Star's Reach (16 page)

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. Bron and
his prentices headed back to work at the ruins, though, and once
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
Nashul used to talk about it all the time. Her mother was some kind
of big name in Circle, though she never had children herself, 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.

Eleven: What The Wind Said

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, because people from Nuwinga
don’t usually move any faster than they have 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. As often as not, when you find dead
people from the old world, what killed them hasn’t 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, and was turning on
a lamp to light the way there. 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
noticing; but I won’t say we dawdled much.

There were lamps burning in the computer
room, and the light splashed out through the open door—we’d jammed
it open, so Anna didn’t have to come and open it again any time we
wanted to go in. Tashel Ban and Eleen had been working on what was
left of the old computers, with as much help as Anna could give
them, while the rest of us kept searching for the place where the
last people at Star’s Reach lived and did their work. Eleen and
Anna were both there in the big room, 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,” Eleen
explained, “and the shelf moved. It’s not fastened to the wall; I
don’t think it used to be there when there were people here.”

“So you looked behind it.”

“So we looked behind it.” With a worried
look: “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 smelled the same thing as soon as I came
into the room: like dust, but not quite, and with just a hint of
something rotten. “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 radiomen and all. There are plenty of times when Eleen and I
are two people who 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 pulled out my radiation counter, Berry raised his lamp,
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, and we sniffed the air for
the sour lightning-smell that tells you there’s electricity close
by. There wasn’t, and the counter clicked slow and soft, nothing
more than 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 fifty of them, all laid
out neatly in a row with their heads close to one wall. They
weren’t as far gone as the bodies you normally find in ruins, just
shriveled up after spending the last however many years in dry
desert air, and their clothes looked brittle but they weren’t quite
gone to shreds yet. What I noticed first, though, was that they all
had cups next to them; it was pretty clear that they’d all drunk
something, lay back on the floor, and died.

Berry gave me a look with wide eyes, but
neither of us said anything, or had to. You find things like that
in old ruins often enough.

We searched the rest of the room, found two
doors opening off it, and went down the corridors to look into the
rooms beyond them. No question, we’d found the place where Anna’s
people lived; there were long rows of bedrooms and a big kitchen, a
couple of rooms where a few hundred people could gather and a lot
more that would fit ten or twenty, and a big space under skylights
where withered sticks in tubs of dry dirt showed where they’d grown
vegetables. The room we found first had computers in it, a bunch of
them on a long desk up against one wall, and other machines I
didn’t recognize. It also had something else, something we didn’t
notice until we were almost finished: a heap of black ashes, over
near one corner of the room, that looked like it had probably been
paper before somebody lit a fire.

I sent Berry down to get the others. By then
everyone else was in the room below, and their footfalls came
echoing up the stairs. Eleen got to the top first, and let out a
little cry when she saw the bodies; Tashel Ban muttered some hot
language under his breath; Anna drew in a sharp breath and then
turned sharply away so that none of us could see her face. 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 that
was it.

We did a little more searching and found
another stairway, going up, that led to a door onto the surface.
Once we found that, Thu and I hauled a couple of empty shelves from
the room below and used them to carry the bodies outside half a
dozen at a time. The desert was as quiet as it ever gets, and a
wind was gusting up out of the south, pushing big heaps of white
cloud with it. We laid the bodies out decently beneath the sky so
they could go back into the circle. We don’t have a priestess here
and Anna, who’s the oldest woman present, doesn’t know the litany,
so Eleen said the words for the last people of Star’s Reach, while
the wind blew across the bodies and sent shreds of their clothing
fluttering off across the sand.

Afterwards, when Anna could talk again, we
sat with her in the room where her people lived and died, and Eleen
asked her about her last hours there.

“I recall very little,” Anna said. “It was a
long time ago, remember, and I was very young. We left at night, I
know that; it was dark outside, and my mother and I went with maybe
two dozen others down into the lower levels and then out to one of
the main doors—probably the one we entered originally. We sat
outside, waiting for my father and a few more people. It was a long
time before they arrived, 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
our things, and telling me we had to leave. There was shouting, and
angry voices that went on and on; I could hear them down the
corridor as I played in our room. That wasn’t normal, and I
wondered what it meant.” Then, blinking and looking at us: “That’s
all.”

Tashel Ban came back then from the heap of
ashes. “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, we found the room
that had belonged to her family, with things nobody had taken the
time to pack scattered around. Among them was a little stick-figure
drawing that looked like it was supposed to be two adults and a
child, with her name written in a child’s block letters down at the
bottom. She turned sharply away and left the room, and I heard her
dry hard sobs from one of the other rooms. After a while she came
back to help us search, but her thoughts were somewhere else.

Tashel Ban and Eleen were working on the
computers all the while. 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 this part of Star’s Reach still had power
coming to it from power cores down below, and at least one of the
computers would still run. 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, but next to nothing that could help us in our quest.
Anna’s family and the ones that left with them took what they could
carry, but the dead 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
people to have where they and their ancestors lived for all those
years.

There were books here and there, sometimes
one or two, sometimes a shelf of them, and we checked those to make
sure they weren’t messages from some other world. One room had most
of a wall covered with shelves, and most of those were full of
books with brown brittle pages and cracked paper 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 and records 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 welcomed to the ruinmen’s guild anywhere I
wanted to settle, and being 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 up above, blowing over
what was left of Anna’s people on its way across the desert, 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 drank poison
and died. Are you sure you want to find it too?