Star's Reach (26 page)

Anyway, Berry and I went to talk to him one
night after dinner, when the old ruinmen were sipping chicory brew
and talking among themselves about digs long before my time and
places I’d never been. We came over to where he was sitting, and
after a few words, he said something about a bottle of Genda
whiskey up in his room, which was true enough but mostly a way to
get us someplace private. That’s how the three of us ended up
sitting on salvaged chairs four floors up in Troy Tower as the sun
went down, the fireflies came out, and a last line of pilgrims with
lanterns cupped in their hands wove their way through the trees
down below, headed off to the big shrine just outside Troy where
they’d doubtless spend the night praying.

“That must have been something,” Tashel Ban
said. We’d been talking about the day I found the dead man’s letter
in the Shanuga ruins. “Whether or not it gets you to Star’s
Reach.”

I nodded. “Whether or not. I’m certainly
going to give it a try.”

“All you can do.” He leaned forward a little.
“I’d be interested in hearing your plans, if you have any, about
what you’ll do if you manage it.”

“I haven’t made any yet,” I admitted.
“Figuring out if I can get there comes first.”

“Fair enough.” Then, after a long moment.
“The thing is, it’s more than just another ruin, or it might be. By
the time it was built, the ancients were using nuclear power cores,
and up to their ears in eye-oh-see planning.”

“Eye-oh-see?”

“Interruption of continuity,” he said, and
that’s when I realized he was spelling out letters. “That’s the
name they used for everything falling to bits, except they thought
it would all come back together again later on. The plan was to
have everything they thought was really important set up to survive
IOC for a good long time. They had IOC facilities in Deesee and the
other cities of the coast, though of course that didn’t work out
very well once the seas rose, and some others in allegiancy
territory and other places where it didn’t do them much good.
Still, Star’s Reach was probably planned and built the same way,
which means it might not be a ruin.”

“Four hundred years is a good long time,” I
said, and sipped at the whiskey.

“Granted. I don’t mean there’ll still be
people there—but the machinery might still be working. It might
still be possible to talk to other worlds, or at least to listen.
And the radio gear itself—it’s going to be so far beyond anything
we’ve got nowadays that if it’s taken apart, even if whoever buys
it doesn’t just sell it for scrap, it’s a good question if anyone
will ever be able to get it working again.”

That was the first time it had ever occurred
to me that there might be more at Star’s Reach than cracked
concrete and broken machines and maybe a few browned papers to tell
us something about what the aliens were trying to say to us. I
considered that for a long moment, until Berry broke the silence.
“You said you were studying radios, Sir and Mister. Did you mean
the kind at Star’s Reach?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’d drop anything
else for a look at those. And if they’re anything short of scrap,
you’re going to need a master radioman to do much of anything with
them, and that’s what I am. You’re familiar with those?”

“Not at all,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment with that owlish
look of his, then: “And of course you don’t know me from the next
fool off the street, either. Do you have time to hear a little
story? It’s my own, and it might make a bit more sense to you why
you’d be better off having me with you if you ever find this thing,
and why it matters that it might be more than a ruin.”

“I’ve got plenty of time,” I said, and looked
at Berry, who just grinned. “Go ahead.”

He took a good swallow from his whiskey
glass. “To start with,” he said, “it might help if I told you my
right name is Dashiell Hammett Vandenberg, thirty-first of the
name. Not that I go by that outside of Nuwinga, and only there with
the right people, if you know what I mean.”

Berry’s eyebrows had gone way up at the name,
and that and what little I’d heard about Nuwinga gave me a pretty
good guess. I sipped whiskey and said, “Well enough to wonder what
somebody with a name like that is doing digging up radio plans over
here in Troy.”

He smiled a little lopsided smile. “Three
older brothers, and every one of them has pupped his own brats. I
don’t use that last word lightly.” He laughed, and so did Berry and
I. “I could have gone to sea, or I could have settled down on our
estates near Ammers and done the gentleman farmer, or I could have
gone up to Lebnan to mix with the politicians and drink myself to
death like my uncle Raymun.” A shrug. “None of those appealed much.
So I went to Rutlen instead. That’s where we have our Versty, the
way you have yours down at Melumi.”

This time it was my eyebrows that went up.
“You’re short a couple of things that you’d have to have to get
into Melumi.”

“True. In Rutlen, though, they let men in to
study, if they’re of good enough family and pay more than I want to
think about.”

I nodded and took another sip. Outside the
window of the little room where we were sitting, the night was
closing in.

“The thing is,” said Tashel Ban, “the
Vandenbergs have a habit of pupping oddities now and then. My
great-great-aunt Aggie was a sea captain, one of the best, and
sailors who wouldn’t take ship if there was any other woman on
board would kill for a berth on the
Flying Gull
—that was her
ship.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Berry.

That got him a glance. “A lot of people have.
Broke up on the rocks on Genda’s north coast long before I came
along, though of course the family has another by the same name
now. But Agatha was one of our oddities. We had another who crossed
over to the Arab countries, took up their religion, and tried to
bring it back with him.” A little sharp shake of the man’s head; I
gathered that the project didn’t go well. “We had another who took
it in his head to go west to the Neeonjin country—I don’t think
anyone knows to this day what happened to him.

“And then there’s me. I took an interest in
radio, though that’s not the sort of thing a gentleman’s son does
in Nuwinga. Here in Meriga, you’ve got a radioman’s guild, as I
recall.”

I didn’t know much about them, since that
wasn’t one of the guilds that has its guildhalls out with the
ruinmen, the burners, and the other crafts nobody wants inside the
walls. In Shanuga the radiomen’s hall is right in the middle of
town, tall and narrow like a rich family’s house, and it’s got a
forest of antennas up above the roof so the radiomen can talk to
people all over Meriga. Still, guilds are guilds; the radiomen have
their misters and prentices, and they’re just as closemouthed about
their guild secrets as we are about ours.

I nodded, and Tashel Ban went on. “We don’t
in Nuwinga, or not quite. With us it’s a government thing. You pass
tests and get licenses; there are different tests and different
licenses, and the top of them all is master radioman. Last I heard
there are a hundred twenty-six people in Nuwinga who’ve passed that
test, and I’m one of them.” He sipped some whiskey. “And I passed
it when I was fifteen years old.”

“So you’re good,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s not the point. What do you
do when you’ve decided to put your life into radio work, and you
get the thing most radiomen spend their lives trying to get before
you’re old enough to grow a beard?”

That interested me. “You tell me.”

“I haven’t the least idea what anybody else
would do,” Tashel Ban admitted. “Me, I decided that I was going to
find out things that not even the master radiomen know, things that
got lost when the old world went down. There’s a lot that nobody
knows about radio any more, and I don’t just mean how they made
chips—you know about those?”

I did. When you’re stripping an old building
that wasn’t looted after the old world ended, you’re likely to find
electronics of one kind or another, computers or radios or other
things that nobody even has a name for these days. Unless they were
old when the old world ended, or made in the troubled years right
before the fuel ran out and the seas rose, what’s inside is mostly
pieces of stiff plastic studded with little electronic things, and
about half of them look like square black centipedes with lots of
metal legs. Those are chips. Most of them don’t work any more, and
some of the ones that work are so complicated that not even the
radiomen can figure out what to do with them, but if you get some
that work you’re in luck, because nobody can make them any more and
the radiomen and a couple of other guilds will pay good money for
them. “I’ve salvaged a fair number of them,” I said.

“So I’d guess. But there were ways of doing
things, back before chips were invented, that could probably be
done today if anybody knew how. Not just vacuum tubes—we make
those, and I think you make them here in Meriga too, though there
again there are a lot of tricks that we still haven’t figured out
yet. There are layers up in the air that bounce radio waves back to
the ground, and the ancients used to use those to talk to people on
the other side of Mam Gaia; the layers aren’t the same as they were
in the old world, and nobody’s sure why. We can get fair range
these days, but if we could figure out how to do as well as the
ancients did we could stay in touch with ships no matter how far
away they sail; we could find out what’s happening in places nobody
from Nuwinga or Meriga have been for four hundred years—plenty of
other things, too.”

“I wonder, Sir and Mister,” said Berry then,
“if it might turn out better for everyone if some of those things
stay lost.”

Tashel Ban turned and gave him a good long
look. “That’s something I think about,” he said. “Along with the
other master radiomen. Where do you cross the line between the
technologies that help people and don’t hurt Mam Gaia, and the
technologies that might lead us back down the road to the same
mistakes the old world made? I don’t know the answer. I do know
that radio’s a way to help people talk to each other when they
can’t get close enough for voices to carry, and getting people to
talk is a good thing much more often than not. So I’m guessing that
figuring out more ways for people to talk by radio isn’t going to
cross that line.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, but my mind jumped
all at once from there to the thing I was looking for. “And if
we’re talking about the distance between one star and another, do
you think it’s the same?”

Tashel Ban was silent for a while. “I think
so,” he said finally. “The same, and even more so. If it’s true—if
they actually did get radio messages from somebody living on a
world around some other star, whether they figured out how to read
the messages or not—just knowing that there’s someone else out
there, that we’re not all alone in all of the universe, sitting
here in the middle of a great big dead emptiness where nobody
anywhere else will ever think a thought or follow a dream or figure
out something about the way the universe works, that’s something.
And if there’s anything more, there again, it’s hard to think of a
way that talking can hurt us.”

He downed another swallow of the whiskey.
“But I’d give anything you care to name to be there when Star’s
Reach gets found, if it does. It’s been more than thirty years now
since I passed my master radioman’s test, and I’ve found a few
things and learned a few things since then, but I’d like to do
something on the grand scale, and helping find Star’s Reach would
count. If you’ll have me, that is. I know this is a ruinman’s
thing, and it’s also yours, if I hear right.”

I nodded. “I’m not going to make any
promises,” I said, “but I’ll keep that in mind.”

He considered that, nodded. “Fair
enough.”

“The one thing I’m not sure of is how to find
you, if it turns out all this leads anywhere.”

He gave me one of his owlish looks again.
“That’s not hard. Get a letter to the Nuwingan embassy in Sisnaddi
and they’ll have it to me soon enough; they know where I am.” Then,
with another lopsided smile: “I mentioned my uncle Raymun, didn’t
I? The one who drank himself to death? He was presden of Nuwinga
when he did most of the drinking. Our presdens don’t all come from
one family the way yours does, but the job doesn’t stray too far,
and I’ve had better than a dozen ancestors in the Gray House.”

We talked for a while longer, though I don’t
remember about what, since I’d had a fair bit of Gendan whiskey by
then, and then we stumbled back to our room—well, I stumbled, at
least, since Berry hadn’t had more than a few sips of the whiskey.
When we got back to our room and the door was closed, I sat down on
my bed and asked Berry, “What do you think of him?”

He was a prentice and I was a mister of the
ruinmen’s guild, but by then he didn’t bother with the
sir-and-mister business unless there was someone around who needed
to be impressed by it, and I’d have laughed if he did it any other
time. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s likable enough, and I think he
can be trusted, but I’d worry about what would happen if there’s a
lot of the wrong kind of technology at Star’s Reach. He might not
just stand by while we scrapped it.”

“If we get there,” I reminded him.

He grinned. “If we get there. I have to keep
telling myself that.”

That night seems long ago and far away now,
as I sit here in Star’s Reach and write these words that maybe
nobody will ever read, and look up now and again to see Eleen
asleep in our bed, after another hard day trying to get an old
computer to give us the secrets of a world so far away it takes
light more than ten years to get here from there. Once Tashel Ban
gets finished making the printouts, I know I won’t just read mine
once; I might just keep reading it over and over again, until the
hazy orange skies and brown oceans and the Cetans themselves are as
real to me as Mam Gaia and her human children on this side of the
sky.