Star's Reach Read online

  “On our way to a job in Cago,” I said.

  “Well, drat.” He was getting on in years, with gray all through his hair and beard and a couple of nasty scars along his face. “We’ve got us a nice clean ruin here and not half enough hands to make the most of it. Name’s Cob.”

  “Trey,” I said, and shook his hand. “My prentice here’s Berry.”

  “Sam.” A motion of his head indicated his prentice, a boy about Berry’s age. “Surely you’re at least looking for someplace to spend the night.”

  “Crossed our minds.”

  He grinned. “Consider it done. Where you fellows from?”

  So I told him, and we got to talking, and pretty soon Berry and I were helping him and Sam load the last of the pipe into the wagon, because that’s what you do if you’re a ruinman and you’re staying at somebody else’s site. By the time we were done, Cob had explained that he’d be taking the wagon down to Lebna, the nearest town, when morning came around, and offered Berry and me a ride that far. Of course we agreed, and helped him with a couple of other bits of lifting and hauling while the daylight was still good, because again, that’s what you do.

  Later on, the lot of us ate stew and pan bread in a room Cob and Sam had cleared in the main building of the nuke. We were close enough to where the containment vessel would have gone that we’d all have been dead in minutes if it wasn’t an empty, but that didn’t bother me any. Berry and I told as much of the news from Shanuga as we could without mentioning Star’s Reach, and Cob had plenty of news about Tucki and some from Sisnaddi itself, which after all is just across the river from Tucki. They’d been driving the wagon down to Lebna every week or so to sell metal, buy supplies, and listen to the gossip, so some of it was pretty recent, too.

  I don’t remember most of it. I was tired, and being around another ruinman made me a bit homesick for the Shanuga ruins and the people I knew, but one thing I do remember. “They say Sheren’s taken sick,” Cob said. “Mam Gaia bless her, she’s been presden what, near forty years now? I’d always figured she’d outlast me, and I hope she does. There’s going to be a mother of a mess when she goes, they say.”

  I wasn’t at all sure what he meant by that. “Been a while since we had an election,” I said, guessing that might be it.

  “And it might be longer before we have another one. There’s some who’d rather cast their vote with guns.” He shook his head. “Damn fools. Like they’d gain anything by that.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. A moment later, though, I happened to look Berry’s way, and he was staring into the fire with an expression I’d never seen on him before, eyes wide and mouth shut tight and every line of his face holding something in. He noticed me looking at him, then, and put on a different expression, fast, but I’d seen the earlier one, and wondered about that for the rest of the evening.

  Seven: The Way of Ruins

  One of the things that makes this story hard to tell in a straight line is that so much of it has to do with ruins, and ruins have their own way of doing things. They all have stories to tell, but they don’t tell them from beginning to end, the way that Eleen and Tashel Ban say I ought to tell the story I’m trying to write here. Ruins know how to wait, seeing as they’ve had plenty of practice at it. They say a word here and a word there, and it’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t figure out what they mean by those words the first time you hear them.

  If you’re a ruinman’s prentice, you either learn that quick or you get reborn, because more often than not, if a ruin’s going to kill somebody, it starts saying that to the ruinmen in its own roundabout way days or weeks before anything happens. I wrote something a while back about Shem sunna Janny, who became a prentice the same year Conn and I did, and who looked at Mam Kelsey’s book with me. He wasn’t stupid, but he never did figure out how to listen to a ruin, and so he was pulling wire out of a conduit one morning in a building we’d started taking down when something inside gave way all at once, and a couple of floors came crashing down on top of him.

  The ruin had been saying that it was going to kill someone since we started work on it that year. When the wind blew, it creaked and shifted, and when we chopped pieces of it loose and dropped them into a clear space below, it creaked and shifted some more. Now of course plenty of ruins creak and shift, and there are some that don’t and still end up dropping on somebody, but that’s the way of ruins; you have to listen to them talk, and then sometimes you can figure out enough to keep from getting reborn. The other prentices stayed away from the ruin that flapjacked on Janny when they didn’t have to go there, even though it had plenty of wire and other things prentices can salvage. Janny didn’t, and that was why we had to haul more concrete than I like to think about to get to his body so a priestess could say the litany for him and we could leave him out underneath the sky for the wild things to bring back into the circle.

  That’s the way ruins are. They tell you what you need to know, but you can’t ever count on having an easy time figuring out what they’re saying. The ruin in Shanuga where I found the dead man’s letter and nearly got reborn was like that. It told me everything I needed to walk straight here to Star’s Reach, but I didn’t figure out what it was trying to tell me until I’d been to Melumi and Troy, and traveled down the Misipi in a steamboat, and gone digging in the Arksa jungle, and spent my time in Sisnaddi half buried in the old archives, and went looking for the place where every question has an answer near drowned Deesee, and all the rest of it.

  It took me all of that to figure out that a single word I’d noticed and then half forgotten was the one thing I needed to understand. Every ruin I’ve ever gotten to know has been like that, and Star’s Reach is like that doubled, tripled, and with whiskey poured on top.

  If I had any doubts that Star’s Reach was like that, they got neatly laid to rest earlier today. We’ve been searching the whole underground complex here level by level and room by room, looking for the place old Anna remembers, where her mother and father and the other people who used to live and work here had their living quarters, their books and records, and the old computers they’d kept running or cobbled together out of old parts. As far as we can tell, the door where we first got into Star’s Reach let us into a part of the complex that no one lived in for most of four hundred years. That’s why the lights don’t work; the current got shut off a long time ago, and the switches that did the shutting are someplace we haven’t found so far.

  We haven’t found the place where Anna was born and her parents lived, not yet, but we found something else almost as important. There’s a big corridor on fourth level, wide as a road, that runs most of the way from one end of the complex to the other. All the stairways either open onto it or connect to corridors that do, and the boxes the ancients used to go up and down from floor to floor when they didn’t want to use the stairs—there’s a word for those, but I forget what it is—those are all close to that corridor too. It’s close to five kloms long, and it’s big and dark and full of echoes, especially when the only people in it are two ruinmen with a little electric lamp, and the layer of dust on the floor pretty clearly hasn’t been bothered in a good long time.

  The first time Berry and I found that corridor, we walked all the way to the end of it, and didn’t notice much of anything except the doors and corridors that opened off it. We must have walked down it again half a dozen times, doing a rough search of the fourth level and looking for signs that people had been there recently. It wasn’t until Berry and I were coming back from the last of those that he noticed that a long blank wall toward the middle of the complex, had a little black screen on the middle of the wall, just sitting there doing nothing in particular.

  He stopped and looked at it, and called me back to it, and it wasn’t until then that we noticed that the long blank wall had seams in it. I guessed what it was, about half a minute after Berry did, and so he ran to get old Anna while I looked over the fingerprint lock. Those are common enough in old
ruins, but I’d never heard of anybody who managed to open one except with pry bars and saws, or maybe a keg of gunpowder.

  Berry brought everyone else with him, too, which I’d expected, but Anna was ahead of the others. She walked up to the screen, studied it for a few moments, and gave me one of her sidelong looks. “Do you want me to open it?” she asked, as though there was any question.

  I nodded. “If you think it’ll recognize you.”

  That got me a smile that didn’t have the least bit of humor in it. “Of course it will,” she said. “All the children had their prints entered as soon as they were born.” She put one of her fingers flat against the screen and rolled it back and forth a bit, and damn if the screen didn’t suddenly light up and turn from black to green.

  Then the rumbling started. I thought for just a moment that it might be an earthquake, and it certainly shook the corridor like one, but it was just old gears that hadn’t moved for something like a century. All of us but Anna watched with our mouths hanging open as a section of the blank wall slid back a good half meeda, split in the middle, and slid away to either side. Inside was pitch black, and then we raised our lamps and walked forward into one of the secret places of Star’s Reach.

  The ancients had a lot of places like the one we entered, and no one, not even Plummer, has ever been able to tell me why. They’re like mazes, with flimsy shoulder-high walls of some kind of plastic foam and fabric, all rotted by the time we get to them, held up with metal posts; in every nook of the maze there’s a desk, and usually a chair, and if you’re lucky there’s an old computer sitting on or under each desk, or at least some pieces of one that can be stripped for metal and parts. Sometimes there are other things too. Ruinmen love finding places like that, because you can break up the flimsy walls and take apart the desks and chairs and things without any risk of bringing the ceiling down on you, and the metal’s worth quite a bit even if there aren’t any computers left. What made so many of the ancients spend their days in places like that is another question, and one I can’t begin to answer.

  I didn’t have to wonder what the people who used to work at Star’s Reach were doing in their maze, though. It was a big one, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Shanuga; a lot of the computers had obviously been stripped for parts a long time back, but the hulks were still there and so were the wires, linking each one to the others, and to dusty shapes on a table along one wall. “Printers,” Tashel Ban said; he went down the row of them, pushing something on them, and little red lights started blinking on the sides of a couple of them. Above the printers were shelves, and on the shelves were books of a sort; they were each a good six or eight senamees thick, with covers on both ends, but the paper in the middle had been punched and fastened together with a bit of flimsy metal instead of being properly bound. That’s what we found out when Eleen pulled one down and opened it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She couldn’t say a word, just looked at me as though somebody had walked up behind her and hit her over the head, so I went and looked over her shoulder. I’d guessed by then what the books had to be, but seeing what was on the page was something else again –

  DATE RECD 04232112

  197606348 671934867 130486713 496710396 713673104 975132348 240618946 720394352 797062309 475102346 713949751 309486723 094896713 049571304 986703047 246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 670479587 624390567 249567495 876340958

  – and so on for page after page after page. Every page had DATE RECD and a number on the top, and I could guess well enough what that meant.

  By the time I was up to noticing much of anything beside the page, everyone else but Anna had gathered around, and they were staring at the numbers pretty much the way Eleen and I were doing. After a long moment, Tashel Ban turned and walked down the row of shelves and printers, pulled down another book, and opened it. “Same thing,” he said. “There must be a couple of hundred of them.”

  That’s how we found one of the things we came to Star’s Reach to find, the reason Star’s Reach itself was built: the messages from some other world around some other star that came to the old world, our old world, right when it was falling apart. We might have found them days earlier or days later, but that’s the way of ruins; they choose their own time to tell you things.

  We searched the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much else there, just the maze with its desks and stripped computers, and the long table with the printers and the books above it. Then we went back and checked every single one of the books—there were two hundred twelve of them—to make sure they were all just the same strings of numbers, and none of the people who sat at those computers had managed to turn the numbers into words and read the messages. Anna says that she thinks they managed it, at least partway. That’s what her mother and father and the rest of them were doing, up to the time that they left Star’s Reach for good, but if that happened none of it got left there in the room we had found.

  Eventually we finished searching and came back to the room where we’re staying. Eleen took the very first book off the shelf and brought it with her. She says she wants to try to figure out if there’s a pattern in the numbers, and I’m sure she’ll give that a try, but I think one of us would have brought one of the books back with us even if she hadn’t come up with that reason. You don’t come this close to the old world’s biggest secret and then just leave it sitting on a shelf, even if you can’t figure out a blessed thing of what it means.

  Still, as I sit here at the desk in the corner of our room and smell dinner cooking, what keeps coming to mind are some of the other times that ruins have handed me a secret, and for some reason the one that I remember best just now is a place that isn’t a ruin yet, but might just become one in a hurry once Sheren dies: the archives in Sisnaddi, where I spent most of a year. They’re in the bottom couple of floors of a big building close to the Presden’s palace, and it’s pretty dark because there isn’t enough electricity for more than a few lamps, so it was easy enough, when I was there, to think that I was in a ruin.

  I suppose I was, in a way. Everything they had in the archives, I found out one day, was what got gathered up from Deesee and hauled inland to Sisnaddi when the ice broke up in a place called Greenlun and slid into the sea, and the seas rose fast and hard everywhere around the world. It was done in such a rush that everything got jumbled together, and the archivists were still trying to sort things out when they weren’t looking things up for jennels and cunnels at the presden’s court who wanted some bit of fancy stuff from the past to pad out a proclamation or the like. A lot of the books went to Melumi, but the records of the old presdens and their courts—or as much as they could get out of Deesee as the sea came rushing in—all stayed in Sisnaddi in the archives, shelves after shelves of big books and binders reaching off into the darkness.

  I learned that story, and a lot more, because I’d already learned the way of ruins, and didn’t try to make the archives or the archivists give me what I wanted right away. After I’d been at the archives for a few weeks, one of the archivists let me know in that quiet, offhand way of theirs about the little corner by two tall windows where people gathered for lunch every day. Every day there’d be a big pot of soup or something brought over from the kitchens of the presden’s court, and after a big formal dinner there might be other things, pastries or cabbage rolls or what have you. One time we got a suckling pig without a single slice cut out of it, and we all feasted like dons in Meyco.

  There, sitting with the archivists and the handful of other people who were searching for something, was where I learned most of what I found in the archives. When there didn’t seem to be any way forward after all, and I went to Deesee and finally found out the one thing I needed to know, it’s because I spent all those noon hours eating soup with the archivists that I was able to go to them and tell them what I’d learned, and walk out of there with the secret of Star’s Reach not three hours later.

  That’s the way ruins are, and
that was just as true of the ruin I should be writing about at this point in my story, the old empty nuke south of Lebna in Tucki, where Berry and I spent the night with Cob and his prentice Sam. For some reason I didn’t sleep well that night, and so at one point when I woke in the darkness I happened to hear Berry and Sam talking in quiet voices off in the next room. I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, and didn’t particularly try; there was another secret there, and you could say it was hidden in that ruin, but it wasn’t one that was meant for me. So I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. After a while I dozed off, and dreamed about Deesee, and Tam, and the ruins at Shanuga, and voices out of the night sky whispering words that nobody here on Mam Gaia’s round belly would ever understand.

  Eight: The Medicine Seller

  The next morning we all got up a little before the sun did, and I lent Cob a hand with the last pieces of metal that had to be loaded on the wagon while Sam and Berry got breakfast ready. It was a bright, clear day, good for travel. After we ate—it was good everyday ruinman’s fare, bread and bean soup and big mugs of chicory brew—Berry and I climbed on board the wagon and found places for our packs in among the metal, while Cob gave Sam instructions for the day and then swung up onto the seat in front and took the reins.

  “Be a bit rough at first here,” Cob said over his shoulder as the horses started up the trail toward the road. “Hope you don’t mind.” He wasn’t lying, either. The wagon lurched and jolted its way up to the road, and Berry and I hung on as best we could. Finally we got onto the old road, and from then on it was pretty smooth going as wagons go. They say that the old roads used to be so smooth you could ride down one of them in one of their cars, faster than a horse can gallop, and you’d hardly notice any bumps at all. I’m not sure I believe that; I’ve helped dig plenty of cars out of old ruins, and they all had handles on the inside for you to grab, and belts to keep you from being thrown out of your seat. Still, that’s what people say.