It was the third day after we left Altan, I think, that we saw the whale. I was still mulling over what Plummer had said, about knowledge and the places it was kept that he wasn’t willing to name; I was wondering when I’d see him again, and whether he’d intended us to meet outside of Cago, and if that was so, why. The brown water splashing around the hull of the Jennel Mornay and the green of the riverbanks way off to either side didn’t seem particularly interested in giving me any answers just then. I thought about Star’s Reach and the hope Berry and I were chasing down the river to Memfis, but there weren’t any answers for me there, either.
That evening, about the time the sun went down and the Jennel Mornay tied up for the night—it was in a riverside town named Jirido—I got to talking with Slane about Memfis. I don’t remember whether he brought it up or I did, but it was probably me. I knew we weren’t that far away from it, and I remembered what Slane said about it when we first met. Not that I needed the warning; Memfis has a reputation and then some.
“Not to worry,” Slane said. He had a glass of whiskey in one hand, and was leaning up against the rail on the cabin deck with nothing on the other side but dark water and the lights of Jirido. “I promised Plummer I’d make sure you and your boy get to the ruinmen’s hall in one piece, and I’ll do that.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he laughed and punched me on the shoulder with his free hand. “You just follow me, you’ll stay safe. You been through Cago?”
“Not to speak of. We got a canal boat south of town.”
He nodded. “Smart. Cago’s only half as big as Memfis, but it’s near as rough. Both of ‘em have too many people and too much money, but in Cago it’s all Genda money and in Memfis it’s all from Meyco. You know about the river trade?” I didn’t, and he gestured at me with his whiskey. “Well, that’s about half of what keeps Meriga plump and happy these days. Genda’s got stuff to sell to Meyco and the countries down south, Meyco’s got stuff to sell Genda and the countries across the Lannic and the North Ocean, and shipping it up and down the Misipi is a lot safer than sending it around by the Gulf and the Lannic and letting Jinya pirates have a shot at it from one side and Arab pirates from the other. So Cago gets one end of the trade and Memfis gets the other, and a lot of people make money off the deal. Me, for example.”
“What do you do?”
“Buy and sell. Bunch of stuff down there on the cargo deck is mine, and it’ll be going to Meyco pretty much as soon as we hit Memfis and I find a buyer. Pick up some Meycan goods then, something with a market up north, and it’s back up the river.” He smiled, or half his mouth did; the other half didn’t move much, ever. “Beats the stuffing out of pushing a plow through Aiwa mud, which is what I’d be doing if I’d followed my daddy’s footsteps.”
“Can’t argue there,” I said. “I’d have been doing the same thing in Tenisi.”
“There you go. But Dell had other ideas for me.” He laughed. “Dell and Plummer. Not sure which one’s the stranger.”
I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I’d gotten used to thinking that nobody anywhere would talk about Plummer. “You’ve known Plummer a while?”
“Half my life. He got me out of a scrape in Sanloo—I was a dumb kid. We’ve been friends since then. I see him every couple of years.”
“He’s got a lot of friends.”
“You ever met the ones that don’t have names?” He was watching me with that look of his that seemed casual and wasn’t.
I don’t think he could have said anything else that would have startled me more. “A few of them,” I said after a good long moment.
He took a swig of his whiskey. “He ever tell you anything about ‘em?”
“Not a word.”
“Me neither.” Maybe he was dodging the question, but I didn’t think so just then. “I just wondered. How’d you meet him?”
So I told Slane the story about how Berry and I met Plummer on the road north to Luwul, and we got to talking about something else from there, I don’t remember what. Finally we went back inside, and I headed for my cabin while he headed for another drink.
Berry was sound asleep in his bunk when I came into the cabin, and didn’t show any sign of waking up, so I sat on one of the little folding chairs at the little table up against the little window that showed me the night and the river. I thought about Plummer, and about Slane, and about Star’s Reach, and after a while when I was sure Berry wasn’t going to wake up I turned on the little lamp over the table and spent a while writing a letter to Jennel Cobey.
I thought he’d probably want to know where we were and how the search for Star’s Reach was coming. I didn’t yet know that we were going to become friends, or that we were going to travel to Star’s Reach together, or that I was going to kill him there. There was a mother of a lot I didn’t know yet, and though it was just a few years ago I can’t remember that trip down the Misipi without thinking about how foolish I was, and how little I knew about what was going on all around me.
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 heat
ers 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.”
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