Star's Reach (25 page)

There was a table and some chairs over
against one wall, so we had a place to work, and I knew enough
about how ruinmen keep their records that it wasn’t too hard for me
to sort out what was worth looking at from the rest, and show Berry
how to do the same thing. That was about the only thing going for
us that first day, though. If the man from Nuwinga was anywhere
around, he didn’t show himself or make a noise, and we went through
more paper than I want to think about, looking for the letters WRTF
or the words they might stand for, and finding nothing.

We stopped for lunch around noon, then went
right back up and kept at it until the sun got low enough that we
didn’t have enough light to work by. The next morning we went up
again, and settled in for another day of turning pages. Before long
we were both so deep in the work that I don’t think either of us
heard the man from Nuwinga until he said, “I hope you won’t mind an
interruption.”

Berry and I both looked up from the papers we
were reading. He was standing by the door, a short stocky man in
clothes that weren’t quite the same as anything you’d usually see
in Meriga, though it would take some telling to say just how. He
had a square craggy face and big hands, and he talked about half as
fast as people talk in Tenisi.

“Not a bit,” I said. “What do you have in
mind?”

“If you happen across something that has to
do with radios, could you let me know? I’m in the room across the
way.”

Berry and I looked at each other, and then I
said, “We’ll do that. We’re looking for something that has to do
with radios ourselves, actually. I’m Trey sunna Gwen.”

The man gave me a blank, owlish look for a
moment, and then his eyebrows went up. “You’d be the ruinman who
found the letter about Star’s Reach.”

“That’s the one.”

He thought about that, then: “We should talk
about that some evening. There’s not much about radios that I don’t
know. The name’s Tashel Ban, by the way.” Then: “Well, we all have
work to do.” He turned and went out the door.

That’s how I met Tashel Ban. I didn’t know a
thing about him other than what he’d said, of course, and it hadn’t
yet occurred to me that it would take more than a ruinman’s skills
to make sense of Star’s Reach if we found it. If somebody had told
me that a few years after that I’d be standing inside Star’s Reach
next to him, watching him talk a computer into turning a bunch of
gibberish into a note that someone here wrote for someone else more
than a hundred years ago, I’d have been surprised. If that same
someone had told me that the person standing next to me as I
watched him tap at the keyboard would be Eleen, the scholar from
Melumi I’d bedded half by accident when the rains came, I’d have
been startled. If I’d been told that the other people in the room,
other than Berry, were the last king of Yami and the last living
person born at Star’s Reach, well, my mouth would have been open
wide enough to catch rabbits, and let’s not even talk about what I
didn’t know about Berry yet. Of course that’s the way it turned
out, but we all had long journeys of our own to travel before any
of that happened.

Sixteen: On Gasoline Oceans

We did it. Well, to be fair, Eleen and Tashel
Ban were the ones who did it, they were following a trail marked
out by the people here at Star’s Reach before us, and what they did
mostly depended on some others a very long way away from here who
might or might not be people at all; but the thing is, it’s
done.

I was hauling paper up from a storeroom on
the seventh level when it happened. The paper’s in big metal bins
down there, and you have to open a bin and then go into another
room for a while until the inside of the bin airs out; the bins
were pumped full of nitrogen to keep the paper from turning brown,
and you can pass out if you breathe too much of it all at once. So
I came trudging up the stair to the big room where the one working
computer is, expecting nothing much, and found everyone clustered
around the screen with the kind of look on their faces you see when
people are watching somebody getting born or getting reborn.

I put down the paper and went over, and they
made room for me. This is what I saw:

second planet of the
system, about .71 AU from the star. The planetary mass is 1.3 times
that of Earth, and so Tau Ceti II has both a higher temperature and
higher gravity than our world. We are still trying to interpret the
Cetans’ description of the composition of their atmosphere, but the
most plausible theory is that it consists mostly of methane and
hydrogen sulfide, with more complex hydrocarbons and noble gases
making up the rest. Most of Tau Ceti II’s surface is apparently
covered by oceans of liquid hydrocarbons, scattered with low-lying
island chains, on which the intelligent phase of the Cetan
population

I don’t know how much time passed before I
managed to say, “You found it.”

Eleen glanced back over her shoulder at me,
beaming. “Yes. This is everything they’d been able to figure out
about the aliens by 2240—more than two hundred years ago.”

“I think,” said Tashel Ban, who was sitting
at the keyboard, “that there are other briefing papers, some older,
maybe some more recent. The note we found earlier was from 2109 in
the old calendar, and there was a briefing paper then, too.”

“I wonder what they meant by ‘the intelligent
phase of the Cetan population,’” Berry said then. His eyes hadn’t
left the screen for a moment.

“Let’s find out,” Tashel Ban said, and tapped
the key that made the text scroll down.

While it scrolled down, all of me that wasn’t
struggling with unfamiliar words was caught up imagining a place
that neither I nor any other human being is ever going to see, a
place with oceans of gasoline and orange skies that smell like
rotten eggs, where living things that look like sheets of old world
plastic slither over each other in the shallows and now and again
crawl up onto the land, bunch together with a couple of hundred
others, and turn into a creature with a mind that can send a radio
message to us. That’s what the Cetans are like, or so the paper
said, and it said something else I’m sure I remember right: they
have just as much trouble making sense of us and our world as we
have understanding them and theirs.

We went through the whole briefing paper a
screen at a time, came to the end, and then stood there, stunned,
for a long moment. Finally Tashel Ban pushed his chair back from
the keyboard, turned to face Thu, and said, “Does anything in here
go beyond our agreement?”

Thu considered, and shook his head once.
“Nothing.”

“Does anyone object if I print out a copy for
each of us?”

No one did, and he nodded and went to try to
talk the one printer they’ve managed to get working into making six
copies of the paper without jamming.

I haven’t mentioned the agreement between Thu
and Tashel Ban yet, mostly because that part of my story doesn’t
come until much later. That happened in Sanloo, where all of
us—well, all of us but Anna, who we didn’t know about yet—were
waiting for Jennel Cobey. We rented rooms in a cheap tavern near
the riverfront, one of those rattletrap places that look as though
they’d been crammed into not enough space between a couple of other
buildings. We had a little common room, some sleeping rooms that
were even smaller, three blurry windows that looked out at another
tavern across the street, and a single lamp. For most of two weeks
that’s where we were, with three meals a day you could more or less
risk eating, and nerves stretched to the breaking point whenever we
thought about what we were about to try to do.

We didn’t have anything to do but wait and
make plans, we did a lot of talking about what might or might not
be at Star’s Reach, and Thu and Tashel Ban ended up over and over
again on opposite sides of the same quarrel. Tashel Ban thinks that
people might be able to have some of what they had in the old world
again, without hurting Mam Gaia in the process. Thu is sure that if
people decide that they can do that, they’ll turn out to be wrong,
and damage Mam Gaia the way they did in the old world. They both
think there might be something in the messages from the aliens that
might make that happen, some secret to making the machines work
without the oil and coal and gas the old world used to make them
work, but they’ve got opposite ideas about what that would mean and
what we ought to do if it turns out that way.

They were in the middle of one of those
arguments, about a week before the jennel finally got there, and
their voices and tempers were rising. Right in the middle of it I
got out my pry bar and brought it down flat and hard on the middle
of the ugly little iron table in the common room. Tashel Ban jumped
at the sound; Thu stopped in the middle of a word, and just looked
at me.

“You know,” I said, “that’s probably the
tenth time you’ve both gotten angry about that, when it’s still
empty breath. I want the two of you to agree right now not to bring
it up again until—” I held up one finger. “—we get to Star’s Reach,
if we do—” I held up a second finger. “—and we find the messages
from the aliens, if we do—” I held up a third finger. “—and we
figure out how to read them, if we can—” A fourth finger. “—and
there’s something about technology in them, if there is. If either
of you can’t agree to that, there’s the door.”

I could get away with that because the papers
I’d signed with Jennel Cobey for the contract dig were in my name
alone, and either one of them might have tried to push back against
me but they weren’t fool enough to try that with a jennel. After a
moment, Thu said, “And if all those things happen, what then?”

I’d already thought of that. “Then the two of
you can settle it in the circle.”

The room got about as quiet as an upstairs
room in a tavern can get. That was partly because the two of them
are probably pretty close to a match—Thu’s faster but Tashel Ban’s
got very good training, on account of who his family is—partly
because nobody was fool enough to think that it would stop at first
blood if it went to the circle, and partly because it wasn’t just
their quarrel. Eleen was pretty much on Tashel Ban’s side, and
Berry was more or less on Thu’s, and I was somewhere in the middle
trying to decide between them. After what seemed like a long time,
though, Tashel Ban glanced at Thu, sizing him up, and said, “I’ll
agree to that.”

“I accept as well,” Thu replied, with just a
hint of a smile.

They’ve gotten to know each other quite a bit
better since then, on the journey here and since then as well, and
they’ve both been as careful as can be about the agreement. Still,
I wonder what will happen if it turns out that the aliens sent us
some bit of knowledge that could undo the end of the old world. The
Cetans, I ought to call them, since that’s the name the people who
were here before us gave them. The Cetans have a name for
themselves, but the briefing paper says they talk with magnetic
fields instead of sounds and nobody was able to figure out anything
about the bits of their own language they sent us, so I don’t
imagine I’ll ever know what that name is. The Cetans seemingly
can’t figure out the first thing about our language either, if that
helps any.

Tashel Ban is still printing out copies of
the briefing paper as I write this. The printer has been jamming on
almost every page, and I can hear him swearing even though he’s two
rooms away. I don’t know most of the words; hot language in Nuwinga
isn’t the same as hot language in Meriga, even though their
language otherwise is close enough to ours that you can catch the
sense of it most times. I’d probably know more, except that I’ve
never been to Nuwinga and Tashel Ban’s usually more careful about
his language than he’s being tonight. I don’t blame him. I imagine
all of us want another look at the briefing paper, another glimpse
of those gasoline oceans and plastic-sheet creatures, even if the
best we can do is to stare at the words and try to picture
something human minds aren’t made to picture.

Last night, when I wrote down the part of my
story where Berry and I got to Troy and met Tashel Ban, I expected
to go straight on to the rest of what we did in Troy in the couple
of weeks it took us to find out that there hadn’t been a thing at
Skeega that might lead us to Star’s Reach. As I think of it now,
though, we didn’t do that much. Mostly, we dug through the old
papers from the Skeega guild hall, which got torn down and sold for
scrap a hundred and fifty years ago when the ruins on that side of
Mishga had all been stripped right down to bare soil.

The one thing that happened that deserves a
bit more describing was that we got to know Tashel Ban, at least a
little. He’d suggested that we talk about Star’s Reach, and I
thought about it for a while and asked Berry for his thoughts, and
decided to go ahead and discuss it, and see if anything would come
of it. He was staying there at Troy Tower, the way we were; if
you’re not a ruinman you usually don’t get to do that, but there
are exceptions now and then, and people from other countries are
one of them, if they’re polite and have a good reason to be
there.

No other country I’ve ever heard of has the
same kind of ruinmen’s guild we have in Meriga, though of course
every other country has people who tear down ruins for the metal
and other salvage. In Meyco it’s the dons who do that, in Genda and
Nuwinga it’s the government, in the coastal allegiancies it’s
anybody who has a mind to try it, and if anybody knows how they do
things over in the Neeonjin country it’s news to me. I guessed,
though, that Tashel Ban might be with the Nuwinga government, since
they deal with ruinmen in Meriga now and again; I was wrong, but as
it turned out, not too far wrong.