Star's Reach (3 page)

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 about 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 some 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.

He smiled a little tight smile and cuffed me
on the shoulder. “You take your time. Mam Kelsey up top can make an
honest copy, and that’ll be needed one way or the other.” To the
prentices: “First of you to find a way out of here other’n that
rope gets a mark.”

That sent them scurrying, and soon enough
Berry won the mark by finding a half-hidden door into a part of the
ruin we’d explored days before. From the other side, you couldn’t
see it at all; that was common enough for the old shelters.
Prentices around the campfire at night used to wonder aloud what
scared the people of the old world so much that they hid so many
doors and laid so many traps. They may be asking the same question
around their fires tonight, and I’m not yet sure that I could give
them an answer.

Three: The Misters’ Lodge

Four days have gone by now since we got to
Star’s Reach, and I’m finally beginning to get some sense of the
shape of it all. There’s a lot of it, at least ten levels going
down, and each level the size of a big city nowadays or a midsized
farm town in the old world. As far as we can tell, it’s empty,
which answers a question I wondered about on the way here. After
Anna joined us in Cansiddi, it occurred to me more than once that
we might just find people still living here, with all the good and
bad chances that might bring. Everywhere we’ve searched so far is
silent, though, and the only tracks in the dust are ours.

The first level, just below the surface, has
skylights in the ceilings, though there are places where the roof’s
cracked and sand’s gotten in. The second and third levels are
easier going, with light wells from the surface to bring in the
daylight and no sand to speak of. Below that the darkness closes
in. Anna says that there were hundreds of power cores down deep in
the underplaces, and those may still be working, but we haven’t
been able to get any of the lights to work but ours. Since the
lamps we brought with us run on sunpower, they have to spend a good
part of each day at the bottom of a light well charging. So I have
plenty of time to write.