Star's Reach (21 page)

“You could follow her,” I said.

She looked up at me then. In a whisper: “I’ve
never had my blood come. And I’ve been trying to start a baby since
before Tam.”

So I held her and stroked her hair some more.
I don’t think either of us was expecting what happened next; still,
we both had an empty place in our lives where Tam used to be, and
as Plummer said to me more than once, human beings don’t have to
make sense. Still, when we were done, Shen kissed me and thanked
me, and then got a little bag out from somewhere in the wet heap of
her clothes.

“She wanted you to have this,” she said. “She
told me to tell you—to say that now you’re going to have to be the
one that sprouts wings and goes into the world.”

I knew what it was before Shen was done
talking, but of course I had to open the bag and look at the little
yellow butterfly, and I did some crying of my own then. Still, I
kept it, and that’s why it’s sitting on the table next to me right
now.

Shen and I got together a couple more times
after that, mostly because there wasn’t anybody else either of us
could confide in, and then she went to the priestesses and became a
postulant. I think she’d hoped that I might give her a baby the way
I’d given one to Tam, but that didn’t happen, and with the door to
Circle good and closed the priestesshood was probably the best
choice she had. I got a letter from her a few months later, when
she’d been accepted at the mother house in Nashul, and another a
year after that, when she’d been sent to her first posting up in
Misota. She sounded happy in the letters; I hope she’s still happy,
wherever she is now.

I wonder if either of them, Tam or Shen, will
ever hear about me and about how I found Star’s Reach, and guess
that the yellow metal butterfly came with me and is sitting here on
the table beside me while I write. I wonder about the child I’ve
got in Shanuga, who I’ll never know and whose name I went out of my
way not to learn; I can’t think that Tam will ever be fool enough
to let him know who fathered him, but I still think about him. And
I wonder why I’m fool enough to sit here late at night, looking at
a little butterfly of yellow metal, when I could be sleeping next
to Eleen.

A few rooms away from me, there’s a computer
full of messages from some other world, and if I were looking at
all this from some distant star I’m sure I wouldn’t notice the
three little lives that got tangled up together for a couple of
years, and the fourth that got started as a result. Still, Plummer
was right when he told me that human beings don’t have to make
sense.

Fourteen: Whisper from the Sky

We were just finishing up breakfast this
morning when something started howling down below in the belly of
Star’s Reach, like a machine doing its best to sound like an animal
and not quite failing. Thu and I were both on our feet so fast that
the chairs we were sitting on went clattering across the floor, and
then a moment later Tashel Ban jumped up, sending a third chair
flying, and ran for the computer. I followed him. Something I
couldn’t read was flashing across the screen when I got there; a
moment later, as the others followed, Tashel Ban started pounding
at the keyboard, and the howling suddenly stopped.

His fingers kept going at the keyboard for a
while, and then he sat back and let out the little grunt that means
he’s got something fixed. “What was that about?” I asked.

He glanced back over his shoulder at me.
“We’re getting a message.”

I heard Eleen draw in a quick sharp breath
behind me, but it took me a moment to figure out what he meant.
“From the aliens?”

“That’s what it looks like.” He tapped a few
more keys, and the screen went blank for a moment, and then things
started appearing on it, one letter or number at a time.

DATE RECD 03192471

512160734 212396027 883760386
957860278 679386673 028671846 671690739 126820368 387316713
698036416 290569348 949037662 486768902 689037693 602690736
235567987 690842093 093701746

It went on like that for a long time,
starting at the top and then marching down the screen, while we all
crowded around and watched, and didn’t make a sound.

I’ve noticed that there’s a difference, at
least for me, between what I think is real and what I know is real,
and sometimes something slides from one to the other fast enough
that you can feel the world flowing around it, like water in a
river around the hull of a ferry as it crosses from shore to shore.
That happened the first time I went with Mister Garman and the
other prentices to the ruins south of Shanuga, right at the
beginning of my prenticeship, when the gray skeletons of the old
buildings turned from dim shapes at a distance to real concrete and
rusted metal that could make me rich if I was lucky or kill me if I
got stupid. It happened the first time I was with a girl, and the
afternoon not two years ago that I got to the top of the dune
behind the beach by drowned Deesee, looked off across the blue
rumpled sheet of the sea, and saw the Spire rising up out of the
water, white and stark and only a few hours from its fall, though I
didn’t know that yet.

It happened, too, when we arrived at Star’s
Reach. We broke camp at first light and started up the road,
knowing that if the maps and the records from the Sisnaddi archives
were right we’d get to the site toward the end of that day. We were
well into the desert by that time, with high thin clouds sweeping
by overhead , flat gray sandy emptiness all around us, and the
track of an old road leading us north of the old highway to the
place we were going. When we got to what was left of an old metal
fence, toward late afternoon, we all looked at each other, but
there are plenty of old fences here and there in the desert and we
all knew it.

When we got to the remains of the second
fence, with barbed wire on top of it and a gatehouse for armed
guards, I started to let myself wonder if we might have found the
place. It was about a quarter hour later, though, when we got close
enough to see the low blunt shapes of the antenna housings sticking
up out of the sand like teeth, line on line of them off into the
distance, and found a door half buried in sand in a hollow too
regular to be Mam Gaia’s work, that Star’s Reach stopped being a
dream and turned into a place, a real place, right in front of
me.

And of course that’s what happened, at least
for me, as we stood there around the computer and watched the
numbers march down the screen, as close as nobody’s business to the
pages and pages of numbers we’d found in the computer room on
fourth level. I’d been thinking all along about people, alien
people, out there somewhere on another world circling another star,
but there was a mother of a lot of difference between that and
actually seeing a message that some alien had sent to us, tapping
it out with its claws or whatever on something that probably didn’t
look anything like a keyboard, and maybe looking up at the sky with
six eyes and wondering what kind of weird creatures were listening
in from the distant planet we call Mam Gaia. Even now, as I write
this, the thought makes my head spin, and right there, trying to
listen to a whisper from the sky that none of us could read yet,
was like it must have been the day that people here on Mam Gaia’s
round belly figured out that the world wasn’t safe and steady as
they’d always thought, but whirled through space around the great
burning fire of the sun.

The message went on for a while, and then
stopped, and the computer printed out:

MESSAGE REPEATS – KEEP PRINTING?
Y/N

Tashel Ban hit a key, and the words vanished;
the numbers stayed there on the screen, like ghosts.

“Of course,” Eleen said. “They’ll have sent
it multiple times so it gets through.”

“I wonder how long it’s been since the last
one arrived,” Tashel Ban said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find
that out.”

There wasn’t much else to do but wonder,
though, so while Eleen copied down the numbers in a notebook, Thu
and I went back to the table and cleaned up the breakfast dishes.
Later on, while Eleen kept doing something at the computer, Tashel
Ban showed Berry and me his way of tracing cables: not just
following the wires, but tracking the signal going through them
with a device he had. It had earphones and a little box with dials
on it, and let him hear the signal in any wire he could get the box
up against.

The message from the aliens was still coming
through, and so we were able to trace the signal down to the room
full of machines on the eighth level, and then up again, all the
way to first level and through the roof to the antennas. I knew,
and so did Berry and Tashel Ban, that there wasn’t anything to see,
but we climbed the stair and went outside anyway. The sky above us
was mostly clear, with long curling mare’s tails of cloud drifting
by high overhead. I watched them go past, and wondered what the
alien out there who was trying to talk to us could see if it looked
up at its sky.

We went back down, Tashel Ban got back to
work, and since I had nothing useful to do, I took another book
down from the shelf of old brown brittle books about aliens, and
got to work on it with the resin. It was a lot like the first one,
all about aliens coming to visit us in machines that looked like
two plates stuck together edge to edge, and a lot of angry words
about how the government was hiding it all from people. I thought
about what Eleen had said about that, how it was all something the
government cooked up to hide things they were doing, and wondered
what it had been like for the people back in the old world who
thought the aliens were right there over their heads but the
presden and his jennels wouldn’t admit it.

That kept me busy until dinner, and since
Eleen and Tashel Ban went right back to work on the computer, I
came back to the room Eleen and I are sharing and started writing.
If we hadn’t had a message from the aliens come through, I would
have started right in on the story of how Berry and I spent our
time at Melumi and then headed off to Troy. That’s the next part of
my story, but since we got the message from the aliens, it seems
like something that happened to somebody else a long time ago, or
something that happened to that six-eyed alien I imagined beneath
its strange sky, tapping out a message to us with its claws and
wondering about us the way we’re wondering about it.

It was a couple of days after the rains
started, back there at Melumi, that a messenger came from the
library to tell us that they’d found a cubicle for us and we could
start reading about Star’s Reach. If it hadn’t been right after the
beginning of the rains, I’d probably have spent the time before the
messenger came pacing around the dorm at Melumi and making life
miserable for Berry, but I had one mother of a hangover to get
through, and it did a fair job of keeping my mind off Star’s Reach
for a little while. Still, by the time the messenger came, I was
eager to start, and Berry and I went splashing across the brick
square at the center of the Versty just as soon as we could.

The messenger led us in through the big
double doors of the library and told us to wait there in the big
empty room just inside. Before we could ask much of anything she
was gone through one of the little doors on the far wall, and so
Berry and I stood there and waited, steam rising from us in the
warm damp air, looking up at the windows to either side. I don’t
know what they were made of. They looked like somebody had taken
pieces of colored glass or something and fit them together into a
picture, all red and yellow and green and blue with clear bits here
and there to set the other colors off. It was really something to
look at, and so that’s what we did.

Click of the door told me that somebody had
come for us. I turned, and saw Eleen standing there. I’d been
wondering, since the hangover stopped making thinking hard, just
how she’d react when we next met, after the way we spent the first
day of the rains. I guessed that she would look embarrassed but say
nothing about what happened. I was right, too; her skin was light
enough that you could see the blush, but all she said was, “If
you’ll follow me.”

So we followed her, through the door and down
a long hallway lined with doors and finally to a big room lit with
watery light from tall windows along one side. The wall under the
windows was divided up by short walls that jutted out a little way
into the room, and between each pair of walls was a table and a
couple of chairs. On the other side of the room from the tables and
chairs was a long counter, and beyond that was the library itself,
shelves and shelves and shelves full of more books than I’d ever
imagined in one place.

Eleen led us to the cubicle third from the
far end, and waved us to the chairs. “This is yours,” she said.
“When you’re ready for books, go to the counter and ask the
librarians; they’ll get them for you. I’ve talked to them about
what you’re looking for, so they should have something ready.”

“Thank you!” I said. She smiled and nodded,
and turned to go.

“Good luck finding that acronym,” Berry said
then.

That got him a startled look over her
shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, and left the room.

We went to the counter right away, and one of
the librarians, a plump old woman with glasses so thick they made
her eyes look huge, came over. “You’re the ruinmen looking for
Star’s Reach,” she said, as though it wasn’t a question she needed
to ask.

“Yes.”

“Ah. Just a moment.” She went over to another
part of the counter, reached underneath it, and pulled out close to
a dozen books in a teetering stack. Berry and I both thanked her,
took the stack back to the cubicle, sat down, stared at each other
for a long moment, and then started looking at the books.