Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  I spent a good part of that day thinking about that, and about the people Plummer talked about the night before, his guild of rememberers. It was a good day for thinking. The weather was clear and not too warm, the road dry but not yet dusty, and there weren’t that many people traveling the way I was going, which was across the Hiyo and down into Tucki. That was out of my way, strictly speaking; Sisnaddi was only another couple of days ahead if I kept going along the north banks of the Hiyo; but I wasn’t in all that much of a hurry to get there, and I wanted to visit Berry and make sure everything was working out between him and Cob.

  There used to be a bridge across the Hiyo at Madsen. Of course it’s gone now, but there’s a ferry there, a big one, that goes back and forth across the river. I paid the two bits it cost to get on, and sat next to the water as the engine groaned and puffed and burned peanut oil and the Hiyo rushed past. Then I was in Tucki again, heading south on roads that weren’t much more than cart tracks, past farms and fields and big patches of forest.

  It all reminded me of the country Berry and I walked through, back at the very beginning of our search for Star’s Reach; and that reminded me of how far I’d traveled and how many things had happened since then. If I’d been on one of the busier roads, with plenty of people to talk with and everything, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but I was alone a lot of the time, and that meant I didn’t have anything to do but think, and wonder what was going to happen when I finally admitted to myself that the whole business had been a waste of time.

  I was pretty much convinced by then that that’s how things would turn out. Now and then I tried to talk myself into believing that I could find something in the archives at Sisnaddi, some piece of paper with the letters WRTF on it that would point me to the place I needed to go, but the further I went south into Tucki the less likely that seemed. I walked past old bits of ruin here and there, rounded chunks of concrete rising up a little ways out of the grass, and it occurred to me more than once that they were telling me that what was left over from the old world didn’t really matter any more. Another hundred years or so of rains pounding down on the concrete, wearing it away a bit at a time; another hundred years or so of ruinmen stripping metal out of anything that might pay for another day’s room and board; another hundred years or so of people in Meriga and all over Mam Gaia’s round belly living their lives in ways that made sense, instead of chasing some wild dream of talking with creatures from some distant world—what would be left after that, but a few old stories about a time when we tried to touch the stars and almost killed Mam Gaia and ourselves doing it?

  So that’s what I was thinking as I walked south day after day from Madsen to Lebna. From there the empty nuke was only a few hours more south and east. I left Lebna after noon, saw the gray towers looming up within an hour or so, and got to the place where the trail led down off the road well before sunset. I could hear voices down below, and followed them down to Cob’s camp.

  Cob and Berry and Cob’s prentice Sam were busy hauling chunks of metal out of a half-stripped building when I got there. Berry saw me first, let out a whoop, and came pelting over to throw his arms around me; Cob and Sam were less excited but not a bit less welcoming, and so we stood there and talked for a bit, and then I helped with the hauling until we’d carried as much out as was ready to move. By then it was getting on for time to eat, so we all went into the main building, and Cob and I talked while Berry and Sam got dinner ready.

  Not much had changed since we’d been by. The ruin still had plenty of metal in it, and Cob was doing well enough that he had money put aside in the guild at Lekstun for when he got too old to work. He’d thought about getting another prentice or two, but never quite gotten around to it, so it was no trouble at all to have Berry there, quite the contrary. “You got yourself a good one,” he told me more than once. “Prentices like that aren’t so easy to find.”

  Then dinner was ready, and we ate bean soup and bread, just as if I was back at the Shanuga ruins, and talked the way ruinmen do. I was watching Berry and Sam, though, and after dinner was over and the two of them had hauled the dishes off and were washing them and chattering in one of the other rooms, I turned to Cob and said, “Those two look like they’ve gotten pretty close.”

  He snorted. “You could say that.”

  I’d pretty much figured out already what he was hinting at, though it surprised me more than a little. “You know Berry’s a tween?”

  “So’s Sam,” said Cob.

  “I didn’t know,” I managed to say then

  “Well, there you have it,” said Cob. “I figure, Mam Gaia bless ‘em, it’s not as if they’ve got lots of other people to pick from, and as long as it doesn’t keep ‘em from doing their work, it’s not exactly any of my business.”

  I nodded, and we talked about something else after that. Still, that night when we’d all wished blessings on each other’s dreams and the rest of them were asleep, I lay on my pallet and thought about that. Of course Cob was right. I don’t know of any reason why a tween couldn’t get as friendly as he wanted with a man or a woman, take your pick, but it’s not something that happens, or at least if it happens nobody talks about it. The priestesses like to say that it’s nobody’s fault but the ancients’ that some poison from the old world got into somebody’s insides and messed with their children’s children, and of course they’re right, but some people still aren’t comfortable around tweens at all, and let’s not even talk about sharing a bed.

  The next morning I woke up early. Cob was still snoring, though the other two pallets were empty, and I slipped outside and stretched and decided to go down to the creek at the bottom of the little valley to wash up. I got most of the way there before I heard water splash, and then Berry’s voice, low enough that I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I looked around, and saw Berry and Sam sitting on the bank not ten meedas from where I was.

  They were paying too much attention to each other to notice me, which is just as well, because it didn’t take much work to figure out what they’d been doing, and what they were probably going to do again before long. I backed away fast and quiet, and went to a different part of the creek, on the other side of the ruins. By the time I finished and came back to the main building, Cob was awake and breakfast was cooking. The way Berry and Sam said their good mornings to me, I don’t think either one had the least idea I’d seen them.

  So I ate my breakfast and thanked Cob for his hospitality, said my goodbyes to Berry, and loaded up my bags and left. I could have stayed. The whole time I was there, I knew that if I asked Cob if he wanted another pair of hands to help with the ruins, he’d welcome me, and I could get back to the work I knew how to do, breaking down a ruin bit by bit and selling the metal. I could have stayed, and left dreams about Star’s Reach to somebody else.

  That’s not what I did, though. I climbed back up the trail to the road, and started walking toward Lebna. The journey wasn’t over, I knew that right down in my bones, and I had to follow it out to the end even if there was nothing at all waiting for me there.

  The funny thing was, I wasn’t brooding over it, not any more. When I was walking from Memfis up to Ensul, before I met Plummer again, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything but what I was going to do if nothing turned up at Sisnaddi, and then on the way from Madsen to Cob’s camp I didn’t think of much else, either. Now that Sisnaddi was just a few days away, it was like the last few days at a ruin before the rains come in or the work runs out. You don’t worry or argue or complain, you just figure out the thing that still needs doing, and then you do it.

  So I walked north and a little east, following the roads through farm country that got richer and more thickly settled the further I went. The fifth day after I left Cob’s ruin, toward the middle of the afternoon, the road I was on bent around a low hill, and ahead of me I could see the gray and brown patchwork of a city, a big one, off at the edge of the northern sky. It was a clear day, and if I’d known what I was looking
for I could have made out the presden’s palace and the big gray building of the archives next to it, but I didn’t know that yet. I drew in a breath, and started down the last part of my journey to Sisnaddi.

  Twenty-Five: At a Table of Stars

  Berry and I were in the radio room last night, listening to the broadcast from Sanloo. There wasn’t much new, just a speech by somebody important in Congrus who said nothing at all in the most graceful way you can imagine, and some guessing about how soon the funeral’s going to be. Berry was there because Tashel Ban taught him how to run the radio, and because he had even more reason to listen than the rest of us. I was there with him partly because I wanted to know what was happening back home in Meriga, partly because Berry’s my prentice and my friend and I figured he could use the company. Tashel Ban and Eleen were still working on the computer, trying to get the last file on it to make some kind of sense; Anna never listened to the radio, and I have no idea where Thu was just then.

  So it was Berry and I, sitting there listening. He didn’t say a thing until the broadcast was over and the last of the music faded back into hisses and crackles. Then, suddenly, he turned toward me. “Trey,” he said, “do you know the thing I’m sorriest about? It’s all the nonsense I told you about who I am and why I ended up as a ruinman’s prentice.”

  It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. “The business about your mother being an Old Believer and all that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you had to say something.”

  He tilted his head, considered that. “You’re probably right. Still...”

  “Did you really grow up in Nashul?”

  A quick shake of his head denied it. “I spent some time there, so I could make the story believable if anybody who knew the place asked questions. No, I grew up in Sisnaddi, inside the walls. My mother wanted me close, so she could visit me sometimes, and one of her servants came to check on me pretty often.”

  “So there are people in Sisnaddi who know about you.”

  His face tensed. “Some. Not many, and I hope they keep their mouths shut.”

  We talked a little more, I forget about what, and then he turned off the radio and said goodnight and went back to his room. I watched him go, and then went back to the main room, where Tashel Ban was hammering at the keyboard as though he meant to keep at it all night, and Thu was sitting over in the opposite corner doing one of his meditations, and Anna was finishing up the dishes. She saw me come in, gave me and Tashel Ban her sidelong look, and then smiled to herself. She doesn’t smile often, and I’m just as happy for that. This one was worse than usual; it curved like the blade of a knife.

  So I went back to the room Eleen and I share, made sure she was sound asleep, and started writing. Well, to be honest, I sat here thinking for a long while, and then finally picked up the pen. Ever since I wrote about the conversation Plummer and I had in the field outside the tents of the Baraboo Sirk, I’ve been thinking about what we’re going to do once we finish up here, and especially what I’m going to do.

  Partly, of course, I’m wondering about what’s going to happen to Meriga, and whether there’s going to be any safe place at all, even for a ruinman, if we get a fourth civil war. Partly, there’s Plummer’s offer. Partly, there’s what happened to Jennel Cobey, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen because of that. Partly, there are all the places I passed on my travels where every scrap of ruin was stripped bare by ruinmen long before I was born, and wondering what’s going to happen to the guild when there aren’t enough ruins left for us to work; and of course partly I’m thinking about the fact that I managed, by sheer dumb luck and a lot of wandering, to find the place that everybody’s been looking for since the old world came crashing down, and what do you do after you’ve done that?

  At any rate, I wasn’t ready to sleep yet and couldn’t make myself write, and so I slipped out of the little room Eleen and I share and went into the big space where the people who were here before us used to grow their vegetables. The glass block skylights up above were pure black, no trace of starlight in them at all, though I was pretty sure it was a clear desert night and plenty of stars were looking down on this side of Mam Gaia’s round belly. I sat on the edge of one of the concrete tubs full of dirt where the vegetables used to be, and looked back up at them.

  I was pretty sure that something was going to happen the next day, something big. Eleen went to bed with a look on her face that wasn’t the one I expected. Ruinmen talk about trying to get through a concrete wall by pounding your head against it, and I’m sure the scholars in Melumi have a more elegant way of saying the same thing; I know the look Eleen gets when that’s what she’s been doing, but that wasn’t the way she looked.

  She looked frightened. Not frightened as though something’s come lunging out of the darkness at you, the way Thu came at me on that night in Memfis; frightened as though everything you thought you could trust just dropped from beneath your feet, the way—I was about to write “the way the floor dropped from beneath my feet in the Shanuga ruins,” but I knew better, any ruinman’s prentice past his first season knows better, than to think you can ever trust an old concrete floor. I sat there and stared up at the night, and thought about the frightened look on Eleen’s face, and all the things we’d learned about the Cetans, and the night stared down at me and didn’t say a thing. Finally I got tired enough to sleep, and went to bed.

  The next morning I was up before it was light. It was my turn and Anna’s to make breakfast, and so I washed and dressed and headed for the kitchen. She was already there, which was unusual. We didn’t see her much before breakfast unless it was her turn to help with the cooking, and even then she’d get to the kitchen when things were well along and do most of the serving to make up for it. This time she was waiting. She didn’t say much most mornings, and this morning she smiled her knife-curved smile, and watched me out of the corners of her eyes, and didn’t say a word.

  I don’t think any of us said a dozen words during breakfast. Everyone knew that something was about to happen. People don’t live together as long as we have, here at Star’s Reach, without getting to sense when a discovery’s been made or a problem’s come up. The longer breakfast went on, the thicker the silence got, until finally Tashel Ban drained his cup of chicory brew and said, “When the rest of you are finished, there’s something Eleen and I have found that we all need to talk about.”

  The rest of us were finished. Berry and Thu took a couple of minutes to clear the table, but nobody even thought about washing the dishes. Tashel Ban waited until they were back at their places, then leaned forward onto his elbows and said, “We’ve recovered the last thing that was put on the computers before the people here died.”

  He stopped there, and after a moment I said, “And?”

  “I have no idea what to make of it. It’s not a document. It’s a program, a huge one, and we can’t figure out what it is or what it’s supposed to do. It’s—” He gave us all his owlish look. “I’m not at all sure how much of an explanation you would prefer.”

  “Details,” said Thu, “are more useful than generalities. Please go on.”

  Tashel Ban sat back in his chair. “I don’t claim to know everything about the way computer programs were put together back in the old world, but I know a fair amount, probably as much as anybody does nowadays. The Nuwingan government has a few computers that are still in working order—I’m pretty sure the Merigan government has some, too—and I’ve worked on ours. I’ve learned enough to look at a program written for the kind of computer they put here at Star’s Reach, and know what to expect, what the files look like, and so on.

  “The program we’ve found is gibberish. Or it looks like gibberish. It’s got things stuck into it that are ordinary pieces of programming code, but I think they were lifted out of other programs that were already in the computer, and they do things with those other programs or the operating system that runs the computer. The rest of i
t is nonsense, letters and numbers and other things all jumbled together without any structure I recognize at all. But—” Here he leaned forward again. “I don’t think it’s actually nonsense. There are patterns in it. I just can’t figure out the first thing about them.

  “So we tried to figure out where it came from and when it was used—you can find that out from inside the computer if you know how—and that’s when things got truly puzzling. The program ran just once, a few hours before the people here tried to delete all their files and then shut everything down. It was downloaded onto the computer a day before, by another program, an even bigger one. This other program was downloaded onto the system four days before that, spent all four of those days doing something I can’t figure out, and then deleted itself.

  “Then we tried to find out where the first program came from, and that’s what kept us busy most of yesterday. It looked as though it just popped up out of nowhere, until we thought of checking the logs for the main radio receivers. That’s where it came from. There was a radio message, a long one, that repeated itself over and over again—” He moved his hands in a circle. “And somehow that set up a repeating pattern all through the communications and computer system here, and the big program somehow unpacked itself from that. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think anyone anywhere knows how to do that.”

  “Clearly someone did,” Thu pointed out. “I wonder if it came from Sisnaddi.”

  “Not those receivers,” Tashel Ban said.