Star's Reach (56 page)

Outside was the same sandy desert I
remembered, with the hollow descending toward the door. After a
moment I caught sight of the dust cloud Thu mentioned, close by,
and after another moment what looked like two tiny dark shapes just
this side of the dust.

I stepped back, let Thu look. “Two of them,”
he said after a moment. “That might be a good sign. Anyone planning
violence would have sent more.”

“Might be a scouting party,” I said.

“True.” He watched for a while longer, then
moved away and let me look again. The two dark shapes had become
men on horseback. I watched them pass the first fence and then the
second, and then, riding more slowly, come toward Star’s Reach. By
the time they reined in by the second fence, I knew that they
didn’t look like soldiers and didn’t really know how to ride. By
the time they dismounted and separated, one of them holding the
horses’ reins and the other walking toward us, I realized they were
wearing what looked like ruinmen’s leathers, but it wasn’t until
the one who came forward got within sight of the hollow in front of
the door that I broke into a big grin and stepped back from the
slit.

“We’re safe,” I said to Thu. “Ruinmen—I know
one of them.”

We left the little room, and while he went
down the stairs to let the others know, I turned off the switch in
the trapped room, waited until the current went away, crossed the
floor, and unlocked and opened the door. “Conn!” I shouted. “Right
over here.”

He turned—he’d been looking at the antenna
housings, kloms and kloms of them reaching west toward the
afternoon sun—let out a whoop, pelted over and threw his arms
around me, then drew back a bit. “And damn if you aren’t waiting
here. Trey, you rascal! Did you know we were coming?”

“We saw the dust cloud most of an hour
ago.”

“And—”

I could see a hundred questions in his eyes.
“It’s Star’s Reach,” I told him. “There are messages from aliens.
Pictures of aliens. All kinds of things.”

His eyes and his mouth both went round, and
he let out a piece of hot language that just about blistered the
air. He turned, then: “Dannel! Get over here.”

The other rider turned out to be another
young ruinman, one I didn’t recognize. He was already on his way,
leading the horses, who didn’t like the look of the hollow or the
antenna housings and were lettng him know that. “What I want to
know,” I said to Conn, “is what you were doing in Cansiddi.”

The astonishment on Conn’s face went
somewhere else. “I made mister a year after you did,” he said, “and
by then they’d closed the guild. Not enough metal in the ruins to
keep new misters in work, they said, and of course they’re right.
So I went to Cago and worked there for a few years, met Dannel
there, and when word got to us from Cansiddi that there might be
something big in the desert west of town, we up and headed this
way.”

Dannel got the horses calmed down enough to
finish walking over. “And when the Cansiddi misters opened your
message, well, we weren’t first in line, but close. You’re Trey?
Pleased to meet you. Everybody else is about a day and a half
further back—we offered to ride ahead and make sure you and
everyone else here knew—”

His voice trailed off, and I realized about
then that he was looking past me at the door to Star’s Reach. Conn
was staring the same direction, too, and if a bright yellow Cetan
had come squishing out the door to offer them each a drink of nice
cold gasoline, I don’t think they could have looked any more
surprised.

I looked back that way, and of course it
wasn’t a Cetan. “Hello, Conn,” Berry said. He had just come out
through the door.

Conn closed his mouth, swallowed, and said,
“So that was you—Sharl sunna Sheren?”

It’s a funny thing, but the people you spend
the most time with are the ones who can change the most without you
noticing. The moment I saw Conn through the slit in the wall, I saw
how much five years had done to him, but it wasn’t until I looked
back over my shoulder and saw Berry there that it finally sank in
how much he’d changed during the same five years. He’d always
looked like his mother, though it took me a good long time to
realize that, but now it wasn’t something you might notice if you
took the time to think about it. It was something you’d notice at a
glance if you passed him in the street.

I don’t even remember what Berry said in
answer. “Damn,” said Conn, and a moment later: “Well, damn.” Then:
“If I’d had any idea who you were, I wouldn’t have had the guts to
thrash you that time you got careless up in the tower we were
stripping.”

“I’m glad you didn’t know, then,” said Berry.
“That probably kept me from getting reborn later on.”

“True enough,” said Conn. Dannel, who had
been watching the whole time with his mouth open, shook his head
and said, “There’s a lot of people who are going to want to see you
in Sanloo.”

“I know,” Berry said, a little grimly.

Dannel shook his head again, sharply. “No, I
mean it. We were in Cansiddi when the radio broadcast what you
said, and the next day that’s all anybody was talking about. Not
just ruinmen—we were out buying food and gear during the day, and
the people you’d least expect were talking about it, asking every
ruinman they met if we knew you, that sort of thing. And talking
about going to Sanloo, to see you—and to make sure that nobody
tried anything stupid.”

“It was something,” said Conn. “When’s the
last time you heard a barmaid say she was going to walk to Sanloo
for something like that? Two of ‘em told me that, and both of ‘em
said that anybody who gave you any trouble was going to get his
whatnots cut off. You should have seen their faces. I honestly
think they’d do it themselves, with the dullest knife they could
find.”

“The thing you said about civil war,” said
Dannel. “A lot of people were talking about that before then, but
they were saying, well, what can you do? Now they’ve got another
choice, and I wouldn’t want to be the jennel who tries to take it
away from them.”

I looked at Berry, and he looked at me, and
then at them. “That’s good to hear,” he said. “Still, I’m going to
need to talk to some of the younger misters and senior prentices
about the trip to Sanloo. I wouldn’t put it past some jennels to
send some soldiers looking for me.”

“Easy,” said Conn. “We can get more people
from Cansiddi if they’re needed, too. And more guns.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Berry.
“Do you think those horses of yours want some water?”

They did, of course—we were standing in the
middle of a desert, after all—and so I went and got a couple of
pans of water for the horses and a bottle for the two of them,
while Conn and Dannel peppered Berry with questions, some of them
about himself and some of them about Star’s Reach. We talked a
little more while the horses drank, and then it was time for them
to head back to the rest of the ruinmen and let them know that we
were ready for them. “We’ll be back with everyone day after
tomorrow,” Conn said, swinging up into the saddle. “And I want to
see those pictures of aliens.”

“I’ll have ‘em waiting,” I promised.

He laughed, and the two of them rode off.
Berry and I looked at each other again. “Well,” he said. “That’s
not something I expected.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say in
response that didn’t sound stupid, so I simply clapped him on the
shoulder, and we turned and went back into Star’s Reach.

It wasn’t until we were going back through
the trapped room, with the lightning-smell lingering in the air and
the black marks on the floor where Jennel Cobey died, that it
struck me all at once that one way or another, the next presden
after Sheren was always going to come riding out of Star’s Reach.
The only question was whether the presden was going to be Cobey
Taggart or Sharl sunna Sheren, a jennel from a rich old Tucki
family or a ruinman who happened to be a presden’s secret child,
someone who was going to start the Fourth Civil War or someone who
might just stop it before it could get going.

One way or another, I had to be around to
make that happen. If Cobey had been a little smarter than I was,
the day we first got here, my part in it would have ended with me
bleeding to death from a bullet hole, and Berry’s story would have
never have gotten past might-have-beens. Instead, it was Cobey’s
story that never went any further, and I had to stay around so I
could talk Berry into announcing himself as a candidate. Once that
happened, my part in his story might as well have been over, and
when he goes riding off toward Sanloo with a guard of young ruinmen
around him, my part is over for good. I’ve learned and done a
mother of a lot of things over the last five years, and I’m sure
there are other things I can learn and do that I haven’t tried yet,
but a farmer’s child from the Tenisi hills isn’t suited to anything
they do in a presden’s court.

So that’s what I was thinking about as we
went to get the others and then walked through half of Star’s
Reach. By the time we were back in the common room, it was evening.
Thu and Berry got to work on dinner, Eleen and Tashel Ban went back
to trying to coax the computer into giving up another paper on the
Cetans, and I sat back down at the table and tried to read the
papers I’d been reading when Thu came to warn us about the riders.
It was the long paper full of brackets and dots, the one that
seemed to be talking about a sea voyage to a place a little like
Star’s Reach, and first told us that the Cetans traveled to other
planets in their system the way we did in ours, back before the old
world ended.

I hadn’t read it since Tashel Ban first
printed copies for all of us and handed them around, and any other
time I’m sure I would have been lost in it within a page or two,
but just then it might as well still be a bunch of Cetan magnetic
pulses for all I got out of it. I kept on trying to read it,
though, since the alternative was to talk about the decisions we’d
have to make before the ruinmen arrived. I didn’t want to do that
yet, and I don’t think anyone else did either.

So I stared at the pages until it was time
for dinner, we all sat and ate as though it was just one more
evening at Star’s Reach, and Tashel Ban and I washed up the dishes
afterwards. We all gathered in the radio room to listen to the
broadcast from Sanloo—there was nothing about Berry this time, just
bits of news that didn’t seem to mean much—and then called
blessings on each other’s dreams and went our ways. I sat up
reading for a while, and once Eleen was asleep I wrote for a while
and went to bed.

The next morning we’d all pretty much run out
of other things to do, and were close to running out of time as
well. After the breakfast dishes were cleared away, everyone stood
around the common room, not quite getting to anything else, waiting
for someone to say something. Finally I went to the table, sat down
in my chair, and said, “Well.”

That was all it took, of course. The others
came over and took their seats. I looked at each of them and tried
to think of something to say.

Thu, the four free winds bless him, made that
unnecessary. “Tomorrow,” he said, “or shortly thereafter, we will
each have to decide where we will be going. Those of us who will be
going, that is.”

“I plan on staying here for another week,”
Berry said at once. “That ought to be enough time to arrange to
leave safely and get to Sanloo.”

Thu nodded. “If you wish,” he said, “I would
welcome the opportunity to go with you.”

Berry’s eyebrows went up. “That would be—very
welcome.” He opened his mouth as if he meant to say something else,
and stopped.

Thu laughed his deep laugh. “You are too
polite to ask why. It is really quite simple, though. My work here
is done, or nearly so, and Sanloo is convenient. And there is the
matter of your safety, which—” He shrugged. “—for wholly personal
reasons, is important to me.”

“Thank you,” Berry said, meaning it.

“My work here,” Tashel Ban said then, “isn’t
done, or anything close to it, and I don’t expect to leave for a
good many years, if ever. We’ve only succeeded in getting maybe a
tenth of the papers on the Cetans out of the computer. All the raw
communications are still in there, and there’s the matter of
resuming contact with them—and beginning contact with the others,
if it’s decided that that should happen. This is Meriga’s
territory, so it occurs to me that the Merigan government should
probably make that decision.”

He said it with a perfectly bland face, but
Berry grinned and said, “If everything goes well, I think that can
be arranged.”

“If everything goes well,” Eleen asked, “what
will you do?”

“Ask Congrus to charter the guild that Trey
proposed,” Berry said at once. “Once that’s done, nobody can
challenge its right to be here and take care of communications with
the Cetans and the others. After that, have the guild start sending
messages to the Cetans right away, send a ‘yes’ to Delta Pavonis
IV, and see about getting the Cetan solar power technology to the
guilds that can start putting it to work.”

Eleen blinked. “I gather you’ve been making
plans.”

“It seemed like a good idea,” said Berry.

“In any case,” said Tashel Ban, “my future is
settled for the time being.”

“And mine,” Eleen said then. “The guild will
need plenty of trained scholars, and it’s not as though there are
many other places a scholar can find work.”

That left me, and I drew in a breath and said
what I had to say. “I won’t be staying. I don’t know yet where I’ll
go, but I expect to leave within a few days.”

They were all looking at me then, and I made
myself go on. “Partly, my work’s done. I’m not a scholar or a
radioman, and I don’t plan on becoming either—and once the extra
metal here is hauled off, there won’t be much for ruinmen to do.
Mostly, though, it’s Jennel Cobey.”