Star's Reach (27 page)

It rains gasoline on Tau Ceti II. The Cetans
need to keep themselves from drying out, but they can’t go back
into the ocean without breaking up into the couple of hundred
plastic-sheet things that are their ocean phase, so they build
pools and channels to catch the rain so they can splash around in
it most of the time. That’s the first thing they ever built, they
say, the way that huts to keep the rain off were the first thing
humans ever built, and before then they lived in hollow places
where the rain gathers the way we used to live in caves. When we
were going over the briefing paper, I stopped at the bit where it
talked about that, and just stared at the words for a long moment.
It’s a funny thing, that something that reminds me just how
different we are from the Cetans makes me think of them as people
like us.

We went from caves to huts to Troy Tower and
Star’s Reach. They went from hollows in the rock to pools and
channels to—what? We don’t know. The people here at Star’s Reach
two hundred years ago didn’t know, though they’d seen something in
one of the messages from Tau Ceti II that made them think the
Cetans built something or other like our buildings. They certainly
know how to build a radio as big as the one here at Star’s Reach,
which is no small job.

It’s occurred to me now and again that they
may be smarter than we are, enough smarter to have missed making
the mistakes that sent the old world to its end. Mind you, it’s
also occurred to me now and again that they may be sitting in their
pools of gasoline and wondering if we’re smarter than they are, and
missed some troubled time in their history that we probably can’t
even imagine. It’s the kind of thing that I used to wonder about
when I was younger, and used to stare up at the stars and think
about what might be out there; it’s almost frightening that now
we’re starting to find out.

Seventeen: What’s Always Real

It’s been close to a week now since I last
wrote down any of my story, and there’s a good reason for that.
Sometime toward afternoon on the day after I wrote that last bit,
Berry came around. I was in the room with the bookshelf, spraying
resin on page after page of yet another alien-book, so I was glad
for the interruption. “Tashel Ban and Eleen want everyone in the
computer room,” he said, and hurried on, so I got to my feet and
went to see what it was.

“This isn’t something I expected,” Tashel Ban
said once we were all there. “Though I’m not sure why I didn’t.
Once the people here and the Cetans worked out enough of the
details about each other’s senses, it was an obvious thing to
do.”

“What Tashel Ban is trying to say,” Eleen
broke in, “is that both sides spent around fifty years figuring out
how to send pictures to each other—pictures of their world that we
could see, and pictures of ours that they could—” She stopped,
laughed. “We don’t even have a word for it. Whatever replaces
seeing for creatures that sense magnetic fields instead of
light.”

“The point, though,” said Tashel Ban then,
“is that both sides managed it.”

The whole room got very quiet.

“We’ve got fifteen huge files—picture
files—that came from a Cetan message,” he went on. “We just have to
find the program that will turn them into pictures.”

“Pictures of Tau Ceti II.” It probably ought
to have been a question, but Thu didn’t say it that way.

“Maybe pictures of Cetans,” said Eleen, and
everyone got quiet again.

So for the last week, that’s what Tashel Ban
and Eleen did, finding everything that might be a program, figuring
out how to get it running, and then trying to use it on the picture
files. I should say, the two of them and Berry; he’s been helping
them out with the computer work over the last month or so, since
there hasn’t been much else to do. The rest of us, me and Thu and
Anna, agreed to take over the cooking and washing until they got
the pictures done, and for a couple of days after that if we had to
bully them into taking some time off. They ought to be looking for
any sign of dangerous technologies, so we can settle the question
that’s kept us silent here while the food gets closer and closer to
running short, but nobody argued the point; for a look at Tau Ceti
II, I’ll put up with a few more sparse meals, and I know I’m not
the only one.

Still, cooking and cleaning don’t take that
much time, so I ended up back in the room with the alien-books. I
made myself finish the one I was spraying when Berry came, but once
it was dry and bundled up, pulling down another one and starting
the whole thing over again was more than I could face. So I
muttered some hot language, stared at the bookshelf for a while,
and then walked over and took the last book off the top shelf. I’d
left it for last, since it’s about three fingers thick and all the
paper’s gone brown as Misipi water and frail as a bug’s wing. What
I didn’t know until I cut the binding loose and went to work on it
was that it wasn’t an alien-book like the others; it was a
story.

More exactly, it was a mother of a story, a
mother with babies and then some. I forgot that I was supposed to
be spraying the pages so many times that I finally just gave up and
read the whole thing through to the end, then read it again when I
went back through to spray the pages I hadn’t done yet. Once I was
done I showed it to Eleen, and her eyes went round; she’d heard of
it, most scholars in her field have, but everybody thought all the
copies had gotten lost around the time the old world ended. That
happened to a fair number of books, and especially stories like
this one. They were a kind of make-believe story set off in space,
and not many people wanted to read that sort of thing when the old
world was ending around them.

Nowadays I think a lot of people would like
it. For all that it’s set in space, you can just change some words
here and there, and anybody in Meriga with the brains Mam Gaia gave
geese would be able to figure out what’s going on. The hero’s the
son of a jennel, or close enough that the difference doesn’t
matter, and there’s a quarrel going back a long way between his
father and one of the other jennels. So the other jennel, who’s got
the morals of a Jinya pirate, works up a plot to get the presden to
send our hero and his father and mother and their servants off to
the deserts out west—well, of course it’s some other planet, but it
might as well have been Cansiddi—where they can be ambushed and
killed by the other jennel’s men and the presden’s soldiers. Our
hero and his mother get away into the desert, though, and meet up
with the desert tribes, and the story goes on from there. Of course
the desert tribes here in Meriga ride horses instead of big worms,
but it’s a make-believe story and you’ve got to make allowances for
that.

Eleen’s reading it now. She probably ought to
be sleeping instead, but in a little while she’ll doze off over the
book and then I’ll get her tucked in and sleeping. I’d meant to
write about how Berry and I left Troy and went to Skeega, and how
we found out we were still being hunted, but just now my head is
still too full of sandstorms and knife duels for that.

This afternoon I finished reading the story
the second time through, got all the pages coated with resin front
and back, and tied them up in a bundle once they were dry. All the
alien-books I’d treated and read were back in the room where I’d
found them, bundled and stacked in a spare box I’d found; so
they’ll be in good order when it’s time to pack them for the trip
to Melumi. I didn’t put the story I’d just finished in the box,
since Eleen wanted to read it, but I wandered into the room anyway
and looked at the shelves full of books that were left, reading
what I could off the spines. I thought I might be able to find
another story, or at least something besides another alien-book.
Before I got very far, though, I heard somebody moving in the
hallway behind me, and looked back over my shoulder.

It was Anna. I said something friendly, I
forget what, but she just looked at me for a long time, and then
came a step or two into the room. “You’ve been preserving those,”
she said.

I nodded.

“Have you read any of them?”

“All I’ve treated so far.” I gestured at the
box.

“What do you think of them?”

I wasn’t at all sure what to say to that, and
her face gave me no clue; the wrinkles around her eyes might as
well have been a mask. “I don’t know what to think,” I said
finally.

She tilted her head and gave me one of her
sidewise glances. “Good,” she said. “That’s a useful habit.” Then,
after a moment: “May I tell you a secret? You’ll need to promise
not to tell it to anyone else, though.”

That was tempting enough that I nodded.
“Ruinman’s bond.”

Anna smiled her thin tight smile. “The secret
is this: those books are the reason Star’s Reach is here. Well,
part of the reason, but a very important part.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Care to
tell me what the reason is?”

Her smile tightened even more. “Keep reading,
and you’ll find it,” she said. A moment later she was gone, and I
heard her footsteps whisper away down the hall.

I stood there for a while, I could hear
Tashel Ban pounding at the computer keyboard—he always sounds as
though he’s attacking the keys, where Eleen types soft and quick so
you can hardly hear her at all—and someone, probably Berry, busy in
the kitchen. I tried to pay attention to the book, but mostly I sat
there and sprayed pages with resin and thought about Anna.

She was the last one to join us on the
journey out to Star’s Reach, and we didn’t even know she existed
until we got to Cansiddi. That seems like a long time ago now,
though it wasn’t much more than a month and a half.

We left Sanloo the day after Jennel Cobey and
his man Banyon showed up, heading pretty close to due west on the
army road from the Misipi to the Suri River. That road reminds you
every step of the way that you’re nearing the borders of the part
of Meriga people can live in. You come up out of the Misipi valley
where it’s all green and full of trees, like most of Meriga is, and
as you go the land gets dry. Day by day, as we walked west and the
pack horses trudged along with us, the land dried out, the wind
picked up, and the trees got further and further apart, with
stretches of tall grass between them. It was as if we were walking
back in time, going back to before the rains came rolling in and
saved Meriga from the long drought.

Finally the trees go away for good, and then
a while after that, you come to Cansiddi. There’s a big fort there
full of soldiers, since the desert tribes like to cross the Suri
and go raiding for horses when they can, and the Meycans have
outposts off to the southwest, far but not far enough. Other than
the fort, the stores and taverns and harlots and all that cater to
the soldiers, and some merchants who aren’t supposed to trade with
the desert tribes but do anyway, there’s not much to Cansiddi. It’s
just gray walls and low brown buildings and dust and the Suri River
itself, which is a mass of brown water and floating junk when the
rains come and a long streak of mud and pools and mosquitoes the
rest of the year. When I was reading about the town on that desert
world in the story I mentioned, Cansiddi really did come to
mind.

I’d have worried about getting through
Cansiddi in one piece if we hadn’t had a jennel with us. As it was,
all the soldiers took one look at Jennel Cobey and jumped as though
Tashel Ban had wired their whatnots to a battery and thrown the
switch. We went to the fort and talked to the cunnel there—well,
mostly the jennel talked—and then we rented rooms in one of the two
decent places in town. Other than a visit to the ruinmen’s guild
hall Berry and I made the next day, we stayed right there at the
tavern while Cobey’s man Banyon made arrangements with the tribes
so we could cross part of the desert and not get our throats cut.
There we were, even more keyed up than we were in Sanloo, and one
evening I went down to get a glass of whiskey from the bar when I
heard something like an argument out by the front door.

Even though it was one of the two best places
in town, they had fights in the bar pretty much every night we were
there, and I don’t mean people yelling at each other for a bit.
They hauled a corpse out the first night we were there, after some
soldiers got into it over a card game and were too drunk to take it
to the circle the way they should have. So I didn’t pay much
attention to the voices I heard out front, until I got close enough
to realize that it was one of the big toughs they keep to guard the
door telling someone else that they weren’t going to bother the
jennel or the ruinman or any of those people. That meant us, and I
was bored and curious enough to go over and see who it was.

I crossed the bar from the stair to a place
where I thought I could see the front door without being spotted,
ducking around the tables and a few puddles of beer the barmaids
hadn’t mopped up yet. About the time I got close enough to see that
the other person was an old woman with a spray of white hair like
feathers on the head of an eagle, though, she looked past the tough
and in a voice I could have heard half a klom away said, “Ruinman,
you’re trying to get to Star’s Reach. I was born there.”

The tough stopped in the middle of a
sentence, and then started laughing, a big rumbling good-natured
laugh, the kind you don’t expect to hear from somebody who makes
his living knocking spare teeth out of unruly drunks. I walked over
to the door, looked at her, and said, “Prove it.”

“I can’t, of course,” she said. “But there
are locks there that only open to a fingerprint.” She held up one
finger. “If they still work, they’ll recognize this.”

That caught my attention right away. The
ancients had locks like that, and you find them in ruins now and
again; of course there’s no way to get them open except with a pry
bar or a barrel of gunpowder, because whatever fingers were
supposed to open them have been topsoil for more than four hundred
years. The thing is, next to nobody outside the ruinmen’s guild
knows about them, the same way that next to nobody but ruinmen know
about the kind of trap that almost killed me in the Shanuga ruins.
She might have found out about them some other way, but it made her
story a little less unbelievable than I thought it was at
first.