Star's Reach Read online

  Hinges yelled as I shouldered the door open and raised my lamp. Garman and the others pressed close behind me. The light showed a metal frame that once held two beds, one atop the other, against the wall to the right; shreds of a curtain failed to hide the toilet next to it. Shelves along the far wall would have held food and water once, and there were two long things, guns almost certainly. Over to the left, not quite against the wall, was a table with dusty shapes on it I didn’t recognize at first.

  We were most of the way to the table before I realized we weren’t alone in the room. The other person there was a long way past greeting us, though. He was sitting at the table with his head and shoulders slumped forward; bits of bone showed through what was left of the stiff heavy clothing the old world put on its soldiers. A sheet of cracked and yellowed paper was under the bones of one of his hands, and right next to that was a box with dials and buttons, probably a radio. I stared at him for a long moment, then made the blessing sign, even though he’d been there long enough that even his ghost must have been dead by then.

  I glanced around the room again. You could see the last weeks or months of the man’s life written there plain enough. He must have hidden there in the last years of the old world, and sat by the radio day by day while the food and water dwindled, waiting for some message that came too late if it came at all. There must have been thousands of stories like that, since ruinmen find such things pretty often.

  “Well,” said Garman. He’d already examined the guns, and went to the radio. “The guns are in fine condition. This—” He motioned toward the box on the table. “—won’t work any more, but we’ll get plenty for it. Conn?”

  Conn was his senior prentice now, and had been searching the shelves. “A couple of small machines—I’m not sure what they are—and bullets for the guns.”

  “Good. I know gunsmiths who’d sell their eyeballs to get those. Now let’s see what this has to say—” He moved the bones of the dead man’s hand away from the yellow paper, and I raised the lamp as the others crowded around. This is what it said.

  TOP SECRET/STAR’S REACH

  PAGE 01 OF 01 R 111630Z NOV 34

  FM: GEN BURKERT DRCETI

  TO: CETI PROJECT STAFF ORNL

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

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

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

  CLASS BURKERT DRCETI RSN 1.5E X4

  TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED

  We all looked up from the paper and at each other. “Mother of Life,” said Garman. “Well.” He said no more, nor needed to. The words hung in the dry air. I can still hear them in my mind, wrapped up in the silence of that place of beginnings and endings.

  That was five years ago. Today the promise of the words on that brittle yellow paper became real, for me and for the others who came with me—Thu, Tashel Ban, Berry, Eleen, and old Anna, for whom all this is the closing of a circle and not the opening of a door. It’s been a long road and I won’t pretend it was an easy one, but we finally reached the place where, if the stories are true, the last big secret of the old world lies waiting.

  As I write these words, we’ve settled for the night in what were probably living quarters two levels below the surface. The rooms in this part of the ruin are bare concrete and not much else, but they’re dry and not too dusty, and there’s plenty of space for the supplies we brought here. One lantern lights up the room where I sit; we turned off the others to save battery power. Eleen sleeps with her head in my lap, brown hair fallen all anyhow under my hand. The others are asleep too, except for Thu, who never sleeps.

  We dodged a miserable death getting in through the door, and killed to do it. I don’t doubt we’ll have plenty of other chances to die before we find what we came for, if we find it at all. Still, it’s a grand thing to have finally gotten to Star’s Reach.

  Two: Stories to the Dark

  I must have been eight years old when I first heard of Star’s Reach, since my father told me the story, and that happened not long before he was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. It was a night a couple of weeks after the rains, I remember that, and we were out on the porch of the little two-room shack where we lived then, my father, my mother and me, enjoying the cool air after a hot damp day and a dinner of rice and greens and a rabbit my mother snared that morning. My mother had her spindle with her, as she usually did, and her arm rose and fell as she drew cotton out into yarn for weaving; my father sat back in his chair and puffed at a clay pipe; I lay on my belly right on the edge of the porch and stared off across the garden in front of our house toward the great dark shadow of the forest and the not-so-dark sky above it, blazing with stars. Fireflies danced between me and the forest, and I made believe that some of the stars had come down to play in the still air.

  My mother’s voice, high and soft, and my father’s, measured and rumbling, wove in and out of each other behind me. I had other things to mind just then, notably the fireflies, and so didn’t hear a word of what they were saying until my mother let out a sharp little yelp. That made me roll over and sit up, facing them.

  “No,” she was saying. “Maddy’s boy?”

  “The one,” said my father. “Came back to their farm yesterday evening sicker’n a dog. They had a doctor come out, and then a priestess, but he was already too far gone.”

  “Do they know...”

  “He’d been out to the ruins. He was babbling about Star’s Reach before he died.”

  A long moment of silence went past. “Then it was his own fault,” my mother said, in a hard brittle voice that wasn’t like her at all. “People who go messing around in those places deserve what they get.”

  My father said nothing. After a while I asked, “Pappy, what’s Star’s Reach?”

  “Never you mind,” my mother told me in the same brittle voice, but my father said, “He’ll hear it soon or late, Gwen. Might as well be the true story, and not whatever lies sent young Calley off to die.”

  She let out a sharp sigh, but did not argue. My father took a long slow draw from his pipe, let the smoke trickle out, and said, “The stars are suns like ours, just a lot farther away. They teach you that at school yet, boy?”

  “Yep,” I told him; the priestess who taught us at the temple down in the village had said something about it that very week.

  “Good. Those suns have worlds turning around ‘em, the way Mam Gaia turns around our sun, and in the old days they thought there were people on some of those other worlds. Not people like us. A-lee-in, they used to call ‘em: that means different.”

  “Different how?” I wanted to know.

  “That’s just it. Nobody knew. You know the spyglass Cullen has?” I did, and wanted one of my own desperately just then. “In the old days they made spyglasses big as this farm and chucked ‘em up in the sky so they could see the stars better, and even through those, the other worlds were smaller’n a pinprick. They’re that far away. But the people who live on those worlds, if there are any, aren’t Mam Gaia’s children. Maybe they’ve got purple skin, and eyes like bugs, and big claws to git you with.” His hands turned into claws and lunged toward me, and I squealed with laughter and rolled back out of reach.

  “Back in the old days they tried all kinds of ways to figure out if there were people on those other worlds,” my father went on. “Finally, so the story goes, somebody figured that they probably used radios, same as we do, and started listening. Of course the other worlds are so far away the signal’s less’n a whisper by the time it gets to us.”

  “Like the Sisnaddi station,” I said. We had a little crystal radio, and sometimes at night, if you jiggled the thing just right, you could just hear the big station at Sisnaddi playing patriotic music and talking abou
t the news.

  “Like that, but so much fainter you can’t imagine it. So they built antennas big as towns and radios bigger’n this house, and when those didn’t do the job, they built even bigger ones. Finally, just about the time the old world ended, they built the biggest antennas and radios of all, at a place called Star’s Reach, and the story is that they did it. They got a message by radio from one of those other worlds, circling one of the suns out there.” His gesture swept across the stars.

  He said nothing for a long moment, and finally I asked, “What did it say?”

  “Nobody knows.” He took another draw from the pipe, breathed out a plume of smoke that scented the night around him. “They got the message, the story says, and it got passed around to all the scholars they had in those days, who could figure things out like that, but nobody could work out what it meant. Then the old world ended and the lights went out forever and that was the end of it.

  “But that wasn’t really the end of it.” His voice went low, and dead serious. “Because ever since the old world ended, people have gotten so caught up in that story that they’ve gone off into the ruins looking for Star’s Reach, hoping they can find the message and figure out what it means. And it kills them, the way it killed Calley. He must have gotten too close to something nuclear, and it poisoned his bones and his blood. There’s plenty of that, and plenty of other poisons that choke you or blind you or get in through your skin and leave you twisting like a half-dry earthworm before you die, and plenty of pits you can fall into and old rotten towers to fall on you and squash you like a bug.

  “And here’s the thing. Nobody’s ever found Star’s Reach, or anything to show that Star’s Reach was ever a real place. It might just be a story. They used to tell lots of make-believe stories, in the old days, about all those other worlds and what might be out there. The whole business about Star’s Reach might be one of those, and Calley and all the others who went looking for it and died were chasing something that was never real at all.”

  “Wicked,” said my mother then. I turned to face her. None of us were more than shadows in the dim light just then, but even now I’m half sure I could see her shoulders and her face drawn up in hard unfamiliar lines. “That’s what they are, the ones who try to dig up the secrets of the old world. What’s dead is dead, for good reason, and there’s nothing good to be gotten from dabbling in the corpse.”

  “I don’t see you turn up your nose at metal from the ruins,” my father reminded her.

  “If the priestesses hadn’t blessed it first I’d do without,” she said. “But I’m not talking about the ruinmen. They’re doing Mam Gaia’s work, tearing down what’s left of the old world and selling us the metal so we can leave the trees to grow and the land to heal. It’s the people who won’t let the old world stay dead, those are the ones I mean. They deserve what they get.”

  My father didn’t answer. After a while, I lay down on the porch again and tried to lose myself in the darting of the fireflies and the slow wheeling of the sky. It was no use; my father’s story would not leave my mind. A message from another world seemed just then to be written out across the night sky, blazing in starry letters I couldn’t quite read. The fireflies had changed as well; they had stopped being stars, wandering or not; their pale gleam made me think of the way that the eyes of ghosts are supposed to glow, and then they were the eyes of the ghosts of all the people like Calley who died looking for Star’s Reach, looking up at the a-lee-in letters they could no more read than I. I shivered, though the night was warm enough, and tried to forget what my father had said.

  I kept thinking about Star’s Reach for a couple of days after that, before something else pushed it out of my mind. Still, I remembered all of it the next time somebody mentioned Star’s Reach to me. That happened not long after I became a ruinman’s prentice, when I was ten, and still learning how to take apart a ruin for its metal without getting reborn in the process. Like the other first year prentices, I didn’t go into the ruins much; my place was in camp, where I helped with cooking and cleaning part of the time, and part of the time got taught by a senior prentice how to handle tools and tie knots and do all the other things ruinmen need to be able to do. It was as dull as it sounds, especially with the gray broken shapes of the ruins rising up toward the sky so close to camp that you could just about hit the nearest concrete with a thrown pebble.

  One evening right after dinner Conn and I were doing the dishes. We were the same age and prenticed with Gray Garman the same year, and we both came from farm families in the hills west of Shanuga where Tenisi and Joja run with the part of Cairline that belongs to us and not the coastal allegiancies, so it was probably a safe bet that we’d end up either good friends or blood enemies. Fortunately we got along well. Conn had a big family on a farm up somewhere near Chicamog, and I didn’t have any family left at all by that time, so I liked to listen to him talk about his brothers and sisters and cousins and imagine that I had a big family too.

  Earlier that day he got a letter from his family—well, it was actually from the priestess at the temple near where his family lived, since nobody in the family knew how to write, but she took down they wanted to say and then wrote it out for them. Back then, Coll was just learning to read and hadn’t gotten good at it yet, so he brought me each letter he got, and when we had spare time I’d pick through the words one by one and tell him what they said. Every so often, when he’d sold enough wire and other metal scrap to pay the postman’s fee, he’d have me write out a letter to his family and send it to Chicamog for the priestess to read to everyone.

  Most times the letters he got were just the usual sort of thing you’d expect from a poor farm family up in the hills. The time I’m thinking of, though, there was real news: one of his brothers was in the army, and came home on leave telling stories of some jennel from the presden’s court who thought he knew where Star’s Reach was. He brought scholars with him to Orrij, up north of us, where there used to be a place for scholars before the old world ended.

  “I hope they find it,” Conn said as he washed a plate. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “I want to read a message from the a-lee-ins,” I said.

  “What’s a-lee-ins?”

  “Creatures out there.” I waved a hand at the sky, as though I knew what I was talking about. “Not people like us. Not Mam Gaia’s children at all.”

  He considered that. “I bet they have three eyes.”

  “I bet they have claws like a crawfish.”

  “I bet they have three legs and seven arms.”

  “I bet they have bright blue skin.”

  “I bet they have their faces on their backsides,” Conn said then, grinning. I aimed a swat at him, which he ducked, and we both laughed and went on to talk about something else.

  We heard later that the jennel and the scholars didn’t find anything, and I learned a lot later that they hadn’t been the first to look there, either. Still, when we were done washing the dishes and getting the kitchen ready for the breakfast crew, we walked back across the open space in the middle of the camp to the tent where all the first year prentices slept. The fireflies were coming out beneath the stars, and all at once I remembered lying there on the porch of the little shack, when the fireflies looked like the eyes of ghosts.

  I thought about both those nights and the pale ghost-eyes looking up at the stars that morning deep down in the Shanuga ruins, as we stood staring at a piece of paper that everyone from the scholars at Melumi to the jennels of the presden’s court to backwoods farm boys like Calley sunna Maddy had been chasing after for more years than I could count. In the flickering light of Gray Garman’s lantern, I suppose we all must have looked a little like ghosts ourselves.

  “Well,” said Garman again, and the moment passed. “Mister Trey, you got some resin?”

  The scholars at Melumi brew a resin that can be sprayed out of a bulb onto old paper, to keep it from going to bits. Garman taught me years ago always to carry s
ome when searching a ruin, in case something written turned up that was worth selling. I pulled a bulb out of the sack at my belt and squirted the resin in a fine mist all over the paper. Stink of the solvent wrestled with the dust and concrete smells of a fresh ruin, and lost. I turned the paper over once the resin was dull and dry, and was most of the way through spraying the other side—an even coat, not too much, just the way I’d been taught—when I noticed the writing there.

  It was one word only, in the pale gray writing they made sometimes in the old days: CURTIS. I glanced up at Garman, saw no more understanding in his face than must have showed in mine. For lack of anything useful to say, I finished spraying the paper and put the bulb away.

  “You got a choice, Mister Trey,” Garman said then. “One find from this room is yours by right, but this—” His gesture indicated the paper. “—is two. You can have it, or you can have the finder’s rights to what’s on it, but damn if I’m giving you both.”

  The paper would be worth hundreds of marks, maybe more, to the scholars at Melumi, enough to set me up as a ruinman with prentices of my own. Finder’s rights might be worth much more or much less; they meant that if anyone followed the paper’s lead to a site, I had rights to a share of it. Among the better sort of ruinmen, it also meant that other misters would give me first shot at finding whatever the paper might lead toward, and start looking for it only when it was pretty much clear that I had failed. I knew which one I ought to choose, and I knew which one I wanted to choose, and damn if I could decide between them right then. “That I’m going to have to think about,” I told him.