in mind. “I was thinking that,” I lied.

“Good.” He pulled two copies of the letter off a table next to his chair, handed them to me. “One for you and one for the scholars. And here—” He tossed me a leather bag that landed in my hand with a clink. “Ought to be about a fifth of what they’ll pay. That’ll keep the two of you in food on the way.”

A fifth of the price was courier’s wages, but from the hard plump shape of the bag, he’d rounded up a good bit. I pretended not to notice, and thanked him.

“Don’t mention it.” He leaned forward, then, and gave me one of his looks. “Now listen. You two go fast, keep mum, and stay off the main roads. Some people might kill to get this before Melumi does.” He handed me another sheet of paper. “This might help.”

I read the paper. It was a letter from him to some ruinman in the Caga ruins, up north on the lakes, saying the Shanuga ruins didn’t have room for a new mister and asking the Caga ruinman to find a place for me. “If anyone asks, that’s why we’re traveling.”

“That’s right.” Then: “And it’s close enough to true, anyway.”

I knew what he was talking about, of course. The Shanuga ruins still had a lot of metal in them, but raw metal doesn’t pay a ruinman much, and the good finds—the old machines and rare metals and documents—had been getting scarcer since before I was born. I’d already heard of towns where the guild only allowed a certain number of misters, and a prentice couldn’t make mister unless he was ready to go somewhere else. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that there might not always be somewhere else to go. That came to mind later, after I’d worked in a dozen different ruins and learned just how close the ruinmen’s guilds had gotten to digging themselves out of business.

After that we had some papers to sign for Berry, so the laws would treat him as my prentice and not Garman’s runaway. Garman put his name on the lines and I put mine, and then Berry surprised the hay out of me by reading the papers and signing his own name nice and neat in the right place. Then we said our goodbyes and Garman cuffed me on the shoulder, one mister to another, and Berry and I left the tent and went to get some food before we started.

The camp was mostly awake by then. Off in the middle distance I could hear Mister Calwel’s voice, high and sharp, yelling at his crew; chickens clucked and scratched in the grass, and one of their wild cousins crowed off in the forest somewhere. I was about to get in line at the cook’s tent when Berry cleared his throat and gave me a look that he must have learnt from Garman, reminding me that I was a mister now and it was prentice duty to go fetch food for me. So I sat down at an empty table and watched the mists burn off the river for a bit, until he came back with bread and chicory-brew and two big bowls of soup. I don’t think either of us said a word until most of that was gone.

“You been to Melumi before?” Berry asked then.

“Not me.” I considered him. “You?”

He grinned. “No, but I always wanted to. You think they can figure out the letter?”

It’s a funny thing, how once you make a decision, it’s easy to think up reasons for it. I nodded, as though the trip to Melumi had been my idea all along. “They ought to be able to tell us what a potus is, and the rest of those words. I figure it’s the best first step.”

And of course it was, and I’d agreed to do courier duty for Garman as well, but right then the thought of going to Melumi sparkled in my mind with something that wasn’t practical at all. I’ve met farmer folk who couldn’t have read their own names if you helped spell it out for them, who daydreamed about going to Melumi just to look through glass at the books and the scholars, and ask some question that didn’t matter to anyone so that a scholar in a gray robe could look up the answer for them and spell it out. Ask most people and they’ll tell you that the scholars know everything. Ask people who read and write, and know a little bit about the world, and they’ll tell you that the scholars know most everything that matters.

They’re as wrong as the first bunch, but compared to what knowledge most of us nowadays have handy, they might as well be right. Meriga’s come down a long ways since the days when Deesee was above water, and there are countries in the world that are bigger and richer, but the college at Melumi, with its shelves and shelves and shelves of books from the old world, is one thing we can still be proud of.

Berry was still grinning. “I’m ready.”

“I bet.” We finished up the food, and then he ran to get his things and I went to my tent and started packing. Not that I had that much to pack; prentices don’t have much chance to load themselves down, and the only thing I’d had time to collect in the day I’d been a mister was a hangover. So one leather pack was enough for clothes and tools and all, with a little bag of keepsakes down in the bottom: a ring that had been my mother’s; a bit of wood carved to look like a horse’s head that I got from Toby, who was my best friend among the prentices for most of four years and got reborn when a building fell on him; the little star of yellow metal the government gave my mother after my father died in the war; and a butterfly of the same yellow metal, or something as close to it as doesn’t matter, that was a parting gift from Tam – and that reminds me, I’m going to have to write about her one of these days.

By the time I’d gotten everything packed, Berry showed up with his pack over one shoulder. He was just about hopping, he was so excited, and I couldn’t fault him for that. Me, I was stuck halfway between being just as excited, and worried as anything that I’d just pitched myself into something way too deep and dangerous for me. Gray Garman’s words about people who might kill to get the letter I carried were on my mind, and so was the fact that I had no notion what I might do if we got to Melumi and the scholars couldn’t tell me what the letter meant.

Still, I swung my pack up onto my back, got it settled, and tried to chase the worries out of my head. I tied the tent door open to let Garman’s prentices know I was gone, and Berry and I turned our backs on the ruins and started walking. The day was turning clear and, thank the four winds, not too hot for a change; a couple of buzzards circled way up in the sky, which is supposed to be a good sign for travelers, though nobody’s ever told me why. Just north of camp we went over to the riverbank and walked along it until a ferryman got close enough to wave in; I handed over a few bits, Berry and I climbed into his little boat, and we sat and watched green water roll past as he puffed and hauled on the oars and got us to the other side. We got off the boat there and scrambled up the bank, and a few minutes later we were walking north on the road to Melumi.

Seven: The Robot's Hand

2009-11-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

Something woke in the deep places of Star’s Reach last night, for what reason we don’t know.

I blinked awake all at once out of some dream about of the Tenisi hills of my childhood, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what. The room was dark except for one hooded lamp over in the corner where Thu keeps watch. Thu was not there; black shape against not-quite-darkness, he stood in the doorway looking out into the corridor beyond.

A moment later I knew what brought him there. A faint vibration came up through the concrete around us, deep and steady. Machinery: it could have been nothing else.

I was on my feet before I quite realized it. Thu glanced back at me; whites of his eyes glinted, the one pale thing in his night-dark face. One hand made a quick silent gesture: come.

Feet into boots, ruinman’s jacket a tough second skin: reactions from my prentice days, those. A moment later I was standing beside him at the doorway. He pointed to the stair, but I was already looking at it, and the dim fitful light that came up through it.

“I’ll wake the others,” I said in less than a whisper. He nodded, never looking away from the stair’s mouth.

A few moments later we were all awake. “The light and the sound came at the same moment,” Thu told us, his voice low. “Nothing else. No sound or sign of anyone.”

“Could the machines have turned themselves on?” Tashel Ban asked.

All of us looked at Anna. In the dim light of the lamp, wrinkles faded from her face, and I could almost see the girl she had been when she left Star’s Reach so many years ago. “It’s possible,” she said after a moment. “I remember so little.”

“Someone must go,” said Thu. He meant he should, and I had been about to say the same thing about me, so I just grinned. He gave me one of his unreadable looks, then nodded once, and the two of us went to the door together. The first time Thu and I met, he did his level best to kill me, and there’s nobody on Mam Gaia’s face I trust more.

Five levels down and one room over from the stair was most of a wall covered with lights and screens and dials. A couple of days earlier, when we’d searched those rooms, they were dark and dead, but now the lights were on and the screens lit up. Our earlier footprints were the only ones in the dust on the floor, so Thu went back up the stair to tell the others while I looked at the blank glowing screens and thought about the robot’s hand.

I wrote yesterday about how my mother and I came to Shanuga after my father died in the wars, and how I dreamed of sunken Deesee and decided to become a ruinman’s prentice. Not too many days after that, when the rains finally stopped for good, Aunt Kell wrote a letter to the ruinman she knew and had one of her daughters run it over. I never did hear whether the ruinman wrote back or just sent a message, but seemingly he had room for a new prentice and was willing to have a look at me. My mother got me dressed up and combed my hair till it hurt, and then the two of us walked the dozen blocks or so from Aunt Kell’s house to the street with no name where the ruinmen live.

Everybody in Shanuga knows where that street is, and most of them would shave between their legs with a broken rock before they’d go there. It’s on the south end of town, just outside a gate in the town walls nobody else likes to use, and the street turns into a muddy road after a bit and heads straight toward where the old ruins loom up out of the river mists, tall and gray and skeletal. The ruinmen’s houses are like every other house in Shanuga, narrow and close together as though they were drunk and leaning on each other’s shoulders to keep themselves upright, and they have signs hanging in front of them like the shops of any of the other guilds in town.

Just before the houses end and the street turns into a road, though, the ruinmen’s guild hall stands there like a bad dream. Other guilds have halls that look like houses, only twice or three times as wide and a couple of stories taller. The ruinmen are, well, ruinmen, and do things differently. Their guild hall is a big gray round thing that stands way up in the air like a ball perched on a stick. I learned later that the ruinmen a century ago took one of the huge water tanks the ancients put up on the hills here and there, hauled it down to the edge of town, put it up on its base and used scrap steel from the ruins to reinforce it and put floors into it. It really is one of the scariest things in town, unless you’re a ruinman, in which case it’s your second home.

We didn’t go there, though I stared at the thing looming up above the end of the street all the way from the gate to the front door of the house where we were headed. My mother knocked on the door; a prentice answered; they exchanged a few words, and then he let my mother and me in and left us in a couple of chairs in the little front parlor.

A little while later Mister Garman came down the stairs from above. He wasn’t Gray Garman yet, or at least there wasn’t more than a bit of gray in his hair yet, but he had the same frown as always and the same habit of saying little and listening a lot. I know he had some questions for my mother, and a few for me, but I honestly don’t remember a word of what was said. For all that I’d been jumping up and down at the thought of becoming a ruinman’s prentice, I was as scared just at that moment as I’ve ever been since. Mister Garman was big and muscled and scarred, and I guessed even then that trying to wheedle or coax him the way I could my mother or Aunt Kell was a waste of breath.

Finally Mister Garman was satisfied, and sent the prentice for the papers. My mother couldn’t read or write, but she was used to making her mark on papers and taking it on faith that they said what they were supposed to say; I could just about spell my own name and the easier words of the litanies, so I wasn’t much help figuring out the papers, but I signed my own name on the line where it was supposed to go, and that made me one of Garman’s prentices until I made mister, got reborn, or chose to walk away, whichever happened first.

My mother hugged me and left. Mister Garman told the prentice to take care of me, and went somewhere else, and the prentice – his name was Jo; he got reborn when a building fell on him two years later – took me upstairs to the big room where the prentices slept, showed me the straw bed where I’d be sleeping and the chest where I got to put my things, and then led me back down two flights to the workshop where the rest of the prentices were busy getting tools ready for the season that was about to begin. I got introduced to all of them, and then right away got put to work rubbing oil into somebody’s leather coat, with an older prentice keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t skimp on the rubbing.

That’s how I spent the rest of the day, except for a spare little meal of bread and thin soup around noon and another meal, even scantier, come sunset. I worried a bit about whether I’d get enough to eat as a prentice, but there it was; my name was already on the papers, and it wasn’t as though I had anywhere else to go. Then it was up to the sleeping room. I thought it was early for sleep, and of course it was, but everyone but me knew what was about to happen.

As soon as the door closed I realized that everyone was looking at me. “Trey,” said the senior prentice, a big redhead nineteen years old named Bill, “You ever had anybody in your family who was a ruinman or a ruinman’s prentice?”

“No,” I admitted.

Bill considered me for a moment. “Then you didn’t know that putting your name on a bit of paper isn’t all there is to becoming a prentice here.” He waited for an answer. Finally I said, “What do I have to do?”

He leaned toward me, and in a loud whisper said, “We’ve got a robot in the cellar. If you’re going to be a prentice here, you’ve got to meet the robot.”

For all I know, it’s only in Meriga and Nuwinga that people like to scare each other silly by telling robot stories late at night, and if anybody ever reads these words, it’s as likely they’ll come to Star’s Reach from Genda, or Meyco, or the Neeyonjin country on the far side of the mountains, as from our little corner of the world. When my father was still alive, he could tell a robot story in a way that would make the chairs shiver. He had a way of making robot sounds, too, so when the robot finally showed up, you didn’t have to imagine the clanking and buzzing it made as it headed toward whoever was about to be buttered all over the walls.

So the half of me that believed what Bill was saying was terrified, and the half of me that figured he was telling a story was fascinated. “Okay,” I said, and my voice shook enough to make the story sound pretty convincing, even to me.

“Good,” said Bill. In a quieter whisper: “We’ve got to go all the way down the stairs, and not wake Mister Garman. Not a sound.”

A moment later we were all trooping down the stairs, barefoot and silent, down floor by floow,m until we finally got to the cold damp silence of the cellar. Nobody brought a light, so it was blacker than black. Bill took my arm and led me somewhere, then had me sit down on something flat that I guessed was a wooden box. “Wait here,” he whispered. “The robot’s on its way.”

I sat there for a while, and had just about decided that the joke was to leave me in the cellar and slip back upstairs to sleep, when I heard something somewhere in the darkness ahead of me: a faint cold clank, like metal landing on stone.

“You hear it?” Bill was still close by, though I hadn’t known it.

“Yes,” I said, and this time my voice was shaking for real.

Another clank followed, a little louder. Then there was a long silence, and then more clanks, a slow steady beat of them, as though something was walking on metal feet: something that was getting closer to me in the cellar. After a bit I could hear a faint buzzing and beeping that would be the machinery inside it.

“Here it comes,” Bill hissed at me. I didn’t answer, because I’d seen two tiny red lights ahead of me. They turned this way and that, as though looking for me. I knew that they were looking for me; I knew they were the robot’s eyes.

The clanking and buzzing got louder, and louder, and the little red dots of its eyes got closer and loomed up above me. I could just about see a darker shape against the darkness, and imagined its glinting metal and wires.

“Put out your hand,” Bill whispered to me then. “You’ve got to shake the robot’s hand.”

I don’t think more than a tiny sliver of me still thought that it was all just a joke by then, but there was still only one thing I could do. I bit my lip and drew in a breath and put out my hand, and felt cold metal touch it., then suddenly clamp hard around it and move it up and down in quick mechanical jerks.

Then, blinding, light: a dozen electric lamps turned on all at once, and along with it laughter and whoops that rang off the cellar walls. It took a moment before I could see anything, and only then did I see the robot: another of the senior prentices, of course, with a glove covered with pieces of metal on his right hand, and a hat on top of his head with two little red lamps on it. All the other prentices were gathered around him, and some of them had noisemakers in their hands: pieces of metal to tap on the stone floor, little toothed wheels that made a buzzing sound when you turned them, and reed whistles to make the beeps.

“You see that?” Bill said to the others. “He reached right out. Come on.”

Still laughing and whooping, the whole lot of them more half-dragged me back up the stairs to the dining room on the fourth floor. Mister Garman was sitting in a big chair at the head of the table, dressed in the black formal clothes of a guild mister, and straight in a line down the table in front of him was as much food as I’d ever seen in one place.

The prentices lined up on the other side of the room, and got as silent as they could. Bill pushed me a step out in front, and then said in a voice that could have passed for a gentleman of the presden’s court in Sisnaddi, “Sir and Mister, the newest apprentice, Trey sunna Gwen.”

“Has he shaken the robot’s hand?” Mister Garman asked in the same oh-so-formal tone.

“He has, Sir and Mister.” Then, grinning: “Put his hand right out. And we didn’t have to drag him down the stairs.”

“Then let the feasting begin,” said Mister Garman. He got up from his chair, with the closest thing to a genuine smile on his face that I ever remember seeing there, and walked to the door. He turned to me and said, “You’ll do well, Trey.” Then, to the others: “Don’t make him do all the cleaning – but this room and the kitchen had better be spotless tomorrow morning.”

The moment he left the room, everyone made for the food, but there was more than enough to go around, meat pies and sweetcakes and just about anything else good you care to think about, and birch punch to drink, which I’d never had before. I gathered from the talk that the scant meals and the hard work were parts of whatever test I’d taken and passed, for some of the prentices laughed about how they’d all but had to be dragged down to the cellar, and others how they’d just about decided to give up and go back to their families, and there were a few who mentioned boys who did just that, up and quit after two bleak meals and a lot of hard work, or who bolted out the door into the night because they were too afraid of meeting the robot.

I didn’t mention that I’d had my share of hard work and scant meals as a farmer’s only son up in the hills, though that was mostly because I was too well fed and comfortable by the time the point seemed worth making. Still, I did my share of the cleaning when it came to that, and the dining room and kitchen were close to spotless when we got up the next morning.

It’s a funny thing, the robot’s hand. Every ruinman’s prentice, not just Garman’s, gets to meet the robot or do something enough like it that the differences don’t matter, and ever after there’s a line between you and everyone who hasn’t shaken the robot’s hand. The old world is a little less distant, maybe, and the things that people outside the ruinmen’s guild think and say seem a little less important. Certainly, as I lay in bed and tried to quiet my mind enough to sleep, the night after I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga underplaces and got started on the road to Star’s Reach, the robot’s hand was what kept coming to mind; I imagined myself going down some other stair, in some vast ruin I could barely imagine, and shaking a hand that didn’t have another prentice on the other side of it.

Maybe that’s what the ancients who built Star’s Reach were trying to do, in their own way. It’s certainly one of the things that sends ruinmen down into the underplaces of the old world’s dead cities, when the pay’s so often poor these days and so many of us get reborn in the process. To touch something that thinks but isn’t human, or isn’t the kind of human we are nowadays: it’s a heady thing, and it makes my head spin sometimes to think that I’m as close to doing that as I write these words as anyone has been since the old world ended, or close to it.

Six: Dreaming of Deesee

2009-11-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

Eleen and Tashel Ban both told me, when I asked them last night, that the way to write something is to start at the beginning and go on step by step until you get to the end. She’s a scholar from Melumi and he’s what they have in Nuwinga in place of scholars from Melumi, and they both know a lot more about writing than I do, but try as I might this thing I’m writing won’t follow their advice. If old Plummer was right, and my story is part of his one story, it got started a long time before I did, and there’s no way to keep the earlier parts of it out of the part I’d meant to tell.

So I’m going to have to take some pages here to write about the Robot’s Hand, even though that part of the story happened to me more than ten years before Gray Garman and I found the letter in the Shanuga underplaces. If other people ever read this, they might be able to understand the rest of the story I want to tell without knowing about the Hand, but they won’t understand me or Berry or the ruinmen, and I’m not sure at all that they’ll be able to figure out why Berry and I turned our backs on the life we’d been living among the Shanuga ruinmen and went looking for a place nobody had been able to find for more than four hundred years. To explain the Hand, though, I’ll have to go a bit further back, to a gray rainy morning when I was nine years old and the world I thought I knew had just fallen apart around me.

That was the year after my father was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. My mother spent almost the whole rainy season that year hoping that the news was wrong, but the men who straggled back from the Kerline coast had little hope to offer her. My father had been in the front ranks at Durrem, they said, when the Jinya cavalry broke through our lines and those who didn’t run fast ended up getting reborn in a hurry. My father was not the kind of man to turn and run. About the time the rains slowed down, when there wasn’t any use in hoping further, my mother sent for a priestess to say the litany for him, and then set about selling our farm. If ours had been a bigger family she might have been able to keep it, but it was just the two of us, and I wasn’t old enough for the heavy work. With the war and all, there were enough empty farms that she couldn’t get much money for it, but she got enough to get us to her family in Shanuga and maybe enough to find me a place as a prentice there.

So we gave away everything we couldn’t take and hadn’t been bought by the farm’s new owners, loaded up the rest in a couple of packs, and started walking one cool wet morning down out of the hills toward Shanuga. I don’t remember much of anything about the journey, though it took us two days and I’d never been anything like that far from home. I’d cried when we first heard my father wasn’t coming home, and cried again when it became pretty much clear that was true, and then again when my mother told me we had to leave the farm, but somehow none of that was quite real to me until I shouldered the pack and followed her out through a gate I’d known since I was born, and that I suddenly knew I’d never see any more. There were no tears bitter enough for that, and I simply trudged along through the rain and mud behind my mother, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing but a huge cold empty space where my life had been.

We got down to Shanuga late the next day. There are bigger cities in Meriga, and I knew that even then, but I’d never seen any settlement bigger than the couple of little market towns you could reach from our farm in a day’s walk, and they had maybe two hundred people each. Shanuga had twenty thousand. It had buildings seven and eight stories tall, made of steel and glass salvaged from the ruins just down the river, with wind turbines turning slow and silent on top of them; it had walls around it, big and gray and massive, pierced with gates here and there, where guards looked down at you from narrow windows as you passed through.

They looked down at my mother and me, saw a couple of harmless poor folk from the hills heading into the city like so many others must have done that day, and probably forgot all about us in the time it takes to blink. Me, I was staring openmouthed at everything around us, and my mother had to speak to me twice to get me to pay attention and follow her into the shadow of the narrow streets. She’d been to Shanuga to visit her family a few times since she married my father, and so the city wasn’t anything like as unfamiliar to her as it was to me.

Her older sister had a tavern in one of the poorer parts of the city. I don’t remember it well; I lived there for only a few weeks and visited only a couple of times after my mother died, which wasn’t that many months after I left. Most of what I remember was the narrow stairway in back going up and up and up, five floors to the little room they could spare for my mother and me. One floor down was where Aunt Kell lived, with two daughters and whoever she had as her good time boy that week; two and three floors down were rooms that people could hire for the night, or longer if they wanted; four floors down, on the street level, was the public room, and below that was a basement full of barrels of beer, some aging, some brewing, some with a spigot stuck in them and a mark drawn with charcoal to tell the barmaids whether it was good enough to drink sober or bad enough not to give to anyone who still had wits enough to notice.

My mother went to work right away, cooking and cleaning for the tavern guests. There wasn’t much I could do just then, so I mostly stayed out of the way. Once the rains stopped for good, I knew, the crafts would be taking prentices, and my mother and Aunt Kell meant to find me a place with one; that seemed like a good idea to me, too, though I hadn’t yet gotten past the shock of having my life tossed into the compost by some Jinya cavalryman I’d never know. Still, as the rains finished winding down and the first bits of clear weather started to show up, it happened more than once that I came down for a meal with my mother and Aunt Kell and her daughters and her good time boy, and Aunt Kell and my mother would stop talking and look at me, and then there would be one of those busy silences where all the words that weren’t being said seemed to keep on chattering to themselves off where you couldn’t hear them.

It was the night after one of those times that I dreamed my first dream about Deesee. Like everyone else, I’d learned growing up to pay attention to dreams and watch for the ones Mam Gaia sends, but up to then I’d never dreamed anything that would make a priestess pay the least attention. This one was different. I don’t think it came from Mam Gaia, though; damn if I know who or what sent it to me, but if it hadn’t come to me I can tell you for a fact I wouldn’t be writing these words by lamplight in Star’s Reach now.

Like so many dreams, it didn’t so much start as unroll from something else too dim to recall. Some things happened, and then I was walking down a city street so wide you could have built a block of Shanuga houses in the middle of it with room to pass on both sides. There were buildings to either side of the street, too, high and pale, with windows lined up in ranks like soldiers in a parade, except all the same size and all the same color. I was the only person I could see anywhere in the city, but not the only thing living; there were schools of fish swimming here and there between the high pale buildings, and when I breathed out my breath turned into bubbles and went rising up toward the silvery sky maybe fifty meedas above me.

None of that seemed strange to me, and I kept on walking. I was supposed to meet somebody in the drowned city, and I turned a corner to get to where I knew I was supposed to go. Ahead of me was what looked like a big grassy meadow with trees, except the grass and the trees were all seaweed that moved back and forth as the water took it. That meant I was getting close, and I hurried a bit more as I walked.

Finally I reached the seaweed meadow, and looked up and to my right, and that was when I figured out where I was.

People call it the Spire and still talk about it, though of course it’s only a memory nowadays; it had a longer name in ancient times that I don’t remember just now. Not that long ago you could see it for klomees along the coast, rising up pale and stark from the sea, a square shaft of white stone with a pointed top. I had never seen it back when I had this first dream, of course, but I knew what it was and what it looked like; back when my father was alive, I’d played with other boys whose families kept pictures of it in their homes. There was an old story that as long as it stood there, sparkling in the mist off beyond the breakers, the drowned city beneath it might still someday rise up from the sea, and the ancient times and all their treasures would come back again. I never met anyone who admitted they believed the story, but I never met anyone who insisted it was just a story, either.

But that was what I was looking at: the Spire, or the lowest part of it, rising up from its hill to pierce what I’d thought was the sky, and I knew then was the surface of the sea. The one I was supposed to meet would be waiting there, I knew, and I started up the hill toward the base of the Spire. Just then the world began to shake all around me, and the Spire shuddered and swayed; and all of a sudden I was in my bed in the little room on the fifth floor of Aunt Kell’s tavern, being shaken awake by one of Aunt Kell’s daughters so I’d be up in time for breakfast.

I thought about that dream all day, while sitting up in the little room and watching the clouds clear and the last few flurries of rain blow past. I thought about Deesee, the dead drowned city where the presdens of Meriga used to live before the lights went off and the seas rose up and the old world crashed into ruin; and I thought about the old world itself, and all the scraps and masses of itself it left scattered all over the countryside, so that in more places than not you could hardly dig in the ground and not find something made back then; and after a while I thought I knew what the dream was trying to tell me.

We ate dinner early in the tavern, so that everyone got fed and the dishes cleaned up before the evening got too lively downstairs. It wasn’t that many hours after breakfast, then, that I came down for dinner, and again my mother and Aunt Kell suddenly stopped talking and looked at me. I knew what they were talking about, and right then I knew what I had to say.

“Momma, I want to prentice with a ruinman, if one’ll take me.” That’s what I put into the silence they’d made. “Aunt Kell, do you know any?”

Aunt Kell glanced at my mother, then back at me. “Happens I do,” she said.

“Would you write a letter to him, if Momma gives her leave?”

Aunt Kell looked at my mother again, and my mother looked at her. “It’s an honest trade,” Aunt Kell said, “and if he makes mister he’ll never want for money.”

“And it’s Mam Gaia’s work,” my mother said. Then, to me: “Trey, if that’s what you wish, you’ve got my leave.”

I whooped and grinned, but there was something in her face and voice that left me feeling cold as metal, somewhere down deep where I couldn’t quite figure it out. There’s a kind of peace that you see when somebody’s gotten past something and can go on with life, and then there’s a kind of peace you see when somebody’s gotten past something and just wants to be done with living; I didn’t know that difference yet, but I must have sensed it. My mother smiled, but there was next to nothing behind the smile: a little relief, maybe, that she had done the last thing she needed to do and could let herself fall into the hollow place where her heart had been.

Thinking of it now, I’m not even sure how much of that I sensed then, how much of it I put into the memory after she caught a coughing disease six months later and died, and how much of it got tangled up after that, when I thought about what had happened and tried to piece together the pattern of my life. Memory’s a tricky thing; I think I remember that first dream of Deesee as though I was still having it right now, but sometimes I wonder how much of that memory comes from later dreams, or from the vision I had at Mam Cassee’s house on the seashore the time I went looking for Deesee myself, and saw the Spire as it fell. If my life has been drawn into the one great story old Plummer talked about, that day on the road to Sisnaddi, how much of what happened before then had to be rewritten by the storyteller so it would fit what he had to say? I stare into the shadows here at Star’s Reach and wonder that sometimes.

Five: The Youngest Mister

2009-10-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

By the time we finished getting the letter copied, work had come to a halt all over the ruin. That happens most times a big find turns up, since most misters are smart enough to take their prentices off the job when they can’t concentrate enough to be safe. Since that was the one break we usually got from work between the time the ruins dried out enough to dig and the time the rains came back, it gave the prentices another good reason to keep an eye open for signs that might lead to something.

We had a few misters in Shanuga who balked now and then at letting their prentices go when a find turned up, but even Mister Calwel knew better than to hold them back this time, since nobody had an eye open for anything but Star’s Reach. It didn’t matter that none of us could make head or tail of the message in the letter, or had the least notion what a potus or a nrao might be. That would be tomorrow’s problem, for as many tomorrows as it took somebody to go to Melumi and ask the scholars. For the moment, as Garman and I walked back into camp from Mam Kelsey’s tent, we passed clusters of prentices talking low and fast, and every time they were talking about Star’s Reach.

Most of them jumped up and came over to ask for another look at the letter. Even the ones who’d been bitter rivals of mine a day before called me “Mister Trey” and were as polite as you could ask. Garman, who had both the copy and the original, let them read the copy. He gave me a sidelong glance every time he handed it over, and I knew he was wondering when I’d tell him whether I wanted the letter itself or the finder’s rights. I couldn’t have told him if I wanted to. I knew which one I should choose if I had the brains Mam Gaia gave geese, and I knew which one every senamee of me wanted to choose, and unfortunately they weren’t the same one.

So we proceeded across the camp to the big tent in the middle of everything that served as the misters’ lodge seven months of the year. The other misters had hauled one of the big wooden chairs right outside the entrance to the lodge and left it there for me to haul back inside. Of course they’d tied a bunch of scrap iron to the thing so it weighed close to fifty keels, just to add to the welcome. Still, I counted myself lucky. A couple of years before there had been one prentice just turned mister that a lot of people disliked, and whoever loaded up his chair drove a stake into the ground and chained the chair to the stake, then draped a bunch more chain all around it so it took him a dozen tries and some of the hottest language I’ve ever heard before he figured out why the thing just wouldn’t budge.

I had an easier time than that, but the chair was still a mother to lift, and a mother with babies to carry into the lodge. Most of the other misters were already in the tent, sitting in their chairs or gathered in twos and threes around the walls, so I had an approving audience as I staggered a quarter of the way around the lodge to the open place they’d left for me, and set down the chair with a crash like a building falling over. The misters laughed and applauded, and then the circle got quiet as I sat down for the first time in a mister’s chair.

“Well,” said Mister Jonus then, taking his seat. Of the twenty misters beside me who worked the Chanuga ruins that season, he was the oldest, and that gave him first and last voice any time the misters made a decision in circle. “Unless anyone objects, we’ve got a new mister among us.”

No one objected. Garman gave me one of his rare fractional smiles and went to his chair. Jonus nodded once, and that was settled.

The rest of the meeting was as slow and plodding as a misters’ lodge usually turns out to be. A couple of younger misters who were working claims next to each other on the west side of the ruins had gotten into a quarrel about who had the right to a little building right on the line between them, and had the common sense to bring it to the lodge instead of going to the circle to settle it with knives. A couple of senior misters working the underplaces close to the river warned of water getting into the deep places. Jonus passed the bucket for money to pay Mam Kelsey’s wages, and I panicked a bit before I remembered that she wouldn’t cost me anything yet since I didn’t have a claim of my own. The bucket went round a second time for money for the families of ruinmen who’d died or been crippled in the ruins, and I found a few coins for that, and then the meeting was over.

By the time we filed out of the tent, Jonus first as the oldest mister and me dead last as the youngest, the sun was well west of noon and the clouds had started to break up after raining somewhere else. By then the prentices had gone from talking low to arguing at the top of their lungs, and somebody had dragged out a barrel of the small beer the misters let prentices drink in the ruins. You couldn’t get away with giving beer to boys of ten back in Shanuga city, but nobody came out to the ruins but ruinmen, their prentices and failed scholars, and the few priestesses who were willing to get that close to the leavings of the old world, and none of them made a fuss about it. It’s true enough that they had little reason to worry, for you had to drink one mighty lot of the stuff to get noticeably tip-overish from it.

Still, the prentices did their level best to get lively with what they had, and once the rest of the misters headed off to their tents or wherever, I was surrounded by a fair-sized mob. Until a few hours before I’d been their equal, and they weren’t ready to let me forget that just yet. So I got dragged over to the barrel and handed a big wooden mug of beer, and had to repeat the story of how I’d blundered my way into the hidden room in the underplaces, and nearly gotten reborn, and dodged past that to find something that everybody in Meriga had been looking for one way or another since about an hour and a half after the last of the old towers went dark and the last airplanes fell out of the sky. Then I had to repeat it again, and again, with more beer, as more prentices joined the crowd and more barrels followed them.

Then somebody who hadn’t seen it wanted to know what the letter said. I remembered about half of it, and some of the others remembered more, but neither the beer nor the excitement helped us get it straight, and the potuses and the nraos got mixed up with a lot of nonsense, and none of us could say any of the odd words without sounding like we were talking backwards. Before long we were all laughing too hard to stand up. Conn topped it off by guessing what a potus might be, and I’d be lying if I said his guess was anything clean. Before long we were discussing the difference between an ornl and a ceti, or some equally clear and important point, while clutching our sides and rolling on the ground.

Things went on like that for quite a while. Some of the younger prentices finally got bullied into fixing food for everyone before the misters got too tired of waiting, and I got handed a big bowl of bean soup and a wedge of hard bread almost as large. That might have helped steady me a little, except that it came with another big wooden mug of beer, and there were more after that.

Night got close and dark around us, and we got quieter, though it took a while. Most of the younger prentices went off to their tents, and one or two of them got noisily sick on the way. A little later, the prentices who worked for other misters asked blessings on our dreams and headed off to their parts of the camp; I’m pretty sure some of them got sick, too, from the way they were weaving as they walked, but if so they weren’t so loud about it. Then it was just me and Mister Garman’s prentices in a circle lit by little lamps, with the stars peeking down through great torn gaps in the clouds above us and the stink of spilled beer around us, talking about other times and the ones who’d been there with us and weren’t with us now, the ones who quit their prenticeship and the ones who got reborn.

Finally we ran out of things to say. A gap like the ones in the clouds was opening between me and the others, and it wouldn’t close again, I knew, even if they all lived to become misters themselves. I’d seen the same thing happen from the other side often enough, but even so it wasn’t easy to sit there in the pale lamplight and know that something that had been the nearest thing to a family I had after my father and mother died was gone now, at least for me.

When the silences had gotten long enough to be uncomfortable, I tried to stand up. That wasn’t the best move, it turned out, for it landed me on the ground with a thump. You have to drink a mighty lot of small beer to get tip-overish, as I said, but I must have drunk a mighty lot that day and then a bit. I tried to stand up again, without much more luck.

The others laughed and teased me, which broke the silence for the moment. Berry, who was the only one of the younger prentices still there, came over and helped me stand up. I wished the rest of them good dreams and, leaning on Berry, managed to walk the thirty meedas or so to my tent without ever quite falling over.

When we got to the tent, he more or less poured me into a sitting position on my cot and then stood there facing me for a long moment. “I’m the one who went and got Mister Garman when the floor fell in,” he told me then, saying it in the way that lets you know a favor is going to be asked before too much longer.

“I’m grateful,” I managed in response.

“You’re going to take finder’s rights to the letter.” Then, all in a rush: “You get to take one of Gray Garman’s prentices as your first prentice. I want you to pick me.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to get my brain to work. “I haven’t settled what I’m going to choose,” I protested, but he just grinned, and said, “You’re not gutless enough to turn down finder’s rights to Star’s Reach.”

He was right, of course, though he could have said not smart enough with equal truth. “If I do,” I tried again, “I’m not going to have more than half a dozen marks to my name. How do you think I’m going to feed a prentice? I’ll have to hire out at other mister’s sites, for certain.”

“Then you can hire me out too.” The grin faltered. “Trey—Mister Trey—for a chance at Star’s Reach I’ll eat dirt and run naked and sleep under a bush for the rest of my life. Anyone would. I bet you have twenty prentices sitting in front of this tent when you get up tomorrow.” The grin was gone, and he swallowed visibly. “But I want you to pick me. I—I know I’m not even your best choice. But I had to ask.”

I sat there looking at him for what seemed like a long while, thinking about the one time I’d wanted something impossible, and asked for it, and gotten it. Anyone else would probably have turned him down flat, or put off the decision until morning and turned him down that way, and I tried to talk myself into doing either one, and failed. “You’ll do,” I said.

Berry’s face lit up like a lamp. “You mean it?”

“I mean it. I’ll tell Garman first thing tomorrow.”

He put out his hand, and I clasped it, sealing the deal. He grinned, then, and said, “Just like the Robot’s Hand. Mister Trey, you have the best dreams anyone ever had. I’ll be here with my things first thing tomorrow.”

A moment later he was gone. I went to the door of the tent, thinking about the Robot’s Hand, and then fell to my knees and got very sick with as little noise as I could manage.

Four: Mam Kelsey's Book

2009-09-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Four days have passed now since we arrived at Star’s Reach, and we’ve begun to get some sense of the shape of the ruin. There’s a lot of it, at least ten levels going down, each one the size of a small city. The first level is a mess, with the roof caved in here and there and plenty of water and mud come down through the gaps, and one big brown bear, already settled in for her winter sleep, who fancied a den right in the middle of a main corridor a good fifty meedas from the hole in the roof where she got in.

The second and third levels are much easier going, with light wells from the surface to bring in the daylight and only a bit of water here and there. Below that the darkness closes in. Anna says that the power cores down deep may still be charged, and I’m inclined to think she may be right, but we haven’t been able to get the lights on the lower levels to work. The lamps we brought with us run on sunpower, but that means they have to spend a good part of each day at the bottom of a light well charging, so I have plenty of time to write.

I have plenty of paper, too. Two days ago we found a couple of boxes of blank notebooks in an otherwise empty storeroom, and I claimed one for myself. So far the notebooks are the only paper we’ve found anywhere in Star’s Reach; Eleen is fretting about that, for there’s always the chance that the people who came here in the last days of the ancient world destroyed their papers before they left, all those years later on. The ancients did things like that often enough.

Still, as evening fills the light well with blue shadows and Berry and Thu clatter the pots over in the corner of the room we’ve set aside for a kitchen, I have a hard time worrying about what will come of this journey of ours. I think of other times over the years that the path to Star’s Reach looked as though it had come to a full stop, no way onward, and then picked up again once I’d seen through a misunderstanding or dodged a danger. If it’s true that they listened to a message from a distant world here, and anything is left of it, I think we’ll find it.

I don’t remember just now if I felt the same way when Mister Garman and his prentices and I left the place in the Shanuga ruins where we’d found the letter that led me here. We were fairly far down and the way back up wasn’t straight by any means, so it took us a bit of time to climb up out of the innards of the building. By the time we saw daylight it was close to noon, and the day was getting hot enough to hurt. Big heaps of cloud were rising over the hills around the ruins, promising rain later on, and big bright birds came flapping past out of the forest that wraps the ruins on three sides. I drew in a deep breath to remind myself that I was still alive.

Word must have gotten around that something was up, for a middle-sized mob of prentices and a good handful of misters were waiting for us down in the old street. “Found something,” Garman told them. “A little more than you’d expect.” He held up the paper, then waved off the prentices so the other misters could get close and read it. That was worth seeing. Mister Calwel spat out a bit of language so hot I half expected my ears to catch fire, and Mister Jonus, the oldest mister there that season and a man who never seemed surprised by anything, blinked and read the paper again and said, “Garman, now that’s a find.”

“Found by Mister Trey here,” said Garman, “who’ll get either the paper or the finder’s rights once he makes up his mind.” He grinned and nudged me with an elbow, and I think it was then that the other misters noticed the blood on my face. All of them, even Calwel, came up to shake my hand and let me know that if I took the finder’s rights they’d offer a good price for them. I grinned and told them they could go ahead and jump off the next tower they happened to climb, and they laughed.

They didn’t have to acknowledge me; they could have called me out if they wanted to. Ruinmen go to the circle now and then, with hands or knives or pry bars, and during my prentice years I’d seen more than one fight end with a mister carried away dead. Still, either they had no quarrel with my advancement to mistership or they didn’t fancy the risk of going to the circle with me. Prentices fight more often than misters, though it almost always stops at first blood, and I won’t claim I never lost those fights but I will say it didn’t happen much. Gray Garman was a good teacher, and he hired a fighting master to teach his prentices the tricks he didn’t know, which is more than most of the misters did.

Once the misters all had their look at the paper, the prentices crowded around to read it, and most of them weren’t half so quiet as the misters had been. Some of them whooped and some of them used language I won’t write down, and there were only a couple of them who stopped and stared with big round eyes; I think those were the ones that really caught what it was that we’d found. Soon enough Garman waved them off, and he and I crossed the ruins to the tent where Mam Kelsey spent the digging seasons.

Most ruinmen hire failed scholars from Melumi to puzzle out old writing and make copies of any papers that get found, and when the ruin’s of any size the misters go in together to pay one to stay out there at the site through the digging season. The Chanuga ruins were big and rich enough for that, and we’d had a failed scholar there every season since I first became a prentice. The last four years, that had been Mam Kelsey. She was a lean thing with hair the same gray color as the robe of her guild, and eyes so bad she had to wear glasses thick as old bottles to see more than a few senamees past her nose.

Her tent was over to one side of the camp, not far from the river, and when the ruinmen had no work for her she would sit on a little folding chair behind a little folding table that always looked ready to collapse beneath notes for the book she was writing in the hope of getting back into the college. When we had work for her, she would push the notes aside, pull her glasses just that extra little bit down her nose, and do whatever needed to be done without saying any more words than she had to. I used to feel sorry for her now and then, but the misters paid her a good wage and she could still call herself a scholar without shame. Later on, I met one failed scholar who worked as a cook in a roadhouse and another who was a harlot, and neither of them would admit to most folk they’d ever been to Melumi at all.

The prentices used to talk about her book sometimes around campfires at night. Nobody knew what it was about, and I don’t think more than one or two of us understood why she spent all her time . Melumi was six hundred klomees northwest of us by the shortest road, and more than that if you took the easy route and hired a bunk on a riverboat. Some of the misters had been there, but unless they felt like talking all we had to go on was the stories that the Wayfarers and other traveling folk told, and that wasn’t much. So we wondered aloud, and made things up, silly or scary as the mood struck us. I don’t recall any of the prentices suggesting that the book might be about Star’s Reach, but that must have been the only thing nobody thought to mention.

One day during the first season she was at the Shanuga ruins, though, a few of us managed to get a brief look at Mam Kelsey’s book. It was a hot sluggish day toward the end of summer, and most of us had been set loose for the afternoon, because part of the old tower Gray Garman was salvaging had gotten unstable and needed to be blasted down. That’s work for misters and their senior prentices, and it’s dangerous, since the big kegs of powder we get from the gunsmiths don’t always go off right. So the rest of us were left to sit around in camp or scavenge wire in safe areas while Garman and his two oldest prentices set the charges.

Three of us were playing toss-the-bones over on the side of camp by Mam Kelsey’s tent. There was me and Conn, and another boy name of Shar sunna Janny, who died the next year when a couple of levels in a building we were stripping flapjacked on top of him. We’d gotten halfway through the game when we saw one of Mister Jonus’ prentices pelting across the field toward her at a pretty fair run. We couldn’t hear what he said to her when he got there, but it wasn’t hard to guess: Jonus’ people must have found something written in the part of the ruins he was working, and needed her help to figure out what it meant. After a moment, she pushed her notes aside, got up, and followed the prentice back across the field toward the ruins.

I think all three of us thought of her book at the same moment. We looked at each other, and grinned, and once she was out of sight got up and pocketed the knucklebones we’d been playng with and went oh so casually over to her tent.

I was the only one of the three of us who could read, and that only after a fashion. Still, the other two just about pushed me over to the book, saying “What does it say?” almost at the same moment, so the words tumbled over each other. The book was open, lying there on Mam Kelsey’s table. I tried to piece together the words at the top of one page. As I recall, they went something like this, above long columns of numbers:

The journals of Matthias add somewhat to this picture. The table below lists every example of sporadic E propagation that Matthias recorded in the seventeen years of his journals that are known to us, along with the daily sunspot number and the geomagnetic index for that day.

I slid to a halt somewhere around the word “geomagnetic,” after beating up some of the other words so bad that their own mothers wouldn’t have known them. I don’t imagine Conn or Shar got any more out of what I’d read than I did, but we’d looked at the book, which was the point of the exercise. After a moment Conn said, “I bet she’ll be back soon,” and we hurried back over to where we’d been playing and started the game where we’d left off. It wasn’t more than a few minutes later that we heard the big rolling boom of the blast, and only a few minutes more that people came running from the ruins to get us. The keg of powder had gone off too soon; Gray Garman was unhurt, and we managed to dig one of his prentices out from the rubble with no worse than a broken leg, but we never found the other one. The priestess said the words for him and sprinkled the good brown earth on top of a mess of broken concrete, and we had to call that good.

I’m pretty sure that Mam Kelsey found out that we stole a look at her book, probably from someone else in camp who caught sight of us over at her tent. She never said a word about it, but I always got the sense when she looked my way that something in the back of her mind was whispering “That’s the boy who looked at my book.” The day that Garman and I came to her tent with the dead man’s letter about Star’s Reach in our hands was no different. She glanced up at us, seemed to take note of me, pushed her notes aside, pulled her glasses down her nose a bit, and took the brown resin-stiff paper from Garman’s hands. She read it, then stopped and read it again, much more slowly.

“Honest copy, Mam Kelsey,” Garm said to her. “Front and back both.”

She nodded, took a piece of paper from the black leather case by her chair, dipped a pen and copied the paper letter by letter. When she was done, she signed the copy, pressed her seal into the paper good and hard, and then got out a bulb of resin and sprayed the copy front and back so it couldn’t be changed without a mark you could see. She blew on the copy until it was dry, then handed it to Garman. He thanked her, and she nodded, waited politely for a moment, and then spread her notes back out on the table and got back to work. I was impressed. I’m sure Mam Kelsey understood at least as much as any of us what that piece of paper meant, but even so she never said a word.

I never did hear what happened to her or her book. It was years later, after I’d been to Melumi and met Eleen there, then met her again in Sisnaddi and finally put the clues together that led us here to Star’s Reach, that I understood a little of what Mam Kelsey was trying to do with her book, and why it absorbed so much of her time. For all I know, her book is sitting right now on a shelf at Melumi, where somebody will use it to write another book long after Mam Kelsey is dead. She had her quest, just as I have mine, and I hope she got at least as far as I have.

(To be continued...)

Three: Stories to the Dark

2009-09-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

I must have been eight years old when I first heard of Star’s Reach, for my father told me the story, and that happened not long before he was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. It was a night sometime in the spring of that year, and we were out on the porch of the little two-room shack where we lived then, my father, my mother and me, enjoying the cool air after a hot damp day and a dinner of rice and greens and a rabbit my mother snared that morning. My mother had her spindle with her, and her arm rose and fell as she drew cotton out into yarn for weaving; my father sat back in his chair and puffed at a clay pipe; I lay on my belly right on the edge of the porch and stared off across the garden in front of our house toward the dark soaring shadow of the forest and the stars above it. Fireflies danced between me and the forest, and I made believe that some of the stars had come down to hover and play in the still air.

My mother’s voice, high and soft, and my father’s, measured and rumbling, wove in and out of each other behind me. I had other things to mind just then, notably the fireflies, and so didn’t hear a word of it until my mother let out a sharp little yelp. That made me roll over and sit up, facing them.

“No,” she was saying. “Maddy’s boy?”

“The one,” said my father. “Came back to the farm yesterday evening sicker’n a dog. They had a doctor come out, and then a priestess, but he was already too far gone.”

“Do they know...”

“He’d been out to the ruins. He was babbling about Star’s Reach before he died.”

A long moment of silence went past. “Then it was his own fault,” my mother said, in a hard brittle voice that wasn’t like her at all. “People who go messing around in those places deserve what they get.”

My father said nothing. After a while I asked, “Pappy, what’s Star’s Reach?”

“Never you mind,” my mother told me in the same brittle voice, but my father said, “He’ll hear it soon or late, Gwen. Might as well be the true story, and not whatever lies sent young Calley off to die.”

She let out a sharp sigh, but did not argue. My father took a long slow draw from his pipe, let the smoke trickle out, and said, “The stars are suns like ours, just a lot farther away. They teach you that at school yet, boy?”

“Yep,” I told him; the priestess who taught us had said something about it that very week.

“Good. Those suns have worlds turning around ‘em, the way Mam Gaia turns around our sun, and in the old days they thought there were people on some of those other worlds. Not people like us. A-lee-in, they used to call ‘em: that means different.”

“Different how?” I wanted to know.

“That’s just it. Nobody knew. You know the spyglass Cullen has?” I did, and wanted one of my own desperately just then. “In the old days they made spyglasses big as this farm and chucked ‘em up in the sky so they could see the stars better, and even through those, the other worlds were smaller’n a pinprick. They’re that far away. But the people who live on those worlds, if there are any, aren’t Mam Gaia’s children. Maybe they’ve got purple skin, and eyes like bugs, and big claws to git you with.” His hands turned into claws and lunged toward me, and I squealed with laughter and rolled back out of reach.

“Back in the old days they tried all kinds of ways to figure out if there were people on those other worlds,” my father went on. “Finally, so the story goes, somebody figured that they probably used radios, same as we do, and started listening. Of course the other worlds are so far away the signal’s less’n a whisper by the time it gets to us.”

“Like the Sisnaddi station,” I said. We had a little crystal radio, and sometimes at night, if you jiggled the thing just right, you could just hear the big station at Sisnaddi playing patriotic music and talking about the news.

“Like that, but so much fainter you can’t imagine it. So they built antennas big as towns and radios bigger’n this house, and when those didn’t do the job, they built even bigger ones. Finally, just about the time the old world ended, they built the biggest antennas and radios of all, at a place called Star’s Reach, and the story is that they did it. They got a message by radio from one of those other worlds, circling one of the suns out there.” His gesture swept across the stars.

He said nothing for a long moment, and finally I asked, “What did it say?”

“Nobody knows.” He took another draw from the pipe, breathed out a plume of smoke that scented the night around him. “They got the message, the story says, and it got passed around to all the people they had in those days to figure things out, but nobody could work out what it meant. Then the old world ended and the lights went out forever and that was the end of it.

“But it wasn’t really the end of it.” His voice went low, and dead serious. “Because ever since the old world ended, people have gotten so caught up in that story that they’ve gone off into the ruins looking for Star’s Reach, hoping they can find the message and figure out what it means. And it kills them, the way it killed Calley. He must have gotten too close to something nuclear, and it poisoned his bones and his blood. There’s plenty of that, and plenty of other poisons that choke you or blind you or get in through your skin and leave you twisting like a half-dry earthworm before you die, and plenty of pits you can fall into and old rotten towers to fall on you and squash you like a bug.

“And here’s the thing. Nobody’s ever found Star’s Reach, or anything to show that Star’s Reach was ever a real place. It might just be a story. They used to tell lots of stories, in the old days, about those other worlds and what might be out there. The whole business about Star’s Reach might be one of those, and Calley and all the others who went looking for it and died were chasing something that never existed at all.”

“Wicked,” said my mother then. I turned to face her. None of us were more than shadows in the dim light just then, but even now I’m half sure I could see her shoulders and her face drawn up in hard unfamiliar lines. “That’s what they are, the ones who try to dig up the secrets of the old world. What’s dead is dead, for good reason, and there’s nothing good to be gotten from dabbling in the corpse.”

“I don’t see you turn up your nose at metal from the ruins,” my father reminded her.

“If the priestesses hadn’t blessed it first I’d do without,” she said. “But I’m not talking about the ruinmen. They’re doing Mam Gaia’s work, tearing down what’s left of the old world and selling us the metal so we can leave the trees to grow. It’s the people who won’t let the old world stay dead, those are the ones I mean. They deserve what they get.”

My father did not answer. After a while, I lay down on the porch again and tried to lose myself in the darting of the fireflies and the slow wheeling of the sky. It was no use; my father’s story would not leave my mind. A message from another world seemed just then to be written out across the night sky, blazing in starry letters I could never quite read. The fireflies had changed as well; they had stopped being stars, wandering or not; their pale gleam made me think of the way that the eyes of ghosts are supposed to glow, and then they were the eyes of the ghosts of all the people like Calley who died looking for Star’s Reach, looking up at the a-lee-in letters they could no more read than I. I shivered, though the night was warm enough, and tried to forget what my father had said.

I thought about that night and the pale ghost-eyes looking up at the stars that morning in the Shanuga ruins, as we stood staring at a piece of paper that everyone from the scholars at Melumi to backwoods farm boys like Calley sunna Maddy had been chasing after for more years than I could count. In the flickering light of Gray Garman’s lantern, I suppose we all must have looked a little like ghosts ourselves.

“Well,” said Garman again, and the moment passed. “Trey, you got some resin?”

The scholars at Melumi brew a resin that can be sprayed out of a bulb onto old paper, to keep it from going to bits. Garman taught me years ago always to carry some when searching a ruin, in case something written turned up that was worth selling. I pulled a bulb out of the sack at my belt and squirted the resin in a fine mist all over the paper. Pungent scent of the solvent wrestled with the dust and concrete smells of a fresh ruin, and lost. I turned the paper over once the resin was dull and dry, and was most of the way through spraying the other side—an even coat, not too much, just the way I’d been taught—when I noticed the writing there.

It was one word only, in the pale gray writing they made sometimes in the old days: CURTIS. I glanced up at Garman, saw no more understanding in his face than must have showed in mine. For lack of anything useful to say, I finished spraying the paper and put the bulb away.

“You got a choice, Mister Trey,” Garman said then. “One find from this room is yours by right, but this—” His gesture indicated the paper. “—is two. You can have it, or you can have the finder’s rights to what’s on it, but damn if I’m giving you both.”

The paper would be worth hundreds of marks, maybe more, to the scholars at Melumi, enough to set me up as a ruinman with prentices of my own. Finder’s rights might be worth much more or much less; they meant that if anyone followed the paper’s lead to a site, I had rights to a share of it. Among the better sort of ruinmen, it also meant that other misters would give me first shot at finding whatever the paper might lead toward, and start looking for it only when it was pretty much clear that I had failed. I knew which one I ought to choose, and I knew which one I wanted to choose, and damn if I could decide between them right then. “That I’m going to have to think about,” I told him.

He grinned and cuffed me on the shoulder. “You take your time. Mam Kelsey up top can make an honest copy, and that’ll be needed one way or the other.” To the prentices: “First of you to find a way out of here other’n that rope gets a mark.”

That sent them scurrying, and soon enough Berry won the mark by finding a half-hidden door into a part of the ruin we’d explored days before. From the other side, you couldn’t see it at all; that was common enough for the old shelters. Prentices around the campfire at night used to wonder aloud what scared the people of the old world so much that they hid so many doors and laid so many traps. They may be asking the same question around their fires tonight, though now I think I could give them an answer.

(To be continued...)