“Not any more,” I told her, and I didn’t, either.
Afterwards, we curled up again, and a little after that she dozed off. I waited until I was sure she was good and sound asleep, then slipped out of bed and got some clothes back on.
The hallway outside the room we share was as hushed as it must have been in the years between when Anna’s people left it and when we arrived. I closed the door as quietly as I could and went down to the room where the alien-books were. It was dark and empty. I turned on the light, and noticed that there was a gap in one of the shelves where I’d put the alien-books earlier that day. It was just about wide enough for one large book. I looked at the gap for a moment, and wondered who else was reading about aliens—Anna, or one of the others?
After a bit, I pulled down one of the stories from the top shelf and tried to read it. It was another of those make-believe stories set on other worlds, like the one with the worms I mentioned a while back; this one was about someone who figured out how to predict the future, and the future he saw coming was the fall of an empire like Meyco’s, except this one covered the whole Milky Way. It was a good story, too, and I’ll go back and read it tomorrow, but just then my mind kept on wandering off and I finally put the book down and just sat there on the floor with my chin in one hand.
I was thinking about Eleen—about how we met, which I’ve already written about, and how we met again in Sisnaddi after I’d come back from the Lannic shore where I found the one thing I needed to know to find Star’s Reach and watched the Spire fall and the rest of it. I came back the way I went, past the burning land to Pisba and then down the Hiyo to Sisnaddi, every step of the way on foot because all the money I had in the world just then was barely enough to keep me fed, never mind pay my fare on a riverboat.
The ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi is just west of town, a bunch of big shapes like mushrooms that rise up out of the tumble of buildings where the chemists, the burners, and the other guilds nobody lets inside the walls live and do their work. What that meant is that I walked all the way around the city walls to get to the ruinmen’s hall, signed myself in, put up with the pitying looks from the old ruinmen there who were sure I was wasting my life chasing Star’s Reach, and went to the big west gate just as soon as I’d washed up and gotten something to eat. Not three hours later I was back out the west gate with a scrap of paper in my pocket that told me where Star’s Reach was and how I was going to get there.
I could have gone back to the ruinmen’s hall and showed it to the old men there, but I knew they wouldn’t believe I’d found anything that mattered, so I went to the big tavern right outside the gate with every intention of spending the last of my money getting thoroughly drunk. They probably would have had to carry me back to the ruinmen’s hall that night, too, except that I walked in the door and nodded to the barmaid and found myself staring straight at Eleen, who was sitting over by the side of the room at a little table with a glass of cheap whiskey in front of her and a look on her face that told me everything I needed to know right away.
After I got over the surprise of seeing her, I went over and stood in front of the table until she noticed me and looked up. She didn’t say anything at all, not at first, just looked at me.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked.
That got me a smile. “Not at all.” She waved at the chair across the table from her.
She was still wearing a scholar’s gray robe, but the only reason a scholar from Melumi would be in a cheap tavern in Sisnaddi was if she’s failed and been sent away. I knew that, and she knew I knew it, and so neither of us had to say anything about it at first, which was probably for the best. “Did you have any luck finding Star’s Reach?” she asked.
“Not yet.” I wasn’t ready to tell her about what I’d just learned. “Both the places you found for me turned up empty—not that that’s your fault.”
“Thank you for saying that.” She tilted her head, considering me. “Are you still looking for it?”
“Not bright enough to quit,” I told her.
That got me a laugh, and she reached past her drink with both hands, and took hold of mine. “Good.”
So I got a glass of whiskey to match hers; I got a little drunk and she got a little more drunk, and we talked about nothing in particular, and the end of it all was that I didn’t get back to the ruinmen’s hall that night. We stumbled up the stairs to the sleeping room she’d hired with the last of the money they’d given her when she left Melumi, and spent that evening pretty much the same way we spent this one.
The next morning, I told her about what I’d learned in drowned Deesee and what I’d found in the archives, and said, “I’m going to need a scholar to come there with me, and I’d like it to be you.”
She thought about that for a moment. Then, bitterly. “I’m a failed scholar.”
“That’s what ruinmen always hire.”
She blinked, and then straightened a little. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not like scholars who are still in the Versty like to camp in the ruins, you know.”
She blinked again, and I could just about see her thinking through what it meant to have a place in the world again, not to mention work that could pay her keep and maybe a lot more. “I suppose not.” Then: “Trey, if you’re willing to take me, I’ll go with you, anywhere at all.” She put her arms around me. “Among other things, you’re good to spend time with, you know.”
Of course I kissed her then, and since she wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I, things went from there pretty much the way you’d expect.
Later on she talked about why she’d been sent away from Melumi. I’d heard of failed scholars since I was little, and of course there was always one at the Shanuga dig, but it’s like so many other things. I’d never really thought about what that meant, or how the failed scholars got sorted out from the others.
By that time we were living together in a little bare room on the fifth floor of a cheap rooming house not far from the ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi. I’d gotten money from Berry and a good deal more from Jennel Cobey, which was how I could afford the room. That’s where we were standing, looking out the room’s one little window at the evening sky, and talking about something that led to something that led to her story.
“My parents were farmers too,” she said. “They had a big farm outside of Fowain, in Inyana—my oldest sister has it now. Ordinary folk, maybe a little better off than their neighbors; they could afford to send me and both my sisters to school, not just the temple school in the nearest village but a real school in Fowain. My sisters learned to read and write and calculate, and then went back home to farm, but I loved it at the school, and I decided I wanted to become a scholar at Melumi.”
“What did your family think about that?”
She shook her head, laughed a tired bitter laugh. “They did their best to talk me out of it. They knew how many girls go to Melumi every year and how few of them stay—I knew that as well as they did, of course, but I was sure I’d be one of the few. So I studied, and studied, and studied, and when I got the letter saying that I’d passed the examination and been admitted to the Versty, I let myself believe that nothing could go wrong.
“So I went to Melumi and began my studies, and found out a little at a time how Melumi actually works. There are a certain number of chairs—they aren’t actually chairs, though that’s what they call them; they’re livings that have been donated by jennels and Circle elders and what have you, and each one will pay for one scholar. If somebody gets reborn while you’re there as a student, and you happen to be in the same field of study as the person who dies, and the senior scholars at Melumi decide that you’re the best person for the job, you get a chair and then you stay at Melumi for the rest of your life. If nobody in your field dies, or the senior scholars decide that you’re not the best student in that field, you get to the end of your time there, and they hand you some money and send you away and that’s the end of it.”
She glanced at me, and then looked away. “Thank you. No, we lost two scholars in history my last year there, and there were three of us who might have been chosen.” She leaned on the window, looking out at the evening getting dark. “The senior scholars make the decision in private, and no one ever talks about it afterwards, so I’ll never know why Danna and Lurey got chairs and I didn’t.”
I bent and kissed her neck. “And now you’ll be chief scholar at Star’s Reach.”
She turned, then, and put her arms around me. “I hope so,” she said. “Oh, I hope so.”
I thought about all that, sitting there on the floor of the room with the alien-books and the stories, and wondered again whether we love each other, or whether we’re just two people who needed somebody—I needed a scholar, she needed something to do with her life, both of us needed someone to share a bed with, and then both of us needed to hope that we could actually get to Star’s Reach and find out what messages the aliens were sending to us. I’ve got B and C and D, but do they add to A? I don’t know, and what’s on the inside of another person’s heart—well, it might as well be on a different world.
Twenty: In the Stream of Time
The funny thing is that the part of my story I want to tell next involved those same words. It happened when we got to Proo, which is where the Cago Canal ends and the Misipi Canal starts up toward Rocalan and the upper Misipi, and it’s also where the riverboats that work the Ilanoy River pick up passengers and freight for the run down to Sanloo and Memfis. We had two days in Proo, partly because there were fifty or sixty canal boats waiting to be unloaded there, and we had to wait our turn, and partly because the riverboat Plummer wanted to take hadn’t finished its run upriver. So Berry and I slept on the boat, visited the town, drank beer with the other boatmen, hauled and carried cargo once it came our turn, and generally got along fine.
The captain of our boat—no, I never did ask his name, or hear anybody else say it—waved me into the cabin after we’d finished loading up for the trip back to Cago. “You know,” he said, “you and your boy did well. There’s not much to be made walking a mule, but if you ever need someplace to lie low and stay fed the while, you could do worse.” With a motion of his head toward the foredeck: “You run with him, you’ll need to lie low now and then.”
He meant Plummer, of course. I would have given him a handful of marks just then to find out what he knew about Plummer, because I was already pretty sure that there was a lot more to the man than the medicine seller he claimed to be, but something in the captain’s face told me that asking any questions was a bad idea and getting any answers wasn’t going to happen any time this side of forever. So I laughed and said, “I noticed that.” We talked a little more, about nothing in particular, and then I went back on deck and got to talking with some of the other boatmen about nothing in general.
That was the day before the Jennel Mornay got to Proo. That was the riverboat Plummer wanted to take, and in case this ever gets read by somebody from the Neeonjin country on the far side of the dead lands, I should probably say that Jennel Mornay was a famous soldier on the presden’s side in the Third Civil War. He was a tough old cavalryman with mustaches out to here, who fought his way downriver from Rocalan to Sanloo in the face of everything the Western Allegiancy could throw at him, which was a lot, and when he was done the final battle at Memfis was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I got to know his face on the trip down the river, because they had a big painting of him in the main cabin.
Still, that’s getting ahead of my story a bit. That morning, the morning the Jennel Mornay came, we said our goodbyes to the canalboat captain and went with Plummer to the Proo levee where the riverboats docked. It wasn’t quite packed with people from the water right up to the warehouses, but that’s because there was plenty of cargo there too. There were three big packet boats already sitting with their noses to the levee, roustabouts loading and unloading barrels and sacks and crates, and passengers getting on or off their boats. Everybody was talking or yelling, the crew chiefs were blowing on their whistles loud enough to make me wonder why their brains didn’t spray out their ears, steam was hissing from the boats, and you could just hear under it all the churn-churn-churn of the big stern wheels keeping the bows up tight against the shore.
Plummer pointed and said something neither Berry nor I could hear, but we both figured out at the same time that “follow me” was part of it. That meant heading through the middle of it all and most of the way out the other side, to the end of the levee where the warehouses were small and rundown and the roustabouts, who were mostly just sitting around, looked like they’d seen a lot of better days. Finally Plummer stopped and so did we; the noise was still loud enough that we could barely hear each other, so we stood there and waited for a while until finally Plummer pointed again.
That’s when I first saw the Jennel Mornay, and after looking at the packet boats, well, let’s just say it was a bit of a disappointment. The plan was the same—one paddlewheel astern, one smokestack around the middle, boxy pilothouse on top of boxy cabin deck on top of boxy freight deck—but it was half the size and twice the age, and showed it. I didn’t know yet that most of the river trade runs on smaller boats like the Jennel Mornay, and they don’t make enough money for the white paint and the big crews and all. If you grow up in the Tenisi hill country and the only riverboats you ever hear about are the big white-painted ones with the fancy carvings all along the roof, let’s just say that a boat like the Jennel Mornay is not going to impress you, and leave it at that.
Still, we shouldered our bags and got in line dutifully behind Plummer, I paid our fare—you can work for your fare aboard a canal boat, but riverboats burn peanut oil and that doesn’t come cheap—and we crossed the landing stage, which I found out a few days later is what they call the ramp that gets swung over from the bow for passengers to board. A rickety stair led up from the freight deck to the cabin deck, where the purser looked at our tickets and waved us over to a couple of cabins over on the port side. They were cramped little rooms and I wouldn’t call them clean, but Berry and I slept in much worse on the long road from Shanuga to Cago, so we didn’t complain. We got our packs stowed and locked the cabin door and went back out to see whatever there was to see.
There were twenty cabins and maybe thirty people to fill them, and at least as many more who couldn’t afford cabin fare and would be sleeping all anyhow down on the freight deck, in among the barrels and sacks and wooden crates the roustabouts were hauling on board to replace what other roustabouts were hauling off. From the walkway that went all around the cabin deck, I could see most of Proo, the little bustling town near the water and the ruins reaching far back into the farm country behind it.
The pilothouse of the nearest of the big white packet boats went up almost twice as far above the water as the Jennel Mornay, and it seemed to be looking down with the kind of raised-eyebrow look a red-hatted Circle elder gives a ruinman who’s made the mistake of crossing her path. After a few more minutes, the packet boat let out a whistle, the paddlewheel at the stern slowed, stopped, and then started turning the other way, pulling her stern first out into the river. It was a gorgeous sight, everything a Tenisi farm boy could hope for in a riverboat; it’s just that this particular Tenisi farm boy was on the wrong boat.
Still, when the last of our cargo was on board and the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded, it was still a sight to watch as we pulled away from the levee, backed out into the river, turned and started downstream. Ugly little thing though it was, the Jennel Mornay handled well, and before long we were churning down the river at a fair pace.
Plummer came out onto the walkway about the time Proo got lost behind a bend of the landscape behind us. “A pleasant day,” he said, “made even more pleasant by the number of kloms I would otherwise have had to walk. I hope the two of you find the boat agreeable?”
I wasn’t going
to tell him that it looked like it got put together out of what was left over when the other boatbuilders had taken their pick. Still, he must have seen it in my face, and laughed his dry little laugh.
“There are advantages,” he said, “to a riverboat that doesn’t attract rich passengers. Even so, I trust that neither of you play cards or dice.”
“Not usually.”
“I recommend avoiding it altogether here. I’ve heard that someone once brought honest dice on board a Misipi riverboat, and the Misipi itself rose up and refused to let the boat pass until they were thrown overboard and replaced by the usual kind.”
A man standing against the rail near us heard this, and burst out laughing. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then, turning: “Well, Mam Gaia’s bright green underthings! Plummer. Good to see you again.”
Plummer beamed. “Likewise. This,” he said to Berry and me, “is Slane, an old friend of mine. Slane, Trey and Berry are more recent friends. You’re headed to Memfis, I would guess.”
“For the moment.” He looked me up and down, glanced at Berry, blinked and took a long hard second look. “You?”
“I have business in Sanloo,” said Plummer. “These two? Memfis and points west.”
By then I’d taken as good a look at Slane as he’d taken at me. He had the sort of clothes that seem expensive but aren’t, and the sort of look that seems casual but isn’t; if he had dice in his pocket, and I guessed he did, the river probably wouldn’t rise up and stop the Jennel Mornay.
“Fair enough.” To Berry and me: “You two been to Memfis?”
“Not yet,” I told him.
He seemed to think that that was funny, and cuffed me on the shoulder. “Good. That’s good. You’ve heard of Dell, haven’t you? Memfis is Dell’s home town. Fact is, he’s a good friend of mine.” He laughed again. “You’re from, where, Joja or east Tenisi?”
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