Star's Reach (57 page)

“It would surprise me,” said Thu, “if there
was no trouble over that.”

“Trouble for me,” I said, “I can handle. I
don’t want it to become trouble for the rest of you, for the guild
we’ve talked about, or for Star’s Reach—and the Taggart family is
important enough to make a lot of trouble for everyone, unless we
all agree that I’m the one who killed him, and leave it at
that.”

Nobody said anything for a while. “There’s
got to be a better option,” said Berry. “I’m not willing to see you
have to run for your life—not when it’s because you saved ours. If
you can lie low here for a while, and everything goes well, I can
protect you from the Taggarts once I’m inaugurated.”

“Maybe,” said Tashel Ban. “It depends on
politics—which of the important families support you, how your
allies and enemies sort themselves out in Congrus. They or one of
their allies might also decide to take the risk of killing him, and
pay whatever price they have to pay.”

I raised my hands. “It’s not worth risking.
I’ve got some ideas in mind for what to do, but you don’t need to
know those. As far as you know, I just up and vanished as soon as
the ruinmen got here, and nobody saw which way I went.”

Berry didn’t like it, I could see that on his
face, but he said nothing more. I happened just then to look at
Eleen, just as she looked at Tashel Ban. She didn’t say anything,
either, but the look told me something I’d been wondering about for
a while.

We ended up talking about other things,
mostly the guild that would be set up here at Star’s Reach and what
Berry could and couldn’t do to help it along if he becomes presden,
and before long it was time to cook another meal; we kept on
talking straight through cooking the meal and eating it and washing
up afterwards, too. We had a lot to talk about, no question, but
there was more to it than that. Tomorrow the ruinmen will be here,
and once that happens, this time will be over for good. We’ll all
remember it until we get reborn, but it’s like the time I was
together with Tam, or the two years I spent digging in the Arksa
jungle through the dry season and partying in Memfis through the
rains: when it’s over, it’s over, and no doubt there’ll be plenty
of good times later on but it won’t ever be the same.

We ended up talking straight through until
dinner. Afterwards we all went to the radio room to listen to the
broadcast from Sanloo, which didn’t have anything much to say but
took the usual time to say it anyway. After that, we went our own
ways, or mostly.

I started for the room where the alien-books
were, and got about halfway there when Berry called my name from
behind. I turned, and he walked up and took hold of my wrists and
looked at me for a long moment with his face tight and unhappy.

“Trey,” he said, “if there’s ever anything
you need—anything at all—get word to me and you’ll have it. No
questions, just—you’ll have it. Understood?”

I nodded and thanked him, and he managed a
smile, let go of me, and turned and went back toward his room. I
knew when I thanked him that I wasn’t ever going to take him up on
that offer, no matter what, and I think he knew it, too, but he had
to make the offer and I had to accept it, because we’re ruinmen,
and because we’re friends.

So I went the rest of the way to the room
with the alien-books, and stood there for a while. I’d had some
thought or other about reading a bit from one or another of the
stories, but when it came down to it I wasn’t in the mood for that,
or much of anything else. After a while I left, and went back to
the room I’ve been sharing with Eleen. I didn’t expect to find her
there, but there she was, sitting on the bed and looking
miserable.

“Trey,” she said, “I told you back in
Sisnaddi that I’d go anywhere with you. I meant that, and it still
stands. I’ll go with you when you leave, if you’ll have me.”

I blinked, sat down on the bed next to her,
and said, “No you won’t. You belong here at Star’s Reach.”

“Trey,” she said again, and then started
crying. I’m not going to try to write out how the conversation went
from there, because she cried for a good long while, and when one
person’s crying and the other’s trying to calm her down, the words
that get said don’t make a lot of sense when they’re written out on
paper. After that, I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and things
more or less went from there, which doesn’t make things any easier
to write down. What it amounted to, though, is that she tried to
convince me that she wanted to go with me, when we both knew that
the one thing on Mam Gaia’s round belly she wanted more than
anything else was to stay at Star’s Reach and spend the rest of her
life studying the messages from the Cetans and the other aliens,
and I had to find some way to get her to do the thing she wanted to
do without making her feel that I didn’t want her. Of course it
didn’t help that it was starting to sink in that I probably
wouldn’t ever see her again, and that wasn’t an easy thing.

Still, it wasn’t as though I had a choice.
Though I hadn’t whispered a word of it to any of them, of course, I
already knew exactly what I’m going to do as soon as I shoulder my
pack and head back east toward the settled country along the Suri
River. I’m going to get rid of my ruinman’s leathers as quick as I
can and get some ordinary clothes, then head as fast as country
roads will take me to the Hiyo valley, and find Plummer or get
found by him, I don’t care which. That’s not just because I need to
drop out of sight for a while, though of course that’s part of
it.

I don’t know if anyone who’s not a ruinman
will understand the rest of it. A lot of what ruinmen do is
dangerous, more of it is boring, and nearly all of it is hard work,
as hard as anything anybody does in Meriga nowadays. Even when
we’re breaking concrete to get at the metal inside or doing some
other chore that isn’t exactly a bubbling mug of fun, there’s
always the hope that next day or the next season might just bring
something wonderful. That’s not always the easiest thing to
believe, especially since so many ruins have gotten stripped clean
and it’s getting harder for new misters to find anything that will
even so much as earn them a living, but the hope’s there, and it’s
a lot of what keeps ruinmen going.

When we left Jennel Cobey and his man Banyon
burning on the sand and came down the stairs into Star’s Reach,
though, I found the thing that every ruinman in Meriga used to
dream of finding, the biggest and richest ruin of them all. If I’m
lucky and a building doesn’t flapjack on top of me or something, I
could work as a ruinman for twenty or thirty or forty more years,
but there’s nothing I could find, not even if I found every one of
the lost cities of the dead lands out west, that would be worth
mentioning in the same breath as what’s around me right now. That’s
why, or a good bit of why, I plan on taking Plummer up on his
offer—and whatever path might be on the other side of the door he
opened for me that night at the sirk in Madsen, it’s a path I know
I have to walk alone.

So Eleen and I talked, when we weren’t doing
other things, and somewhere in the middle of it all she agreed that
she was going to stay and I wasn’t, though I was a little
preoccupied at the time and don’t remember exactly when that got
settled. Finally, though, we were lying there in bed; I was on my
back and she had her head on my shoulder and the rest of her about
half draped over me, and after a bit she started crying again, very
quietly, and I lay there and stroked her hair and felt the empty
aching space that was going to be part of my life once I started
walking again.

That’s when I decided that we really did love
each other. It’s a funny thing, for we both spent a lot of time
wondering about that, and talked about it now and then. I also
knew, from the look she’d given Tashel Ban earlier when I’d said I
planned on leaving, that the two of them would probably end up in
bed together not too long after I was gone, if they hadn’t done it
already. Still, love is like that. As Plummer said, human beings
don’t have to make sense, and when love sits on one side of the
balance and everything else you ever wanted is on the other, love
doesn’t necessarily come out ahead.

She cried for a long while, then lay there
quietly with me for a longer one, and then all of a sudden propped
herself up on one arm and said, “There’s one thing more we need to
settle. The Cetan paper you were reading this morning—do you
remember it?”

The change of subject left me blinking for a
moment, but then I got my head clear enough to answer. “The story
about the sea voyage?”

“Yes. It’s their account of how they first
got to the place where spaceships used to take off, before their
old world ended. They sent that to the people here maybe twenty
years before the message from Delta Pavonis IV came through, and
they wanted the people here to send them something like that from
our world. There’s some discussion of that in the records we’ve
found, but the people here hadn’t settled anything when
communication stopped.”

I nodded. “And?”

“Tashel Ban and I were talking about that the
other day, and we both remembered that there’s a story right here
very much along the lines of the one the Cetans sent us. So we
wanted to know if you’d be willing to leave the notebook you’ve
written here, so we can translate your story into the language we
use to talk to the Cetans, and send it to them.”

I gaped at her for a good long moment and
then said, “Can you do that? Translate it?”

“Yes. Berry showed me how he put together his
message, and we’ve also got computer programs that are set up to
handle the translation, so it shouldn’t even be that
difficult.”

I stared at her for another long while,
thinking of blobby yellow Cetans sitting in pools of gasoline rain,
reading all the things I’ve written since we came to Star’s Reach.
I know that it’ll be whatever they use instead of computer
printouts, and in their language of magnetic fields, but damn if I
didn’t keep on imagining them turning the pages of my notebook,
looking at the ink and the paper.

“If you think they’ll be able to make any
sense of it,” I told her finally, “yes, you can have the
notebook.”

She thanked me, and I kissed her, and before
long we were going at it again, long and slow and gentle this time,
because we both knew that this was pretty much certain to be our
last time together. Afterwards, we lay close, and when I was sure
she had gone to sleep I got up, went to my desk, turned on the
little light there, and sat there staring at my notebook for a good
long time before opening it and starting to write. I’ve thought
more than once about what it would be like if someone from the
Neeonjin country were to come here and read this, but the Neeonjin
country might as well be one room over compared to where it’s going
to go.

I wonder what the Cetans will think of it.
Will they ever really know what a ruinman is, or what jennels are,
or what Shanuga or Memfis or drowned Deesee look like? They don’t
have parents or children or lovers, they don’t make babies, they
just crawl up out of the gasoline ocean in little pieces and come
together, and go back to it again and fall apart. Will they even be
able to figure out what Eleen and I were just doing, or why?

I think of that, and then I wonder just how
much we’ll ever know about the Cetans and their world, and let’s
not even talk about the thirty-eight other intelligent species out
there who are waiting to hear from us. It’s a big universe, and it
shows just how little of the universe I can know that right now,
the couple of meedas between me and Eleen feel as wide and cold as
the spaces between the stars.

Thirty: How the Old World Ended

This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, and
as soon as I was washed and dressed, while Thu and Berry got
breakfast made and Eleen and Tashel Ban printed out papers for the
ruinmen, I read back over the story I’ve written in this notebook.
I realized, somewhere in the middle of the night, that some of what
I’ve written down mentions things I promised Plummer I wouldn’t
tell anyone, and flipping through the pages first thing, I found
myself reading what I’d written about the talk we had in the field
in Madsen, with the river on one side of us and the big tent of the
Baraboo Sirk on the other.

I had no idea what to do. If I hadn’t
promised Eleen to leave the notebook with her, I could just have
taken it with me when I left, but I didn’t want to break my promise
to Eleen any more than I wanted to break my promise to
Plummer—well, and in the latter case there were the Swords to think
about, and the very calm way he’d talked about throats getting cut.
So I was paging through the notebook, trying to figure out if I
could tear out just the pages that mattered or something, and then
breakfast was ready. I stuffed the notebook in one of the drawers
of the old metal desk and left it at that.

All through breakfast I was thinking about
that. Back when I was writing most of it, though I wondered now and
then whether anyone else would ever read the notebook, I couldn’t
ever quite make the thought look real. We were in Star’s Reach,
after all, and the rest of Meriga and everything else seemed very
far away. Now that the rest of Meriga was about to come knocking on
our door, I wondered how on Mam Gaia’s round belly I could have
been such an idiot, but the morning didn’t have any answers for
me.

About the time we got things cleaned up, Thu
came down the stair from outside to announce that he could see a
dust cloud off to the east. We’d decided the day before what to do,
so as soon as the last copies of the papers were printed out, Berry
and I went down the stair and set out for the old east entrance
where the trapped room was, while the others went to the big room
with the printers and notebooks down below the living quarters, and
started getting things set up for the newcomers.