Star's Reach (41 page)

“Well,” Tashel Ban said after a bit. “I think
you’re all going to want to look at this.”

“This” was something the people at Star’s
Reach before us had mostly translated out of the code they and the
Cetans worked out to talk to each other. Close to half the words
had little curves around them (like this), which I already knew
meant that nobody was sure if that was the right word or not, and
here and there were little curves with a line of dots between them
like this (.....), which meant that nobody had the least idea what
word ought to go there. It was a mess to read, no question, but it
seemed to be telling a story about someone going someplace on a
boat. The place the boat was going, it said, was a place where a
long time ago (.....) to the third planet.

Right after that was one of the little stars
they used in the old world to mark where somebody wanted to put a
note, and the note was down at the bottom of the page. What it said
was this:
ref. to precollapse space travel—see briefing paper
223
.

It took a moment for that to sink in, and
then I said a bit of language even hotter than the one Tashel Ban
used. We were all staring at the thing by then. Even Anna came
over, read the paper over my shoulder, and nodded, as though she
expected it.

“How easy will it be to find that briefing
paper?” This was from Thu.

“I’m about to find out,” said Tashel Ban, and
started to get up, but I said, “After breakfast, I hope.” He gave
me one of his owlish looks and nodded, and so we all sat down and
had one of the fastest meals I’ve ever eaten. As soon as he was
done with his soup, Tashel Ban was on his way to the computer, and
Eleen and Berry were right there with him, while Thu and Anna and I
did the dishes.

They found it before noon, and Tashel Ban
managed to get the printer to behave and give us each a copy. It’s
sitting on the desk next to me right now, answering a question so
big I don’t think any of us dared to ask it before now.

“They did the same thing we did.” That’s what
Tashel Ban said, as the printer grunted and whirred behind him.
“They figured out how to use the concentrated energy sources on
their planet, and used them up so fast and so carelessly that they
ran out of energy and messed up their climate around the same time.
They had droughts, the way we did, but much worse. There was no
rain worth mentioning on their islands for something like two
thousand of our years.”

Berry caught what that meant a moment before
I did. “Without rain—”

“Exactly,” said Tashel Ban. “The Cetans’
intelligent phase can’t stay together for more than a few hours. So
that was the end of their old world, and even when the droughts
started to break, there would be a while when some of the islands
would get regular rains, and then the rains would go away and
whatever got started on those islands went away too.

“That went on for another few hundred of our
years. Finally the rains lasted long enough on one set of islands
that the Cetans there figured out how to build catchment basins and
cisterns, and finally solar stills that would make artificial rain
right through the drought periods. So their culture survived, and
they built boats and spread the skills they had from island to
island right around their world. That was something like a thousand
years ago.”

“What sort of space travel did they manage
beforehand?” Thu asked.

“About as much as we did,” Tashel Ban told
him. “Some satellites, some probes out to other worlds, and a few
trips that put a couple of Cetans on the surface of Tau Ceti III
for a day or two and got them back alive. That much they’ve been
able to figure out from the old records, now that they can read
them again. That took a long time—the way their old world ended,
the languages were completely lost, and all they had to start from
were ruins and records that nobody could understand.”

I thought about that this evening as the
three of us who know how to work on the computer kept chasing after
the last things the people at Star’s Reach learned, and the three
of us who don’t cleaned up after dinner and got a pot of beans
soaking and some sourdough rising for the next day’s meals. When
people talk about the end of the old world—our old world—they talk
about how hard it was, how many people died and how much got lost.
I don’t remember anybody saying “You know, it could have been a lot
worse,” but it was a mother of a lot worse for the Cetans than it
was for us. I imagined what it might have been like if there wasn’t
a living person in Meriga for two thousand years, and then a
trickle of people coming in from somewhere else who didn’t know the
first thing about where all the ruins came from.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about
when I sat down here at the desk tonight. I wanted to write about
what happened after we finished up the dig at Wanrij and went back
to Memfis for the rains, and I spent a couple of months drinking
myself stupid and tumbling into bed with pretty Memfis women.
That’s what all the other ruinmen were doing, of course, but I had
a better reason for it than they did, or at least that’s what I
thought at the time. They knew that as soon as the rains ended,
they’d be back to work on some other dig. I knew that as soon as
the rains ended, I’d have to face up to the fact that my search for
Star’s Reach had run up against a blank wall and there was no way
forward.

Then, about the time the rains started
slackening off, a couple of the senior misters of the Memfis guild
came looking for me. It was late afternoon, about an hour before
the music started up at the big covered market down the street, and
the rain was drumming against the one little window of my room in
the guild hall. I welcomed them and found them a couple of chairs,
and we chatted about nothing much for a few minutes before they got
to the point of their visit.

“That was a well run dig you did up at
Wanrij,” one of them told me; his name was Orin, a gruff
gray-haired mister from the hill country down by the Meycan border.
“Nice and orderly, and everyone got paid on time. Doesn’t always
happen the first time somebody runs a site.”

I thanked him, and wondered where the
conversation was going to go. The other mister, who was lean and
bald and had little bright eyes like a sparrow, answered that
question soon enough. “We’ve talked to the misters, and if you’re
minded to stay here in Memfis—of course you might have other
plans—if you’re so minded, anyway, we’d be willing to see you have
a place in the guild here.”

I’m not sure how I kept my mouth from falling
open. That sort of thing happens sometimes, when a mister from one
town gets involved in a dig somewhere else and everyone gets along
well, but I hadn’t even thought about the chance that it might
happen to me. I managed to stammer out something like a thank you,
and then remembered that I had to get things settled with Jennel
Cobey and tried to say something about that; I was pretty much
babbling nonsense, or at least that’s the way I remember it, but
the two misters were as professional as you can get. They let me
know that I had plenty of time to sort things out and make up my
mind, said a few more things I don’t remember at all, and left.

I told Berry that evening before we went down
to the market. His eyes got big and then narrowed a bit. He was
weighing the thought of staying in Memfis against the hope we’d had
of finding Star’s Reach, I knew, the same way I was. We partied
that night, and the next, and the next, and with every day that
passed I got more perplexed and more upset about it all. I knew
that staying in Memfis was the only choice that made any kind of
sense at all, but something in that choice just didn’t sit well
with me.

One evening about a week later, we were alone
in the room, taking care of some of the last work on the Wanrij
dig—bills that still had to be paid, money from metal sales that
had to be accounted for and paid out, all the little things that
keep misters busy the last few weeks of the rains. As we got to the
end of the paper, Berry sat back and looked at me. “Sir and
Mister?”

I think I mentioned a while back that he
never used my title except when it was something really important.
I set down the bill I was reading and nodded for him to go on.

“What do you think now about finding Star’s
Reach?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “What do you
think?”

“I think...” He got silent for a long moment,
then: “I wonder if maybe we’ve done as much as anybody could have
done.”

I gave him a look, and didn’t say anything. I
couldn’t think of anything to say, because everything else seemed
to be saying that he was right, except for that little cold feeling
in the pit of my stomach that said he was wrong.

The rains end in Memfis a week or two after
they’ve gone away everywhere further north, and so as soon as the
rains slacken off in Memfis, the riverboats come down the Misipi to
dock at the Memfis levee. That was how a letter from Jennel Cobey
got to the Memfis guild hall when the last scant rain was falling,
long before the roads were dry enough for traveling. I’d been
worrying about what that letter would say, because I’d spent a lot
of the jennel’s money and come up with nothing. Still, that just
showed how much I still had to learn about the man. What the letter
said was this:

To Mister Trey son of Gwen, at the Memphis Ruinmen’s
Hall, my greetings. The money’s not an issue; I’m sorry to hear
that nothing concerning Star’s Reach turned up after all, but it
was always a gamble. Have you considered searching the archives at
Cincinnati? If you’re minded to keep looking, that might be the
best of the remaining options.

—
General Cobey
Taggart

I thought about that for the rest of the day,
and it kept coming to mind that evening while I danced and drank
and tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t have to make a choice
by the time the sun came out for good. One more pretty Memfis woman
put it out of my head for a little while, but after we’d finished
what we were doing and fallen asleep in her bed, I started
dreaming, and there it was again.

It was another of my Deesee dreams, with the
wide streets and the silvery sky up above that was the surface of
the sea. I found my way to the Spire, the way I usually did, and
there was the man in the old world clothing, the one we found long
dead in the Shanuga ruins, standing there waiting for me. I hurried
up the grassy slope toward him, and then I saw his face, tense,
almost pleading, waiting for me to do or say something.

Then I knew what he wanted, and I must have
cried out, because all of a sudden I was awake, light was coming in
through the window next to me, and the woman I was with was bending
over me, soft and sweet and brown, asking if I was all right. I
lied and said yes, and kissed her, and things pretty much went from
there, but all the while I knew what the dead man wanted from me
and what I had to do.

When I told Orin, the Memfis mister, I made
it sound as though Jennel Cobey had asked me to go to Sisnaddi and
the archives there. He nodded, frowned, and said, “I can’t promise
that there’ll still be a place for you when you’re done, you know.”
I told him I knew that, and I did, but it didn’t keep me from
feeling like the number one fool on Mam Gaia’s round belly when he
went his way and I went mine.

A little later that day I told Berry. I
expected him to argue, but he didn’t. He gave me a look I didn’t
expect at all, wary and guarded. “Trey, I can’t go to Sisnaddi,” he
said. Before I could say anything: “I can’t tell you why, but it’s
worth my life. Probably yours too.”

I looked at him for a long moment, and then
said, “Do you want to stay in Memfis?”

“Well—” He paused, then: “I was thinking
about Cob’s site in Tucki, the empty nuke.”

That sounded like a good idea to me. “That
ought to work. I could get you a message fast if anything turns up
in the archives.”

“And I can save up some money for whatever’s
next. It’s too easy to spend money here.”

“True enough,” I said, and we agreed that
he’d go to Tucki as soon as the roads were open, and I’d head for
Sisnaddi as soon after that as the last of the paperwork for the
Wanrij dig was finished. We probably could have gone together, but
I figured the sooner he got there and earned some money, the
better, and I knew myself well enough to know that I could use the
time alone. It didn’t occur to me that Berry might have his own
reason for wanting to go back to that corner of Tucki, but then I
had plenty of other things on my mind just then.

As soon as the roads were open, I sent a
letter to Cob to let him know there was a spare prentice on the
way, and a couple of days later Berry went with a crew of metal
traders who had business in Tucki. Most of the Memfis ruinmen
headed out to digs of their own. All around me, Memfis got busy
making money, and I sat in my little room in the Memfis guild hall
with nothing to do but wait for the last bills to come in, feeling
more and more like a fool with every day that passed. The music and
the dancing were over and the pretty Memfis women had other things
to do with their time, and a dream, a jennel’s good wishes, and a
letter from a dead man were the only things I had to show for more
than three years of my life.

I got the last of the bills paid on the last
day of Oggis, and left the Memfis guildhall the next morning. It
was a bright clear day, with salt air sweeping in from the Gulf of
Meyco and high billowing clouds drifting here and there. I said my
goodbyes at the guildhall, walked past the big covered market, and
kept on going. Just the part of Memfis outside the gate where the
ruinmen live is as big as all of Shanuga, but I knew where to go
and where not to go, and so nobody gave me trouble on the way. By
noon I was walking past the little farms that keep the city markets
in greens and garden truck.