Star's Reach (49 page)

That’s what I figured out, as I stood there
looking east across the desert. I figured out something else, too,
which is that we’ve learned something now that they didn’t know,
back in the old world. That was when I knew what I was going to say
to the others.

I left Anna’s body to the wind and the dust,
then, and went back down into Star’s Reach. I wasn’t the first one
in the main room, though that was only because Thu was sitting in
his usual chair at the table, where he’d probably been the whole
time. He nodded to me; I nodded back, walked over to the table, and
stood there waiting, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
Everything I’d done and tried to do during the five years since I
found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins came down to one
decision we were going to have to make then and there. That two of
the people I liked best on Mam Gaia’s round belly might have to go
into the circle with knives to settle the thing didn’t help at
all.

A door opened and closed down the hall, and
Berry came in next, with the kind of brittle calm on his face you
see when people are ready for a fight they don’t want but know they
can’t get out of. He nodded to me and Thu, took his seat at the
table, folded his hands and waited. About the time he settled into
place, another door opened and closed, and Eleen came in; her eyes
were red, as though she’d been crying, but she greeted everybody by
name, went to her place at the table across from Berry’s and
sat.

A good long minute went by, and then boots
sounded on the stairway down to the rest of Star’s Reach. Tashel
Ban came up them, his face grim. He didn’t say anything to anyone,
just walked over to his chair, pulled it out, plopped down into it
and sat there with his chin propped on his hands and his eyes
staring at nothing in particular.

I sat down then, and looked from face to
face, remembering all the roads we’d walked together in one way or
another, and also remembering the others who walked part of them
with us and weren’t there for one reason or another.

“The way I see it,” I said then, “we’ve got
three decisions to make. The first is what to do about Star’s
Reach, the second is what to do about the messages from the Cetans,
and the third is what to do about this last message.”

“What to do about Star’s Reach?” This from
Tashel Ban. “I don’t see much that we can do about that.”

“Turn it over to the ruinmen to break apart
for scrap,” said Thu at once. “Find some way to preserve it in its
current condition, so the conversation with the Cetans can
continue. Abandon it, claim that we found nothing, and leave it for
someone else to find.”

“More or less,” I said. “There’s also Anna’s
choice, I suppose, but I don’t see much point in that.”

That got a moment of silence, then: “No,”
Tashel Ban said. “I don’t see a point to the last of your three
choices, either, and which of the first two we choose depends on
what we decide about the Cetans and the others. That’s the real
question, as I see it: do we tell the priestesses, your government,
and mine what we’ve found about the Cetans and the others, or do we
destroy the computer up here, erase the data from the mainframes
down below, and hand the site over to the ruinmen?”

“How hard would it be to do that?” I
asked.

“The second choice? Stripping the data from
the mainframes would be very slow—my guess is that that’s why the
people who were here before us didn’t do it. Destroying the
computers up here? As long as it would take to toss each one of
them down the stairwell.”

Eleen drew in a sharp breath and closed her
eyes, but said nothing.

“Does anyone disagree that those are our
choices?” I asked then. Nobody did, and after a moment I nodded.
“Then I want to hear what everyone thinks we should do. Tashel Ban,
maybe you can go first.”

“If I must.” He didn’t say anything for a
while. Finally: “When I offered to come with you here, Trey, I had
hopes: not Anna’s hopes, but closer to them than I like to recall.
I hoped that if we could get here, find messages from some other
world, and figure out how to read them, that might teach us how to
live on this planet without damaging it, and still have some of the
things they had in the old world. Not all of them, not even most of
them, and not in our lifetimes—but some of them, someday.

“Maybe we will, even so, but there’s nothing
here that helps with that, and much that speaks against it. Do you
remember what the message from Delta Pavonis IV said, about how
they can’t teach us anything we aren’t ready to learn? That’s
something I had learned already from the Cetan messages. Even
something as simple as their way of turning sunlight into
electricity—and that’s a very simple thing, something we could have
figured out long ago if we happened to be looking in the right
place—even that took most of a hundred years of work by people here
at Star’s Reach to understand, because Cetans don’t think like us
or build things the way we do. Maybe some of the other aliens out
there think a little more like human beings, but I wouldn’t put
money on it.

“I still think it’s worth saving what we’ve
found, and sharing it. Those solar spheres the people here worked
out from the Cetan formula would be worth having, and we might be
able to figure out a few more tricks like that, given enough time.
But—” He leaned back, and let his hands fall into his lap. “If the
rest of you think that it’s too dangerous, for whatever reason, I’m
not going to fight for it. I’ve read messages from aliens, and seen
a little of what they and their worlds look like. Maybe that’s
enough.”

The room was silent again for a while, and
then Thu laughed his deep ringing laugh.

“This is a rich irony,” he said. “Shall I
speak next?” I nodded, and he went on. “You will all no doubt
remember our arguments in Sanloo, where Tashel Ban spoke of the
hope he has just described, and I spoke of my fear of what human
beings might do with any equivalent of the old world’s
technologies. He says that what we have found here has betrayed his
hopes. Equally, it has betrayed my fears.

“He has reminded us of one part of the
message from Delta Pavonis. I will remind you of another part, the
part that spoke of making the usual mistakes and suffering the
usual consequences. If so many species have done to their own
worlds what we did to ours, and struggled back from the results of
that folly the way we are doing, then who can pretend that it was
merely bad luck that brought the old world down in flames? Who can
ever claim again that we can repeat the same stupidities and avoid
the same results? And especially—” He tapped the table with one
finger. “—especially when some of those others, such as the Cetans,
suffered much more than we did.

“I distrust the technologies that can be
found here at Star’s Reach, and what human beings might do with
those in the future. I know that some message from another species
might someday teach human beings something far less harmless than
the solar spheres you have mentioned. I know, for that matter, that
it is possible that the message from Delta Pavonis is filled with
lies, and the beings who sent it intend some harm by it. Even so,
if the rest of you decide that it will be best to share what we
have found with the priestesses, the government of Meriga, and the
world, I will not demand that the matter be settled in the
circle.”

Something like a knot came undone inside me
then. “Eleen?” I asked.

“I don’t want the knowledge to be destroyed,”
she said simply. “If everything we’ve gotten from the Cetans has to
be printed out, bundled up, sent to Melumi and locked in a vault
for a thousand years, I won’t object, but I don’t want it
destroyed. Maybe it’s just because I was trained as a scholar, but
the thought of seeing all that knowledge lost isn’t something I can
face. If the rest of you decide that that’s what has to be done—”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do.” Opening them
again: “But there are places such things could be kept safely for a
very long time, if that’s what it comes to.”

“Do you think they need to go someplace like
that?” I asked her.

“No,” she said at once. “No, I think it would
be better if everyone in Meriga knew about the Cetans and what
happened to them, and about the others—the ones from Delta Pavonis,
and all the rest. I think—I think it would be better if we could
keep on communicating with the Cetans, and take up the others on
their offer, but I know the rest of you may not agree with that.
I’ll yield on that if I have to, but I want to see the knowledge
preserved.”

“Berry?” I asked.

He looked up from the table. “I’m thinking
about what will happen when word gets out. Whatever we decide, once
people learn where Star’s Reach is, they’re going to start heading
this way. Some of them will just want to see it, the way people
want to see Melumi or Troy, but some of them may have other plans,
and the men and guns to put those plans into action.”

“We came too close to that already,” said
Tashel Ban, “with Jennel Cobey.”

“Exactly,” said Berry. “So whatever decision
we make, we need to keep that in mind, and do something to make our
decision more than empty wind.”

“That said,” I asked him then, “what do you
think we should do?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t want to
see the messages from the Cetans destroyed. I’m not at all sure I
want to see everything handed out all anyhow to the world. If my
mother was still alive, I’d say we should contact the government
and the priestesses and let them deal with it, but right now? Until
a new presden gets chosen, it’s up to Congrus to decide, and I
don’t even want to think about the kind of mess they’d make of it.
So I don’t know.”

Another silence came and went. “Trey,” Eleen
asked then, “what do you think?”

I looked from face to face. “I think,” I said
then, “that we’re asking questions that are too big for five people
to answer. I’ve got my own preferences—I’d like it if more people
found out about the Cetans and the others, I’d like to see those
solar spheres turning sunlight into electricity all over Meriga and
the rest of Mam Gaia; I’d like to have people keep talking with the
Cetans, and take the others up on their offer to talk—but are those
the right choices? I don’t have any idea. If there are answers here
at Star’s Reach, it’s going to take a lot of people a lot of time
and work to figure them out. That’s more than we can do.

“I think that what we need is to get more
people here. We need ruinmen, scholars, and priestesses, to start
with, because they’re used to ruins and things left over from the
old world, but sooner or later there need to be people who are
trained to do the work that needs doing here, and can keep it going
for a good long time.”

Eleen was staring at me by then. “What you’re
suggesting,” she said, “is a guild.”

I hadn’t thought of the word, but the moment
she said it I knew it was the right one. “Yes,” I said. “Not like
the group that was here in the time of Anna’s parents, closed off
from the rest of Meriga, but something like the ruinmen, the
radiomen, the scholars—” Plummer’s guild of rememberers, I wanted
to say, but didn’t. “A guild that can work with the priestesses and
the government to make sure that what happens here doesn’t do
anything wrong or illegal, and still keep the conversations going
with the Cetans and the others.”

“You’ll need scholars,” she said, “and I
don’t know how many of those you can get to leave Melumi.”

That’s when I figured out the last part of
it. “We’ll just ask the ones that aren’t at Melumi any more.” I
could see their faces: Mam Kelsey at the Shanuga camp, Maddy the
cook at the Wanrij roadhouse, Lu the harlot, others I’d met along
the way. “The failed scholars. How many of them get turned away
from Melumi every year?”

“Anything up to a dozen,” she said. I don’t
think she was seeing the same faces I was, but she was lookng past
me then, at something I couldn’t see.

“That might work,” said Tashel Ban. Then: “It
would take money, quite a bit of it.”

“There’s a lot of metal here that isn’t
needed any more and could be sold for scrap,” I told him. “That’ll
be enough to make a good start. After that—well, how much do you
think the chemists would pay to know how to make those solar
spheres?”

Tashel Ban whistled. “A very pretty
figure.”

“I bet plenty of people would pay a couple of
marks to have a picture from Tau Ceti II to hang on the wall, too,”
I said. “The money won’t be a problem.”

“As Berry has said,” said Thu then, “your
guild will need to be armed, especially at first.”

“That’s why the first thing I think we should
do is get a bunch of ruinmen out here,” I said. “Not to strip the
place—I have finder’s rights on it, and they’ll honor that—but to
make sure that nobody else will try to take it. People don’t often
mess with us.”

“I well remember,” Thu said, with a slight
smile.

“Time might be an issue there,” said Eleen.
“One of you would have to go back to Cansiddi, talk with the guild
there, get enough ruinmen together—”

I shook my head. “I left notes on how to get
here at the Cansiddi guild hall, in case we didn’t come back.
They’re sealed and locked away, but all it would take is one radio
message from me to get them to open it. And if I know ruinmen at
all, once word got around that I went west from Cansiddi into the
desert, dozens of young misters with no other call on their time
headed for Cansiddi on the off chance that they might be able to
get in on the dig.”

They were all looking at me by then, Berry
nodding, Eleen still staring at something none of us could see,
Tashel Ban giving me his owlish look, Thu unreadable as always.

“It would be a gamble,” Thu said finally.