Star's Reach (48 page)

That brought another long silence. I don’t
know for sure that everyone else was thinking about what that much
time means, but I certainly was.

“There was a debate,” Eleen said then, “in
the old world, about technology. Almost everyone back then thought
that technology could just keep on progressing forever, becoming
more and more powerful, until human beings could do anything they
could imagine. There were a few scholars who pointed out that
everything else follows what’s called the law of diminishing
returns. Trey, if you’re digging for metal in a ruin, the longer
you keep digging, the harder it gets to find metal, am I
right?”

“True enough,” I said.

“What these scholars were saying is that
knowledge works the same way, and technology works the same way. So
the kind of thing that Anna—”

Her voice trailed off. After a moment I
realized why. Anna was nowhere in the room, and from the blank
looks on everyone’s faces, nobody had seen her go. A cold thought
stirred, and I thought I knew where she would be; I turned away
from the computer and headed at a run to the room where the old
alien-books were.

I was wrong, but as I got there I heard
something hit the floor in the kitchen. I sprinted that way, and
there she was, lying in a puddle of blood with her hands on a knife
and the knife in her chest. Her eyes were already staring up at
nothing as the last color drained out of her.

Twenty-Six: Waiting for the Thunder

“She was almost right,” Eleen said.

We were outside, not far from where we’d
taken the bodies of the ones who died at Star’s Reach before we
came. There wasn’t much left of them, a few odd scraps of bone here
and there in the dust, but they had company now. We did our best to
save her, but Anna knew exactly what she was doing when she turned
the knife on herself.

So we found an old table and hauled her
outside on it, the way we hauled what was left of the people her
parents knew, to send her back into the circle. Eleen said the
litany for her, we stood there for a while, and then we walked a
little ways off, over to one of the big angular lumps of concrete
that hid the antenna elements from the wind and sand. After a
while, the silence got too heavy to bear any longer, and we started
talking, quietly, about what had just happened.

“When I was going through the files we’d
reconstructed, I found messages among the people who ran things
here, talking about the same things Anna mentioned,” Eleen said.
“From the very beginning, there were always a few people who worked
here who thought that aliens were already visiting Mam Gaia in
flying saucers, and would come down and rescue humanity someday. As
long as they did their jobs, the others didn’t concern themselves,
just as they didn’t worry about the few who were Old Believers and
wanted time off one day out of every seven to talk to their
god.

“As the years went by, though, more and more
people here came to believe in the flying saucers. The others
worried about that, but the believers couldn’t be spared—Star’s
Reach had mostly shut itself off from the rest of Meriga by then,
because of the troubles that led up to the Third Civil War, and
even if they’d gone looking for help there was nobody else in
Meriga or anywhere else who knew how to do the things they needed
to get done.

“So the people in charge worried but didn’t
do anything, and the number of believers grew, until finally
everyone at Star’s Reach either believed in the flying saucers, or
shared the same hope that a more advanced civilization would
contact them and help humanity if they just kept working on the
project. I can’t fault them for talking themselves into that
belief. They needed some reason to keep on, some way to convince
themselves that what they were doing mattered to anybody but
themselves. So they traded messages with the Cetans and waited for
someone else to contact them. And—” She spread her hands, palm up,
and let them drop.

“You didn’t say anything about this before,”
I said then.

“I didn’t think it was important. There were
many other documents; I could have bored you all for hours every
evening, talking about everything we found. It never occurred to me
that those messages would explain why they killed themselves.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Berry said.
“They got the message they were waiting for.”

“Except it wasn’t what they were waiting
for,” Eleen pointed out. “Like Anna, they believed, or hoped, that
the aliens who contacted them would be so far ahead of us that they
could come here, give us back the kind of energy sources we had in
the old world, fix everything we did to Mam Gaia—all that, and
more. They wanted the old world back again, and they thought the
aliens would give it to them. And what they got instead was what we
just heard.”

None of us said anything for a little while,
and then Thu spoke. “The question that occurs to me is whether the
message was telling the truth.”

“I don’t know,” Eleen admitted. “I don’t know
of any way we could know.”

“One part of the message is certainly true,”
said Tashel Ban. “Delta Pavonis IV is a gas giant with an
atmosphere that looks green to us. Scientists discovered that
before the old world ended—and as far as I know, that information
isn’t in the computers here at Star’s Reach.”

Thu nodded. “But that does not tell us
whether the beings who sent the message might respond to a reply
with something more than a radio message.”

“Like a spacecraft?”

“Or a great many spacecraft.”

Tashel Ban shook his head. “If they could do
that, they wouldn’t have had to send a message and wait for a
reply. They could have sent a spacecraft as soon as they detected
our signals, found out whatever they wanted to know, and followed
up with a fleet, if that’s what they had in mind. But—” He held up
one finger. “If they could do that, we’d have been visited a long
time ago; Delta Pavonis is only twenty light years away.” He held
up a second finger. “And we’ve been receiving messages from the
Cetans all along. They apparently got the same message we did; I
don’t know whether they answered or not—we haven’t taken the time
to decode the messages from them that are stored in the main
computers down below—but they’ve been trying to talk to us ever
since, and waiting for a reply. If somebody came calling from Delta
Pavonis IV, that didn’t disrupt the Cetans’ transmissions at
all.”

“There’s one thing more,” said Eleen then. “I
mentioned the debate about whether progress could go on forever.
There was one argument against that theory that nobody ever managed
to push aside. It’s called Fermi’s paradox, after the scholar who
first thought of it.”

“I have heard of it,” said Thu.

“I haven’t,” I said.

Thu nodded, and Eleen went on. “Even when
scholars still believed in the Big Bang, they knew the universe had
been around for at least thirteen billion years, and there had been
plenty of stars with planets long before Mam Gaia was formed. If
other intelligent species evolved during those thirteen billion
years, and interstellar travel is possible, then they would have
been all over the galaxy long before our time, leaving traces we
couldn’t miss. There are no such traces. The most likely reasons
for that are either that we’re the first intelligent species to
evolve in this galaxy, or that interstellar travel isn’t possible.
Once we contacted the Cetans, the first reason stopped being a
possibility—two intelligent species less than eleven light years
apart means that intelligent species are fairly common. That leaves
the other, which most scholars back then didn’t want to think
about.”

“None of that is conclusive,” said Thu.

“True,” said Tashel Ban. “If you want
conclusive proof, though, it’s twenty light years away.”

“Or ten,” said Berry.

“True enough,” Tashel Ban replied. “The
Cetans probably know one way or another by now. I wish we could ask
them.”

“Actually,” said Berry then, “we can.” The
pale tense look he’d had since we heard about his mother wasn’t
exactly gone, but there was something past it, something that
flickered and glowed like a flame.

“In theory, yes,” said Eleen. “But we’d have
to finish working out the code—”

“Not just in theory.” He glanced from Eleen
to me to Tashel Ban to Thu. “Let me show you.”

So we left Anna to the wind and the blowing
sand, and went down into Star’s Reach again. Berry led the way to
his room, opened the door, waved us in. The stacks of paper were
still scattered all over every flat surface but the floor. He went
straight to one stack on his desk, took a sheet of paper off the
top, and handed it to Eleen. “I think you can read this.”

She glanced over it, then stopped, read it
over again with eyes going wide. “Yes.”

“If you’re willing,” Berry said.

She nodded, considered the paper for a moment
longer. “There’s a center from which movement radiates outward,
linked to radio frequency and to this end of the communication—oh,
of course. ‘Our radio station.’ Then there’s a reference to a
previous state of flow, but the flow drops away to nothing—‘stopped
transmitting to you.’ A spatial-subset indicator, and then
interference patterns—‘because of local troubles.’ I think I can
read the rest: ‘and was abandoned for a time. The troubles have
ended, the sphere—no, the planet, our planet, is unharmed, and we
have reoccupied the station. We will resume regular communication
once we review past messages and finish learning how to send new
ones.’”

We were all staring by the time she finished.
“Berry,” I said then, “you worked that out yourself?”

“I kept wondering about the Cetans, what they
must have been thinking after our transmissions stopped. It seemed
only fair to let them know that our species is still here.” With a
little shrug: “And I didn’t have much else to do, other than wash
dishes and help with the computers when I could. So I started
printing out messages and translations at night, and tried to
figure out how the code worked.”

Tashel Ban had taken the paper from Eleen,
and was reading over it. “The syntax is correct,” he said. “If we
sent this, I’m quite sure the Cetans could read it.”

I was looking at Berry when I realized what
had to happen next. “That’s not prentice work,” I said. “Give me
your pry bar.”

He stared at me, then without a word went to
his work belt, got the bar, and handed it to me. I hefted it, then
flicked out the sharp end good and fast, catching him on the face
just under the cheekbone. I heard Eleen gasp, but by then I was
holding out the pry bar for Berry. “Take it, ruinman,” I told
him.

He took it, and his face lit up the way mine
must have, deep down in the Shanuga ruins where Gray Garman made me
a mister. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say
something, and then gave it up and flung his arms around me. I
patted his back and looked past him at the others. As he drew away,
I said, “Eleen, Thu, Tashel Ban, I’d like to introduce Sir and
Mister Berry of the ruinmen’s guild of—well, of Star’s Reach, for
now.”

So of course they all congratulated him.
While Tashel Ban was doing that, though, Thu turned to me. “For
now,” he said. “It seems to me that certain decisions need to be
made.”

“I know,” I told him, and he nodded, once, as
though that settled something.

I waited until the congratulations were over
and Berry was dabbing something on the cut I left on his face, and
then said, “Well. We know as much as we’re going to know about
what’s here, and you know as well as I do how much food we’ve got
left. We’ve got some choices to make—but I’m going to need a little
time first, to think about everything that’s happened.”

Nobody argued.

“An hour, perhaps?” This from Thu.

Nobody argued about that, either, and so I
turned and went out into the hallway.

I knew where I needed to go, though I didn’t
know why, not at first. The metal stair boomed beneath my
footsteps, and the door groaned open, letting in a spray of dust
and sand. A moment later I was outside, underneath the empty desert
sky, with the concrete antenna housings stretching away into the
distance on all sides and the low dark shape that used to be Anna,
lying there where we’d left her.

I thought about what little I knew about her
and her life, the circle through time that brought her back here to
the death her parents managed to escape. I thought about the things
she’d said about the false stars and the priestesses; I thought
about the alien-books we both read, and the promises that sounded
so true to her and so false to me, and where the difference was;
and I stared past her, back eastwards to the place where the ground
pretends to meet the sky. That’s when I figured out why she died,
and why the people who were here at Star’s Reach before us died,
and maybe, just maybe, why all those billions of people died when
the old world ended: their universe was too small.

I don’t know if that will make the least bit
of sense to anyone else who reads this, if anyone ever does. After
I wrote those five words, I sat at the desk here in the little bare
room I share with Eleen, with the point of my pen not quite
touching the paper, for something like a quarter of an hour. I must
have decided half a dozen times to scratch the words out, and half
a dozen more times to spend the next half dozen pages trying to
explain what I meant, and changed my mind each time.

Still, it’s simple enough. The people who
wrote the alien-books, and most of the stories that were in the
shelves with them, had all kinds of notions about what might be
waiting out there between the stars, but they never dreamed that
the universe was big enough to hold distances that couldn’t be
crossed or problems that couldn’t be solved. It wasn’t that people
back then were just plain wicked, the way the priestesses say. They
really believed the universe was small enough that they could make
it behave, the way Plummer says they used to make animals behave in
sirks. That’s why they ignored so many of their problems until it
was too late to do anything about them, and why they told
themselves stories about flying saucers and space travel and how we
were all going to go to the stars someday, where we’d find lots of
people like us and lots of planets like Mam Gaia, because they
never imagined the universe was big enough to hold anything
else.