“True,” said Tashel Ban.
“There’s another factor,” Eleen said then. “The radio.”
“Also true,” said Tashel Ban, as though the two of them had talked about it before, which no doubt they had. He turned back to Thu. “Before we make a decision about making all this public, we also need to know what’s happening in Meriga. If war’s broken out—well, then things are going to be rather more difficult.” He gestured, palms up. “So I’d like to propose that we assemble the radio receiver. Just the receiver, to listen; we can leave the transmitter for later.”
That was another part of the agreement I mentioned a while back, the one I got Thu and Tashel Ban to settle on before we left Cansiddi. Tashel Ban brought his own radio gear with him when he came to join us in Sanloo, a transmitter and a receiver, both of them with the tubes taken out and packed in lom wool to keep them from breaking on the road. They stayed that way after we arrived, because we’d agreed that no word of what we found, if we found anything, was to go out until we all agreed on what to say.
Thu thought a moment, and then said, “That will be acceptable.” I glanced around at everyone else and asked, “Anyone disagree?” Nobody did, and so that’s what Tashel Ban is doing now, muttering to himself as he makes sure the tubes are still good and figures out how to hook the radio up to one of the antennas outside. Anybody with two bits of common sense would be pretty much frantic to know what’s happened in Meriga while we’ve been gone, since the presden was probably dying when we left and jennels were busy raising armies to fight each other, but what I’m thinking about instead is Thu—how we met, and how he almost killed me.
That happened maybe a month after I got to Memfis. As soon as Berry and I got settled in at the ruinmen’s hall there, I went to the misters, explained to them what I was there for, asked about the records of past digs, and told them about the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility and the contract dig I’d agreed to do with Jennel Cobey. They knew a fair amount of that already, of course, since ruinmen carry news with them when they travel, but they didn’t know all of it, and it’s one of the courtesies that you don’t dare skip when you’re planning a dig in someone else’s region.
Of course I planned on bringing the Memfis misters and prentices into the dig, and paying them with Jennel Cobey’s money, and I let them know that. I also mentioned, which they already knew, that I hadn’t managed a dig myself before, and would welcome the local guild’s help with that. Between the prospect of money up front and the chance to help find the way to Star’s Reach, they were pretty pleased with me, and gave me all the help I needed.
It turned out that the ruin of the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility hadn’t been worked yet, either. Memfis was a big city in the old world, even bigger than it is now, when it’s the largest city in Meriga. Some of the ruins around it are buried deep in river mud and water, and won’t be at any risk of being touched by a ruinman’s shovel until Mam Gaia decides she wants a different climate again and the sea draws back a good long ways to the south, but there are a lot of ruins less hard to get, and the guild’s only been working them since after the Third Civil War. It wasn’t too hard to figure out where the place was, and so all I had to do was get the money from Jennel Cobey, hire people, get supplies together, and make a start on the dig.
I sent the jennel a letter right away and started making arrangements. That meant visiting the houses of each of the misters in the Memfis guild, first of all, and making deals over dinner and whiskey; after that was done and I knew how many misters and prentices I’d have to set up with food and tents and the like, it meant visiting the merchants that outfit ruinmen with the things they need, and making deals with them—usually with no dinner and whiskey in sight, since most of them will take a ruinman’s money but won’t stoop to eat or drink with him. So I went from place to place with somebody’s prentice to show me the way and Berry trotting alongside me to prove that I was enough of a mister to have a prentice of my own, and fairly often I got the feeling that somebody was watching me.
Someone was, and I found that out the hard way one night.
Berry and I went to visit a provision merchant that afternoon, and stayed late. The merchant’s name was Dalla; she was short and round and pleasant, and got into the provisions trade because she had family in the ruinmen’s guild, so we got dinner and whiskey; I don’t doubt that she meant to show off the sort of provisions she could get us, too. By the time we settled on a deal, or as much of a deal as I could make before Jennel Cobey got my letter and replied, it was well after dark, and though I wasn’t quite tipsy I wasn’t far from it. We went down the steps onto the street and the door of the merchant’s closed behind us, leaving us in the next thing to perfect darkness, since the moon was down and we were outside the gates of Memfis. We had only a few blocks to walk to get back to the ruinmen’s hall, and there was nobody else in sight, so we started off without any particular worries.
Then a shadow came out of a deeper shadow to one side and blocked our way.
I stopped, not too sure of myself. The shadow stood there for a moment, looming over the two of us, and then said in a deep voice, “You have a dead man’s letter. I need it. If you give it to me now, you will not become a dead man yourself.”
What startled me then wasn’t that somebody would be willing to kill me to get my copy of the letter; I’d been waiting for that since Berry and I left Shanuga all those months ago. What startled me is that I had the letter with me, and this person knew it. Now it’s true that I’d taken it with me to a couple of other merchants by then, since news about the letter had gotten around and I could usually get a better deal on provisions if I let the merchant see and handle the copy I had. I didn’t think of that, though. I could have simply handed over the letter and gotten a new copy from Jennel Cobey, too, but I didn’t think of that, either. All I could think of was that somebody was trying to take my one hope of finding Star’s Reach away from me.
I pulled my pry bar out of my belt, and the shadow turned into a man and jumped at me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else move that fast. I was just barely able to jump out of his way, and flailed at him with the pry bar; that made him duck to one side, and probably kept me from getting spitted, because he had a knife in his hand—I could just about see it as he moved.
I had more reach with the pry bar than he had with the knife, so I dodged past him, as fast as I could, and snapped the pry bar out at the back of his knee, one of those nasty little moves that leaves your enemy down on the pavement where you can kill him or just go away, your choice. It hit—I could feel the shock right up the bar—but I might as well have clobbered a rock. He spun around and came at me again, as though I hadn’t hit him at all.
There’s a kind of nightmare I’ve had now and again all my life, where I’m being attacked in total darkness by somebody I can’t see, and nothing I do makes any difference. This fight was like that. I think I landed three or four good hard hits with the pry bar, and none of it seemed to do a thing to the man who was trying to kill me. He just kept coming at me, and I kept jumping away and hitting at him. I knew that he would wear me down if the fight kept going much longer but I didn’t have a spare moment to think of anything else I could do.
Then he came at me again, and I was just that little bit too slow getting out of his way, and by the time I landed I could feel something wet spreading along my side. The pain flared a moment later: not a deep cut, but bad enough. He moved toward me, slowly, testing. I shifted my grip on the pry bar and got ready to stuff it down his throat.
Then boots pounded on the cobblestones, dozens of them, fast. My attacker turned, stopped, and tried to run, but the moment of hesitation lost him his chance. Dark shapes blurred in a scuffle, and something rose and fell. I knew the shape at a glance: a ruinman’s shovel.
Light flared near my face, half blinding me. It was a lantern, and Berry was holding it. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I hadn�
�t noticed where he was since the fight started, and guessed that he’d gone for help. “He’s hurt!” Berry shouted, and some others in ruinmen’s leathers came over, got me down on the street and started doing something with my side.
I couldn’t quite see my attacker, just a hand here and a foot there pinned down under a fair-sized mob of burly ruinmen. They’d brought shovels and picks, which only get brought out for fighting when it’s a matter for blood.
“Kill him?” someone asked, and I was dizzy enough that for a moment I wondered if he meant me.
“No.” One of the guild misters—I recognized him, or almost—shook his head. “He goes back to the hall. If he’s somebody’s hired knife, we’ll find out who, and then...”
He didn’t have to finish. It wouldn’t have done me any good if he had, though, because the street was starting to spin around me, and the lantern got very faint and far away, and so did everything else for a good long time.
I woke up eventually, which I hadn’t really expected to do, but it was a good long while before I could do much of anything but lay there in my bed in the Memfis guild hall and heal. The knife cut I took in the fight wasn’t deep but it went most of the way through the muscles along my side, and though the ruinmen got someone in to clean it and stitch it up, it’s not the kind of thing you can jump up and ignore the next day. So I lay there, and tried not to yelp when the healer came by twice a day to dab it with something that smelled of herbs and cheap alcohol; it kept the cut from festering while it closed up, but damn, it hurt.
The man who’d tried to kill me was in the guild hall, too, down below ground. Most ruinmen’s halls have a couple of rooms in the basement where somebody can be locked up—a prentice who tried to cheat his mister, someone who isn’t a ruinman but tried to pass himself off as one, that sort of thing. There are places in Memfis where there aren’t any basements because the water level’s too high, but the ruinmen’s hall is up on what used to be a bluff overlooking the river before the seas rose, then became an island, and now is a sort of low ridge, not high enough to count for a hill, between two low flat areas full of warehouses and cheap lodgings that get a couple of senamees of water in the streets when the Misipi floods. There’s enough room between the top of the ridge and the water level for a basement, but it’s damp and smells bad. I can’t imagine a better place to take new prentices to shake the robot’s hand, but you wouldn’t want to store anything there.
But that’s where he was, or so Berry told me. He also said that the man hadn’t said a word since he was thrown into the room in the basement where they had him; the Memfis ruinmen had tried to get him to talk, to find out who’d paid him if anybody did, but they might as well have tried to get a word out of the stones of the basement walls. So there I was, and there he was, and nothing much changed while my belly healed.
After a while, they let me sit up for a few hours a day, and then for most of the day, and then I got to walk a little; Berry brought me records from the digs out in the part of Arksa where the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility was, and ran messages to the merchants and misters who were negotiating with me about the dig, so I had something to think about besides how close I’d come to ending this story in a puddle of blood on a Memfis street.
Finally, though, I was healed enough to leave the room, eat with everyone else, and start doing more to get the dig going. If was pretty clear by then that the dig wasn’t going to start until after the rains came and went again, even if I’d been healed enough to handle heavy work before then, which I probably wasn’t. Even then I thought that this was probably a good thing, since it gave me enough time to figure out what I was doing, get as much advice as I could from the other misters, and catch the worst of my mistakes before they cost anything. So I made plans and drew up contracts and waited for word to come from Jennel Cobey.
Still, there was one other thing I wanted to do right away. As soon as I could walk well enough to handle the stairs, I went down to the basement to talk to the man who’d almost killed me. Berry went with me, along with one of the Memfis misters named Ran, a tough white-haired old man as short and solid as a brick, and a couple of his prentices. Just to be safe, the prentices had pry bars at their belts and shouldered a couple of shovels with the blades filed sharp. I didn’t go armed, but I pocketed something else I thought would be of more use. So we went down the stairs all the way to the basement, and Ran unlocked the door and turned on a light.
The basement smelled bad, as I wrote a moment ago. The air was damp, and the walls were big rough chunks of concrete split out of some old world structure, bashed into rough blocks, and mortared into place, the sort of thing you find all over Meriga wherever nobody cares what the results are going to look like. Ran led the way down a short passage and turned a corner, and we were in a room of sorts with a few old boxes and barrels in it. Over on the far side was a door made of iron bars, and on the other side of the door was the man I’d come to see.
I hadn’t realized until then that it wasn’t just the night that made him look dark when he attacked me. He was what they used to call black in the old world, and what we’d call really dark-skinned nowadays, now that everybody in Meriga is some shade of brown. I used to think, when I first heard that people in the old world spent so much time bickering and fighting over skin color, that the people they called white back then actually had skin the color of chalk, and the people they called black had skin the color of soot, and that people looked like that until they finally got around to making babies with each other in the drought years and, thank the four winds, the babies came out brown instead of concrete gray.
Most children in Meriga end up thinking something like that, before somebody gets around to telling them that “white” back then just meant light enough brown that you could see the pink through it, and “black” meant anything much darker than that. This man’s skin was a lot darker than that, darker than anybody else I’ve ever seen in Meriga, the color of really good beer or the kind of leather gear that’s stained with nutshells and then rubbed with oil until it glows.
He glanced up at us, noted each of us, and then without a word turned back to whatever patch on the floor he’d been considering when we came in.
“That’s him,” said Ran. “Maybe you can get him to talk.”
“Maybe I can,” I said, and faced the man behind the door. “You wanted a dead man’s letter from me,” I said to him. “I want to know some things from you. I thought maybe we could make a bargain.”
He looked up at me, considered. “Let me read the letter,” he answered, “and I will answer your questions.” He had a deep voice, with just a bit of an accent I couldn’t place.
“And if I show you the letter and you won’t talk?”
Another glance. “I do not break my word.”
The funny thing was that I believed him. People are odd that way; there are men who will kill you in a heartbeat for no reason at all but won’t tell a lie, women who will whore their bodies for a handful of coins but won’t break a promise; well, we all have things we do and things we won’t, and which is which doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I pulled the letter out of my pocket—it was the copy I got from Mam Kelsey back in Shanuga—and started to move toward the door, but Berry took it from my hand, carried it the rest of the way, and tossed it through the bars with a quick little motion that didn’t get any part of him close enough to the bars to be in range of whatever the man might do.
The man didn’t do much of anything, except reach a hand up so fast I couldn’t follow the motion and catch the letter as it flew. He unfolded it, angled it to catch the light, and read it. After a good long moment I said, “Make much sense?”
He glanced up at me again. “I assume it does to you.”
“I’ve got some guesses. But I’ve also got some questions.”
“Of course.” He folded the letter again and with a snap of his wrist sent it flying back out through the bars, where Berry caught it. “I will answer any qu
estion you ask except one.”
“Who are you?”
That got me just the faintest bit of a smile. “That is the one.”
One of Ran’s prentices started laughing, a sudden loud laugh like a donkey braying, and stopped all at once when Ran gave him a hard look. I wasn’t too surprised, though. “Who paid you to get the letter from me?”
The thought seemed to startle him. “No one paid me.”
“Why did you want the letter, then?”
“To find Star’s Reach, of course.”
“Why?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “If it exists,” he said then, “and if the stories about it are true, and if the people there did manage to speak to beings from some other world—so many ifs. Grant that it is all true. If the beings from some other world told them some way to do the same things to this world that our ancestors did in the past, that knowledge must be destroyed.”
“And you want to go there to destroy it.”
“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and stared at me, as though he was the one on the outside of the bars. “If you discover Star’s Reach, and you find knowledge of that kind, what will you do?”
“Hand it over to the priestesses,” I told him.
He considered that. “And those with you?”
“It’s the ruinmen’s way,” I said, but of course he had a point, and I knew it. That’s one of the things ruinmen ought to think about more than they usually do, because we deal with what’s left over from the old world. The priestesses say that the old world couldn’t survive once it burnt through most of Mam Gaia’s oil and coal and gas, and it’s going to be millions and millions of years before she can store enough carbon underground to let anyone do anything like that again. Still, nobody knows that for sure, and the idea that the aliens might have passed on something that would give people too much energy again, and do the same kind of harm to Mam Gaia a second time, hadn’t occurred to me.
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