Star's Reach Read online

  Still, there’s another point to tracing cables, which is that it’s a game. When I was growing up in the Tenisi hills, there was a game all the children knew how to play with stones. You set fourteen of them out in a triangle, leaving one empty place, and then move one stone over another to the empty space. Any stone you leap over gets taken out, and you can’t move a stone except by leaping over another next to it. If you end up with just one stone left, you win, and if you have more than one left, you lose. On winter nights, we used to play it by the hour. Tracing cables is like that, and the prentices I knew in Shanuga used to play it the same way.

  I’m good at it, and Berry’s better than I am; I won’t say it was easy, but we won the game. It took us all afternoon to do it, and we nearly lost the trace when the cables dropped two levels inside a solid wall, but toward evening we scrambled down a narrow staircase eight levels down and found the machines at the other end. There was a whole bank of them, big consoles with screens and buttons and lights, and three of them were lit up like the one we found earlier: lit up and waiting, for what we still don’t know. Half the floor of the room was steel grate, and we could see further down the big gray cylinders full of something or other nuclear, turning out a steady trickle of electricity as they’d done for more than four hundred years. There were a lot of them, more than I’d ever seen or heard of in a single place.

  We searched the room, scanned it for radiation, shone a light through the doors that opened out from it into other parts of the eighth level, and then started back up the stairs. We got back just about the time the evening meal was ready; we were winded from the climb but exhilarated, and ready to tell our good news to anyone who would listen.

  As it happened, though, it was the only good news anyone had. Eleen and Tashel Ban hadn’t had anything like the luck we had, and whatever was in the computer was still tangled up around itself and impossible to read, maybe for now, maybe forever.

  “There’s still some chance,” Tashel Ban said, gesturing with a piece of bread. He was sitting back in one of the big padded chairs we’d dragged into what we were already calling the common room, as though Star’s Reach was a tavern. “The data’s in there, no question of that. The question is getting it out in some form we can read.”

  “Were there machines to do that?” Berry asked. I gave him a startled look; the idea hadn’t occurred to me, and it sounded like a good one.

  “There were programs,” Tashel Ban said after a moment. “I don’t think anybody knows how they worked. There are maybe fifty people this side of the oceans nowadays that can make a computer do anything at all, even when it’s in good order, and maybe five who can fix one that’s not working if the problem’s a simple one.”

  “This is not simple, I gather,” said Thu.

  “I wish I could tell you.” Another gesture with the bread, short and sharp, put a period on the end of his words. “Maybe something simple, maybe not.”

  “If there was a program that could read the files,” Berry said then, “there in the computer, do you think you could find it?”

  I think all of us stared at him then. “I might,” Tashel Ban said after a long moment. “Maybe.” He didn’t say another word during the meal, either, just stared at his soup as though it was a computer screen and he could make the beans and salt pork spell out messages from the stars by thinking at them hard enough. Eleen mostly just looked tired. Once we’d finished the meal, they went back to work, and I went to the room where we’d found the shelf full of old books and pulled one out at random.

  Its pages were brown and brittle and the cheap paper cover was going to bits, but we’d brought enough resin from Melumi to preserve a building full of books, and so I took it with me into the sleeping room Eleen and I are sharing, got a bulb from my pack, used a sharp knife to cut the pages loose from what was left of the binding, and squirted every page with resin on both sides. That’s the way you save a book, if you’re a ruinman and can’t be sure of getting the thing to a scholar before it crumbles away to nothing, and I told myself that that’s what I was doing. Now of course what I was actually doing was trying to keep my mind off the chance that we might have come all this way to Star’s Reach and gotten this close to the messages from the stars and still managed to fail, but saving an old book seemed like as good a thing to do as any.

  So I sprayed every page front and back, and read it in the process, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything in it. It was all about people from other worlds who were coming to ours in ships that looked like a couple of plates stuck together edge to edge, and how the government was pretending that wasn’t happening, but any day now something would happen that the government couldn’t hide and there we’d be, and the aliens—I finally found out how that word is spelled, after all these years—would save us or something.

  Any day now, I thought. I looked back at the page right at the beginning where it says when a book got made, and saw that it was already more than fifty years old when the old world ended . What do you do when any day now was five hundred years ago?

  By the time I’d finished the book and wrapped up the pages for safekeeping, it was late, but I didn’t feel a bit of sleep in me. I pulled out the notebook where I’m writing this, but couldn’t think of what to say. I could hear the clatter of the computer keyboard from the common room. Then, after what seemed like a long while, silence.

  Then footsteps whispered down the corridor, coming to our room. Eleen came in a moment later. “Trey? I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Maybe.” She sat down next to me on our bed. “Maybe. Berry might just be right.” She leaned against me; I could feel the tiredness in her. Then: “What did you find?”

  She meant the book I’d sprayed and wrapped, which was sitting on the bare metal table here in our room. “Not too sure,” I said. “One of the old books. Somebody saying there were aliens visiting our world back in the old days.”

  “Flying saucers,” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  A little, tired laugh. “Funny. They’ve got all the records about that at Melumi. The old Merigan government made the whole thing up, so they could hide tests of airplanes and things they didn’t want other countries to know about. Every few years they’d fake another round of reports, and they always looked like whatever stopped being secret five or ten years later: round silver balls when they were testing balloons, black triangles when that’s what the planes looked like, that sort of thing. They kept it going right up until the old world ended.”

  “Well, nobody told whoever wrote this book.”

  “Funny,” she said again. “I wonder why it’s here.” The last couple of words weren’t much more than a mumble, and I just about had to undress her and help her into bed, she was that close to falling asleep.

  Afterwards, when I’d written about the last few days, I sat there at this desk for a while and looked at her. I thought about the long road we’d traveled to get here, and of course I ended up remembering how Eleen and I first met. That was what I was going to write about next, before Tashel Ban came running to tell us about the door and the smell, and so I might as well write about it now.

  It happened back when Berry and I got to Melumi the first time, riding along with Jennel Cobey and getting a glimpse of what it’s like to live when you don’t ever have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. I got my first taste of that the morning after I’d met the jennel, when a couple of his servants showed up at the door of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall with horses for themselves and one each for me and Berry, and led us jingling and clattering through the streets of Luwul to the ferry across the Hiyo River. We met the jennel and the rest of his party there, a couple of dozen servants and soldiers on horseback, and a bunch of horses with nothing on their backs but packs and bundles.

  The jennel greeted me in what certainly sounded like fine spirits, then caught sight of Berry. For just a moment he looked about as startled as
a man can look, and then smoothed the look off his face as though it had never been there, nodded politely and said a few words to me that didn’t mean a thing. I’ve never known anybody but Plummer who caught on as quickly as Jennel Cobey did, and I used to think that he might have guessed at a glance that Berry was a tween. These days I’d guess differently, but that belongs later in this story.

  So we crossed the river and rode north through Inyana with the jennel. He had people riding ahead of him, so every night we stopped someplace where there were beds and hot meals for the jennel and his advisers and officers and friends, which meant us among others. A couple of days when we were riding, he sent a servant to bring me up near the head of the line with him, and he asked about the ruinmen and Star’s Reach; a couple of evenings when he wasn’t yet busy with the harlot or two that his servants found for him pretty much every stop along the way, he sent for me to join him at dinner. The rest of the time, Berry and I rode well back in the line, had our meals with the servants and soldiers, and had a quiet room to ourselves wherever we stayed. It was pleasant enough, the way a dream can be pleasant, and felt almost as unreal.

  We got to Melumi late one afternoon most of two weeks after we’d left Luwul. There were big heaps of cloud looming up dark in the sky behind us, warning of the approaching rains, and a rising wind set the tree branches dancing and the grass bending low. We’d been riding all day through Inyana farmland, and finally came to a town no different from any of the others we’d passed, except this one was Melumi and had the big brick buildings of the Versty back behind it and women in gray scholar’s robes everywhere.

  The Versty used to be bigger than it is nowadays. I learned that later, but when I first saw it I don’t think I would have believed it if somebody told me. There were six huge buildings of red salvaged brick: the library, the school, the offices, and the three buildings—dorms, they call them, though I don’t know why—where scholars, students, and visitors sleep and eat. We rode into the big square in the middle of it all, and while the servants and soldiers went to the dorm for visitors, the jennel and Berry and I got down off our horses, and went inside the offices.

  The jennel’s people had ridden ahead, of course, so the scholars were waiting for us. There were three of them, all with gray hair pulled back tight around their faces and lips pulled back tight across their teeth. There was a Versty official too, someone of high enough rank to chat comfortably with a jennel, and half a dozen junior scholars or senior students a little older or younger than I was, but it was the three scholars who mattered and just then they were the only ones I noticed. We exchanged a few words and then I handed the copy of the letter over to them, and Jennel Cobey startled the stuffing out of me by handing them the original as well.

  We could have given them each a pound of gold or a dead rat, and I don’t think their faces would have moved any more than they did. One of them turned to one of the girls and held out her hand, without a word, and the girl handed her a hand lens; the scholar sat down and went over the original so slowly I think she must have looked at every fiber in the paper. The other two took the copy and read it, word by word, glancing at each other now and then; one would make a little nod or shake of the head to the other, and then they’d go on reading. The three of them were at it for more than a quarter hour, and then all of a sudden they turned to the official. Two of them nodded and the other, the one who’d used the lens, said, “Authentic.”

  The official beamed, and handed the original back to the jennel. “Well. Not that we had any doubts, of course.” Cobey allowed a broad smile, but didn’t say anything.

  “Can you tell us what it means?” I asked then.

  All at once three pairs of cold clear scholar’s eyes were looking at me, with exactly the same expression they would have turned on the dead rat. After a moment, one of them turned to one of the junior scholars, and said, “Eleen, you’ll prepare a translation.”

  That’s when I noticed Eleen: thin and bony, with lighter skin and redder hair than you usually see this side of Genda. She made a little curtsey to the scholar and glanced at me briefly with no particular interest, and then took the copy and left the room. I glanced after her, then turned back to the scholars and didn’t give her a second thought.

  That was how I first met her, and that’s also how I first saw Melumi. I got to know both a good deal better in the next few months, because the rains arrived. Nobody travels during the rainy months. Once the rains start, most roads end up waist deep in water or worse, riverboats tie up at the nearest town and get covered with tarps to keep from getting flooded and sunk, and everybody who goes outside gets used to being soaked right to the skin. If you’re traveling and the rains catch you, you stay wherever you are, with whoever else happens to be there, and you do what you need to do to get along; if that means a baby gets started or somebody’s life gets turned upside down, well, that’s what happens.

  Still, I was glad I could get to Melumi before the rains came down, so that Berry and I could spend a couple of months learning everything that was known about Star’s Reach. I admit that was maybe half an excuse for wanting to spend some time at Melumi, but there was some reason to it, and maybe some hope. If the scholars at Melumi could figure out all the strange words on the letter I’d found, one of them might point us in a direction nobody had looked before and then, just maybe, we’d be on our way to Star’s Reach.

  The first part of the plan worked fine. We got settled into a couple of rooms in the dorm they have for guests and visitors. I still had most of the money Gray Garman gave me back in Shanuga, so the cost of staying in the guests’ dorm until the rains ended wasn’t going to be a problem. It turned out to be even less of a problem than I thought, because when I went to talk to the old woman who ran the dorm about paying, she told me that Jennel Cobey was covering it. I still tried to be careful with what I had left, since I knew it might have to see us through a mother of a lot of travel before our search was over.

  We were at the dorm maybe two days, and the sky was getting full of dark heavy clouds, when a messenger came from the library to tell us that the translation was finished. Berry and I followed the messenger back across the big open square at the center of the Versty, ducking past scholars in gray robes and visitors staring goggle-eyed at the big brick buildings, and ended up in a little room with a table and some chairs and not much else in it. The messenger—she was a young thing, not much more than fifteen, with black hair pulled back tight from her face and eyes that looked a little frightened all the time—motioned for us to sit down and then left, closing the door behind her. A few minutes later the door opened again and Eleen came in.

  I recognized her from our arrival at Melumi, and said something polite, I don’t remember what. She replied with something just as memorable, and then sat down across the table from us and handed us a sheet of paper. This is what it said:

  TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH

  This was the highest level of secrecy; only people who were allowed to know about Star’s Reach could see it.

  PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV 54

  There is only this one page. It was sent on the eleventh of November 2054 in the old calendar, late in the afternoon.

  FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI

  It was sent by a Jennel Burkert, who was in charge of (something about) talking with beings who live on other worlds.

  TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF ORNL

  It was sent to the people who were trying to talk with beings who live on other worlds, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was near Orrij in Tenisi.

  1. (TS/SR) PROJ DIR LUKACS REPORTS EVAC COMPLETE FROM NRAO AND LANGLEY. ALL RECORDS AND STAFF SAFE. WRTF OPERATIONAL AND CETI INCOMING.

  The TS/SR means the same thing as the Top Secret/Star’s Reach at the beginning. Someone named Lukacz, who was in charge of the project, said that everything and everyone had been gotten out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which was in the mountains on the border between Jinya and Meriga, and Langle
y, which was close to Deesee and is now underwater. (Something) was working and talk from beings who live on other worlds was coming in.

  2. (TS/SR) POTUS/DNS/DCI ADVISED THAT PROJECT ONGOING DESPITE CRISIS.

  The presden and the two jennels who commanded Meriga’s spies had been told that even though there was trouble, the work hadn’t stopped.

  3. (TS/SR) TRANSPORT FOR ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF TO FOLLOW ASAP. INSTRUCTIONS VIA FEMA/GWEN WHEN SITUATION PERMITS.

  Someone was trying to get everyone working on that project out of the place near Orrij and take them to (something). As soon as possible, they would be told what to do by a special radio system the presden used when there was trouble.

  CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E X4

  Jennel Burkert ordered the message to be kept secret because it had scientific knowledge in it that nobody else was supposed to know. It was not going to be made public even after ten years because it showed how the presden planned to deal with certain kinds of trouble.

  TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED

  Means the same as the first line. This had to be put on everything that was this secret.

  I read through it twice, and then handed it to Berry. “Thank you,” I said to Eleen. “This is going to be helpful. Well, except—”

  She folded her hands in front of her and waited without saying a word.

  “The thing called WRTF.” Berry had already finished with the paper by then, and he handed it back to me. I took it, and tapped where the letter said ORNL PROJECT STAFF TO WRTF. “That’s where the people who were working on this thing were going, weren’t they? That might be Star’s Reach, the place I’m trying to find.”