Star's Reach (19 page)

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 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
doors 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 hair out of the way while
she threw up into the chamberpot, helped her get 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 whiskey. 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.

Thirteen: The Yellow Butterfly

I came in here to write about two hours ago,
after one of those uncomfortable meals where nobody has anything to
say but nobody wants 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 electricity humming to itself 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. All I did for what seemed like a long time was
look at the blank paper and think about what we were doing here,
and whether we’d come all this way to read messages from another
world or just to dig up Meriga’s last really big heap of scrap
metal. 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 surprised 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 on the
other doors, letting people know, so by the time we got back to the
computer everyone else 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,”
Tashel Ban told him, “ you have my permission to hit me with a
stick.”

Berry blinked, then: “The program?”

“That’s the one. We were able to find close
to a hundred program files, 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 Kitzhaber 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 to receive our report, much less do anything about it.
Our logistics team in KC can’t get any details about the progress
of the fighting in the southeast or the Japanese refugee situation
on the Pacific coast, other than that both are bad and ongoing; the
team’s running short of almost everything and they 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 a point to doing so, and what if
anything we’re going to tell the CETI team and the 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 a family named Kitzhaber.”

“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. I don’t
know if it’s just that she’s old and doesn’t remember things that
well, or if she still has all her memories and just doesn’t talk
about them; I’m starting to think the second is more likely than
the first, but that’s a guess at best.

“So what does it mean?” I asked Eleen.

“2109 in the old calendar is just over three
hundred fifty years ago,” she said. “The Second Civil War was going
on then, so it’s no wonder they couldn’t find a government.”

“That’s the one with the three presdens?”
Tashel Ban asked.

“Exactly. 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 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.

When I wrote about how I met Eleen, that 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 somewhere, and it might as well go here.

There’s another reason Tam’s story might as
well go here, too, because I met Tam pretty much the same way I met
Eleen, at the start 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 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 the tools and gear cleaned and repaired for next season and
getting them packed away 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 by getting cocky and
taking stupid risks. The building we stripped had plenty of metal,
enough to pay for a couple of bad seasons; 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 been.
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 to the metal merchants, 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 through 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 there in the
ruinmen’s quarter, splashing each other with water and getting into
half-playful fights with the other misters’ prentices. The half
dozen of us who counted as senior prentices, though, headed toward
the town gate and the buildings 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 four free winds. There are a fair number of guilds that
will take women who’ve had their twenty without a baby, but the
ruinmen aren’t one of them.

What that means is that if you’re a ruinman’s
prentice, eight or nine months of the year you’re someplace where
the only woman you’re likely to see is one failed scholar three or
four times your age, and unless you happen to fancy men rather than
women, you’re pretty much out of luck. When I was ten and I was
first working at the ruins, 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 by
the ruinmen’s hall, a good many of them have girls on their mind.
You can find girls there, too, and not just the kind who can be
hired for the afternoon for a dozen marks or so. There are trades
besides ours that have their place outside the walls for the same
reason we do, because 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, if they’re 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 guilds take and
train prentices, and 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 looked excited and embarrassed and the other just looked
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. I’d have put it down to jealousy,
except that he’s always fancied men rather than women, so I suppose
it was just the beer. 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.