Star's Reach (46 page)

He tilted his head, considered that. “You’re
probably right. Still...”

“Did you really grow up in Nashul?”

A quick shake of his head denied it. “I spent
some time there, so I could make the story believable if anybody
who knew the place asked questions. No, I grew up in Sisnaddi,
inside the walls. My mother wanted me close, so she could visit me
sometimes, and one of her servants came to check on me pretty
often.”

“So there are people in Sisnaddi who know
about you.”

His face tensed. “Some. Not many, and I hope
they keep their mouths shut.”

We talked a little more, I forget about what,
and then he turned off the radio and said goodnight and went back
to his room. I watched him go, and then went back to the main room,
where Tashel Ban was hammering at the keyboard as though he meant
to keep at it all night, and Thu was sitting over in the opposite
corner doing one of his meditations, and Anna was finishing up the
dishes. She saw me come in, gave me and Tashel Ban her sidelong
look, and then smiled to herself. She doesn’t smile often, and I’m
just as happy for that. This one was worse than usual; it curved
like the blade of a knife.

So I went back to the room Eleen and I share,
made sure she was sound asleep, and started writing. Well, to be
honest, I sat here thinking for a long while, and then finally
picked up the pen. Ever since I wrote about the conversation
Plummer and I had in the field outside the tents of the Baraboo
Sirk, I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to do once we
finish up here, and especially what I’m going to do.

Partly, of course, I’m wondering about what’s
going to happen to Meriga, and whether there’s going to be any safe
place at all, even for a ruinman, if we get a fourth civil war.
Partly, there’s Plummer’s offer. Partly, there’s what happened to
Jennel Cobey, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen because
of that. Partly, there are all the places I passed on my travels
where every scrap of ruin was stripped bare by ruinmen long before
I was born, and wondering what’s going to happen to the guild when
there aren’t enough ruins left for us to work; and of course partly
I’m thinking about the fact that I managed, by sheer dumb luck and
a lot of wandering, to find the place that everybody’s been looking
for since the old world came crashing down, and what do you do
after you’ve done that?

At any rate, I wasn’t ready to sleep yet and
couldn’t make myself write, and so I slipped out of the little room
Eleen and I share and went into the big space where the people who
were here before us used to grow their vegetables. The glass block
skylights up above were pure black, no trace of starlight in them
at all, though I was pretty sure it was a clear desert night and
plenty of stars were looking down on this side of Mam Gaia’s round
belly. I sat on the edge of one of the concrete tubs full of dirt
where the vegetables used to be, and looked back up at them.

I was pretty sure that something was going to
happen the next day, something big. Eleen went to bed with a look
on her face that wasn’t the one I expected. Ruinmen talk about
trying to get through a concrete wall by pounding your head against
it, and I’m sure the scholars in Melumi have a more elegant way of
saying the same thing; I know the look Eleen gets when that’s what
she’s been doing, but that wasn’t the way she looked.

She looked frightened. Not frightened as
though something’s come lunging out of the darkness at you, the way
Thu came at me on that night in Memfis; frightened as though
everything you thought you could trust just dropped from beneath
your feet, the way—I was about to write “the way the floor dropped
from beneath my feet in the Shanuga ruins,” but I knew better, any
ruinman’s prentice past his first season knows better, than to
think you can ever trust an old concrete floor. I sat there and
stared up at the night, and thought about the frightened look on
Eleen’s face, and all the things we’d learned about the Cetans, and
the night stared down at me and didn’t say a thing. Finally I got
tired enough to sleep, and went to bed.

The next morning I was up before it was
light. It was my turn and Anna’s to make breakfast, and so I washed
and dressed and headed for the kitchen. She was already there,
which was unusual. We didn’t see her much before breakfast unless
it was her turn to help with the cooking, and even then she’d get
to the kitchen when things were well along and do most of the
serving to make up for it. This time she was waiting. She didn’t
say much most mornings, and this morning she smiled her
knife-curved smile, and watched me out of the corners of her eyes,
and didn’t say a word.

I don’t think any of us said a dozen words
during breakfast. Everyone knew that something was about to happen.
People don’t live together as long as we have, here at Star’s
Reach, without getting to sense when a discovery’s been made or a
problem’s come up. The longer breakfast went on, the thicker the
silence got, until finally Tashel Ban drained his cup of chicory
brew and said, “When the rest of you are finished, there’s
something Eleen and I have found that we all need to talk
about.”

The rest of us were finished. Berry and Thu
took a couple of minutes to clear the table, but nobody even
thought about washing the dishes. Tashel Ban waited until they were
back at their places, then leaned forward onto his elbows and said,
“We’ve recovered the last thing that was put on the computers
before the people here died.”

He stopped there, and after a moment I said,
“And?”

“I have no idea what to make of it. It’s not
a document. It’s a program, a huge one, and we can’t figure out
what it is or what it’s supposed to do. It’s—” He gave us all his
owlish look. “I’m not at all sure how much of an explanation you
would prefer.”

“Details,” said Thu, “are more useful than
generalities. Please go on.”

Tashel Ban sat back in his chair. “I don’t
claim to know everything about the way computer programs were put
together back in the old world, but I know a fair amount, probably
as much as anybody does nowadays. The Nuwingan government has a few
computers that are still in working order—I’m pretty sure the
Merigan government has some, too—and I’ve worked on ours. I’ve
learned enough to look at a program written for the kind of
computer they put here at Star’s Reach, and know what to expect,
what the files look like, and so on.

“The program we’ve found is gibberish. Or it
looks like gibberish. It’s got things stuck into it that are
ordinary pieces of programming code, but I think they were lifted
out of other programs that were already in the computer, and they
do things with those other programs or the operating system that
runs the computer. The rest of it is nonsense, letters and numbers
and other things all jumbled together without any structure I
recognize at all. But—” Here he leaned forward again. “I don’t
think it’s actually nonsense. There are patterns in it. I just
can’t figure out the first thing about them.

“So we tried to figure out where it came from
and when it was used—you can find that out from inside the computer
if you know how—and that’s when things got truly puzzling. The
program ran just once, a few hours before the people here tried to
delete all their files and then shut everything down. It was
downloaded onto the computer a day before, by another program, an
even bigger one. This other program was downloaded onto the system
four days before that, spent all four of those days doing something
I can’t figure out, and then deleted itself.

“Then we tried to find out where the first
program came from, and that’s what kept us busy most of yesterday.
It looked as though it just popped up out of nowhere, until we
thought of checking the logs for the main radio receivers. That’s
where it came from. There was a radio message, a long one, that
repeated itself over and over again—” He moved his hands in a
circle. “And somehow that set up a repeating pattern all through
the communications and computer system here, and the big program
somehow unpacked itself from that. I don’t know how to do that. I
don’t think anyone anywhere knows how to do that.”

“Clearly someone did,” Thu pointed out. “I
wonder if it came from Sisnaddi.”

“Not those receivers,” Tashel Ban said.

It took just a moment for that to sink in.
When it did, Thu’s eyes narrowed. “You are saying that the program
came from—” A motion of his chin pointed upwards. “Out there.”

“As best we can tell, yes.”

I thought I understood then. “So it’s
something from the Cetans?”

“That’s the question we asked,” Tashel Ban
said. “But the program doesn’t look anything like what the Cetans
send, and it doesn’t correspond at all to what the people here
before us were able to learn about Cetan computing.”

I was still trying to get my head around that
when Berry spoke. “That message,” he said. “The one that brought
the program. When did it arrive?”

“That was the next question we asked,” Tashel
Ban told him. “I gather you’ve guessed the answer.” Then, because
Thu and I were both looking puzzled: “The main antennas point
whichever way this part of Mam Gaia’s belly is facing. Right now,
they’re facing Tau Ceti in the morning hours. More than a few hours
to either side, and—” He shrugged. “They’re pointing to another
part of the sky.”

That’s when I realized what he was saying.
“So it’s—someone else.”

“Apparently so,” said Tashel Ban. “And I have
no idea what to make of that.”

We all stared at him, and then someone
laughed. It was a dry, harsh laugh like paper tearing, and it took
me a good long moment before I realized that it was coming from
Anna.

“Forgive me,” she said, still laughing. “Of
course you don’t know what to make of that. You haven’t been
looking in the right place.” She looked straight at me, then. “You
understand. Or you should. You’re the only one who read the books
they left for us—the only one but me.”

I knew right away what she meant, but before
I could think of any way to answer, Tashel Ban said to her,
“Perhaps you can explain it to the rest of us, then.”

“If you wish.” She looked at him, and then at
the rest of us. “The Cetans aren’t the reason all of this is here.
They were the one species who answered the radio messages we sent,
because they’re at about the same level of technology we are, and
they haven’t been contacted yet by the Others.” The way she said
that last word, you could tell she would have written it with the
capital letter. “The Others are the reason Star’s Reach was
built.”

“Another species.” This from Thu.

She gave him something I’d have called a
pitying look from anybody else. “Thousands of other species,” she
said. “Millions of years more technologically advanced than we are.
They have ships that can travel from star to star in less time than
it took us to walk here from Cansiddi. They have answers to all the
questions human beings tried and failed to find back in the old
world. They were already visiting this planet before the old world
went away. One of their ships crashed here, at a place called
Roswell, off in the desert, and that’s when the government back
then started building Star’s Reach, to make contact with them, to
talk to them and get the technologies that would keep the old world
from ending the way it did.

“But they wouldn’t answer. We weren’t ready
for first contact, not then, not for a long time afterwards. They
knew that if they landed, if they even communicated with us openly,
people couldn’t stand knowing that we’re nothing more than a
backward species on a backward planet that needs all the help the
Others can give us.” She gestured outwards, the movement sharp as
broken metal. “Think of all the people in Meriga who spend their
days praying to Mam Gaia. What would they do if they suddenly found
out that their Mam Gaia is nothing more than a grain of dust
spinning around an ordinary star in an out of the way corner of the
galaxy?

“So the Others didn’t contact us. They didn’t
think we were ready. They didn’t contact the Cetans, either, and so
we and the Cetans made contact with each other, and spent a couple
of hundred years talking back and forth by radio. And maybe it was
that—” She stopped, and shook her head. “Maybe it was that, that we
were able to communicate with an alien species and bear it, that
convinced the Others that we were ready to be contacted. And when
they contacted us, we still weren’t ready.”

“You think that’s why the people here killed
themselves,” said Eleen.

“I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “I’ve told you
already most of what I remember; it was a long time ago, and I was
very young. Still, once I got here and started reading the books
they left for us, it all made sense. And—” She gestured again,
palms up. “They left the books about the Others here for us to
find, when they burned so much else. Why?”

“Tell us,” said Eleen.

“To give us the chance to figure out ahead of
time that the Others are out there. I don’t think they expected
anyone to be able to read the computer files, the way you have, but
they probably guessed that when Star’s Reach was found, we’d start
talking to the Cetans again, and sooner or later the Others would
try to contact us a second time. That’s what the program’s for, I’m
sure of it—a way to contact them, or a message from them. They’re
still waiting out there with their advanced technology—waiting for
us to be ready to welcome them, waiting until they can make this
world even better than it was before the old world ended. Waiting
to come down and take humanity to the stars.”

There was a light in her eyes like nothing I
ever saw there before. All at once I remembered the books we’d both
read, the alien-books and the make-believe stories set in space,
and I knew what was in her mind. I’d read the books and scratched
my head and wondered, but she’d read them and believed all of it,
and I thought I could guess why. “Anna,” I asked her, “did your
parents tell you any of this?”