Star's Reach (18 page)

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
Langley, 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.”

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.