Star's Reach (35 page)

Still, I had a hint, and it came that night.
After I’d gotten the letter more or less finished and the ink was
dry, I turned out the light and got undressed and went to bed. I
thought I’d have trouble sleeping, but the slow rocking of the
riverboat and the sound of Berry’s quiet breathing and I don’t know
what else put me to sleep right away, and somewhere toward the end
of the night I dreamed about Deesee.

It was like the other dreams I’ve written
about already. I was walking through the streets that were as wide
as rivers, between the tall pale buildings with windows that were
all the same size and shape and color, with fish swimming past me
and my breath going up in bubbles and the surface of the water like
a silver sky high above. I knew I had to meet someone at the Spire,
and I knew it was important, but I couldn’t figure out how to get
there. I went down one street after another, turned this way and
that, but all I found was more tall pale buildings. Then, when I’d
just about given up, I saw a little passage between two of the
buildings, and went through it onto green grass, and the Spire
stood tall and pale as a ghost, rising up out of a low grassy hill
in front of me.

I hurried up the hill and got to the foot of
the Spire. The person I was supposed to meet was waiting there for
me. He wore the heavy stiff clothes that soldiers wore in the old
world, and the funny hat with a flat top and a black bill above the
eyes that jennels and cunnels wore back then; his hair was cut
short, and his face was long and hard and tense with worry. As soon
as he caught sight of me, he hurried across the grass and took hold
of both my hands, and said two words, but I couldn’t hear them; all
that came out of his mouth was bubbles that floated up toward the
surface of the water above us.

He said them again, and all of a sudden I
realized what they were: he was trying to say “Star’s Reach.” It
was then that I recognized him. I’d seen his face once before,
after all, or what was left of it after better than four hundred
years buried in the Shanuga ruins. He was the man whose corpse was
there with the letter I’d found, the one that sent me on my
journey.

I must have screamed then, because all at
once it was morning, and Berry was shaking me. “Trey? Are you all
right?”

I blinked and stared at him, and then the
dream let go of me and I realized where I was. “Just a dream,” I
said. “Dreaming about a ghost.”

He gave me a horrified look, and right away I
wished I hadn’t said anything. Maybe it’s just a Tenisi thing; I’ve
never heard anybody mention it away from Shanuga or the hill
country where I grew up, but there it’s said that if you dream
about a ghost, it means that somebody’s going to try to kill you.
“Well, not really a ghost,” I said after a moment. “That soldier we
found down in the ruins with the letter.”

Berry nodded, as though that made it less of
a bad sign. We got dressed and went to breakfast, and I tried to
put the dream out of my mind.

The rest of the trip downriver after that all
pretty much runs together in my mind. We went past the place where
the Hiyo river flows into the Misipi, where there used to be a fair
sized town and isn’t one any more because of the flooding ever year
when the rains come. After that the Misipi got even wider than it
was before, and as often as not we could see the sun flashing on
lakes and marshes to either side, sometimes a good long distance
away. Towns got few and we stopped less often, though Slane told me
over dinner one night that there were houses aplenty wherever the
ground was high enough that they wouldn’t be washed out to sea by
floodwaters. It was rich country away from the river, he said, and
the farmers grew rice and rubber trees and all kinds of fruit you
don’t see further north. Come harvest they’d bring their crops down
to the Misipi and the
Jennel Mornay
would spend a month or
so nosing up to the shore, loading up as much as would fit on the
cargo deck, and taking it all down to Memfis or up to Sanloo,
depending on where the price was better that week. I sat back and
sipped my beer and listened, and found myself thinking about what
it would be like to live that kind of life, the way I’d thought
about working a canal boat when we’d been on our way from Cago to
Proo.

Still, I had a place to find first, if I
could. I rewrote my letter to Jennel Cobey that night and sealed it
up, so it could be mailed to him as soon as we got to Memfis, and
after that all I could do was wait until the
Jennel Mornay
got where it was going.

That happened finally late one afternoon.
We’d been warned, so Berry and I were out on the front of the cabin
deck along with most of the other cabin passengers. It was as good
a day as you could ask for, with clouds drifting past, the sun
slanting down, and the Misipi wide and smooth and brown, and there
off in the distance was Memfis: a blur along the edge of the sky at
first, and then a city so big you could have dropped Shanuga into
it a dozen times over and not noticed; and off beyond it, the
Misipi spread and opened into a line of silver that was Banroo Bay.
We got closer, and the air smelled of salt and tar and a hundred
other things I’d never smelled before; and finally the
Jennel
Mornay
blew its whistle, right behind us, loud enough to make
me put my hands over my ears, and we came up to the Memfis
levee.

Slane was as good as his word, too. He had
some business to do with a buyer from Meyco, as he’d said, but once
that was done he got me and Berry and took us to the Memfis
ruinmen’s hall, which was just north of town. I lived there off and
on for the next two years and a bit, so my memories of that first
trip there have a lot of others laid down over the top of them. As
best I remember, the trip there was mostly a blur of narrow streets
and crowds, and the quarter around the ruinmen’s hall was
practically big and bustling enough to be a city all its own, with
the houses of the ruinmen and the other trades nobody wants inside
the city walls all cheek by jowl with each other and with the
taverns and shops and markets that sell to them.

The Memfis ruinmen’s hall is a huge dome made
of triangles, most of them metal but some of them glass to let
light get in or let ruinmen look out. When we got there, Slane gave
it a long dubious look, then laughed and said, “Damn if I’d stay in
a place like that, but it looks about right for you two. You see
Plummer any time soon, tell him he owes me a favor.”

We promised we would, and thanked him, and
said our goodbyes, and he strolled out of my life. For all I know
he’s still working the riverboats, buying and selling and making a
few spare marks now and then with crooked dice, but I’ve never seen
him since. I wonder if he’d be surprised to know that I’m sitting
here right now at Star’s Reach, as the night settles in, and
writing about him.

He got us safely to the ruinmen’s hall, as I
said, and once Berry and I went in and identified ourselves and got
a proper ruinman’s welcome, with maybe a bit thrown in because they
knew perfectly well who we were and why we were there, I felt safe.
I hadn’t quite forgotten about the dream, but I didn’t think much
about what that kind of dream’s supposed to mean, and I went about
my first couple of days in Memfis as though nothing of the sort had
happened. I was wrong, but I didn’t find that out for a few
weeks.

Twenty-One: The King of Yami

“We may have a problem,” said Tashel Ban.

Dinner was on the table, just bread and
beans—we’ve been at Star’s Reach long enough that the tastier end
of our supplies have started to run short. Still, everyone looked
at him. Everyone but Eleen, I ought to say; she sat there, not
looking at anyone or anything, the way she does when there’s
trouble and she can’t do anything about it. Tashel Ban had papers
in his hands and he was looking at Thu, and that meant a very
particular kind of trouble.

Thu said nothing, and after a moment Tashel
Ban went on. “We found another paper on Cetan science and
technology, probably the last one that the people here had time to
put together—it was written about three years before Star’s Reach
was abandoned. Not much different from the last one, except that it
refers to another paper, and we were able to find the other
paper.

“You’ll remember that the Cetans have their
own way of getting electricity from sunlight, unlike anything
humans ever tried. That’s what the other paper is about. Some of
the people here decided to try to figure how that worked from what
they’d already learned about Cetan technology. They—” He shrugged.
“The compounds the Cetans use aren’t stable in an oxygen
atmosphere—they catch fire as soon as electricity starts flowing
through them—but they were able to figure out the basis for the
effect, and find compounds that will work here. So—” He looked
straight at Thu. “We have a formula for a Cetan technology that
could change the way we get energy here.”

Thu considered that for a moment. “Does it
differ from the sunpower cells we use?”

“The principle’s the same. The details
aren’t. The solar cells the old world used were made with
technologies we don’t have any more; the ones we use now are quite
a bit less efficient, and they’re not cheap to make. This
technology is much more efficient and probably much cheaper, once
some work gets done on sources for the chemicals.”

“Chemicals.” Thu repeated the word as though
it wasn’t something you say around good people. “How toxic?”

“They’d have to be tested. Still, the result
seems to be chemically stable, and it’s recyclable.” He used his
hands to show a ball the size of someone’s head. “Imagine something
that looks like glass, about this big around, with a wire going
into the center of it and a net of fine wires all over the outside.
Light shines on it and kicks electrons into motion, and they flow
out the wire that goes to the center and back in through the net
around the outside. The Cetan ones last for about thirty of our
years, then have to be melted down and remade. Here, they hadn’t
figured out how long they would last, but something like that’s
probably a good guess.”

“How much power will come from it?”

“Depends on location and season. My best
guess, from the figures in the paper, is that each of them will
produce around a hundred watts under average conditions—say, five
of them would equal your ordinary farmyard wind turbine.”

Thu just looked at him for a long moment,
then: “You say they will not be too expensive. As expensive as a
wind turbine?”

“Less than that,” Tashel Ban answered. “As a
guess—and it’s no more than a guess—once these were being produced
in fair numbers, you could probably buy a five or six hundred watt
system for about half as much as a wind turbine would cost
you.”

Another long silent look from Thu, and then,
unexpectedly, he laughed. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does
it’s a great rolling laugh that fills up whatever space he’s in.
Tashel Ban looked baffled, probably wondering what the joke was,
which was what I was wondering just then, too. The others watched
and waited.

“You expect me,” Thu said then, “to invoke
our bargain and settle our disagreement with knives, because
farmers in Meriga will be able to choose between wind and sun to
power a few light bulbs and a fan in the summer? No. My
requirement—” He tapped a finger on the table, hard enough that it
rang. “My requirement is that nothing we find here will give
humanity the chance to do again what they did to the earth. Wind
turbines have not done that. Solar cells and solar water heaters
have not done that. I see no reason to think that this new
technology will do that—and I do not grudge the farmers their light
bulbs and cool air in the summer.”

There’s a kind of tension you get in a place
where a fight’s about to start, and everyone knows it. If the fight
isn’t going to happen after all, and everyone knows it, the moment
when the tension lets go lands like a punch in the stomach. I know
I swayed, and I’m pretty sure most of the others did, too. Berry
didn’t, though. He glanced at me, at Thu, and at Tashel Ban, and
then said, “I wonder how hard it would be to figure out whether
there’s anything later than that paper on the computer.”

Tashel Ban thought about that for a moment.
“I could probably do it now. We’ve found enough files with dates
that it should be possible to figure out the raw code, and
search.”

“That might be a good idea,” said Berry then.
“I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that we have to do two
things before we can let other people know about any of this.”

We were all looking at him then. “First,” he
went on, “is finding out if the Cetans have sent us anything that
might hurt Mam Gaia, or humanity, or Meriga or the other nations.
Second is finding out why the people here—” He glanced sideways at
Anna, who was watching him sidelong with no expression on her face
at all. “—why they died. We could do both by finding what
information they left that’s later than this.”

“True,” said Tashel Ban.

“There’s another factor,” Eleen said then.
“The radio.”

“Also true,” said Tashel Ban, as though the
two of them had talked about it before, which no doubt they had. He
turned back to Thu. “Before we make a decision about making all
this public, we also need to know what’s happening in Meriga. If
war’s broken out—well, then things are going to be rather more
difficult.” He gestured, palms up. “So I’d like to propose that we
assemble the radio receiver. Just the receiver, to listen; we can
leave the transmitter for later.”

That was another part of the agreement I
mentioned a while back, the one I got Thu and Tashel Ban to settle
on before we left Cansiddi. Tashel Ban brought his own radio gear
with him when he came to join us in Sanloo, a transmitter and a
receiver, both of them with the tubes taken out and packed in lom
wool to keep them from breaking on the road. They stayed that way
after we arrived, because we’d agreed that no word of what we
found, if we found anything, was to go out until we all agreed on
what to say.