Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  The Arksa jungle—that’s part of the story the way Memfis is, and for most of the same reasons. The Tenisi hill country where I grew up has woodland here and there, but it’s too far inland, too high up, and too dry in the dry season to get the kind of jungle you get down close to the Gulf of Meyco. There are parts of Arksa that are like the Tenisi hills, or so I was told, but the part where we were digging was close enough to Banroo Bay that the best way to get there from Memfis was to hire one of the steamboats that work up and down the bay and go across to a little town on the far side of the Misipi called Url, and then hire wagons and go from there. The old Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility was a couple of days north and west of there.

  The first time I went there was a few weeks before the rains set in, that first year I was in Memfis, a week or so after Jennel Cobey’s men took Thu and let him go. We took a boat across to Url, hired some horses with the jennel’s money, and took the main road up out of the soggy land near the river to Josbro. That’s a fair sized town, and if you go past it a ways you get to Wanrij, which is just a road house, a shrine, and a once a week market. We stayed the night at the road house, and then hired a guide and went into the jungle to find the place called WRTF.

  It might as well have been any other patch of jungle, green and dark, full of huge tree trunks rising up from the ground, birds yelling at each other up where you can’t see them, and a million different bugs flying around, most of which took at least one nip out of me. We did some searching, and found what was left of concrete walls here and there, overgrown with tree roots or sticking out of the undergrowth all anyhow like an old man’s teeth. We poked the ground with metal rods here and there, and got a rough sense of how far the buildings went, then tied red cords around the trees that would have to go.

  That’s something I’d never done before, since the ruins in Shanuga had been cleared long before I was born, and it’s something most people in Meriga won’t do at all, since cutting down trees is one sure way to get Mam Gaia good and mad at you. Still, ruinmen do it when they have to, and we had to. That meant getting priestesses to come out and do the ceremony, paying to have ten times as many trees planted and tended somewhere else, and dealing with lumbermen, which nobody wants to do.

  As soon as the rains were over and the ground was dry enough, we were back with the priestesses, and we stood around and looked respectful as the priestesses asked forgiveness for each of the trees that had to come down. They finished around noon, and the lumbermen came about an hour later, men with big dirty beards and shabby leather clothes and old rattletrap wagons drawn by oxen. Most of the ruinmen made themselves scarce, but I was in charge and that meant I had to go around with them and make sure they knew which trees to take.

  You don’t pay lumbermen. They mill the trees they take, sell the useful wood to carpenters and turn the rest into charcoal for the blacksmiths, and they’ll take more than they’re supposed to if they can make it look like a mistake, or at least that’s what people say. When I got back to the site after they finished, the only trees they had taken out were the ones we’d marked, but maybe that was because they knew we were keeping track. Still, the site was cleared and ready to dig, and that was what mattered.

  We used to joke back in Shanuga about the old habit of calling a place where ruinmen work a dig, because the Shanuga ruins don’t take much digging. The Wanrij dig, which is what everyone ended up calling ours, was another matter. The whole thing was covered with four hundred years of fallen leaves and mud, and that had to be dug up and hauled away before we could get to the ruins themselves. It was a big installation, big as a town, and before long we found mud-filled stairs heading downward, rough concrete poured into gaps in good concrete, and all the other signs that tell you that somewhere down below are underground shelters from the last days of the old world.

  That was an exciting time, and it took some work to keep everyone working in their own sections when somebody found a promising stairway, but I wanted the dig to be done right. That was partly because I knew Jennel Cobey was paying good money for it, and partly because I knew that the Memfis misters were watching me to see what kind of ruinman I was, but more than anything else it was because this was my dig, my very first dig, and damn if I was going to let anyone mess it up. So all the misters and prentices kept busy in their own sections, and we got it cleared one shovel of mud at a time.

  I didn’t get to do much of the shoveling, though. Back when I was Gray Garman’s senior prentice, I did a lot of the work of running his section of each year’s dig in the Shanuga ruins, but I’d never had charge of a dig, much less a brand new dig in a ruin that nobody had touched since the old world ended. That meant a lot of time in my tent over to one side of the ruin, ordering supplies and tools, coping with squabbles, settling accounts with the metal merchants who came out to buy scrap once we started turning it up, and much more. Berry was my senior prentice—well, of course, he was my only prentice, but the custom still held, and that meant that he ran a mother of a lot of errands for me, and sat in at the end of each day when all the misters and their senior prentices met to discuss how things were going and what needed to be done.

  That usually happened in my tent, but not always. Once a week we had a mister’s lodge, the way ruinmen always do, and of course Berry couldn’t come to that. Once or twice a week we’d walk up the rough little road we’d made through the jungle from Wanrij to the roadhouse, and the misters and senior prentices would meet there.

  The cook at the roadhouse was named Maddy, and she was a failed scholar, though we didn’t know that at first. She’d come out with our meals when we met there, and ask how the dig was going; we didn’t find out that she’d been to Melumi until the failed scholar we had at the dig happened to mention that the two of them had been friends at the Versty. We teased Maddy about that afterwards, but we also asked her advice when it came to the kind of questions scholars can answer, and we all got along wonderfully after that.

  I just never knew what was going to happen. One morning the prentices started yelling over on the eastern side of the dig, and it turned out that a snake had come crawling out of the jungle during the night and was sleeping in one of the old stairwells. It was a big one, almost ten meedas long, which is bigger than they usually get even in the jungle. I asked the Memfis misters what they did with snakes like that, and that’s how we ended up having snake chops for dinner the next two nights, which saved a good bit of money on our food that month. One week it was a fever that came through and put half the misters and prentices flat on their backs, another week it was a shipment of tools I ordered back before the rains that didn’t arrive on time—it never did show up, in fact—and the next week it was something else again.

  One week, it was Jennel Cobey. He came to see the site late in the first season, on his way from Memfis to Sanloo: political business, he told me, so I didn’t ask any more questions. He was as curious as always, wanting to know everything we were doing at the dig, and the prentices stared and whispered as I took him all over the site and he talked to me as though I was a jennel too. He stayed for three days and then rode away with his soldiers and servants first thing in the morning.

  When the misters and I met at the roadhouse in Wanrij that night, some of them talked about other jennels who were hurrying around the country with their soldiers. There was a cold feeling down in the pit of my stomach as we talked. I knew, we all knew, that all those jennels and soldiers meant six kinds of trouble sometime soon.

  By the end of that first season, we’d cleared the whole site and gotten down to the first basement level of all the buildings. We had to stop there, because we were too far from Memfis to risk staying at the dig until just before the rains; instead, tools and gear had to be packed up and hauled back down the road to Url, and parties of prentices went with them, heading home to Memfis. By the time everything was shut down, clouds were rolling in from the Gulf, and we left the site in a hurry and beat the rains by two days. Then it was
Memfis parties and pretty Memfis women, and days spent at the ruinmen’s guild hall sleeping off rum and whiskey and planning the next season’s work. We knew by then where there were stairways going further down and where the underground shelters probably were, and if Star’s Reach or anything connected to it was still at WRTF, that’s where it would be.

  Finally the rain stopped, and the parties stopped, and as soon as the roads were dry I was on my way to Wanrij with Berry and the first party of misters and prentices. A mother of a lot of mud had washed into the ruins during the rainy season, and once we had the camp up and running again, that had to be dug out again. There were snakes—no more of the really big ones, luckily—and other things that thought the ruins we’d dug up made good homes, and they had to be chased back out into the jungle.

  Then there was a little lake not far away from the dig, where we sent prentices to get water the year before, and it somehow got a resident gator, a big one. You don’t kill gators unless you have to, and we didn’t have to, so the prentices hauled water from a different lake that second year, and we got used to the way our gator would roar most evenings, calling for a mate or just letting everybody else on that part of Mam Gaia’s round belly know that he was alive and minded to stay that way.

  Since we’d cleared the site and knew where to look, the work went faster that season. One shovelful of mud and basket of concrete chips at a time, we got the deep stairways cleared and the rough concrete broken, and started getting into underground places where nobody had been since the old world ended. One afternoon, I was in my tent writing out orders for the next month’s food, and Berry came at a run: they’d smelled the sour lightning smell deep in the ruin, behind a concrete plug that had just been cleared away. The orders could wait. I went back with him, fast.

  It was two levels down, and would have been dark as midnight except that we’d spent the extra money to get plenty of electric lamps. As it was, the prentices and misters were a crowd of shadows around a rough doorway in the concrete. Beyond the doorway was darkness, and a very faint point of red light off in the middle distance. I knew exactly what I was seeing, and so did everyone there, even though none of them had nearly fallen onto a trapped floor the way I did.

  There was some talking, and then the senior prentice of one of the Memfis misters walked into the room. He knew what he was doing, too; he stepped from safe spot to safe spot all the way to the little red dot, found the switch, and turned it green. The rest of us followed, and for a moment I was sure that the door on the other side of the room was going to lead us straight into Star’s Reach.

  It didn’t. What was on the other side was a shelter, pretty much like the one I’d found in the Shanuga ruins. It had plenty of metal in it, a radio, and some guns, and that was all. The prentice who’d crossed the floor was made a mister on the spot, and we all cheered and congratulated him, but all the same it was a bleak moment, and not just for me.

  The days and weeks and months went on. W found and emptied every underground room in the ruin; we found nearly enough metal to make the dig pay for itself even if it hadn’t been a contract dig, and a few real prizes like the radio; we even found a room with a row of old metal filing cabinets in it, full of the moldering scraps of what used to be paper, just enough of it still readable that the failed scholar I’d hired for the dig was able to tell us that it was what the ancients called “human resources records,” which was their phrase for all the papers they needed to tell them who got hired and who got fired from a job.

  What we didn’t find was one single scrap of anything that had to do with Star’s Reach or with messages from other worlds. If it had been any other dig, it would have been a success, but it wasn’t any other dig, and as the season wound up and the ruin was stripped down to the rebar in the concrete, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had wasted years of my life on a daydream.

  We finished the dig a month before the rains came. The prentices and the misters packed everything up, one party at a time, and hauled tools and tents and cooking pots back home to Memfis. The last wagon from the metal merchants came and went. We filled in all the holes we’d dug and sent a letter to the priestesses, letting them know the site was clean and that we’d be most grateful if they could tell people who wanted to get right with Mam Gaia that they could come plant trees there. Then, last of all, I sat down in my tent and wrote a letter to Jennel Cobey, telling him that we hadn’t found Star’s Reach.

  That kept me busy until late that night. The next morning Berry and a few of the other prentices folded and packed my tent and the few other things that were left at the dig, and loaded them on a wagon. I took one more walk around the site, made sure everything was in order, and then went to join them. We hadn’t hired any horses this time, since it was clear that the jennel wasn’t going to get what he hoped he was paying for. The teamster tapped the oxen with his stick, the wagon started to roll, and the rest of us—me and Berry and half a dozen prentices who were more or less friends of his, and had been lent to me by their misters—started walking up the dusty road to Wanrij.

  Twenty-Three: The Thing That Matters

  You never know where you’re going to find the thing that matters. That’s one bit of wisdom I learned on the long road from Shanuga to Star’s Reach, and if it hadn’t gotten through my skull already, this morning would have pounded it in nicely.

  Anna and I were about to put breakfast on the table, Thu and Berry were talking politics over in the corner, and Eleen and Tashel Ban were bent over something they found in the computer yesterday. It was just an ordinary morning at Star’s Reach, and then Tashel Ban let out a bit of hot language I don’t think I’ve ever heard him use before. Thu and Berry looked up from their conversation; I set down the plate I was carrying; Eleen stared at him; only Anna kept on with what she was doing, spooning soup into bowls as though no one had said a thing.

  “Well,” Tashel Ban said after a bit. “I think you’re all going to want to look at this.”

  “This” was something the people at Star’s Reach before us had mostly translated out of the code they and the Cetans worked out to talk to each other. Close to half the words had little curves around them (like this), which I already knew meant that nobody was sure if that was the right word or not, and here and there were little curves with a line of dots between them like this (.....), which meant that nobody had the least idea what word ought to go there. It was a mess to read, no question, but it seemed to be telling a story about someone going someplace on a boat. The place the boat was going, it said, was a place where a long time ago (.....) to the third planet.

  Right after that was one of the little stars they used in the old world to mark where somebody wanted to put a note, and the note was down at the bottom of the page. What it said was this: ref. to precollapse space travel—see briefing paper 223.

  It took a moment for that to sink in, and then I said a bit of language even hotter than the one Tashel Ban used. We were all staring at the thing by then. Even Anna came over, read the paper over my shoulder, and nodded, as though she expected it.

  “How easy will it be to find that briefing paper?” This was from Thu.

  “I’m about to find out,” said Tashel Ban, and started to get up, but I said, “After breakfast, I hope.” He gave me one of his owlish looks and nodded, and so we all sat down and had one of the fastest meals I’ve ever eaten. As soon as he was done with his soup, Tashel Ban was on his way to the computer, and Eleen and Berry were right there with him, while Thu and Anna and I did the dishes.

  They found it before noon, and Tashel Ban managed to get the printer to behave and give us each a copy. It’s sitting on the desk next to me right now, answering a question so big I don’t think any of us dared to ask it before now.

  “They did the same thing we did.” That’s what Tashel Ban said, as the printer grunted and whirred behind him. “They figured out how to use the concentrated energy sources on their planet, and used them up so fast and so carelessly that
they ran out of energy and messed up their climate around the same time. They had droughts, the way we did, but much worse. There was no rain worth mentioning on their islands for something like two thousand of our years.”

  Berry caught what that meant a moment before I did. “Without rain—”

  “Exactly,” said Tashel Ban. “The Cetans’ intelligent phase can’t stay together for more than a few hours. So that was the end of their old world, and even when the droughts started to break, there would be a while when some of the islands would get regular rains, and then the rains would go away and whatever got started on those islands went away too.

  “That went on for another few hundred of our years. Finally the rains lasted long enough on one set of islands that the Cetans there figured out how to build catchment basins and cisterns, and finally solar stills that would make artificial rain right through the drought periods. So their culture survived, and they built boats and spread the skills they had from island to island right around their world. That was something like a thousand years ago.”

  “What sort of space travel did they manage beforehand?” Thu asked.

  “About as much as we did,” Tashel Ban told him. “Some satellites, some probes out to other worlds, and a few trips that put a couple of Cetans on the surface of Tau Ceti III for a day or two and got them back alive. That much they’ve been able to figure out from the old records, now that they can read them again. That took a long time—the way their old world ended, the languages were completely lost, and all they had to start from were ruins and records that nobody could understand.”

  I thought about that this evening as the three of us who know how to work on the computer kept chasing after the last things the people at Star’s Reach learned, and the three of us who don’t cleaned up after dinner and got a pot of beans soaking and some sourdough rising for the next day’s meals. When people talk about the end of the old world—our old world—they talk about how hard it was, how many people died and how much got lost. I don’t remember anybody saying “You know, it could have been a lot worse,” but it was a mother of a lot worse for the Cetans than it was for us. I imagined what it might have been like if there wasn’t a living person in Meriga for two thousand years, and then a trickle of people coming in from somewhere else who didn’t know the first thing about where all the ruins came from.