Star's Reach (59 page)

Instead, he got himself reborn, and it’ll be
Berry who comes riding out of Star’s Reach to become presden. I
don’t think I’ll ever rest easy thinking about how little it would
have taken to make things go the other way.

So that’s what I was thinking when we got
back to the living quarters. Orin and the other two misters thanked
me and went off to make sure their prentices were settled in,
everyone else was somewhere or other besides the common room, and I
stood there for a good long moment wondering what I was going to
do.

Then I heard footsteps whispering down the
stair to the surface. I turned just as Thu came down them. He
stopped, motioned to me to come over, and very quietly said, “A
friend of yours is waiting above.”

I stared at him for a moment, and all at once
realized who it had to be. He put his finger to his lips; I managed
a nod somehow; he stepped out of the way, and I went up the stair
and out the door into the afternoon sunlight with my head spinning.
There was someone sitting on one of the antenna housings close by,
and he turned as I stepped out onto the sand. I didn’t need to see
the round eyeglasses glint like moons to know that it was
Plummer.

“Allow me to congratulate you,” he said,
after we’d greeted each other. “For this very remarkable find,
and—” He gave me one of his considering looks. “—for the details of
your arrival, shall we say. Thu told me what happened, though of
course I’ll want to hear your account as well.”

“You know,” I said, “I never would have
guessed that he was a friend of yours.”

“Thu? If you mean a member of our guild, no,
not at all. We have an arrangement with him, as we do with the
priestesses and some others; with his family, I should say, for it
was originally made with his great-great-grandfather. We have him
review any book on technology before we put it back into
circulation, and he does occasional work for us, when that’s
needed.”

“As a Sword?”

“Essentially, yes.” He motioned for me to
join him, and I climbed up and sat next to him on the antenna
housing. Wind whipped sand around us, and the sun sank toward the
haze in the western sky.

“I’m honored,” I said.

Plummer chuckled at that. “I hope I won’t
disappoint you by saying that you weren’t the main reason he was
here. No, that was your young prentice—I’m by no means certain what
to call him now.”

“Sharl sunna Sheren. I’ll always think of him
as Berry, but—”

“Understood. Thu believed he needed
protection, and of course he was quite correct—and we were
mistaken. Since Cobey Taggart had ample opportunity to kill young
Sharl if he’d wished to do so, and since he’d also spared Thu’s
life when killing him and throwing the body into Banroo Bay would
have been the simplest option, we didn’t treat the rumors about his
intentions as seriously as we should have. Things could have ended
so badly.”

I thought about that for a while. “I wonder
if anyone knows why Cobey didn’t kill Thu.”

“As it happens, yes.” Plummer shook his head,
and chuckled again. “It’s quite funny, really. We found out from
the Taggart family, who got it from some of the jennel’s servants
after his death. He didn’t believe that the man who assaulted you
was actually the last king of Yami. He found it highly amusing that
some ordinary Memfis street criminal had convinced you of something
so very unlikely, and would laugh about it when he’d been
drinking.”

I thought about that, too. “And Berry?”

“That was considerably more complicated. Did
you ever find out who it was that was following you along the back
roads of Tucki, when we first met?”

“If it was the same person who was following
us in Inyana, yes.”

Plummer nodded. “Sheren kept watch over her
child. If anything had happened to Sharl, and she had any reason to
think that Cobey Taggart was involved, he would have died in some
very unpleasant manner, and I’m sure that he knew it. He couldn’t
act until he was certain she was dying, and not even then unless he
was far enough from settled country that he could keep word from
getting back to her while she still lived. We failed to take that
into account.”

“And I helped the whole thing along,” I said,
shaking my head.

Plummer looked at me for a long moment. “He
would have come here one way or another, you know,” he said. “With
you or without you. Because it was the first of those, and not the
second, there won’t be a Fourth Civil War in our lifetimes. The
gains of the last hundred years or so have the chance to become the
foundation of something lasting, and not just one more of history’s
might-have-beens.”

The wind rushed past us on its way to the
green hills beyond the Suri. “Meriga is healing now,” Plummer said.
“Not healed—it won’t be healed for many centuries to come, not
fully—but it‘s healing. There’s strength and hope and a sense of
possibility that might be turned to good purposes, or bad ones. All
things considered, the country could benefit just now from a
presden who’s earned his living with his own hands, who’s traveled
from one end of it to the other on his own feet, who’s learned what
it means to be disliked and distrusted for no better reason than
the prejudices of the thoughtless. That might spare us some
mistakes, and put some high hopes in reach.” He glanced at me. “Or
not. There are no guarantees.”

“I suppose there never are,” I said.

Plummer nodded. “At the same time,” he said,
“your find here may have quite some impact of its own. Thu told me
some of what turned up here; I admit to a great deal of curiosity
about the details.”

“I have a copy of everything we printed out.
It’s down below, but I can get it for you.”

“Many thanks. And of course that brings up
another matter we should discuss.”

“Your offer.”

“Precisely. Have you considered it?”

“Over and over again.” I drew in a breath.
“I’d like to take you up on that—but there’s a problem, or might
be.” I swallowed, then, and told him about this notebook, about the
account I’d written of my journey here, and where Eleen and Tashel
Ban wanted to send it.

He took that in, then: “Are you willing to
place yourself under my authority as Cord?”

“Yes.”

“Even if that means that I tell you to
destroy the manuscript?”

I’d already thought about that. “Yes.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said at once.
“Can you arrange for it to be hidden once the translation has been
made and sent to the Cetans?”

I thought of what Eleen said, when we were
discussing the message from Delta Pavonis IV, about hiding
everything we’d found for a thousand years, and nodded. “The
scholar we have here is a good friend. She’ll do that if I ask
her.”

“That will be quite adequate.” He paused,
then went on. “Perhaps we can arrange with her to have the
manuscript placed in one of our collections, once she’s finished
with it. Fifty years from now, anyone could read it without danger.
It’s simply the interval between then and now that’s at issue.”
With another of his little smiles: “And I confess to a certain
degree of vanity. It would be pleasant to know that beings on
another planet will have heard of me. More to the point, of the
work in which I’m engaged.”

“I wonder what they’ll think about that,” I
said. All at once I could imagine a bunch of blobby yellow Cetans
sitting in a pool of gasoline in some tilted-bowl building of
theirs, under the golden sky of Tau Ceti II, talking to each other
in their magnetic-field voices and trying to figure out who this
Plummer person was in the strange story they’d gotten by radio from
Mam Gaia all those light-years away. I grinned and said, “For all
we know, some of them might be doing the same work.”

“An enticing thought.” Plummer looked at me
for a moment, then said, “How soon would it be convenient for you
to leave?”

I’d been wondering all along how soon he
would ask that question, or one close enough to it that the
difference wasn’t worth worrying about. “Whenever you like. Well,
I’ll need to see to the notebook and get my things packed, but
that’s all.”

“Excellent. It would be best if we could
leave before nightfall.”

I got off the antenna housing. “So long as
you won’t disappear when I turn my back.”

That got me a broad smile. “I can certainly
promise that,” he said. “In fact, one of the first things you need
to learn is how that’s done.”

“I’d like to know that,” I told him.

“We can begin as soon as you return,” he
said.

There are voices outside in the hallway now,
prentices talking with each other as they head for the kitchen and
the evening’s chores. In a little while, when they’re gone, I’ll
shoulder my pack and head up the stair and leave Star’s Reach
behind, and Plummer and I will be on our way—where, I have no idea,
and I’m not at all sure it matters to me just at the moment. The
note for Eleen is on the bed we’ve shared. I’d be lying if I said
the note was just about this notebook and what to do with it, but
that’s one of the things I wrote about.

I wondered for a while if I should take
something from Star’s Reach to carry with me wherever I go next,
the way I’ve carried Tam’s yellow metal butterfly, the ring that
used to be my mother’s, the star they sent her after my father
died, and the few other things I’ve got in the little bag of
keepsakes down at the bottom of my pack. Still, I decided against
it, and I think that was the best choice. I’ll be carrying plenty
with me anyway: the view from Troy Tower, the nights with Eleen and
those other nights in Memfis during the rains, the lazy days on the
canal boat and the riverboat, the stories I heard when we were
camping at night with travelers on a dozen different roads, the
slow arc the Spire made as it fell and the expression on Jennel
Cobey’s face as he fell, too. It’s more than enough.

I asked Plummer about that, in a way, before
I came back down into Star’s Reach. I’d just about turned to go,
and then stopped and said, “One other thing,” and reminded him
about what he’d said about the one big and nameless story that has
all other stories in it.

He blinked. “I said that?”

“I think you were drunk.”

“That’s certainly possible,” he admitted.

“The thing I’m wondering is this,” I said.
“If I’ve finally gotten out of the one big story, what do I do
now?”

He thought about that for a moment. “If it’s
true,” he said, “that all stories belong to that one story, you
can’t leave it, because whatever you do is a story—whatever any of
us do is a story, and part of other stories. As long as the end of
the story you’re in isn’t the end of you as well, I suppose you
find a new story that the rest of your life can tell.”

He paused, then, and glanced up at me. “In a
way, you know, that’s what Meriga has been doing for the last four
hundred years. The old world had its own favorite story, which said
that we owned Mam Gaia and everything else and could make them all
do whatever we wanted”—he gave me a little smile—“like animals in a
sirk. That story didn’t have a happy ending, quite the contrary,
and since then, we’ve been looking for another story to tell.”

“Well, most of us,” I said.

“True enough. Cobey Taggart wanted to go back
to the old story, and look how his story ended.” He shrugged. “But
most people know better now. It might just be possible now for us
to find out what our new story should be, and get to work telling
it.”

I thought about that as I came down the stair
into Star’s Reach, walked down the corridor to this bare little
room, turned on the lamp and got out this notebook as I’ve done so
many times over the time I spent here. Plummer’s right, and not
just about Meriga. Nuwinga and Genda and the coastal allegiancies
are looking for new stories, if they haven’t found them already,
and other people all over Mam Gaia’s round belly are busy looking
for their own new stories—and they’ll find them, too.

I’m sure of that because there are others
who’ve already done it. The Cetans might still be figuring out
their new story, but the bubble-and-feather things from Delta
Pavonis IV figured out theirs back before the first of Mam Gaia’s
human children climbed down out of the trees in Affiga, and I don’t
even want to think about how long ago some of those other species
made—what was it the message said?—the usual mistakes and suffered
the usual consequences, picked themselves up again and found some
new story to tell with their lives and their worlds. If they could
do it, I’m pretty sure we can.

And you know, I think I probably can,
too.

***

There are three pieces of paper pasted on
the inside back cover of the original notebook. The first is a
handwritten note, which seems originally to have been pinned to the
outside of the front cover:

My dear Lissa,

This is the manuscript I told you about. You
may read it if you wish, but please don’t make a copy of it or show
it to anyone else in the guild, and give it to
(a word or name
carefully blotted out with ink)
as soon as possible. She’ll see
to it that it gets to the place it needs to be.

With all my thanks and gratitude,

Eleen darra Sofee

Below this is a handwritten label:

Manuscript #338

Received into this collection on 14
Janwer,

24th year of Sharl sunna Sheren’s
Presdency

Below this is a printed label:

This manuscript, accession number 2878,

has been placed in the special
collections

of the Central Archive of the Guild of
Rememberers

on the occasion of its public dedication

on the twenty-second day of Toba

in the sixteenth year of Trey VII,

Presden of the Union of Great Meriga

being in the ancient calendar