Star's Reach (32 page)

After a bit, I pulled down one of the stories
from the top shelf and tried to read it. It was another of those
make-believe stories set on other worlds, like the one with the
worms I mentioned a while back; this one was about someone who
figured out how to predict the future, and the future he saw coming
was the fall of an empire like Meyco’s, except this one covered the
whole Milky Way. It was a good story, too, and I’ll go back and
read it tomorrow, but just then my mind kept on wandering off and I
finally put the book down and just sat there on the floor with my
chin in one hand.

I was thinking about Eleen—about how we met,
which I’ve already written about, and how we met again in Sisnaddi
after I’d come back from the Lannic shore where I found the one
thing I needed to know to find Star’s Reach and watched the Spire
fall and the rest of it. I came back the way I went, past the
burning land to Pisba and then down the Hiyo to Sisnaddi, every
step of the way on foot because all the money I had in the world
just then was barely enough to keep me fed, never mind pay my fare
on a riverboat.

The ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi is just west
of town, a bunch of big shapes like mushrooms that rise up out of
the tumble of buildings where the chemists, the burners, and the
other guilds nobody lets inside the walls live and do their work.
What that meant is that I walked all the way around the city walls
to get to the ruinmen’s hall, signed myself in, put up with the
pitying looks from the old ruinmen there who were sure I was
wasting my life chasing Star’s Reach, and went to the big west gate
just as soon as I’d washed up and gotten something to eat. Not
three hours later I was back out the west gate with a scrap of
paper in my pocket that told me where Star’s Reach was and how I
was going to get there.

I could have gone back to the ruinmen’s hall
and showed it to the old men there, but I knew they wouldn’t
believe I’d found anything that mattered, so I went to the big
tavern right outside the gate with every intention of spending the
last of my money getting thoroughly drunk. They probably would have
had to carry me back to the ruinmen’s hall that night, too, except
that I walked in the door and nodded to the barmaid and found
myself staring straight at Eleen, who was sitting over by the side
of the room at a little table with a glass of cheap whiskey in
front of her and a look on her face that told me everything I
needed to know right away.

After I got over the surprise of seeing her,
I went over and stood in front of the table until she noticed me
and looked up. She didn’t say anything at all, not at first, just
looked at me.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked.

That got me a smile. “Not at all.” She waved
at the chair across the table from her.

She was still wearing a scholar’s gray robe,
but the only reason a scholar from Melumi would be in a cheap
tavern in Sisnaddi was if she’s failed and been sent away. I knew
that, and she knew I knew it, and so neither of us had to say
anything about it at first, which was probably for the best. “Did
you have any luck finding Star’s Reach?” she asked.

“Not yet.” I wasn’t ready to tell her about
what I’d just learned. “Both the places you found for me turned up
empty—not that that’s your fault.”

“Thank you for saying that.” She tilted her
head, considering me. “Are you still looking for it?”

“Not bright enough to quit,” I told her.

That got me a laugh, and she reached past her
drink with both hands, and took hold of mine. “Good.”

So I got a glass of whiskey to match hers; I
got a little drunk and she got a little more drunk, and we talked
about nothing in particular, and the end of it all was that I
didn’t get back to the ruinmen’s hall that night. We stumbled up
the stairs to the sleeping room she’d hired with the last of the
money they’d given her when she left Melumi, and spent that evening
pretty much the same way we spent this one.

The next morning, I told her about what I’d
learned in drowned Deesee and what I’d found in the archives, and
said, “I’m going to need a scholar to come there with me, and I’d
like it to be you.”

She thought about that for a moment. Then,
bitterly. “I’m a failed scholar.”

“That’s what ruinmen always hire.”

She blinked, and then straightened a little.
“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not like scholars who are still in the
Versty like to camp in the ruins, you know.”

She blinked again, and I could just about see
her thinking through what it meant to have a place in the world
again, not to mention work that could pay her keep and maybe a lot
more. “I suppose not.” Then: “Trey, if you’re willing to take me,
I’ll go with you, anywhere at all.” She put her arms around me.
“Among other things, you’re good to spend time with, you know.”

Of course I kissed her then, and since she
wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I, things went from there
pretty much the way you’d expect.

Later on she talked about why she’d been sent
away from Melumi. I’d heard of failed scholars since I was little,
and of course there was always one at the Shanuga dig, but it’s
like so many other things. I’d never really thought about what that
meant, or how the failed scholars got sorted out from the
others.

By that time we were living together in a
little bare room on the fifth floor of a cheap rooming house not
far from the ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi. I’d gotten money from
Berry and a good deal more from Jennel Cobey, which was how I could
afford the room. That’s where we were standing, looking out the
room’s one little window at the evening sky, and talking about
something that led to something that led to her story.

“My parents were farmers too,” she said.
“They had a big farm outside of Fowain, in Inyana—my oldest sister
has it now. Ordinary folk, maybe a little better off than their
neighbors; they could afford to send me and both my sisters to
school, not just the temple school in the nearest village but a
real school in Fowain. My sisters learned to read and write and
calculate, and then went back home to farm, but I loved it at the
school, and I decided I wanted to become a scholar at Melumi.”

“What did your family think about that?”

She shook her head, laughed a tired bitter
laugh. “They did their best to talk me out of it. They knew how
many girls go to Melumi every year and how few of them stay—I knew
that as well as they did, of course, but I was sure I’d be one of
the few. So I studied, and studied, and studied, and when I got the
letter saying that I’d passed the examination and been admitted to
the Versty, I let myself believe that nothing could go wrong.

“So I went to Melumi and began my studies,
and found out a little at a time how Melumi actually works. There
are a certain number of chairs—they aren’t actually chairs, though
that’s what they call them; they’re livings that have been donated
by jennels and Circle elders and what have you, and each one will
pay for one scholar. If somebody gets reborn while you’re there as
a student, and you happen to be in the same field of study as the
person who dies, and the senior scholars at Melumi decide that
you’re the best person for the job, you get a chair and then you
stay at Melumi for the rest of your life. If nobody in your field
dies, or the senior scholars decide that you’re not the best
student in that field, you get to the end of your time there, and
they hand you some money and send you away and that’s the end of
it.”

“I’m guessing that nobody died in your
field,” I said.

She glanced at me, and then looked away.
“Thank you. No, we lost two scholars in history my last year there,
and there were three of us who might have been chosen.” She leaned
on the window, looking out at the evening getting dark. “The senior
scholars make the decision in private, and no one ever talks about
it afterwards, so I’ll never know why Danna and Lurey got chairs
and I didn’t.”

I bent and kissed her neck. “And now you’ll
be chief scholar at Star’s Reach.”

She turned, then, and put her arms around me.
“I hope so,” she said. “Oh, I hope so.”

I thought about all that, sitting there on
the floor of the room with the alien-books and the stories, and
wondered again whether we love each other, or whether we’re just
two people who needed somebody—I needed a scholar, she needed
something to do with her life, both of us needed someone to share a
bed with, and then both of us needed to hope that we could actually
get to Star’s Reach and find out what messages the aliens were
sending to us. I’ve got B and C and D, but do they add to A? I
don’t know, and what’s on the inside of another person’s
heart—well, it might as well be on a different world.

Twenty: In the Stream of Time

The funny thing is that the part of my story
I want to tell next involved those same words. It happened when we
got to Proo, which is where the Cago Canal ends and the Misipi
Canal starts up toward Rocalan and the upper Misipi, and it’s also
where the riverboats that work the Ilanoy River pick up passengers
and freight for the run down to Sanloo and Memfis. We had two days
in Proo, partly because there were fifty or sixty canal boats
waiting to be unloaded there, and we had to wait our turn, and
partly because the riverboat Plummer wanted to take hadn’t finished
its run upriver. So Berry and I slept on the boat, visited the
town, drank beer with the other boatmen, hauled and carried cargo
once it came our turn, and generally got along fine.

The captain of our boat—no, I never did ask
his name, or hear anybody else say it—waved me into the cabin after
we’d finished loading up for the trip back to Cago. “You know,” he
said, “you and your boy did well. There’s not much to be made
walking a mule, but if you ever need someplace to lie low and stay
fed the while, you could do worse.” With a motion of his head
toward the foredeck: “You run with
him
, you’ll need to lie
low now and then.”

He meant Plummer, of course. I would have
given him a handful of marks just then to find out what he knew
about Plummer, because I was already pretty sure that there was a
lot more to the man than the medicine seller he claimed to be, but
something in the captain’s face told me that asking any questions
was a bad idea and getting any answers wasn’t going to happen any
time this side of forever. So I laughed and said, “I noticed that.”
We talked a little more, about nothing in particular, and then I
went back on deck and got to talking with some of the other boatmen
about nothing in general.

That was the day before the
Jennel
Mornay
got to Proo. That was the riverboat Plummer wanted to
take, and in case this ever gets read by somebody from the Neeonjin
country on the far side of the dead lands, I should probably say
that Jennel Mornay was a famous soldier on the presden’s side in
the Third Civil War. He was a tough old cavalryman with mustaches
out to here, who fought his way downriver from Rocalan to Sanloo in
the face of everything the Western Allegiancy could throw at him,
which was a lot, and when he was done the final battle at Memfis
was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I got to know his face on
the trip down the river, because they had a big painting of him in
the main cabin.

Still, that’s getting ahead of my story a
bit. That morning, the morning the
Jennel Mornay
came, we
said our goodbyes to the canalboat captain and went with Plummer to
the Proo levee where the riverboats docked. It wasn’t quite packed
with people from the water right up to the warehouses, but that’s
because there was plenty of cargo there too. There were three big
packet boats already sitting with their noses to the levee,
roustabouts loading and unloading barrels and sacks and crates, and
passengers getting on or off their boats. Everybody was talking or
yelling, the crew chiefs were blowing on their whistles loud enough
to make me wonder why their brains didn’t spray out their ears,
steam was hissing from the boats, and you could just hear under it
all the churn-churn-churn of the big stern wheels keeping the bows
up tight against the shore.

Plummer pointed and said something neither
Berry nor I could hear, but we both figured out at the same time
that “follow me” was part of it. That meant heading through the
middle of it all and most of the way out the other side, to the end
of the levee where the warehouses were small and rundown and the
roustabouts, who were mostly just sitting around, looked like
they’d seen a lot of better days. Finally Plummer stopped and so
did we; the noise was still loud enough that we could barely hear
each other, so we stood there and waited for a while until finally
Plummer pointed again.

That’s when I first saw the
Jennel
Mornay
, and after looking at the packet boats, well, let’s just
say it was a bit of a disappointment. The plan was the same—one
paddlewheel astern, one smokestack around the middle, boxy
pilothouse on top of boxy cabin deck on top of boxy freight
deck—but it was half the size and twice the age, and showed it. I
didn’t know yet that most of the river trade runs on smaller boats
like the
Jennel Mornay
, and they don’t make enough money for
the white paint and the big crews and all. If you grow up in the
Tenisi hill country and the only riverboats you ever hear about are
the big white-painted ones with the fancy carvings all along the
roof, let’s just say that a boat like the
Jennel Mornay
is
not going to impress you, and leave it at that.

Still, we shouldered our bags and got in line
dutifully behind Plummer, I paid our fare—you can work for your
fare aboard a canal boat, but riverboats burn peanut oil and that
doesn’t come cheap—and we crossed the landing stage, which I found
out a few days later is what they call the ramp that gets swung
over from the bow for passengers to board. A rickety stair led up
from the freight deck to the cabin deck, where the purser looked at
our tickets and waved us over to a couple of cabins over on the
port side. They were cramped little rooms and I wouldn’t call them
clean, but Berry and I slept in much worse on the long road from
Shanuga to Cago, so we didn’t complain. We got our packs stowed and
locked the cabin door and went back out to see whatever there was
to see.