Star's Reach (11 page)

It took me all of that to figure out that a
single word I’d noticed and then half forgotten was the one thing I
needed to understand. 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 had any doubts that Star’s Reach was
like that, they got neatly laid 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 other people who used to live and work
here had their living quarters, their books and records, and the
old computers they’d kept running or cobbled together out of old
parts. As far as we can tell, the door where we first got into
Star’s Reach let us into a part of the complex that no one lived in
for most of four hundred years. That’s why the lights don’t work;
the current got shut off a long time ago, and the switches that did
the shutting are someplace we haven’t found so far.

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 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. It’s close to five kloms long, and
it’s big and dark and full of echoes, especially when the only
people in it are two ruinmen with a little electric lamp, and the
layer of dust on the floor pretty clearly hasn’t been bothered in a
good long time.

The first time Berry and I found that
corridor, 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 and looking for signs that people had
been there recently. It wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back
from the last of those that he noticed that a long blank wall
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, about half a
minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I
looked over the fingerprint lock. Those are common enough in old
ruins, but I’d never heard of anybody who managed to open one
except with pry bars and saws, or maybe a keg of gunpowder.

Berry brought everyone else with him, too,
which I’d expected, but Anna was ahead of the others. She walked up
to the screen, studied it for a few moments, and gave me one of her
sidelong looks. “Do you want me to open it?” she asked, as though
there was any question.

I nodded. “If you think it’ll recognize
you.”

That got me a smile that didn’t have the
least bit of humor in it. “Of course it will,” she said. “All the
children had their prints entered as soon as they were born.” She
put one of her fingers flat against the screen and rolled it back
and forth a bit, and damn if the screen didn’t suddenly light up
and 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
something like a century. All of us but Anna watched with our
mouths hanging open as a section of the blank wall slid back a good
half meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side.
Inside was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked
forward into 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 shoulder-high walls of
some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get
to them, held up with metal posts; 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 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 any risk of 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 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 obviously been stripped for parts a long time
back, 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 thick, 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 986703047
246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 670479587
624390567 249567495 876340958

– 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 but Anna had gathered
around, and they were staring at the numbers 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—there were two hundred twelve of them—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 might just become one in a
hurry once Sheren dies: the archives in Sisnaddi, where I spent
most of a year. They’re in the bottom couple of floors of a big
building close to the Presden’s palace, and it’s pretty dark
because 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 Greenlun 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 together, and the archivists were
still trying to sort things out when they weren’t looking things up
for jennels and cunnels 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 as they could get out of
Deesee as the sea came rushing in—all stayed in Sisnaddi in the
archives, shelves after shelves of big books and binders reaching
off into the darkness.

I learned that story, and a lot more, because
I’d already learned the way of ruins, and didn’t try to make the
archives or the archivists 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 by two tall windows where people gathered for lunch every
day. Every day there’d be a big pot of soup or something brought
over from the kitchens of the presden’s court, and after a big
formal dinner there might be other things, pastries or cabbage
rolls or what have you. One time we got 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. 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.

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 everyday 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 packs 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 you’d hardly notice any
bumps at all. 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 with babies 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 shops around a big central market square, and we
were in Lebna.