Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  His fingers kept going at the keyboard for a while, and then he sat back and let out the little grunt that means he’s got something fixed. “What was that about?” I asked.

  He glanced back over his shoulder at me. “We’re getting a message.”

  I heard Eleen draw in a quick sharp breath behind me, but it took me a moment to figure out what he meant. “From the aliens?”

  “That’s what it looks like.” He tapped a few more keys, and the screen went blank for a moment, and then things started appearing on it, one letter or number at a time.

  DATE RECD 03192471

  512160734 212396027 883760386 957860278 679386673 028671846 671690739 126820368 387316713 698036416 290569348 949037662 486768902 689037693 602690736 235567987 690842093 093701746

  It went on like that for a long time, starting at the top and then marching down the screen, while we all crowded around and watched, and didn’t make a sound.

  I’ve noticed that there’s a difference, at least for me, between what I think is real and what I know is real, and sometimes something slides from one to the other fast enough that you can feel the world flowing around it, like water in a river around the hull of a ferry as it crosses from shore to shore. That happened the first time I went with Mister Garman and the other prentices to the ruins south of Shanuga, right at the beginning of my prenticeship, when the gray skeletons of the old buildings turned from dim shapes at a distance to real concrete and rusted metal that could make me rich if I was lucky or kill me if I got stupid. It happened the first time I was with a girl, and the afternoon not two years ago that I got to the top of the dune behind the beach by drowned Deesee, looked off across the blue rumpled sheet of the sea, and saw the Spire rising up out of the water, white and stark and only a few hours from its fall, though I didn’t know that yet.

  It happened, too, when we arrived at Star’s Reach. We broke camp at first light and started up the road, knowing that if the maps and the records from the Sisnaddi archives were right we’d get to the site toward the end of that day. We were well into the desert by that time, with high thin clouds sweeping by overhead , flat gray sandy emptiness all around us, and the track of an old road leading us north of the old highway to the place we were going. When we got to what was left of an old metal fence, toward late afternoon, we all looked at each other, but there are plenty of old fences here and there in the desert and we all knew it.

  When we got to the remains of the second fence, with barbed wire on top of it and a gatehouse for armed guards, I started to let myself wonder if we might have found the place. It was about a quarter hour later, though, when we got close enough to see the low blunt shapes of the antenna housings sticking up out of the sand like teeth, line on line of them off into the distance, and found a door half buried in sand in a hollow too regular to be Mam Gaia’s work, that Star’s Reach stopped being a dream and turned into a place, a real place, right in front of me.

  And of course that’s what happened, at least for me, as we stood there around the computer and watched the numbers march down the screen, as close as nobody’s business to the pages and pages of numbers we’d found in the computer room on fourth level. I’d been thinking all along about people, alien people, out there somewhere on another world circling another star, but there was a mother of a lot of difference between that and actually seeing a message that some alien had sent to us, tapping it out with its claws or whatever on something that probably didn’t look anything like a keyboard, and maybe looking up at the sky with six eyes and wondering what kind of weird creatures were listening in from the distant planet we call Mam Gaia. Even now, as I write this, the thought makes my head spin, and right there, trying to listen to a whisper from the sky that none of us could read yet, was like it must have been the day that people here on Mam Gaia’s round belly figured out that the world wasn’t safe and steady as they’d always thought, but whirled through space around the great burning fire of the sun.

  The message went on for a while, and then stopped, and the computer printed out:

  MESSAGE REPEATS – KEEP PRINTING? Y/N

  Tashel Ban hit a key, and the words vanished; the numbers stayed there on the screen, like ghosts.

  “Of course,” Eleen said. “They’ll have sent it multiple times so it gets through.”

  “I wonder how long it’s been since the last one arrived,” Tashel Ban said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find that out.”

  There wasn’t much else to do but wonder, though, so while Eleen copied down the numbers in a notebook, Thu and I went back to the table and cleaned up the breakfast dishes. Later on, while Eleen kept doing something at the computer, Tashel Ban showed Berry and me his way of tracing cables: not just following the wires, but tracking the signal going through them with a device he had. It had earphones and a little box with dials on it, and let him hear the signal in any wire he could get the box up against.

  The message from the aliens was still coming through, and so we were able to trace the signal down to the room full of machines on the eighth level, and then up again, all the way to first level and through the roof to the antennas. I knew, and so did Berry and Tashel Ban, that there wasn’t anything to see, but we climbed the stair and went outside anyway. The sky above us was mostly clear, with long curling mare’s tails of cloud drifting by high overhead. I watched them go past, and wondered what the alien out there who was trying to talk to us could see if it looked up at its sky.

  We went back down, Tashel Ban got back to work, and since I had nothing useful to do, I took another book down from the shelf of old brown brittle books about aliens, and got to work on it with the resin. It was a lot like the first one, all about aliens coming to visit us in machines that looked like two plates stuck together edge to edge, and a lot of angry words about how the government was hiding it all from people. I thought about what Eleen had said about that, how it was all something the government cooked up to hide things they were doing, and wondered what it had been like for the people back in the old world who thought the aliens were right there over their heads but the presden and his jennels wouldn’t admit it.

  That kept me busy until dinner, and since Eleen and Tashel Ban went right back to work on the computer, I came back to the room Eleen and I are sharing and started writing. If we hadn’t had a message from the aliens come through, I would have started right in on the story of how Berry and I spent our time at Melumi and then headed off to Troy. That’s the next part of my story, but since we got the message from the aliens, it seems like something that happened to somebody else a long time ago, or something that happened to that six-eyed alien I imagined beneath its strange sky, tapping out a message to us with its claws and wondering about us the way we’re wondering about it.

  It was a couple of days after the rains started, back there at Melumi, that a messenger came from the library to tell us that they’d found a cubicle for us and we could start reading about Star’s Reach. If it hadn’t been right after the beginning of the rains, I’d probably have spent the time before the messenger came pacing around the dorm at Melumi and making life miserable for Berry, but I had one mother of a hangover to get through, and it did a fair job of keeping my mind off Star’s Reach for a little while. Still, by the time the messenger came, I was eager to start, and Berry and I went splashing across the brick square at the center of the Versty just as soon as we could.

  The messenger led us in through the big double doors of the library and told us to wait there in the big empty room just inside. Before we could ask much of anything she was gone through one of the little doors on the far wall, and so Berry and I stood there and waited, steam rising from us in the warm damp air, looking up at the windows to either side. I don’t know what they were made of. They looked like somebody had taken pieces of colored glass or something and fit them together into a picture, all red and yellow and green and blue with clear bits here and there to set the other colors off. It was really something to look at, and so that’s
what we did.

  Click of the door told me that somebody had come for us. I turned, and saw Eleen standing there. I’d been wondering, since the hangover stopped making thinking hard, just how she’d react when we next met, after the way we spent the first day of the rains. I guessed that she would look embarrassed but say nothing about what happened. I was right, too; her skin was light enough that you could see the blush, but all she said was, “If you’ll follow me.”

  So we followed her, through the door and down a long hallway lined with doors and finally to a big room lit with watery light from tall windows along one side. The wall under the windows was divided up by short walls that jutted out a little way into the room, and between each pair of walls was a table and a couple of chairs. On the other side of the room from the tables and chairs was a long counter, and beyond that was the library itself, shelves and shelves and shelves full of more books than I’d ever imagined in one place.

  Eleen led us to the cubicle third from the far end, and waved us to the chairs. “This is yours,” she said. “When you’re ready for books, go to the counter and ask the librarians; they’ll get them for you. I’ve talked to them about what you’re looking for, so they should have something ready.”

  “Thank you!” I said. She smiled and nodded, and turned to go.

  “Good luck finding that acronym,” Berry said then.

  That got him a startled look over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, and left the room.

  We went to the counter right away, and one of the librarians, a plump old woman with glasses so thick they made her eyes look huge, came over. “You’re the ruinmen looking for Star’s Reach,” she said, as though it wasn’t a question she needed to ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. Just a moment.” She went over to another part of the counter, reached underneath it, and pulled out close to a dozen books in a teetering stack. Berry and I both thanked her, took the stack back to the cubicle, sat down, stared at each other for a long moment, and then started looking at the books.

  We figured out right away that Eleen hadn’t made things easy for us. I wanted to read about Star’s Reach, and so she had the librarians find books that had something to say about Star’s Reach, but what they had to say wasn’t in any particular order and a lot of the words were longer than I was used to reading back then. After a bit, Berry whispered a suggestion and I nodded, and he went to the counter, talked to the librarian for a bit, and then left the room and came back maybe a quarter hour later with a couple of notebooks and pens. We spent the rest of the day copying out everything we could find on Star’s Reach into those notebooks; the light through the windows got too faint to read before we were done, and so we gave the books back to the librarian and did what we could to keep the notebooks dry while we crossed the brick square to the guests’ dorm in time for dinner. Afterwards, back in our room, the two of us went over what we’d found, Berry helped with the words I didn’t know, and we tried to figure out anything we could about Star’s Reach.

  That’s how we spent the next day, and the day after that, and pretty much all the days we were in Melumi while the rain pounded down and life did what life in Meriga usually does during the rains, which is to say, not very much. Now and then there were breaks in the routine, when Jennel Cobey had us come up to his room and tell him what we’d found so far, or when the library was closed for some Versty function and nobody but the scholars went there, but the rest of the time, Berry and I were copying things out of old books in the daytime and trying to figure out what it all meant at night.

  By the time the clouds started to thin and the rain went from pouring down every single day to skipping a day now and then, we’d filled a couple of notebooks each, but I don’t think either of us knew much more than we did when we started. I won’t say that it was wasted time; the librarians found us a couple of books about how people in the old world went looking for life on other worlds, which were at least interesting, and they also brought us any number of things written by scholars at Melumi who read every scrap of paper left from the old world that mentioned Star’s Reach or anything like it, and that saved us a bunch of searching but didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

  Everyone pretty much agreed that if the Star’s Reach project actually existed, which nobody knew for certain, it started out using the big radio telescope in the hills between Meriga and Jinya, the one the letter I found called NRAO, and the people who were trying to figure out what the aliens were saying were at the place near Orrij in Tenisi the letter also mentioned. Most of the scholars insisted that the whole thing had been shut down when the Second Civil War broke out, or maybe when all the ice on Greenlun slid off into the sea and Deesee and the other cities of the coast went under water; some of them thought that all the people and equipment might have gone somewhere else, but they didn’t have the least idea where.

  One evening toward the end of our stay in Melumi, Berry and I got to the end of a couple of hours of trying to make some kind of sense of the latest things we’d copied, and both realized at right around the same moment that we hadn’t gotten anywhere. I got up and went to the window. The clouds were breaking apart off to the west, and stray beams of orange sunlight were slanting down over the Versty and the town off past it, reminding me that we didn’t have that much longer before we’d have to choose a direction to go. Berry stayed at the table, propping his chin in his hands.

  “I hope she finds something about WRTF,” he said after a long moment.

  I turned around. “So do I.” Then: “If she doesn’t, we can go to Orrij and the radio telescope place, and see if the records have anything.”

  It was a long shot, and we both knew it. The jennel and the scholars who went to Orrij looking for Star’s Reach, back when I was a first year prentice, weren’t the first people to go searching through what’s left there. The ruins near Orrij had been stripped of salvage not long after the old world ended, and though there were some papers and other things there for scholars and the like, there wasn’t much. As for the NRAO, it was right in the middle of the fighting in a couple of campaigns in one of the civil wars, I forget which, and ruinmen had been there, too, long before I was born. There might still be something about WRTF in one place or the other, but more likely there’d be nothing at all.

  Still, Berry nodded. “Worth a try, Mister Trey.”

  I think it was two days later that we got something better, and it wasn’t in anything the librarians brought us. Berry and I were in our cubicle as usual; the only sounds in the whole library, it seemed just then, were the rain drumming on the windows above us, the scratch of pens on paper, and every so often a rustle and tap as one of us handed a book to the other and tapped a finger on a passage worth a second look. That’s why I noticed, long before anybody came into sight, footsteps in the corridor coming toward us fast.

  It was Eleen. She caught sight of us, and motioned for us to come with her. A few minutes later all three of us were in one of the little rooms off the corridor, and she was handing me a small piece of paper. On it were these words:

  White River Transport Facility

  I realized what the words meant before I’d even finished reading them. “You found it.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I know where it is, too, or nearly. There was a White River in most of the old states, but this one’s in Mishga, the old state of Michigan, near Muskegon—that’s Skeega nowadays.”

  I nodded, and tried to stay calm while I wrote down the name of the town in my notebook. “Somewhere near Skeega.”

  “That’s what the book said.” She drew in an uneven breath. “We’re not quite finished searching, but this is the only WRTF that’s been found so far.”

  I thanked her, and she nodded and left the little room. Neither Berry nor I had any patience left for the books then; we went back to the guest’s dorm, across a brick square that was only a little wet with drizzle, and went straight to our room to talk. Jennel Cobey would hear the news soo
n enough; until then, this was ruinmen’s business.

  “Transport facility,” Berry said as soon as the door was shut.

  “Meaning they may have gone somewhere else from there.”

  “That’s my thought. I hope there are records.”

  I grinned. “Best in the world. Skeega’s right across Mishga from Troy.” Berry’s eyes went wide, as I expected, and before he could say anything I went on: “So we’ll have to stop at Troy on the way.”

  He let out a whoop, and at his age I would have done the same thing. Troy’s where the ruinmen started, and if there’s a ruinman in Meriga who hasn’t been there and doesn’t want to go, I’ll eat my boots for breakfast. Back five hundred years or so it was a big city full of factories and towers, but even before the old world ended it fell on hard times, most of the people left, and most of the factories and towers and houses and all fell into ruin. The story has it that people started making their livings by stripping the ruins for raw materials and selling them, and as time went on and the people who were doing that figured out that they’d all be better off if they worked together, the first ruinmen’s guild got started. All but one of the ruins in Troy were stripped down to bare ground so long ago nobody alive remembers it, and there are only a few ruinmen there now, but the guild hall is still there and they’ve got records of most of the digs in Mishga and the parts of Meriga that are close by. Melumi is where the scholars and most of the other people in Meriga keep their memories, but Troy is where we keep ours.

  Now of course Berry and I both knew that our chances of finding out where the people in the Star’s Reach project went from Skeega weren’t that much better than our chances of figuring out the same thing by digging through the records in Orrij and NRAO, but at least we had another chance at it, and the chance to visit Troy into the bargain. The watery sunlight that came in through the window now and then, reminding us both of the approaching end of the rains, seemed much more promising than it had a few days before, and I began to hope—well, not that I would actually find Star’s Reach, but that the search wouldn’t come to a dead halt quite as soon as I thought. There was a much longer and stranger road ahead of me than I had any idea just then, but of course I didn’t know that yet.