Star's Reach (34 page)

It was getting toward night before we got to
the next town, which was Altan, over on the Ilanoy side. There were
already lamps being lit there, so I could see it a good ways off,
but the sky was still light enough that I could see something else:
a line of concrete pilings like broken teeth, rising up out of the
Misipi on either side. I blinked, looked again, and said some
language hotter than I usually use; it hadn’t occurred to me that
even the ancients would have put a bridge over a river that
big.

“There were once dozens of those, as it
happens,” Plummer’s voice said next to me.

I hadn’t heard him walk up, but somehow that
didn’t surprise me. I glanced at him. “Across the Misipi?”

“Exactly. All of them gone now, to be sure;
the last were here and at Rocalan, and they were destroyed during
the Third Civil War. A pity; I don’t imagine anything of the sort
will ever be built again.”

“Does anyone even know any more how they were
made?”

“There are books on the subject at Melumi and
Sisnaddi, and a few other places.”

He was watching me with that same odd look,
as though he was waiting for me to say something in particular, so
I thought for a long moment before answering. It was more than
that, though, because Melumi’s got the Versty and Sisnaddi’s got
the government archives, and I’d never heard about any other place
with a collection of books worth noticing. He was, I suddenly
guessed, trying to tell me something. What?

“If there are books tell how it’s done,” I
asked him, “why won’t a bridge like that ever be built again?”

Maybe it was the right thing to say. His
voice went quiet, so that I had to strain to hear him. “Building a
bridge is a simple thing for a nation that already has factories,
machines, plenty of cheap iron ore, plenty of fuel—especially the
fuel. And it’s an obvious thing if there are tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of cars, and people who want to drive the
cars from one side of a river to the other side and back again
every day. If the factories and the machines are gone, and the
mines were worked out long before any of us were born, and steel
has to be cut by hand out of old buildings by your colleagues, and
the fuel and the cars and most of the people are gone as well, then
it’s neither obvious nor simple. A bridge like that one would cost
every mark the government—” He said the word the old-fashioned way,
rather than saying it “gummint” the way everyone else does
nowadays. “—takes in taxes over ten years, and do no more good for
anyone than a ferryman and his boat.”

I thought about a conversation we’d had
earlier, on the way to Proo. “Well, but don’t they spend plenty of
money on canals?”

“True. That takes men with shovels and men
with trowels, earth and stone and mortar, and all of those can be
had for a very modest sum these days. You know the current price of
steel, I suspect. How much would it cost to bridge the river here
with steel beams?”

I did know the price of steel, and even
trying to guess the cost made my head hurt. “Okay,” I said. “That
makes sense. And I guess there are books in Melumi and Sisnaddi and
those other places that tell how to build canals, too.”

“Among other things,” Plummer said.

Right then I was sure I knew what he was
trying to tell me. My thoughts set off running in half a dozen
directions at once, but I managed to get them settled enough not to
blurt out something like an idiot. “Maybe you can tell me this,” I
said finally. “If nobody’s ever going to build a bridge like that
again, what’s the point of having books that tell how it’s
done?”

Plummer didn’t say anything for a long time,
then: “When I was a boy, which was rather a few years ago now,
there was a book I read often, about a boy who made a little boat
and put it in the river, hoping that it would travel all the way
down to the sea. Did you ever read that?”

I was surprised enough that I turned to face
him. The lamps of Altan were spots of light mirrored in his
eyeglasses. “I used to love that book!”

“Did you ever make a little boat like the one
in the story, and put it in the river?”

“Yes. I used to wonder what happened to
it.”

“One never knows.” He turned away, looking
out into the gathering dark on the river. “Knowledge is much the
same. It comes down the stream of time to us, and perhaps turns up
on the bank, and we can put it back in the water and send it on its
way, or leave it on the bank to rot. The difference, of course, is
that there is no sea: just a river flowing out of sight, and
perhaps the chance that somewhere further downstream the little
boat will be of use to someone, for reasons we will doubtless never
know.”

He looked back toward me, then, and I could
just see his smile in the last of the light. “An interesting
subject to think about. We’ll talk more another time.” With that,
he turned and went back into the cabin. I stared after him, and
waited a long moment before following.

I didn’t sleep well that night, because I
knew what he was talking about. Ever since I was small I’d heard
stories and rumors about people, maybe in Meriga, maybe somewhere
else, who had knowledge from the old world that nobody else had any
more. Half the robot stories my father used to tell me, and more
than half the ones the prentices used to tell each other in Gray
Garman’s house, had somebody in them who had an old book he wasn’t
supposed to have, or something like that, and of course one part of
the reason that ruinmen live outside the city walls and get uneasy
looks from good folk is that people wonder if we know more than we
should.

Now of course I knew that the right thing to
do was to go talk to a priestess as soon as I had the chance and
tell her what Plummer had said to me, and of course I knew that I
wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. You don’t become a ruinman
and dream about Deesee and go searching for Star’s Reach if you
think everything from the old world ought to stay buried, and no
doubt Plummer knew that perfectly well. Still, between wondering
what Plummer and his nameless friends might be offering me, and
wondering what they might ask in return, I had a hard time getting
to sleep, and when I finally did, damn if I didn’t have a dream
about Deesee like the ones I had when I was a boy: the vast empty
streets and the water’s surface shimmering overhead as I hurried to
meet somebody whose name I didn’t know at the base of the
Spire.

I woke up before the sun came round Mam
Gaia’s belly to shine on us. Berry was sound asleep and I didn’t
wake him; I washed up quietly and got dressed and went to see if
Plummer was awake yet. I went to the door to his cabin, and found
it just a little open; when I nudged it a bit further, I could see
at once that the cabin was empty and the bed hadn’t been slept
in.

I laughed, at myself as much as anything. I
knew right away that he’d slipped off the boat as soon as it docked
in Altan; I’d have done the same thing in his place, I realized
right away, just in case I’d misjudged the person I’d talked to. I
wondered how long it would be until he showed up again.

The empty cabin didn’t have any answers for
me. After a moment I went aft to the kitchen, where they were
boiling up a big pot of soup for breakfast, and begged an early cup
of chicory brew. We got going about an hour later, and passed
Sanloo a little while after that.

From Sanloo south, the Misipi winds its way
toward the sea in big sweeping arcs, as though it knows where it’s
going but isn’t in any kind of hurry to get there. The riverboats
do the hurrying, or try to, but there’s only so fast you can go
upstream breasting the current, and on the way downstream you’re
going to be stopping at every little town anyway, so there’s only
so much hurrying you can do. That’s the way it felt to me,
certainly, as the
Jennel Mornay
paddled its way toward
Memfis and the last part of our trip down the river went past.

That’s not to say there was any lack of
things to look at and think about. For one thing, the Misipi has
little gray whales in it—little by whale standards, or so I’ve been
told, though the one that came up for air a dozen meedas from the
Jennel Mornay
didn’t look that small to me.

Back in the old world, there weren’t any
whales in the Misipi. There weren’t many left anywhere in Mam
Gaia’s waters, of course, and the Misipi had so many poisons in it
toward the end that there wasn’t much living in it at all. After
the old world ended and the seas rose, some gray whales that
managed to hide from the hunters through the last dark days of the
old world found their way to the mouth of the Misipi and liked the
scenery or something, and they or their children’s children got
used to fresh water and found places to live upriver, and so there
they are. The riverboatmen say it’s good luck to see one, and not
even a Jinya pirate will hurt one—there are some things the
priestesses don’t even need to preach about, you just don’t do—and
so the whales get on pretty well.

It was the third day after we left Altan, I
think, that we saw the whale. I was still mulling over what Plummer
had said, about knowledge and the places it was kept that he wasn’t
willing to name; I was wondering when I’d see him again, and
whether he’d intended us to meet outside of Cago, and if that was
so, why. The brown water splashing around the hull of the
Jennel
Mornay
and the green of the riverbanks way off to either side
didn’t seem particularly interested in giving me any answers just
then. I thought about Star’s Reach and the hope Berry and I were
chasing down the river to Memfis, but there weren’t any answers for
me there, either.

That evening, about the time the sun went
down and the
Jennel Mornay
tied up for the night—it was in a
riverside town named Jirido—I got to talking with Slane about
Memfis. I don’t remember whether he brought it up or I did, but it
was probably me. I knew we weren’t that far away from it, and I
remembered what Slane said about it when we first met. Not that I
needed the warning; Memfis has a reputation and then some.

“Not to worry,” Slane said. He had a glass of
whiskey in one hand, and was leaning up against the rail on the
cabin deck with nothing on the other side but dark water and the
lights of Jirido. “I promised Plummer I’d make sure you and your
boy get to the ruinmen’s hall in one piece, and I’ll do that.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he laughed and
punched me on the shoulder with his free hand. “You just follow me,
you’ll stay safe. You been through Cago?”

“Not to speak of. We got a canal boat south
of town.”

He nodded. “Smart. Cago’s only half as big as
Memfis, but it’s near as rough. Both of ‘em have too many people
and too much money, but in Cago it’s all Genda money and in Memfis
it’s all from Meyco. You know about the river trade?” I didn’t, and
he gestured at me with his whiskey. “Well, that’s about half of
what keeps Meriga plump and happy these days. Genda’s got stuff to
sell to Meyco and the countries down south, Meyco’s got stuff to
sell Genda and the countries across the Lannic and the North Ocean,
and shipping it up and down the Misipi is a lot safer than sending
it around by the Gulf and the Lannic and letting Jinya pirates have
a shot at it from one side and Arab pirates from the other. So Cago
gets one end of the trade and Memfis gets the other, and a lot of
people make money off the deal. Me, for example.”

“What do you do?”

“Buy and sell. Bunch of stuff down there on
the cargo deck is mine, and it’ll be going to Meyco pretty much as
soon as we hit Memfis and I find a buyer. Pick up some Meycan goods
then, something with a market up north, and it’s back up the
river.” He smiled, or half his mouth did; the other half didn’t
move much, ever. “Beats the stuffing out of pushing a plow through
Aiwa mud, which is what I’d be doing if I’d followed my daddy’s
footsteps.”

“Can’t argue there,” I said. “I’d have been
doing the same thing in Tenisi.”

“There you go. But Dell had other ideas for
me.” He laughed. “Dell and Plummer. Not sure which one’s the
stranger.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I’d
gotten used to thinking that nobody anywhere would talk about
Plummer. “You’ve known Plummer a while?”

“Half my life. He got me out of a scrape in
Sanloo—I was a dumb kid. We’ve been friends since then. I see him
every couple of years.”

“He’s got a lot of friends.”

“You ever met the ones that don’t have
names?” He was watching me with that look of his that seemed casual
and wasn’t.

I don’t think he could have said anything
else that would have startled me more. “A few of them,” I said
after a good long moment.

He took a swig of his whiskey. “He ever tell
you anything about ‘em?”

“Not a word.”

“Me neither.” Maybe he was dodging the
question, but I didn’t think so just then. “I just wondered. How’d
you meet him?”

So I told Slane the story about how Berry and
I met Plummer on the road north to Luwul, and we got to talking
about something else from there, I don’t remember what. Finally we
went back inside, and I headed for my cabin while he headed for
another drink.

Berry was sound asleep in his bunk when I
came into the cabin, and didn’t show any sign of waking up, so I
sat on one of the little folding chairs at the little table up
against the little window that showed me the night and the river. I
thought about Plummer, and about Slane, and about Star’s Reach, and
after a while when I was sure Berry wasn’t going to wake up I
turned on the little lamp over the table and spent a while writing
a letter to Jennel Cobey.

I thought he’d probably want to know where we
were and how the search for Star’s Reach was coming. I didn’t yet
know that we were going to become friends, or that we were going to
travel to Star’s Reach together, or that I was going to kill him
there. There was a mother of a lot I didn’t know yet, and though it
was just a few years ago I can’t remember that trip down the Misipi
without thinking about how foolish I was, and how little I knew
about what was going on all around me.