Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  “I wonder, Sir and Mister,” said Berry then, “if it might turn out better for everyone if some of those things stay lost.”

  Tashel Ban turned and gave him a good long look. “That’s something I think about,” he said. “Along with the other master radiomen. Where do you cross the line between the technologies that help people and don’t hurt Mam Gaia, and the technologies that might lead us back down the road to the same mistakes the old world made? I don’t know the answer. I do know that radio’s a way to help people talk to each other when they can’t get close enough for voices to carry, and getting people to talk is a good thing much more often than not. So I’m guessing that figuring out more ways for people to talk by radio isn’t going to cross that line.”

  Maybe it was the whiskey, but my mind jumped all at once from there to the thing I was looking for. “And if we’re talking about the distance between one star and another, do you think it’s the same?”

  Tashel Ban was silent for a while. “I think so,” he said finally. “The same, and even more so. If it’s true—if they actually did get radio messages from somebody living on a world around some other star, whether they figured out how to read the messages or not—just knowing that there’s someone else out there, that we’re not all alone in all of the universe, sitting here in the middle of a great big dead emptiness where nobody anywhere else will ever think a thought or follow a dream or figure out something about the way the universe works, that’s something. And if there’s anything more, there again, it’s hard to think of a way that talking can hurt us.”

  He downed another swallow of the whiskey. “But I’d give anything you care to name to be there when Star’s Reach gets found, if it does. It’s been more than thirty years now since I passed my master radioman’s test, and I’ve found a few things and learned a few things since then, but I’d like to do something on the grand scale, and helping find Star’s Reach would count. If you’ll have me, that is. I know this is a ruinman’s thing, and it’s also yours, if I hear right.”

  I nodded. “I’m not going to make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He considered that, nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “The one thing I’m not sure of is how to find you, if it turns out all this leads anywhere.”

  He gave me one of his owlish looks again. “That’s not hard. Get a letter to the Nuwingan embassy in Sisnaddi and they’ll have it to me soon enough; they know where I am.” Then, with another lopsided smile: “I mentioned my uncle Raymun, didn’t I? The one who drank himself to death? He was presden of Nuwinga when he did most of the drinking. Our presdens don’t all come from one family the way yours does, but the job doesn’t stray too far, and I’ve had better than a dozen ancestors in the Gray House.”

  We talked for a while longer, though I don’t remember about what, since I’d had a fair bit of Gendan whiskey by then, and then we stumbled back to our room—well, I stumbled, at least, since Berry hadn’t had more than a few sips of the whiskey. When we got back to our room and the door was closed, I sat down on my bed and asked Berry, “What do you think of him?”

  He was a prentice and I was a mister of the ruinmen’s guild, but by then he didn’t bother with the sir-and-mister business unless there was someone around who needed to be impressed by it, and I’d have laughed if he did it any other time. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s likable enough, and I think he can be trusted, but I’d worry about what would happen if there’s a lot of the wrong kind of technology at Star’s Reach. He might not just stand by while we scrapped it.”

  “If we get there,” I reminded him.

  He grinned. “If we get there. I have to keep telling myself that.”

  That night seems long ago and far away now, as I sit here in Star’s Reach and write these words that maybe nobody will ever read, and look up now and again to see Eleen asleep in our bed, after another hard day trying to get an old computer to give us the secrets of a world so far away it takes light more than ten years to get here from there. Once Tashel Ban gets finished making the printouts, I know I won’t just read mine once; I might just keep reading it over and over again, until the hazy orange skies and brown oceans and the Cetans themselves are as real to me as Mam Gaia and her human children on this side of the sky.

  It rains gasoline on Tau Ceti II. The Cetans need to keep themselves from drying out, but they can’t go back into the ocean without breaking up into the couple of hundred plastic-sheet things that are their ocean phase, so they build pools and channels to catch the rain so they can splash around in it most of the time. That’s the first thing they ever built, they say, the way that huts to keep the rain off were the first thing humans ever built, and before then they lived in hollow places where the rain gathers the way we used to live in caves. When we were going over the briefing paper, I stopped at the bit where it talked about that, and just stared at the words for a long moment. It’s a funny thing, that something that reminds me just how different we are from the Cetans makes me think of them as people like us.

  We went from caves to huts to Troy Tower and Star’s Reach. They went from hollows in the rock to pools and channels to—what? We don’t know. The people here at Star’s Reach two hundred years ago didn’t know, though they’d seen something in one of the messages from Tau Ceti II that made them think the Cetans built something or other like our buildings. They certainly know how to build a radio as big as the one here at Star’s Reach, which is no small job.

  It’s occurred to me now and again that they may be smarter than we are, enough smarter to have missed making the mistakes that sent the old world to its end. Mind you, it’s also occurred to me now and again that they may be sitting in their pools of gasoline and wondering if we’re smarter than they are, and missed some troubled time in their history that we probably can’t even imagine. It’s the kind of thing that I used to wonder about when I was younger, and used to stare up at the stars and think about what might be out there; it’s almost frightening that now we’re starting to find out.

  Seventeen: What’s Always Real

  It’s been close to a week now since I last wrote down any of my story, and there’s a good reason for that. Sometime toward afternoon on the day after I wrote that last bit, Berry came around. I was in the room with the bookshelf, spraying resin on page after page of yet another alien-book, so I was glad for the interruption. “Tashel Ban and Eleen want everyone in the computer room,” he said, and hurried on, so I got to my feet and went to see what it was.

  “This isn’t something I expected,” Tashel Ban said once we were all there. “Though I’m not sure why I didn’t. Once the people here and the Cetans worked out enough of the details about each other’s senses, it was an obvious thing to do.”

  “What Tashel Ban is trying to say,” Eleen broke in, “is that both sides spent around fifty years figuring out how to send pictures to each other—pictures of their world that we could see, and pictures of ours that they could—” She stopped, laughed. “We don’t even have a word for it. Whatever replaces seeing for creatures that sense magnetic fields instead of light.”

  “The point, though,” said Tashel Ban then, “is that both sides managed it.”

  The whole room got very quiet.

  “We’ve got fifteen huge files—picture files—that came from a Cetan message,” he went on. “We just have to find the program that will turn them into pictures.”

  “Pictures of Tau Ceti II.” It probably ought to have been a question, but Thu didn’t say it that way.

  “Maybe pictures of Cetans,” said Eleen, and everyone got quiet again.

  So for the last week, that’s what Tashel Ban and Eleen did, finding everything that might be a program, figuring out how to get it running, and then trying to use it on the picture files. I should say, the two of them and Berry; he’s been helping them out with the computer work over the last month or so, since there hasn’t been much else to do. The rest of us, me and Thu and Anna,
agreed to take over the cooking and washing until they got the pictures done, and for a couple of days after that if we had to bully them into taking some time off. They ought to be looking for any sign of dangerous technologies, so we can settle the question that’s kept us silent here while the food gets closer and closer to running short, but nobody argued the point; for a look at Tau Ceti II, I’ll put up with a few more sparse meals, and I know I’m not the only one.

  Still, cooking and cleaning don’t take that much time, so I ended up back in the room with the alien-books. I made myself finish the one I was spraying when Berry came, but once it was dry and bundled up, pulling down another one and starting the whole thing over again was more than I could face. So I muttered some hot language, stared at the bookshelf for a while, and then walked over and took the last book off the top shelf. I’d left it for last, since it’s about three fingers thick and all the paper’s gone brown as Misipi water and frail as a bug’s wing. What I didn’t know until I cut the binding loose and went to work on it was that it wasn’t an alien-book like the others; it was a story.

  More exactly, it was a mother of a story, a mother with babies and then some. I forgot that I was supposed to be spraying the pages so many times that I finally just gave up and read the whole thing through to the end, then read it again when I went back through to spray the pages I hadn’t done yet. Once I was done I showed it to Eleen, and her eyes went round; she’d heard of it, most scholars in her field have, but everybody thought all the copies had gotten lost around the time the old world ended. That happened to a fair number of books, and especially stories like this one. They were a kind of make-believe story set off in space, and not many people wanted to read that sort of thing when the old world was ending around them.

  Nowadays I think a lot of people would like it. For all that it’s set in space, you can just change some words here and there, and anybody in Meriga with the brains Mam Gaia gave geese would be able to figure out what’s going on. The hero’s the son of a jennel, or close enough that the difference doesn’t matter, and there’s a quarrel going back a long way between his father and one of the other jennels. So the other jennel, who’s got the morals of a Jinya pirate, works up a plot to get the presden to send our hero and his father and mother and their servants off to the deserts out west—well, of course it’s some other planet, but it might as well have been Cansiddi—where they can be ambushed and killed by the other jennel’s men and the presden’s soldiers. Our hero and his mother get away into the desert, though, and meet up with the desert tribes, and the story goes on from there. Of course the desert tribes here in Meriga ride horses instead of big worms, but it’s a make-believe story and you’ve got to make allowances for that.

  Eleen’s reading it now. She probably ought to be sleeping instead, but in a little while she’ll doze off over the book and then I’ll get her tucked in and sleeping. I’d meant to write about how Berry and I left Troy and went to Skeega, and how we found out we were still being hunted, but just now my head is still too full of sandstorms and knife duels for that.

  This afternoon I finished reading the story the second time through, got all the pages coated with resin front and back, and tied them up in a bundle once they were dry. All the alien-books I’d treated and read were back in the room where I’d found them, bundled and stacked in a spare box I’d found; so they’ll be in good order when it’s time to pack them for the trip to Melumi. I didn’t put the story I’d just finished in the box, since Eleen wanted to read it, but I wandered into the room anyway and looked at the shelves full of books that were left, reading what I could off the spines. I thought I might be able to find another story, or at least something besides another alien-book. Before I got very far, though, I heard somebody moving in the hallway behind me, and looked back over my shoulder.

  It was Anna. I said something friendly, I forget what, but she just looked at me for a long time, and then came a step or two into the room. “You’ve been preserving those,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Have you read any of them?”

  “All I’ve treated so far.” I gestured at the box.

  “What do you think of them?”

  I wasn’t at all sure what to say to that, and her face gave me no clue; the wrinkles around her eyes might as well have been a mask. “I don’t know what to think,” I said finally.

  She tilted her head and gave me one of her sidewise glances. “Good,” she said. “That’s a useful habit.” Then, after a moment: “May I tell you a secret? You’ll need to promise not to tell it to anyone else, though.”

  That was tempting enough that I nodded. “Ruinman’s bond.”

  Anna smiled her thin tight smile. “The secret is this: those books are the reason Star’s Reach is here. Well, part of the reason, but a very important part.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Care to tell me what the reason is?”

  Her smile tightened even more. “Keep reading, and you’ll find it,” she said. A moment later she was gone, and I heard her footsteps whisper away down the hall.

  I stood there for a while, I could hear Tashel Ban pounding at the computer keyboard—he always sounds as though he’s attacking the keys, where Eleen types soft and quick so you can hardly hear her at all—and someone, probably Berry, busy in the kitchen. I tried to pay attention to the book, but mostly I sat there and sprayed pages with resin and thought about Anna.

  She was the last one to join us on the journey out to Star’s Reach, and we didn’t even know she existed until we got to Cansiddi. That seems like a long time ago now, though it wasn’t much more than a month and a half.

  We left Sanloo the day after Jennel Cobey and his man Banyon showed up, heading pretty close to due west on the army road from the Misipi to the Suri River. That road reminds you every step of the way that you’re nearing the borders of the part of Meriga people can live in. You come up out of the Misipi valley where it’s all green and full of trees, like most of Meriga is, and as you go the land gets dry. Day by day, as we walked west and the pack horses trudged along with us, the land dried out, the wind picked up, and the trees got further and further apart, with stretches of tall grass between them. It was as if we were walking back in time, going back to before the rains came rolling in and saved Meriga from the long drought.

  Finally the trees go away for good, and then a while after that, you come to Cansiddi. There’s a big fort there full of soldiers, since the desert tribes like to cross the Suri and go raiding for horses when they can, and the Meycans have outposts off to the southwest, far but not far enough. Other than the fort, the stores and taverns and harlots and all that cater to the soldiers, and some merchants who aren’t supposed to trade with the desert tribes but do anyway, there’s not much to Cansiddi. It’s just gray walls and low brown buildings and dust and the Suri River itself, which is a mass of brown water and floating junk when the rains come and a long streak of mud and pools and mosquitoes the rest of the year. When I was reading about the town on that desert world in the story I mentioned, Cansiddi really did come to mind.

  I’d have worried about getting through Cansiddi in one piece if we hadn’t had a jennel with us. As it was, all the soldiers took one look at Jennel Cobey and jumped as though Tashel Ban had wired their whatnots to a battery and thrown the switch. We went to the fort and talked to the cunnel there—well, mostly the jennel talked—and then we rented rooms in one of the two decent places in town. Other than a visit to the ruinmen’s guild hall Berry and I made the next day, we stayed right there at the tavern while Cobey’s man Banyon made arrangements with the tribes so we could cross part of the desert and not get our throats cut. There we were, even more keyed up than we were in Sanloo, and one evening I went down to get a glass of whiskey from the bar when I heard something like an argument out by the front door.

  Even though it was one of the two best places in town, they had fights in the bar pretty much every night we were there, and I don’t mean peop
le yelling at each other for a bit. They hauled a corpse out the first night we were there, after some soldiers got into it over a card game and were too drunk to take it to the circle the way they should have. So I didn’t pay much attention to the voices I heard out front, until I got close enough to realize that it was one of the big toughs they keep to guard the door telling someone else that they weren’t going to bother the jennel or the ruinman or any of those people. That meant us, and I was bored and curious enough to go over and see who it was.

  I crossed the bar from the stair to a place where I thought I could see the front door without being spotted, ducking around the tables and a few puddles of beer the barmaids hadn’t mopped up yet. About the time I got close enough to see that the other person was an old woman with a spray of white hair like feathers on the head of an eagle, though, she looked past the tough and in a voice I could have heard half a klom away said, “Ruinman, you’re trying to get to Star’s Reach. I was born there.”

  The tough stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then started laughing, a big rumbling good-natured laugh, the kind you don’t expect to hear from somebody who makes his living knocking spare teeth out of unruly drunks. I walked over to the door, looked at her, and said, “Prove it.”