Star's Reach
Page 15
I turned my chair so I could look at them, and after a while Conn noticed where all my attention was. “You’re not,” he said with a big grin, all but daring me.
“You watch me,” I told him, and got up.
So I walked up to the two of them and asked if they’d like a beer. The one who was just embarrassed, a little dab of a thing with a good bit of brown in her hair, gave me a look like I’d offered to cut her throat, but the other one, the excited one, smiled and said “Sure.” I managed to wheedle three more glasses out of the barkeeper, which took some doing; carried them back over and asked, “Mind if I sit?”
They didn’t, or at least the one I was interested in didn’t. Her name was Tam, short for Tamber, and the other one’s name was Shen; they’d been good friends since, oh, always, and was I really a ruinman’s prentice? So I sat, and we talked, and talked, and talked some more. It was starting to get dark outside by the time Shen insisted that they had to get back home, and would Tam please listen and come? So they left, and I left a little later, feeling pretty thoroughly dazzled by my luck.
Conn followed me—he’d been doing something else in the tavern the whole time, probably toss-the-bones, and probably winning, as he usually did—and proceeded to push me into the deepest puddle he could find. I’d have put it down to jealousy, except that he’s always fancied men rather than women, so I suppose it was just the beer. So we had another fistfight, one of the kind where both parties are laughing too hard to do much damage to anybody but themselves, and stumbled back up the stairs of Mister Garman’s house late enough that we got a week’s worth of the grubbiest cleaning chores Gray Garman could find for us.
I figured that was the last I’d see of Tam, but it didn’t work out that way. A week later, I think it was, I was back at that same tavern, and damn if she didn’t walk in the door, spot me, and come right over to the table where I was sitting. She was alone this time, and we talked again for what must have been a couple of hours; she had someplace she had to be at sunset, and I made good and sure she left the tavern in plenty of time, because I’d started to get hopeful and didn’t want to make it any harder for her to get outside the gate again. That time, before she left, we’d already settled when and where we’d meet next.
I think it was the fourth time we met, or it may have been the fifth, before one of us worked up the courage to suggest going somewhere less crowded than a tavern, and I honestly can’t remember which of us made the suggestion first. There were places outside the gate where you could take a girl, or a girl could take you, and a mark or two would buy a bed that wasn’t too dirty and a couple of hours of privacy. That’s what we did, and things proceeded from there. Afterwards, though, she nuzzled her face into my shoulder and suddenly started to cry, and after she’d finished crying I asked why; we talked, and I began to figure out what she was doing in a cheap rented bed with a ruinman’s prentice.
She was from one of Shanuga’s important families, as I’d guessed, with a mother who was a big name in Circle, and grandmothers and great-aunts who wore the red hats that only Circle elders get to wear. Of course they’d expected her to follow after them, and let her know once she’d gotten old enough that she needed to get a baby started, and she’d gone out and found a likely boy and done the thing, except that there wasn’t a baby. Of course that meant she had to keep at it, and she’d done that until every boy in Shanuga’s wealthy families got to thinking of her as free for the taking, and there still wasn’t a baby on the way.
That was when she realized that she wasn’t going to follow her mother into Circle. She told them so, and there was a big fight with the grandmothers and great-aunts and everybody involved, and at the end of it all Tam’s mother told her that if she didn’t have enough sense and pride to do the right thing by her family, then she might as well go off to the ruinmen. “She used to scare my brothers when they were little and misbehaved,” she told me, laughing through the tears, “by telling them she was going to send them to be ruinmen’s prentices. I couldn’t believe that she’d say that to me, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed at her.” Then, three days later, the rains came and she teased and bullied Shen into coming with her to the nameless street where the ruinmen live, where she met me.
“I can’t exactly get you into the ruinmen’s guild, you know,” I told her.
That got another laugh. “I know that. Still—Trey, I’ve got just over three years before my twenty, and then I’ll have to find a life for myself, you know. I need to know what it’s like out here, outside the gate where you live. And—” She pressed her face into my shoulder again and said something that I couldn’t figure out at all; so I eased her back from me a bit and she said it again, and we did some kissing and then pretty soon we were going at it again.
“I want to be a butterfly,” she said later. I made a wing-flapping motion with my hands, and she laughed. “No, I mean it. You know how butterflies start out as little green worms, and spend all their time on one tree, until finally they turn into a whatsit and then hatch out and go fluttering off into the world?”
I’d learned that much from the priestesses. “Yes.”
“When I have my twenty, I’ll hatch out, and then I want to fly.”
It was late by the time she left to go back into the city, and later still before I got back to Mister Garman’s house, but nobody made a point of it this time and I made sure to get my share of the work done and then a bit for the next few days. I had a lot of thinking to do. Even then I wasn’t quite slow enough to think that Tam had met me and fallen giddy in love, and that was all there was to it. Partly, I guessed, she was getting back at her mother and grandmothers and great-aunts by doing something that would make them yell like panthers if they ever found out, and partly she was right about finding something else to do with her life.
Once she had her twenty—her twentieth birthday, that is—if there hadn’t yet been a baby or any sign of one on the way, the door to Circle would swing gently shut and her family would close up around itself with her on the outside. That’s the way Circle works, and if you want to know why, I’m not the person to ask. One of the old women in red hats might be able to tell you, but probably won’t, because Circle has its secrets and holds onto them good and tight.
Still, after thinking all that through a couple of times on a couple of nights where I didn’t get much sleep, I decided that none of it mattered, because whether or not she was in love, I was, and I’d just take my chances. We’d arranged to meet again a week later, and a day or so before then I went up to one of the little shops outside the gate where they sell little trinkets and things. I knew what I wanted to find, and found it after most of an hour of looking through little bins and cases of bright bits of cheap metal, the sort of thing that boys give to girls and girls to boys.
There’s an alley back behind the tavern where we first met, and the grubby little place with rooms and beds for rent has a door that opens onto it. That’s where we met, with rain pelting down from a sky the color of cold iron, and we laughed and kissed, scampered inside and hurried up the stairs to the room I’d already rented; we’d settled on that as much to have a quiet place to talk as for the obvious reason. We were both soaked, as everybody is during the rains, and so of course we had to get our wet clothes off and hanging on the pegs next to the door; she sat on the bed, brown and plump and glowing in the dim light, and smiled up at me.
“Close your eyes,” I told her, “and hold out a hand.” I put what I’d found into her palm. “Go ahead and look.”
She looked at her hand and then at me, and her eyes were round and wet. “Trey,” she said. “Oh, Trey.”
There wasn’t much I could say in response, and we didn’t do much talking for a while after that. Later, when she was lying on her back and I was propped up on one elbow, looking at her, I took the gift and perched it on her nose: a little butterfly of yellow metal. “That’s your butterfly,” I said, “and it’ll take you someplace you can’t even imagine.”
All that first rainy season we got together once or maybe twice a week, and when the rains stopped and it was time to head back out to the Shanuga ruins we said our goodbyes with plenty of tears and laughter. I missed her like anything the first month or so, but I was one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices by that time, as I said, and so I didn’t have any great amount of time to sit and fret.
For all that, I didn’t know what to expect when the clouds piled up again over Shanuga at the end of that dry season and we hauled our gear back to the house on the street with no name and got ready for the rains. Half of me was sure she’d come to the tavern where we used to meet once the rains came pouring down, and half of me was sure that I’d never see her again, and between the one and the other, I must have been a mother of a mess to deal with those last few days of work.
When the rains finally came, I made myself stay away from the tavern for an hour or so, just to try to prove to myself that I wasn’t as tied in knots about it all as I knew I was, and then headed for it when I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. I turned the corner and just about bumped into Tam and Shen as they splashed across from the street outside the gate. We stood there laughing and kissing in the pouring rain while Shen blushed and tried to find something else to look at, and about the time she gave up Tam and I drew back out of one more long kiss and headed into the tavern with Shen right behind us.
Over three glasses of small beer we talked and caught up on eight months away from each other, and I did my level best to make room for Shen in the conversation, but it wasn’t easy; all I wanted to do was look at Tam and hear her voice and, well, I could go on but don’t really need to. They’d both filled out more than a bit, Tam more than Shen, and weren’t half so coltish as they’d looked the year before, so there was plenty for me to look at, too. Finally they went back inside the walls and I went out into the rain, feeling quite a bit giddier than the beer would explain, and got into a good rousing fight with some burners’ prentices, but we’d made plans to meet again within a few days, and it was straight to the little rented rooms that time.
Not much had changed in her life, though her family had finally gotten around to noticing that she’d done her best to get a baby started, and gone from being angry at her to being sad and pitying, which irritated her even more. All through the rains that year, when we weren’t busy with each other’s bodies, she asked me questions about the ruinmen and what I knew about the people and the trades outside the walls, or spun fine stories about what she might do after she had her twenty, when her life would be her own to make. Me, I had my own ideas about that; I knew that some of the misters in the ruinmen’s guild had women they lived with, with everything to make a marriage except the blessing from the priestesses you don’t get without children, and I’d begun to think about becoming a guild mister someday and sharing that life with Tam.
Her stories weren’t anything like so ordinary. She liked to daydream about adventures, going to Genda or Nuwinga, sailing on the sea, and yes, one time she told a story about the two of us finding Star’s Reach and learning what it was that the people from other worlds wanted to say to us, although for the life of me I don’t remember what she decided that was. I thought they were fine stories, and I was still young and silly enough that it didn’t occur to me that there wasn’t a bit of reality in any of them. I knew, because she’d told me, that she wanted a baby, wanted the place in Circle that would have been hers if she could have a healthy child, but it hadn’t occurred to me that her stories were one of the ways she was consoling herself for the life she wasn’t going to get, though I knew perfectly well that I was one of the others.
But the rains ended, as of course they had to sooner or later, and we said our goodbyes with more tears and more laughter, and I went off to the Shanuga ruins again and spent eight more months digging and hauling metal and tracing cables. We worked hard that season, harder than usual, for Gray Garman’s luck landed us with a big heavy windowless building of concrete and steel, and we tore it right down to its roots to get the metal that ran all through it. Night after night I went to bed aching in every muscle, but we all ended the season with plenty of money, and when the clouds piled up and we hauled our tools back home I couldn’t have been happier.
So when the rains came, I went to the tavern sooner rather than later, and waited for Tam. I was still waiting a couple of hours later, and finally I couldn’t stand it and went outside and there was Shen, all by herself, huddled and miserable in the rain, trying to work up the courage to come inside.
I knew right away that something was up, but I took her into the tavern and got her a beer. She wouldn’t meet my eyes at all, just looked at the table and sipped the beer, and finally said, “Trey, Tam’s about to have a baby.”
I stared at her for a long time, tried to say something, and had it come out sounding a lot like a pipe gurgling. I guessed right away what had happened, of course, and Shen confirmed it: “They think it’ll come in a week or two.”
“Did she—” I wanted to ask if she’d had any other lovers, and couldn’t, but Shen caught what I was trying to say, and finally met my eyes. “Just you.”
Of course I understood what kind of a mess Tam was in. If word ever got out that the baby was fathered by a ruinman’s prentice, the old women in red hats would get together and quietly agree that Tam wasn’t going to get into Circle no matter how many healthy babies she had, and there would be sixteen kinds of trouble for her from every side as well. So I swallowed and nodded, and promised I’d say nothing to anybody. Shen told me a few more things, none of which I remember now, and then scurried back to the gate with a promise that she’d come in two weeks if there was news.
Those were the longest two weeks I’ve ever had. When they were over, Shen showed up looking even more huddled and miserable than before. I met her outside the tavern, and was startled out of my skin when she looked up at me with red wet eyes and asked if we could go someplace private instead of the tavern. That pretty much meant one of the little rented rooms, so there we went. Since there was nowhere else to sit we sat down on the narrow little bed, and then all at once Shen burst into tears. I put an arm around her to comfort her, and she tensed for just a moment and then went limp against me, clinging to me while she cried.
It took a while before she could say much of anything, but finally she told me that Tam had had her baby, and it was a fine healthy little boy. So Tam was in Circle, paraded through the streets to the Circle hall with her mother and all the other women in the family beaming and laughing along with her. Whenever she mentioned Circle she started crying again, and I held her and stroked her hair and only then realized what she was trying not to say.
“You could follow her,” I said.
She looked up at me then. In a whisper: “I’ve never had my blood come. And I’ve been trying to start a baby since before Tam.”
So I held her and stroked her hair some more. I don’t think either of us was expecting what happened next; still, we both had an empty place in our lives where Tam used to be, and as Plummer said to me more than once, human beings don’t have to make sense. Still, when we were done, Shen kissed me and thanked me, and then got a little bag out from somewhere in the wet heap of her clothes.
“She wanted you to have this,” she said. “She told me to tell you—to say that now you’re going to have to be the one that sprouts wings and goes into the world.”
I knew what it was before Shen was done talking, but of course I had to open the bag and look at the little yellow butterfly, and I did some crying of my own then. Still, I kept it, and that’s why it’s sitting on the table next to me right now.
Shen and I got together a couple more times after that, mostly because there wasn’t anybody else either of us could confide in, and then she went to the priestesses and became a postulant. I think she’d hoped that I m
ight give her a baby the way I’d given one to Tam, but that didn’t happen, and with the door to Circle good and closed the priestesshood was probably the best choice she had. I got a letter from her a few months later, when she’d been accepted at the mother house in Nashul, and another a year after that, when she’d been sent to her first posting up in Misota. She sounded happy in the letters; I hope she’s still happy, wherever she is now.
I wonder if either of them, Tam or Shen, will ever hear about me and about how I found Star’s Reach, and guess that the yellow metal butterfly came with me and is sitting here on the table beside me while I write. I wonder about the child I’ve got in Shanuga, who I’ll never know and whose name I went out of my way not to learn; I can’t think that Tam will ever be fool enough to let him know who fathered him, but I still think about him. And I wonder why I’m fool enough to sit here late at night, looking at a little butterfly of yellow metal, when I could be sleeping next to Eleen.
A few rooms away from me, there’s a computer full of messages from some other world, and if I were looking at all this from some distant star I’m sure I wouldn’t notice the three little lives that got tangled up together for a couple of years, and the fourth that got started as a result. Still, Plummer was right when he told me that human beings don’t have to make sense.
Fourteen: Whisper from the Sky
We were just finishing up breakfast this morning when something started howling down below in the belly of Star’s Reach, like a machine doing its best to sound like an animal and not quite failing. Thu and I were both on our feet so fast that the chairs we were sitting on went clattering across the floor, and then a moment later Tashel Ban jumped up, sending a third chair flying, and ran for the computer. I followed him. Something I couldn’t read was flashing across the screen when I got there; a moment later, as the others followed, Tashel Ban started pounding at the keyboard, and the howling suddenly stopped.