Star's Reach (50 page)

“If you’ve got a better idea,” I told him,
“I’d be happy to hear it.”

He allowed a smile, said nothing. I glanced
at the others. Berry was still nodding; Eleen had stopped looking
past me at whatever it was, and had begun to smile; Tashel Ban
frowned, and then said, “It’s a gamble, no question. Shall we cast
the bones?”

So that’s what we did. It took the rest of
the day for Tashel Ban to get his transmitter put together, tested,
and hooked up to an antenna that could toss signals toward Cansiddi
and the rest of Meriga. Thu sat in the room with him, watchful and
quiet as a hawk in the air, and the rest of us tried to find other
things to do and mostly didn’t manage it. Finally, about the time
the sun threw its last red light into the glass skylights where the
people here before us grew their vegetables, Tashel Ban came out
blinking from the radio room and called us all in.

The transmitter and receiver were sitting
side by side, two metal boxes with dials on them, on an old metal
table. A low hiss came out of the receiver. We stood around them,
looked at each other.

“If anybody has second thoughts,” I said,
“now’s the time to say something.”

Nobody did. Tashel Ban looked at each of us,
sat down on a metal chair in front of the radio gear, turned some
switches, picked up the microphone and talked into it: “Cansiddi
station. Cansiddi station. Message traffic. Am I clear?”

The hiss turned into a voice. “This is
Cansiddi station. You’re clear. Go ahead.”

“Message for the Cansiddi ruinmen’s guild
from the misters at the Curtis dig.”

“Copied,” said the voice.

“They’re going to need more help here.
Contract terms are on file at Cansiddi. Let us know how many
misters and prentices are available.”

“Copied,” the voice repeated. “Anything
else?”

“No. Curtis station out.”

“Cansiddi station out and waiting,” said the
voice.

Tashel Ban turned some switches again, and
set the microphone down. “That’s all. They’ll have a prentice run
the message to the Cansiddi ruinmen tomorrow, and we’ll probably
get an answer this time tomorrow evening.” He looked at me. “If
they’re ready to answer.”

“They will be,” I told him. I hadn’t talked
to the misters at the Cansiddi guildhall about Star’s Reach, much
less told them what was in the packet of papers they locked up. All
I did was tell them to wait for a message from a dig at Curtis, or
if they didn’t get one in two years, open the packet anyway. Still,
ruinmen are ruinmen, and I knew it was a safe bet that rumors
spread all through the guild by the time we were out of sight of
Cansiddi on the road west.

“I hope they will be armed,” Thu said
then.

“For a dig this far out from settled
country,” I said, “of course.”

The news from Sanloo always starts a little
after full dark, and Tashel Ban was already twisting the dial on
the receiver, past louder and softer hisses and something that was
probably a voice too soft and blurred to hear, some other message
going to some other radiomen’s guildhall a long ways off. Most
nights I listened, but just then I wanted to be alone for a little
while. I’d walked a long hard road from the underplaces of the
Shanuga ruins to Star’s Reach and the things we’d found there, and
now it was over, or close enough that the last few steps were
hardly worth counting. Pretty soon there would be work to do and
choices to make, but before that happened I wanted to sit for a
while and look at nothing much, and let everything that happened
along the way sink in for a time.

So I left the room. Eleen left with me, and
put her arms around me for a while; when she looked up again her
face was wet, but the look on her face told me she was relieved,
not sad. She kissed me, and then she smiled, let go of me, and
without a word went off somewhere else. I watched her go, and
wondered again whether the two of us loved each other or not. Then,
though part of me wanted to follow her, I went to the room where
the alien-books and the stories were sitting in their boxes, next
to the bare bookshelf, and stood there for a long moment.

That’s where I was when I heard Berry shout:
“What?”

Things were very quiet for a while, and then
footsteps came down the hall. I went to the door in time to see him
go past. His face was hard and closed, and I don’t think he saw
anything in front of him; he certainly didn’t see me. I waited
until he was past, then went out into the hall. Half of me wanted
to go back to the radio room and find out what happened, but the
wiser half said to go after Berry, and so I turned to follow him as
the door to his room shut with a slam.

There’s a fine art to figuring out what to do
when that happens, and it has a lot to do with the person. The very
few times that Gray Garman slammed the door to his room, the senior
prentices made good and sure that nobody made the least bit of
noise for the rest of the night, and right about dawn one of them
would open the door, find Garman slumped in his chair, dead drunk
and passed out, and get him into bed. Then everything would be all
right. Conn, who became Garman’s senior prentice when I found the
letter in the ruins, was just the opposite; somebody had to knock
on the door right after he slammed it and go talk him down, or he’d
decide that none of us liked him and stay in a foul mood for
days.

I’d never heard Berry slam a door before, but
I knew him well enough to guess how long to wait. I stood at his
door for what seemed like a good long while, then tapped on it.

“Please go away.” His voice was muffled by
the door.

“Berry,” I said, “it’s Trey.”

A silence came, sat there for a while, and
went somewhere else, and then the door opened.

I stepped in, and Berry pushed the door shut.
“There’s nothing you can say,” he told me.

“I didn’t plan on saying much,” I said. “Not
least because I don’t know what happened.”

He considered that. Then: “They had a formal
viewing of my mother’s body today. There were questions in Congrus
about what killed her—the usual political thing. What they didn’t
know until they had the viewing is that my mother was a tween.”

I’m not sure how long I stared at him before
I realized that my mouth was open, and closed it.

Berry turned away from me, faced the bare
concrete wall. “And so none of it had to happen.” His voice was
shaking. “She—he—didn’t have to pretend I didn’t exist, send me off
to the ruinmen—all of that. She could have done what her mother
must have done. I—” In a whisper: “I could have been Presden. If
she could pretend, so could I.”

Maybe it was his voice, or the way his
shoulders tensed and rose, but all at once I thought of the time
Jennel Cobey and I went to see the Presden in Sisnaddi, and the
gray, gaunt, guarded old woman who was waiting for us in the room
full of books. “Maybe she didn’t want you to have to live like
that,” I said. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like to
have to hide something like that for a whole lifetime.”

“I would have done it,” Berry said.

“Knowing that you couldn’t ever have a lover
like Sam.”

His head snapped around, and he stared at me.
After a moment: “I didn’t think you knew about me and Sam.”

“I just about tripped over the two of you
when I was visiting Cob’s dig, before I went to Sisnaddi.” He
blushed, and I went on: “How your mother—” I was going to say
got pregnant with you
, but stopped, because I’d thought of
one way that might have happened and didn’t want to mention it.

Berry laughed, though, a short hard laugh
like a dog barking. “I already thought of that,” he said. “Yes, my
mother may also have been my father.”

“I didn’t know tweens could do that,” I said,
for want of anything better.

“Some can have babies, some can father them.
Some can do both. Some can’t do either one. What I heard from older
tweens is that you just never know.” The hard bright brittle tone
was slipping away from his voice. All at once, he turned and sat
down on his bed as though all the strength had gone from his legs.
“Trey,” he said then, “it’s not just that. Someone in Sisnaddi
talked. The news bulletin said that there were rumors that there
was a child, a tween. Rumors.” Another laugh, desperate. “With the
right year and my real name attached. Every jennel in Meriga with
an eye on the succession will have soldiers hunting for me by
now.”

“What’s your real name?”

He stared up at me, and I could see the lump
in his throat go up and down. “Sharl. Sharl sunna Sheren.” Then:
“Mother of Life. You have no idea how long it’s been since the last
time I said that aloud.”

I thought about that, and thought about him.
“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” He bent over, face in hands.
“I just don’t know.”

It’s a funny thing, but when he said those
words, I knew he had to say them, and I knew what I had to say in
response. Thinking back on it a moment ago, as I sat here and
listened to Eleen’s soft breathing and tried to think of what to
write next, I wondered for a moment if I was remembering something
out of the stories that were left here among the alien-books, or
something from the stories my father used to tell when I was a
child and he hadn’t yet been called away to the war that killed
him. Then I thought of what Plummer said, about the one big story,
and realized that he was right: there is only one story, and there
was only one way it could go right then and there, in Berry’s bare
little room in the ruins of Star’s Reach.

“I do,” I said. “You’re going to declare
yourself a candidate.” Before he could answer: “If you’re going to
say a tween can’t be Presden, you’re wrong. We just had one for
more than forty years, and everyone knows it now.”

He stared up at me for a long moment, then
said, “They’ll kill me.”

“They’re going to kill you anyway,” I
reminded him. “What have you got to lose?”

Another moment, then: “I’d have to figure out
how to go about it...”

“Tashel Ban will know.”

“That’s true,” he said. “That’s true.” He
drew in a ragged breath, and just for a moment I could see the
child he’d been back at Shanuga, all those years and kloms ago.
“Trey—will you come with me?”

“Let’s go,” I said, and motioned toward the
door.

A better storyteller than I am could probably
make something out of what happened after that; what comes to mind
now, thinking back on it, are little bright images like scraps of
broken glass. I remember Tashel Ban’s hands moving in a pool of
lamplight as he explained how presdens are chosen and how
Berry—Sharl, I should probably say now, though it doesn’t come
easily after this long—could proclaim himself and get the process
going. I remember the table in the main room, all five of us
sitting around it, while Berry told us what he meant to do and the
rest of us listened and agreed. Then we were all in the radio room,
with Tashel Ban turning switches on the transmitter, making sure a
message would get bounced back off the high thin air to stations
all over this end of Meriga, and handing the microphone to the thin
red-haired ruinman who’d been my prentice not so long ago, and
would probably be either Presden of Meriga or a corpse before much
more time went past.

“My name is Sharl sunna Sheren.” His voice
was calm, there at the last, as though he knew all along what he
was going to do. “I meant to announce myself later on, after my
mother’s funeral, but the news that came out today changed that.
Unless there’s someone with a better claim, I am my mother’s heir
and a candidate for the Presdency.

“You’ve heard the rumors; they’re true. I was
born eighteen years ago and raised secretly in Sisnaddi. My mother
didn’t want me to have to live the kind of lifelong lie she did, so
as soon as I was old enough, I was prenticed out to the ruinmen.
I’m a mister in the ruinmen’s guild now, and was working at a ruin
when the news came about my mother.

“I’m not going to say where I am, for two
reasons. One should be obvious. The other one—that’ll be known soon
enough. Since as far as I know, there are no other heirs or
candidates, I’m calling a meeting of the council of electors in
Sanloo on the twentieth of Febry, a month and a half from now. I’ll
present proofs of my identity and ancestry there, so the electors
can decide on my candidacy.”

The words he’d rehearsed with Tashel Ban a
few minutes earlier ended there, but he held onto the microphone,
and after a moment went on. “One other thing. There have been a lot
of rumors about this jennel and that one, about soldiers—about war.
I want to ask everyone to put those rumors aside. We have laws in
Meriga to decide who will be Presden, and whether or not the
electors accept me, those laws need to be followed. The three civil
wars we’ve had in this country should have taught us that there’s
nothing good to be gained from a fourth. On the twentieth of Febry
I’ll make my case before the electors in Sanloo; if any other
candidates want to be considered, they can do the same; whatever
the electors decide, I’ll accept it, and everyone else needs to do
the same thing. That’s all. Thank you.”

He handed the microphone back to Tashel Ban.
A moment later, the hiss from the receiver turned into a voice:
“Copied.”

Then it was over, and we went one at a time
back to our rooms. Eleen fell asleep almost at once, but it’s taken
me a good couple of hours of writing to feel sleepy at all, and I
don’t imagine that Berry will get any more sleep tonight than Thu
ever does. When I was a prentice working in the Shanuga ruins and
Gray Garman would set gunpowder charges to bring down a building,
we’d see the flare of the fuse being lit, and then wait in a safe
place until the charges boomed like thunder and the building came
down. We lit the fuse on a mother of a charge tonight, a mother
with babies and grandbabies all around, and there’s no safe place
anywhere in Meriga or around it; all we can do now is wait for the
thunder.