Star's Reach (17 page)

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 take the time to do it the right way.
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 were stored in nitrogen and still ought to work. 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.

Twelve: When the Rains Come

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 ruin every day, we moved all our supplies and
gear from the rooms where we’ve stayed since we first got here.
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 the rest of us shouldered the bundles and
boxes and kegs, and tried to make as little noise as we could when
we went 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’ll
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 fourteen of them out in a triangle, leaving
one empty place, and then move one stone over another to the empty
space. Any stone you leap over gets taken out, and 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 the same way.

I’m good at it, and Berry’s better than I am;
I won’t say it was easy, but we won the game. It took us all
afternoon to do it, and we nearly lost the trace when the cables
dropped two levels inside a solid 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 screens and buttons 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 full of
something or other nuclear, turning out a steady trickle of
electricity as they’d done for more than four hundred years. 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, 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 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 in one of the
big padded chairs we’d dragged into what we were already calling
the common room, as though Star’s Reach was a tavern. “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 not.”

“If there was a program that could read the
files,” Berry said then, “there in the computer, do you think you
could 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 one 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 every page with resin on both
sides. 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 still
managed to fail, 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
everything in it. It was all about people from other worlds who
were coming to ours in ships that looked like a couple of plates
stuck together edge to edge, and how the government was pretending
that wasn’t happening, 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 right at the beginning where it says when a book got made, and
saw that it was already more than fifty years old when the old
world ended . 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 clatter of the
computer keyboard from the common room. Then, after what seemed
like a long while, silence.

Then footsteps whispered down the corridor,
coming to our 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 the bare metal table here in our room. “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 they’d fake another round of reports, 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.

Afterwards, when I’d written about the last
few days, I sat there at this desk for a while and looked at her. I
thought about the long road we’d traveled to get here, and of
course I ended up remembering how Eleen and I first met. That was
what I was going to write about next, before Tashel Ban came
running to tell us about the door and the smell, and so I might as
well write about it now.

It happened back when Berry and I got to
Melumi the first time, 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. I got my first taste of
that 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 ferry
across the Hiyo River. We met the jennel and the rest of his party
there, a couple of dozen 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 crossed the river and rode north
through Inyana with the jennel. He had people riding ahead of him,
so 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 among others. A couple of days when we were riding,
he sent a servant to bring me up near the head of the line with
him, and he asked 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 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
almost as unreal.

We got to Melumi late one afternoon most of
two weeks 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 and the
grass bending low. We’d been riding all day through Inyana
farmland, and finally came to a 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 of red 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 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 got down off our horses, and went inside the
offices.