Star's Reach (22 page)

We figured out right away that Eleen hadn’t
made things easy for us. I wanted to read about Star’s Reach, and
so she 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 a lot of the words were 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 and nobody but the
scholars went there, 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 it was wasted time; the librarians found us a couple
of books about how people in the old world went looking for life on
other worlds, which were 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, and that 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 nobody knew for
certain, 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 Greenlun slid off into the sea and Deesee and the
other cities of the coast 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
jennel and the scholars who went to Orrij looking for Star’s Reach,
back when I was a first year prentice, weren’t the first people to
go searching through what’s left there. The ruins near Orrij had
been stripped of salvage not long after the old world ended, and
though there were some papers and other things there for scholars
and the like, there wasn’t much. 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. There might still be something about WRTF in one
place or the other, but more likely there’d be nothing at all.

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

I think it was two days later that we got
something better, and it wasn’t in 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
all be better off if they worked together, the first ruinmen’s
guild got started. All but one of the ruins in Troy were stripped
down to bare 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 Meriga that are close by. 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, reminding us both 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 of
course I didn’t know that yet.

Over the next couple of days there at Melumi,
as the rains finally stopped and the sun got a chance at last to
take a good look down through the clouds and find out what had
gotten itself washed away this time, it didn’t feel like a long
strange road ahead at all; it felt as though Star’s Reach was right
around the next corner. 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—and guessed right, as it turned out—that he was going to
toss some money our way to make the trip easier.

Finally we had two weeks of clear weather,
and one of the 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 the way 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 up 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.