Star's Reach (42 page)

Off to the left, riverboats were churning up
the water; off to the right everything was green and growing. All
in all, it was as nice a day as you could ask for, but for all I
cared just then it might as well have been some day in the drought
years with dust falling from the sky onto bare gray dirt. I missed
Berry, and I missed the friends I’d made among the Memfis ruinmen,
but I was glad to be alone, so that nobody else had to put up with
my mood.

Still, life on the road is life on the road,
and I’d learned to like it well enough during the time Berry and I
spent wandering the long way around from Shanuga to Memfis. Before
too many days were past, Memfis was far enough behind that the sour
taste of my failure there was starting to fade from my mind. It
still hurt to think about it, but it was a mother of a lot easier
not to think about it, and that helped. The river road along the
Misipi isn’t as busy as some others, since anyone who can afford a
ticket takes a riverboat, but there were plenty who couldn’t or
who, like me, didn’t want to spend the money they had, or who had
business that took them to the little towns and villages along the
way.

Before long I was walking with a bunch of
actors who made their living going from town to town, putting on
the same play wherever they went. It was good enough that I’d have
paid money to see it, but since we were on the road together I just
gave them a hand setting things up and packing up again afterwards.
It was about an old man who lived on an island off in the Gulf of
Meyco, with nobody but his daughter and a couple of robots to keep
him company—this was a long time ago and he knew all about
technology, you see, and so he had robots. Then there was a big
storm, and the old man’s brother, who was a jennel and who’d chased
him out of Memfis and sent him to the island, gets blown ashore,
along with a bunch of friends, and the presden and her son: they
were all on a ship together, you see. It’s all a merry romp from
there, until the old man triumphs, the jennel’s humbled, the
presden’s son falls in love with the old man’s daughter, and they
all go sailing back to Memfis.

The actors were good company, and I traveled
with them all the way north to where the Hiyo River flows into the
Misipi. They were going to Sanloo and I wasn’t, so we said our
goodbyes one bright morning and they got a ferry over to the
Misipi’s west bank. I went east along the Hiyo toward Dooca,
crossed on the ferry at Troplis, and followed the road that ran
along the northern bank from there. I could just as well have
stayed in Tucki, but I didn’t, and it was because I didn’t that two
important things happened to me.

The first was at a town called Conda, a
couple of days walking past the ferry. The road north of the river
doesn’t get much travel along that stretch, and since there are
faster ways to get from Dooca to places further east, I had the
road to myself most of the time. Conda’s a little place, not much
more than a weekly market and a levee where riverboats tie up; it
had one tavern, with a sign that said they had rooms for the night,
so I went in. I was just about the only person there, except for
the barmaid and a woman maybe ten years older than I was, who was
sitting at the bar nursing a drink.

I figured out right away that she was a
harlot; it didn’t take her much longer to figure out that I wasn’t
looking for a harlot; once that got settled, since neither of us
had anywhere else to go, we sat there at the bar and talked, while
the barmaid did her chores and kept our glasses from getting dry.
The harlot’s name was Lu, and she was on her way from Naplis to
Sanloo, where she hoped she could get a place at one of the big
houses and put some money aside before she got too old for her
trade. I told her a little about where I’d been and where I was
going; I didn’t say a word about why, but damn if she didn’t
suddenly turn and stare at me for a good long minute, and say,
“You’re the one who’s looking for Star’s Reach.”

So I asked how she’d figured that out, and
she turned back to her drink and started to cry. That’s when it
came out that she’d been a scholar at Melumi, and got sent away the
way Eleen was. She ended up in a brothel in Naplis, because she was
pretty and good in bed, and not too proud to make old men think
they were twenty again. She still had a few books from her Versty
days, but she kept them tucked away where they couldn’t be seen; a
lot of men like a harlot to pretend to be this or that, but nobody
I ever heard of has a thing for scholars.

I ended up buying her dinner, because I had
the money and she didn’t, and over the food we talked about Star’s
Reach, and what I found and didn’t find. After that we had a few
more drinks, and after that she took my hands and let me know that
if I was minded to share a bed she had one upstairs, and I was
young and nice and just because she made her living that way didn’t
mean it was all about money.

That was how I ended up in a cramped little
room on the upper floor of a little tavern in Conda, in a cramped
little bed that wasn’t quite long enough for one person or wide
enough for two, in that warm quiet place you get to sometimes after
you’ve tumbled somebody. She felt like talking, which isn’t
something a harlot can do very often in that sort of situation, so
I nestled up to her and listened, and that’s when she told me about
the place on the Lannic shore by Deesee where every question has an
answer.

She didn’t know much about it, just that the
road west from Pisba through the burning land leads there, and that
there were stories about people who went there and asked questions
nobody else could answer, and got the answer. I wondered at first
if there was supposed to be a robot there, or something else from
the old world that could answer questions, and then if it was like
a Dell’s bargain; she laughed and said no, it was just a place
where questions got answered, or that’s what the stories said. You
crossed the burning land and went to the Lannic shore along the
road west from Pisba, and there by the water, where the Spire rose
out of the waves, you could find the answer to anything.

“Maybe,” she said in a drowsy voice. “Maybe
if you don’t find what you need at Sisnaddi, you should try going
there. Better than nothing, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t feel like arguing,
or doing much besides being there next to her; neither of us said
anything for a while, and then she mumbled something I couldn’t
make sense of, and pretty clearly fell asleep.

I didn’t stay awake much longer, but
somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up cold out of a dream
about Deesee. I’d been walking through the wide streets with fish
swimming past me and the water a silvery sky up above, and I
couldn’t find my way to the Spire. I needed to know how to get
there, and I couldn’t find the way. Then I was awake, and off past
Lu’s shoulder a little window let in a flurry of stars.

It was almost a year later, when I’d followed
every last lead in the Sisnaddi archives out to a dead end, that I
followed the hint I’d gotten in a harlot’s bed in a little Ilanoy
town in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the stars that night knew
enough to tell me to follow it sooner, but if they did know, they
weren’t telling that either.

I still had some long roads ahead of me, from
there along the Hiyo to Sisnaddi by way of an empty nuke in the
northern part of Tucki, from Sisnaddi east across the burning land
to the beach where the Spire rises up out of the distant waves, and
then back to Sisnaddi again with the thing I’d been trying to find
all along, and then from Sisnaddi by way of Sanloo and Cansiddi and
the desert to Star’s Reach, where I sit in a little pool of light
with a pen in my hand and an old notebook on the desk in front of
me. Getting here has been close to the only thing on my mind all
that way—well, other than what’s going to happen between Eleen and
me, and what’s going to happen to Meriga when the presden dies, and
a few other things like that.

Still, I got here, and pretty soon I’ll be
finding out whether that was a good idea or not. Tashel Ban thinks
he’s found the last thing the people at Star’s Reach put on the
computer before they died.

Twenty-Four: When the Door Opened

The presden died today. We heard this evening
when Tashel Ban tuned up the receiver and caught the broadcast from
Sanloo. I was in the radio room with him, along with Eleen and Thu,
when the loudspeaker crackled and hissed and started playing music.
It wasn’t the music the Sanloo station usually plays, the lively
sort of tune on tars and drums you hear all over Meriga; it was the
slow sad old-fashioned music that always comes ahead of bad
news.

I guessed right away what it meant, went to
the door, and shouted down the hall, since there was one person at
Star’s Reach who wasn’t in the radio room just then and needed to
be. Plates rattled in the kitchen, footsteps rang down the hall,
and Berry came in just as the music stopped and the radio, or the
man on the other end of it, started talking.

The announcement was all in the sort of
formal language you never hear unless the presden’s court is
involved somehow, and I won’t try to repeat all of that word for
word. The important thing was that Sheren darra Emeli, Presden of
Meriga, died this morning of having too much cancer in her. Now of
course he said some other things, mostly that there will be a
funeral in a week to send her back into the circle, and that the
Baspresden, who usually just bangs the gavel when Congrus meets and
whose name I can’t even remember, will run the country until the
succession gets sorted out. All that is probably important for
people who live in Sisnaddi or have to deal with the government.
What matters for most of us here at Star’s Reach and across most of
Meriga, though, is that for more than forty years the country’s
been mostly at peace and mostly prosperous, and all of that could
stop between now and the next rains.

That matters for Berry, too, but he had
something else to think about as well. He stood there in the
doorway, listening, not saying anything at all. I thought just then
of the child who’d helped me stagger to my tent in Shanuga after I
became a mister, but he didn’t look like a child any more, and the
look on his face wasn’t a child’s look, not by a good long walk.
The announcer went on for a while, talking about what there was in
the way of other news, and then he stopped talking, the slow sad
music started again, and Berry turned without saying a thing and
went back to the kitchen.

I think everyone else was looking at him by
the time he left, and then they were all looking at me. I couldn’t
think of anything to say, so I followed Berry down the hall to the
kitchen. He’d gone back to washing the dishes, though his face was
all twisted up trying not to cry, and his eyes weren’t looking at
anything at all. I found a towel, stood next to him and started
drying the plates as he washed them.

“My mother died about six months after Gray
Garman took me as a prentice,” I said after a little while. “So I
know there’s nothing anybody can say.”

He stopped, and looked at me for a long
moment. Finally: “When did you find out?”

He wasn’t talking about my mother, of course.
“I started wondering after you said you couldn’t go to Sisnaddi,
but Jennel Cobey took me to see her in Sisnaddi. That did it.”

Berry started washing again. “Do you suppose
Jennel Cobey knew?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

“And the others here?”

“If they didn’t, they do now.” I took the
last plate from him, dried it.

“I suppose it was stupid to think nobody
would ever figure it out.” He started in on the bowls. “I hope they
keep their mouths shut, or I’ll end up dead in a ditch
somewhere.”

“Or Presden,” I said.

He snorted. “Not as a tween. If I’d been born
one way or the other I’d be in Sisnaddi right now taking the oath
of office, but—” He handed me a bowl. “She couldn’t even admit I
existed. Can you imagine what the Circle elders would have said?
No, I’ll get offered the presdency the day after a dozen false
stars turn up drunk in a Memfis whorehouse.”

I couldn’t think of an answer to that, and he
didn’t say anything else for a while. We finished up the dishes,
and then he said, “Trey—thank you.”

“Sure.”

He nodded, and then turned and went to his
room. I knew better than to follow.

I’ve been thinking since then of the one time
I saw the presden. It was a little more complicated than I told
Berry, because Jennel Cobey didn’t just up and decide to take me to
see her. What happened was that Sheren found out about his plans to
go looking for Star’s Reach, and whoever told her about it gave her
more details than the jennel wanted her to know.

This was after I’d come back from Deesee and
started making arrangements for the journey here. Everyone in our
party but Berry, who was still in Tucki, and Anna, who we didn’t
know about yet, was already there, and in the middle of everything
one of the jennel’s servants brought a note telling me to dress up
as well as a ruinman could and meet him that evening at the
presden’s palace inside the walls in Sisnaddi.

The jennel sent somebody to get me through
the city gates, and so I turned up at the palace doors all scrubbed
and in the nicest clothes I could find. I was as nervous as I’ve
ever been, and it didn’t help any to see that Cobey looked nearly
as nervous as I felt. “Trey,” he said in a low voice, “Don’t say
any more than you have to. I don’t know what this is about.” That
was all the time he had to talk, since the guards in their fancy
uniforms came out of the big front door of the palace just then,
and I followed him in the door and through more huge rooms and long
corridors than I’ve seen anywhere this side of a really big ruin.
At first there were people everywhere, guards and courtiers and
servants all bustling about, but the further we went the more the
crowd thinned, until finally we came to a door with two guards
standing outside it and no one else anywhere in sight except the
servant who was guiding us.