Star's Reach Read online

  She tilted her head to one side, considering. “Possible,” she said after a moment. “It’s not in the books of acronyms, though.”

  Back then I had no idea what an acronym was, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Is there any other way to find out what it means?”

  “Maybe. It could take weeks or months, and there would be a fee, of course.”

  That set me back for a moment, and then I remembered what Jennel Cobey had said. “The jennel will pay for that,” I told her.

  Her eyebrows went up, and I could just about see her move me from a box in her mind marked “scruffy young ruinman” to another, not too far away from it, marked “scruffy young ruinman who knows somebody rich and powerful.” After a moment: “Then I can certainly do that.” She stood up. “Is there anything else?”

  “Well, yes. We want to spend the rains reading as much as we can about Star’s Reach. Is there somebody I can talk to about doing that?”

  That got another pair of raised eyebrows, and I went into a third box, this one marked “scruffy young ruinman who maybe isn’t as dumb as he looks.” “I can make the arrangements,” she said. “It will take a day or two to find you a cubicle.”

  “That’ll be fine,” I told her. “And there’s one more thing besides that.”

  She folded her hands again and waited.

  “The word on the back.” I’d remembered it the day before, sitting in our room in the guests’ dorm and staring at nothing much while evening closed in. “The one in gray writing.”

  “The word in pencil,” Eleen said. “Curtis. It’s a name, a common one back then. Probably the name of the person who received the message.”

  I thought of the dusty room deep in the Shanuga ruins where I’d found the letter, and the dead man in the heavy clothing of an old world soldier who was sprawled on the table next to it. Curtis, I thought, imagining someone calling him that when he was still alive. It all seemed to make sense, and because it seemed to make sense I didn’t ask the question that might have gotten me to Star’s Reach years sooner than I did.

  She asked if there was anything else, then, and when I said there wasn’t, smiled and nodded and left the room. Before I could do much more than draw in a breath the messenger took us out of the library. Berry and I followed her, went back to the guests’ dorm, and managed not to say anything to each other until we were safely in my room with the door shut.

  There were two chairs and a table in every room in the dorm, all of them exactly the same, and all probably salvaged from the same ruin. I put the translated letter down on the table. Berry settled into one of the chairs and leaned forward. “WRTF,” he said, spelling out the letters. “I figured that out about half a minute before you said it, Mister Trey.”

  “That that’s what we have to know?”

  He nodded. “That WRTF might be Star’s Reach.”

  “What else could it be?”

  He glanced up at me. “Someplace they were going first, before heading to Star’s Reach.”

  “Oh.” He was right, of course. “Well, we’ll hope it turns out to be Star’s Reach.”

  He grinned. “Even if it isn’t, if we know where they went from Tenisi, that’s a clue, and there might be other clues there.”

  That cheered me up a bit. I sat down next to him and we spent a couple of hours going over the letter and trying to figure out if it was telling us anything we weren’t hearing. Later that day I took the translated letter up the stairs to the top floor of the guests’ dorm, which is where rich and important guests got to stay, and spent an hour or so talking it over with Jennel Cobey.

  He read the thing over, tapped one finger on the letters WRTF, and said, “That’s the key. We’ll have to ask the scholars to find out what it means.”

  “Already done, Sir and Jennel,” I said. “The scholar I talked to said it would take a while—weeks or months.”

  He nodded once, as though that settled something. “With the rains so close, that’s hardly a problem.” To one of his servants: “Creel, have somebody take care of the fees.” Then he turned back to me and started peppering me with questions about the letter and the ruins it mentioned; I was glad that Berry and I had been over it earlier, because I would have been pretty fairly lost otherwise. Still, when I went back down to my room I was about as pleased as I could be, and Star’s Reach felt almost close enough to touch.

  The next day I had other things to think about, because the rains started. There were a few spatters on the windows when I first got up, and more a bit later on, and then about an hour before noon the skies opened up and the rain came down in great gray sheets. Any other plans Berry and I might have had went to wherever it is that might-have-beens spend their days, since the first day of the rains isn’t a day to get anything done. We dropped what we were doing and headed outside into the warm wet air and the warm streaming water.

  There’s about three hundred years of history behind that. After the old world ended but before the seas finished rising, there was a long time when most of Meriga was as dry as an old bone. There were plenty of places where it didn’t rain a drop for years on end, and even the places that did get rain got just a bit of it, now and then, so farmers never knew when they put seeds in the ground whether they were going to get a harvest or not. It was a hard and hungry time, and a lot of people died. After that, Mam Gaia decided that we’d had enough punishment, or that’s what the priestesses say; the ice down in Nardiga melted, the seas rose a lot more, and the rains came sweeping in for the first time, the way they do every year now. Everybody danced and partied in the falling rain, so the story goes, and everybody still dances and parties the day the rains come, all over Meriga.

  Everyone from the Versty was heading into the town, and we followed them. I don’t have the least idea what Berry did, since I did what most people do when the rains come; I let myself get lost in the crowd and end up wherever I happened to end up. In my case it was a string of bars along a narrow little street off one side of the Melumi town square, getting thoroughly drunk on cheap whiskey and dancing in the rain with local girls who felt like being a little daring, or maybe just this once didn’t care that I was a ruinman.

  Somewhere in the middle of all that, a half dozen or so of the young scholars from the Versty came into whatever bar I was in, and one of them was Eleen. We danced, and then spun away with other partners, and then ended up dancing together again. She was about as drunk as I was, and not as good at keeping her feet, so when that dance ended we stumbled our way over to a booth over to the side, and one thing led to another. One thing fairly often leads to another on the first day of the rains, but to this day I’m not exactly sure how we ended up at a rooming house a couple of doors away, in a narrow little upstairs room with a narrow little bed, going at it like a couple of cats in heat and then curling up around each other, wet and drunk and happy.

  The next morning I held her hair out of the way while she threw up into the chamberpot, helped her get close enough to presentable to pass muster at the scholars’ dorm, and got her back there. I wasn’t in the world’s best shape myself, but we’d matched each other drink for drink there for a while, and there’s a lot less of her to handle the whiskey. Me, I dragged myself back to my room in the guests’ dorm, slept for most of the day, and woke up thinking that the thing with Eleen was just one of those things that happens when the rains come, over and mostly forgotten once the whiskey wears off. I was wrong, but I wouldn’t find that out for a couple of years, and both of us had a long hard road to travel first.

  Thirteen: The Yellow Butterfly

  I came in here to write about two hours ago, after one of those uncomfortable meals where nobody has anything to say but nobody wants silence, either, so each of us tried to say nothing in as many words as possible, and failed. Berry and I spent all day tracing cables, more to have something to do than for any better reason, and we found two more rooms full of machinery with lights on and electricity humming to itself in the air; we go
t back upstairs to find Eleen and Tashel Ban still hunched over their work, and the last meal of the day mostly ready.

  So we ate, and tried to find something to say, and then I came here to the room Eleen and I are sharing and sat down to write. All I did for what seemed like a long time was look at the blank paper and think about what we were doing here, and whether we’d come all this way to read messages from another world or just to dig up Meriga’s last really big heap of scrap metal. Finally, I picked up the pen and got ready to write, and damn if it wasn’t then that I heard footsteps in the hall outside.

  It was Eleen, and if an alien from some other world had suddenly popped out of the computer and shaken her hand I don’t think her face would have been more surprised or more delighted. “Trey,” she said, and tried to say something else, and couldn’t; and then just said, “You’ve got to come.”

  So I came. Tashel Ban was tapping on the other doors, letting people know, so by the time we got back to the computer everyone else was either heading that way or already there. “You found something,” Berry said, which was what I was thinking too.

  “If I ever ignore one of your suggestions,” Tashel Ban told him, “ you have my permission to hit me with a stick.”

  Berry blinked, then: “The program?”

  “That’s the one. We were able to find close to a hundred program files, and one of them turned out to be a recovery program. So we’ve got our first readable text.”

  “What does it say?” This from Thu.

  “Have a look.” Tashel Ban waved a hand at the computer screen.

  We all crowded around the screen. This is what it said:

  28 Mar 2109

  To: Executive Committee Members

  From: Donna Kitzhaber VC Security

  Foley and Benedetti got back from Kansas City last night. A full report will follow after debriefing; the short version is that right now there’s no central government to receive our report, much less do anything about it. Our logistics team in KC can’t get any details about the progress of the fighting in the southeast or the Japanese refugee situation on the Pacific coast, other than that both are bad and ongoing; the team’s running short of almost everything and they want to return here while the roads are still open. We’re going to have to figure out soon how much of an operation we can keep going here without outside help, whether there’s a point to doing so, and what if anything we’re going to tell the CETI team and the support staff.

  -- DK

  I’d be willing to bet that every one of us read it through twice, except for Anna, who glanced over it, nodded, and said, “I knew a family named Kitzhaber.”

  “Friends of your parents?” Tashel Ban asked her.

  “I think so. I used to play with their daughter, before we left.” She didn’t say anything else. I don’t know if it’s just that she’s old and doesn’t remember things that well, or if she still has all her memories and just doesn’t talk about them; I’m starting to think the second is more likely than the first, but that’s a guess at best.

  “So what does it mean?” I asked Eleen.

  “2109 in the old calendar is just over three hundred fifty years ago,” she said. “The Second Civil War was going on then, so it’s no wonder they couldn’t find a government.”

  “That’s the one with the three presdens?” Tashel Ban asked.

  “Exactly. The rest, well, we’ll see what else we can get out of the computer.”

  “I wonder what the report was,” Berry said then. “The one the letter mentions.”

  Tashel Ban glanced at him, nodded after a moment. “I was wondering that myself. We may just try to find it next.”

  “Not tonight, I hope,” I said. I was thinking about the haggard look on Eleen’s face.

  “No,” said Tashel Ban. “No, not tonight.”

  It wasn’t too much later that I got Eleen tucked into our bed and sleeping, but I had too many thoughts and memories running through my head to sleep, so after her breathing settled and slowed I crawled out from under the blankets and sat down at the table again.

  When I wrote about how I met Eleen, that got me thinking again about Tam, and a part of the story of how I got here to Star’s Reach that I meant to write earlier and didn’t. It’s even more out of place here than it was when I was explaining how I became a ruinman and how Berry and I left Shanuga, but it’s got to go in somewhere, and it might as well go here.

  There’s another reason Tam’s story might as well go here, too, because I met Tam pretty much the same way I met Eleen, at the start of the rains. I was sixteen then, and one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices. We’d just finished hauling everything back from the Shanuga ruins at the end of the season, racing the rain clouds as they marched up from the south. That was hard work, and there was plenty more of the same just ahead, getting the tools and gear cleaned and repaired for next season and getting them packed away where they belonged.

  Still, the end of a season’s always a glad time unless the season’s been a mother of a mess, and this one had been pretty good. We’d only had three prentices get reborn that year, and two of them brought it on themselves by getting cocky and taking stupid risks. The building we stripped had plenty of metal, enough to pay for a couple of bad seasons; it also had a bunch of old broken computer gear in a room we had to dig our way into, three levels down into the underplaces where looters hadn’t been. Best of all, I’d found a couple of metal chairs buried in rubble, and small finds like that are a prentice’s to keep or sell if he wants to. I sold them to the metal merchants, and ended up with a nice bit of money in my pocket.

  So I was feeling pleased with myself that day, as we sorted out the shovels and picks—this one’s fine, that one needs filing, that other one needs a trip to the blacksmith—and the clouds we could see through the windows turned from white to gray to dark gray to that inky blue-black that means Mam Gaia’s about to cut loose on you good and proper. It took an effort to pay attention to the tools, and when the thunder finally rolled and a first flurry of fat raindrops spattered against the windows, we gave up trying and pounded down the stairs to the street.

  The younger prentices stayed there in the ruinmen’s quarter, splashing each other with water and getting into half-playful fights with the other misters’ prentices. The half dozen of us who counted as senior prentices, though, headed toward the town gate and the buildings just outside it. We couldn’t go in, not without some good reason the guards would believe, but there were taverns where a boy of sixteen could get small beer if he was polite to the tavernkeeper, and shops where you could buy any number of little useless things, and prentices from some of the other crafts that were outside the walls; and there were also girls.

  That’s one of the things about being a ruinman’s prentice. Most of the crafts only take boys as prentices—well, boys and tweens, who count as boys according to Circle and the priestesses. With girls, there’s always the chance they can have healthy babies, in which case they go into Circle and whatever time the mister’s put into their training goes dancing down the four free winds. There are a fair number of guilds that will take women who’ve had their twenty without a baby, but the ruinmen aren’t one of them.

  What that means is that if you’re a ruinman’s prentice, eight or nine months of the year you’re someplace where the only woman you’re likely to see is one failed scholar three or four times your age, and unless you happen to fancy men rather than women, you’re pretty much out of luck. When I was ten and I was first working at the ruins, that didn’t matter to me a bit, but by the time I was sixteen it was starting to feel like an inconvenience.

  So when the senior prentices go to the buildings piled up around the little southern gate of Shanuga by the ruinmen’s hall, a good many of them have girls on their mind. You can find girls there, too, and not just the kind who can be hired for the afternoon for a dozen marks or so. There are trades besides ours that have their place outside the walls for the same reason we do, because peopl
e think they’re dirty or shameful or toxic; some of those are family trades, and the girls from those families won’t get into Circle no matter how many babies they have, so when they get old enough, if they’re interested in boys, they make friends with prentices from the ruinmen, the chemists, the burners, and so on. You also get girls who aren’t born healthy but whose families for one reason or another won’t let the birth women put a pillow over their faces when they’re born. There are trades that take them young and train them, the way the guilds take and train prentices, and those are outside the walls too.

  Now and then, though, you also find girls from good families who come there because they want to feel like they’re being wild and taking risks, and that’s more or less what happened on the day I was talking about. Conn and I were inside one of the taverns with a couple of glasses of small beer we’d wheedled from a friendly barkeeper, having spent a good two hours splashing and shouting and getting into a friendly fistfight or two with a couple of prentices from the burners—there’s an old rivalry there, since they burn the bodies of dead people and we handle a lot of bodies from the old world.

  There we were, and the rest of the tavern was full of wet happy people, but it was a bit quiet for the day the rains come, and after a while I saw why. There were two girls sitting at a little table up against the wall in a quiet corner. One looked excited and embarrassed and the other just looked embarrassed, and from the clothes they were wearing nobody in the tavern had any reason to doubt that their mothers could buy the tavern and everyone in it with spare change from their pockets and not notice the difference.