Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  “I can’t, of course,” she said. “But there are locks there that only open to a fingerprint.” She held up one finger. “If they still work, they’ll recognize this.”

  That caught my attention right away. The ancients had locks like that, and you find them in ruins now and again; of course there’s no way to get them open except with a pry bar or a barrel of gunpowder, because whatever fingers were supposed to open them have been topsoil for more than four hundred years. The thing is, next to nobody outside the ruinmen’s guild knows about them, the same way that next to nobody but ruinmen know about the kind of trap that almost killed me in the Shanuga ruins. She might have found out about them some other way, but it made her story a little less unbelievable than I thought it was at first.

  The tough turned to me. “Sir and Mister,” he said, “This woman, she’s old Anna, who does laundry and sewing for some of the officers up at the fort. If she’s from Star’s Reach, I’m the presden’s one and only virgin daughter.”

  That got me laughing, too. “Tell you what,” I said. “Upstairs there’s a scholar from Melumi who knows everything anybody knows about Star’s Reach. If this Anna’s lying, we’ll know right away, and you can chuck her out the door once we chuck her down the stair.” I turned to Anna, who looked at me with her head tilted just a little and a look on her face that might have meant anything. “And if you are lying, you probably want to turn right around and leave now.”

  “I’ll gladly talk to your scholar,” she said, without a bit of hesitation in her voice. The tough shrugged and stepped out of the way, I motioned with my head, and Anna and I crossed the bar and went up to our rooms.

  Everybody was there in the common room we’d rented except Banyon, who was still out settling things with the tribespeople, and every eye in the place turned toward us the moment they realized there was somebody else with me. “This is Anna,” I said by way of explanation. “She’s made a pretty remarkable claim.”

  “What the ruinman means,” she said at once, “is that I was born at Star’s Reach. I hear you’re trying to get there.”

  That got a moment’s dead silence. Jennel Cobey glanced from me to Anna to Eleen and back to me; the others looked at each other; Eleen looked straight at Anna and said, “That’s quite a remarkable claim. Would you care to say more about it?”

  “My mother,” said Anna, “was a linguistic analyst, and my father was a software engineer. Both of them were E-6 technical specialists.”

  Eleen’s eyebrows went up, so I knew the words meant something. “And you?”

  “I was five years old when we left. We and a few dozen others were the last ones alive; that’s what my parents told me.”

  “Can you lead us there?” This from the jennel.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “It was a long time ago.” Then she explained about the fingerprint locks, and I explained that that was why I’d brought her up, and then everybody started talking at once, asking questions and then not waiting for the answers, until finally I held up both hands and we got down to some serious talk.

  That was how Anna joined us. There was still a lot we didn’t know about her then, and I think there’s still a lot we don’t know about her even now. Or maybe just one thing: she knows something we don’t, or thinks she does, about Star’s Reach, why it’s here and why we’re here. Maybe it’s in the alien-books, but if it is, I haven’t found it yet.

  The thing that makes me wonder about that is that the alien-books are basically all the same. Start reading and before long you can count on finding something about aliens kidnapping people and doing things to them, or about a place called Roswell, or another place called Area 51, or—well, there are about a dozen things in all. It’s always those same things, and how the government’s trying to hide them, and sometime soon the government will fess up or the aliens will land and then we’ll all know the truth. There’s never anything about gasoline oceans and rotten-egg skies, or creatures with a free-swimming ocean phase and an intelligent communal phase on land, and nothing we’ve learned about the Cetans makes me think they fly around in spaceships shaped like dishes, or that they got off their world at all, the way a few of us did for a little while back before the old world ended.

  I didn’t particularly want to keep reading about those things, but I didn’t have much else to do just then. I picked one of them and turned to go to the room Eleen and I share, and just then I heard Berry’s voice off in the computer room; I couldn’t tell what he said, but it was loud enough and excited enough that I got up and headed that way.

  By the time I was halfway down the hall he came hurrying to find me. “Found it,” he said. “The first picture’s loading right now.”

  So we went and found Thu and Anna, and all four of us hurried back to the computer room and crowded around the screen. It was black when we first got there, with a little line of brownish orange along the top, but the line got wider a bit at a time as we watched, and shapes started to appear. After a while I realized that they were clouds, like Mam Gaia’s clouds, but brown and orange and gold instead of white and gray and blue.

  Bit by bit the whole screen filled with a picture: a rocky landscape with ocean off in the hazy distance. The ocean was brown except where it caught the light and shone red like fire; some of the rocks were bluish and others were purplish. Most of them looked like rocks on Mam Gaia, except for the color, but in the front of the picture they were smooth, and there was a golden pool in the middle of the smooth place.

  In front of the pool were five blobby pale yellow shapes that didn’t look like much of anything, except that they were more or less in the middle of the picture. I guessed the picture was probably a picture of them. I wondered what they were, and then all at once realized that they were Cetans.

  I stared at them for I don’t know how long. It’s one thing to read about alien beings on another world, and I’d done a lot more reading about those than the others who came with me to Star’s Reach, what with the alien-books and the stories. It’s another to see them, or pictures of them, and know that the blobby shapes in the picture spent years sending messages to our world, and trying to figure out the messages that came back. For me, at least, they stopped being aliens and turned into people, and the fact that they didn’t have a blessed thing in common with me or any of Mam Gaia’s children other than minds that could look up at the stars and wonder if there was someone to talk to, out there, somehow made me think of them as people even more.

  “I can load the next one,” said Tashel Ban then, “if everyone’s ready.”

  Everyone was ready. It took a while to load, like the first one, and again the first thing we saw was the sky. This time it was deep orange, and the brown ocean was nowhere in sight. Instead, there was a blue and purple landscape with a building. It was made of stone, or something like stone, and it was purple like a lot of the rocks were, but it wasn’t like any building any human being would ever have thought of putting up, not even in the last days of the old world, when they put up some pretty strange things.

  You could tell at a glance that it was meant to bring rain in, not to keep it out, and it wasn’t divided up into floors with rooms, because—or at least that’s my guess—the Cetans don’t think that way about buildings any more than they do about numbers. It was a little like a bunch of wobbly-looking plates or shallow bowls piled all anyhow, bigger ones on the bottom and smaller ones further up, except that the sides of most of the plates turned into ramps that led to plates further up or plates further down. There were Cetans all over it, lots of them, piled up all anyhow in heaps in the bowls or moving up and down the ramps.

  At first, I couldn’t make any sense of the building at all. Still, ruinmen have to learn a lot about how buildings stay up, since part of our job is making them fall down. After a while, looking at the plates or bowls or whatever they were, I could see how each part of the structure carried its own weight and passed it on down to the foundations. After another moment, I could see ho
w the gasoline rain pooled here and flowed there, so the Cetans who used the building, whatever they were doing with it, could keep themselves wet the whole time. Another moment still, and I realized what that meant: on Mam Gaia or Tau Ceti II, take your pick, stone weighs a lot and liquids flow downhill.

  That may not sound like too big of a discovery to whoever reads this, if anybody ever does. Still, since Tashel Ban and Eleen first got the computer to give them one of the briefing papers a couple of months ago, I’ve mostly been thinking about how different the Cetans are from us, how different their world is, and so on. All of us have been thinking about that, and it’s all true enough, but a world where stones are heavy and rain puddles and flows is a world that follows the same rules ours does, even if we and the Cetans don’t understand those rules in anything like the same way. That was when I understood why, in spite of all the differences between us and them, we could still figure out a way to talk to each other, because some things are always real.

  After a bit, Tashel Ban asked if we were ready for the next picture, and we were. Right at the moment I don’t remember a lot of details from the rest of it, other than skies that were always brown and orange and gold, and blue and purple rocks, and blobby yellow Cetans. There was one picture of a Cetan being born, if that’s what you call what happens when a lot of free-swimming plastic sheet things come crawling up onto a beach and join together to make an intelligent-phase Cetan; there was another of a Cetan dying, if that’s anything like what it means when they run out of whatever it is the free-swimming phase gathers in the sea, and turn dark yellow-brown and go back to the sea and separate out into a couple of hundred plastic sheet things again. I hope the people who used to live here at Star’s Reach sent them pictures of one of us being born, and one of us dying or dead—and if they did, I wonder what the Cetans thought about those.

  Tashel Ban’s trying to figure out how to make one of the color printers work; he says that it has an IOC label, so ought to run come drought or drowning rains. If he gets it to work, there’ll be copies for everyone. Even if he doesn’t, I can look at the pictures later, and I’ll do that, since I was thinking too much about what’s always real when I should have been looking at Tau Ceti II. One of the pictures was still on the computer screen when I left the room, daring me to think about what it would be like to stand somewhere none of Mam Gaia’s children is ever going to stand, watch the gasoline waves roll up onto a purple beach, and talk to a blobby yellow Cetan the way two people from different corners of Meriga talk over a couple of beers when the rains are pouring down and passing the time is the only thing anybody needs to do.

  Still, there’s something important we can learn from the Cetans. That came to mind later on, when Anna and I were washing up after dinner. We didn’t talk much at all; I was too distracted by my thoughts and she was off somewhere by herself, the way she usually is, and glancing at me now and then out of the corners of her eyes, as though she was waiting for me to say something or do something. That reminded me of the way Plummer so often said something and then watched me, waiting for an answer I didn’t yet know how to give him, but Plummer always turned toward me and looked straight at me when he did that. With Anna, the look is always sidelong, and if she’s waiting for an answer it’s not one I have.

  The thing that came to mind as I was drying dishes, though, is that maybe the alien-books had it wrong, not just a little wrong but as wrong as you can get. All of them, whether they thought the aliens were going to save us, or teach us something, or conquer us, or eat us for dinner—well, to start with, it’s always about us; it’s always about how human beings are so important to the aliens that they’re going to travel all the way from another star to do something for us, or with us, or to us. But it’s more than that.

  What the alien-books are saying, at least the ones I’ve read so far, is that what we think is real isn’t real: that the skies are really full of alien spaceships even though we don’t think they’re there, or that the government is really hiding the aliens or in cahoots with them or something else secret and scary, or that the aliens are going to give us all kinds of wonderful new science and technology that will prove that we don’t really have to pay attention to Mam Gaia’s limits and laws, or something else like that. The books are always about how the universe isn’t what we think it is.

  So far, though, the Cetans aren’t telling us any of that. If we’re important to them, it’s the same way that they’re important to us, the way that families in some out of the way valley up in the Tenisi hills are important to each other, since there’s nobody else you can invite over to talk and share a meal and sip whiskey as the sun goes down. Now of course they can’t come visit us, any more than we can go visit them, but it would be a lonelier universe if they weren’t out there in their gasoline pools and their buildings made of big stone plates. The thing they’re telling us, though, is even more important than that: they’re telling us that what’s real is always real.

  Tashel Ban said that the people who were here before us here had to explain to the Cetans how we see pictures, so they would know to put whatever we were supposed to see somewhere in the middle of the pictures they sent us. It never would have occurred to them to put those five Cetans right in front of the pool, spread apart so we could see them, in the middle of the first picture, since they see—or whatever you call it—in all directions at once. Pictures with edges and something to look at in the middle are a human thing, and whatever Cetan pictures are like is a Cetan thing, but there are things you find in both, like rocks that are heavy and rain that pools and flows, and that just might teach us and the Cetans both that some of what we think is so really is so, all the way from our side of the sky to theirs.

  That may not sound like much of a thing to value. Still, thinking back over the long road that got me here, I remember too many times that I thought something was true when it wasn’t, and too many others that I thought something wasn’t true when it was. For that matter, the priestesses say that the old world died because so many people kept on insisting that things they ought to have known were true weren’t true at all, and kept on insisting on it even when Mam Gaia kept slapping them across the face with the truth, over and over again. So if a blobby yellow alien in a pool of gasoline can look at any of the things we think we know and say, “Yes, that’s what it looks like to us, too,” that’s worth something, and if that’s all we find here, maybe the long road’s still been worth walking.

  Eighteen: Mule’s Pace

  It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I wrote earlier, to finish going through the papers from the Skeega ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something that mentioned the White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most of what they’d left at Troy Tower that we got the records from the seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.

  It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got to work there. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.

  That was the most exciting thing about that stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little rebellions catching fire here and there all over Meriga and there weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stomp on all of them. That’s all it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and a bunch of
long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of it got burned by rebels toward the end of the Second Civil War, and it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any good.

  After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing. “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”

  Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”

  I thought about routes, and added up the money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—

  “You know,” I said then, “we could go from here to Cago.”

  His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”

  “Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat from there.”

  That got me an open mouth, and then another grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”

  “Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”

  That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner, shared another glass of Genda whiskey with Tashel Ban that night, got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.

  We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable. All the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s cheaper and safer than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to market, with a few players or an elwus walking with them just to add a bit of color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were being followed.