Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about when I sat down here at the desk tonight. I wanted to write about what happened after we finished up the dig at Wanrij and went back to Memfis for the rains, and I spent a couple of months drinking myself stupid and tumbling into bed with pretty Memfis women. That’s what all the other ruinmen were doing, of course, but I had a better reason for it than they did, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. They knew that as soon as the rains ended, they’d be back to work on some other dig. I knew that as soon as the rains ended, I’d have to face up to the fact that my search for Star’s Reach had run up against a blank wall and there was no way forward.

  Then, about the time the rains started slackening off, a couple of the senior misters of the Memfis guild came looking for me. It was late afternoon, about an hour before the music started up at the big covered market down the street, and the rain was drumming against the one little window of my room in the guild hall. I welcomed them and found them a couple of chairs, and we chatted about nothing much for a few minutes before they got to the point of their visit.

  “That was a well run dig you did up at Wanrij,” one of them told me; his name was Orin, a gruff gray-haired mister from the hill country down by the Meycan border. “Nice and orderly, and everyone got paid on time. Doesn’t always happen the first time somebody runs a site.”

  I thanked him, and wondered where the conversation was going to go. The other mister, who was lean and bald and had little bright eyes like a sparrow, answered that question soon enough. “We’ve talked to the misters, and if you’re minded to stay here in Memfis—of course you might have other plans—if you’re so minded, anyway, we’d be willing to see you have a place in the guild here.”

  I’m not sure how I kept my mouth from falling open. That sort of thing happens sometimes, when a mister from one town gets involved in a dig somewhere else and everyone gets along well, but I hadn’t even thought about the chance that it might happen to me. I managed to stammer out something like a thank you, and then remembered that I had to get things settled with Jennel Cobey and tried to say something about that; I was pretty much babbling nonsense, or at least that’s the way I remember it, but the two misters were as professional as you can get. They let me know that I had plenty of time to sort things out and make up my mind, said a few more things I don’t remember at all, and left.

  I told Berry that evening before we went down to the market. His eyes got big and then narrowed a bit. He was weighing the thought of staying in Memfis against the hope we’d had of finding Star’s Reach, I knew, the same way I was. We partied that night, and the next, and the next, and with every day that passed I got more perplexed and more upset about it all. I knew that staying in Memfis was the only choice that made any kind of sense at all, but something in that choice just didn’t sit well with me.

  One evening about a week later, we were alone in the room, taking care of some of the last work on the Wanrij dig—bills that still had to be paid, money from metal sales that had to be accounted for and paid out, all the little things that keep misters busy the last few weeks of the rains. As we got to the end of the paper, Berry sat back and looked at me. “Sir and Mister?”

  I think I mentioned a while back that he never used my title except when it was something really important. I set down the bill I was reading and nodded for him to go on.

  “What do you think now about finding Star’s Reach?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think...” He got silent for a long moment, then: “I wonder if maybe we’ve done as much as anybody could have done.”

  I gave him a look, and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, because everything else seemed to be saying that he was right, except for that little cold feeling in the pit of my stomach that said he was wrong.

  The rains end in Memfis a week or two after they’ve gone away everywhere further north, and so as soon as the rains slacken off in Memfis, the riverboats come down the Misipi to dock at the Memfis levee. That was how a letter from Jennel Cobey got to the Memfis guild hall when the last scant rain was falling, long before the roads were dry enough for traveling. I’d been worrying about what that letter would say, because I’d spent a lot of the jennel’s money and come up with nothing. Still, that just showed how much I still had to learn about the man. What the letter said was this:

  To Mister Trey son of Gwen, at the Memphis Ruinmen’s Hall, my greetings. The money’s not an issue; I’m sorry to hear that nothing concerning Star’s Reach turned up after all, but it was always a gamble. Have you considered searching the archives at Cincinnati? If you’re minded to keep looking, that might be the best of the remaining options.

  —General Cobey Taggart

  I thought about that for the rest of the day, and it kept coming to mind that evening while I danced and drank and tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t have to make a choice by the time the sun came out for good. One more pretty Memfis woman put it out of my head for a little while, but after we’d finished what we were doing and fallen asleep in her bed, I started dreaming, and there it was again.

  It was another of my Deesee dreams, with the wide streets and the silvery sky up above that was the surface of the sea. I found my way to the Spire, the way I usually did, and there was the man in the old world clothing, the one we found long dead in the Shanuga ruins, standing there waiting for me. I hurried up the grassy slope toward him, and then I saw his face, tense, almost pleading, waiting for me to do or say something.

  Then I knew what he wanted, and I must have cried out, because all of a sudden I was awake, light was coming in through the window next to me, and the woman I was with was bending over me, soft and sweet and brown, asking if I was all right. I lied and said yes, and kissed her, and things pretty much went from there, but all the while I knew what the dead man wanted from me and what I had to do.

  When I told Orin, the Memfis mister, I made it sound as though Jennel Cobey had asked me to go to Sisnaddi and the archives there. He nodded, frowned, and said, “I can’t promise that there’ll still be a place for you when you’re done, you know.” I told him I knew that, and I did, but it didn’t keep me from feeling like the number one fool on Mam Gaia’s round belly when he went his way and I went mine.

  A little later that day I told Berry. I expected him to argue, but he didn’t. He gave me a look I didn’t expect at all, wary and guarded. “Trey, I can’t go to Sisnaddi,” he said. Before I could say anything: “I can’t tell you why, but it’s worth my life. Probably yours too.”

  I looked at him for a long moment, and then said, “Do you want to stay in Memfis?”

  “Well—” He paused, then: “I was thinking about Cob’s site in Tucki, the empty nuke.”

  That sounded like a good idea to me. “That ought to work. I could get you a message fast if anything turns up in the archives.”

  “And I can save up some money for whatever’s next. It’s too easy to spend money here.”

  “True enough,” I said, and we agreed that he’d go to Tucki as soon as the roads were open, and I’d head for Sisnaddi as soon after that as the last of the paperwork for the Wanrij dig was finished. We probably could have gone together, but I figured the sooner he got there and earned some money, the better, and I knew myself well enough to know that I could use the time alone. It didn’t occur to me that Berry might have his own reason for wanting to go back to that corner of Tucki, but then I had plenty of other things on my mind just then.

  As soon as the roads were open, I sent a letter to Cob to let him know there was a spare prentice on the way, and a couple of days later Berry went with a crew of metal traders who had business in Tucki. Most of the Memfis ruinmen headed out to digs of their own. All around me, Memfis got busy making money, and I sat in my little room in the Memfis guild hall with nothing to do but wait for the last bills to come in, feeling more and more like a fool with every day that passed. The
music and the dancing were over and the pretty Memfis women had other things to do with their time, and a dream, a jennel’s good wishes, and a letter from a dead man were the only things I had to show for more than three years of my life.

  I got the last of the bills paid on the last day of Oggis, and left the Memfis guildhall the next morning. It was a bright clear day, with salt air sweeping in from the Gulf of Meyco and high billowing clouds drifting here and there. I said my goodbyes at the guildhall, walked past the big covered market, and kept on going. Just the part of Memfis outside the gate where the ruinmen live is as big as all of Shanuga, but I knew where to go and where not to go, and so nobody gave me trouble on the way. By noon I was walking past the little farms that keep the city markets in greens and garden truck.

  Off to the left, riverboats were churning up the water; off to the right everything was green and growing. All in all, it was as nice a day as you could ask for, but for all I cared just then it might as well have been some day in the drought years with dust falling from the sky onto bare gray dirt. I missed Berry, and I missed the friends I’d made among the Memfis ruinmen, but I was glad to be alone, so that nobody else had to put up with my mood.

  Still, life on the road is life on the road, and I’d learned to like it well enough during the time Berry and I spent wandering the long way around from Shanuga to Memfis. Before too many days were past, Memfis was far enough behind that the sour taste of my failure there was starting to fade from my mind. It still hurt to think about it, but it was a mother of a lot easier not to think about it, and that helped. The river road along the Misipi isn’t as busy as some others, since anyone who can afford a ticket takes a riverboat, but there were plenty who couldn’t or who, like me, didn’t want to spend the money they had, or who had business that took them to the little towns and villages along the way.

  Before long I was walking with a bunch of actors who made their living going from town to town, putting on the same play wherever they went. It was good enough that I’d have paid money to see it, but since we were on the road together I just gave them a hand setting things up and packing up again afterwards. It was about an old man who lived on an island off in the Gulf of Meyco, with nobody but his daughter and a couple of robots to keep him company—this was a long time ago and he knew all about technology, you see, and so he had robots. Then there was a big storm, and the old man’s brother, who was a jennel and who’d chased him out of Memfis and sent him to the island, gets blown ashore, along with a bunch of friends, and the presden and her son: they were all on a ship together, you see. It’s all a merry romp from there, until the old man triumphs, the jennel’s humbled, the presden’s son falls in love with the old man’s daughter, and they all go sailing back to Memfis.

  The actors were good company, and I traveled with them all the way north to where the Hiyo River flows into the Misipi. They were going to Sanloo and I wasn’t, so we said our goodbyes one bright morning and they got a ferry over to the Misipi’s west bank. I went east along the Hiyo toward Dooca, crossed on the ferry at Troplis, and followed the road that ran along the northern bank from there. I could just as well have stayed in Tucki, but I didn’t, and it was because I didn’t that two important things happened to me.

  The first was at a town called Conda, a couple of days walking past the ferry. The road north of the river doesn’t get much travel along that stretch, and since there are faster ways to get from Dooca to places further east, I had the road to myself most of the time. Conda’s a little place, not much more than a weekly market and a levee where riverboats tie up; it had one tavern, with a sign that said they had rooms for the night, so I went in. I was just about the only person there, except for the barmaid and a woman maybe ten years older than I was, who was sitting at the bar nursing a drink.

  I figured out right away that she was a harlot; it didn’t take her much longer to figure out that I wasn’t looking for a harlot; once that got settled, since neither of us had anywhere else to go, we sat there at the bar and talked, while the barmaid did her chores and kept our glasses from getting dry. The harlot’s name was Lu, and she was on her way from Naplis to Sanloo, where she hoped she could get a place at one of the big houses and put some money aside before she got too old for her trade. I told her a little about where I’d been and where I was going; I didn’t say a word about why, but damn if she didn’t suddenly turn and stare at me for a good long minute, and say, “You’re the one who’s looking for Star’s Reach.”

  So I asked how she’d figured that out, and she turned back to her drink and started to cry. That’s when it came out that she’d been a scholar at Melumi, and got sent away the way Eleen was. She ended up in a brothel in Naplis, because she was pretty and good in bed, and not too proud to make old men think they were twenty again. She still had a few books from her Versty days, but she kept them tucked away where they couldn’t be seen; a lot of men like a harlot to pretend to be this or that, but nobody I ever heard of has a thing for scholars.

  I ended up buying her dinner, because I had the money and she didn’t, and over the food we talked about Star’s Reach, and what I found and didn’t find. After that we had a few more drinks, and after that she took my hands and let me know that if I was minded to share a bed she had one upstairs, and I was young and nice and just because she made her living that way didn’t mean it was all about money.

  That was how I ended up in a cramped little room on the upper floor of a little tavern in Conda, in a cramped little bed that wasn’t quite long enough for one person or wide enough for two, in that warm quiet place you get to sometimes after you’ve tumbled somebody. She felt like talking, which isn’t something a harlot can do very often in that sort of situation, so I nestled up to her and listened, and that’s when she told me about the place on the Lannic shore by Deesee where every question has an answer.

  She didn’t know much about it, just that the road west from Pisba through the burning land leads there, and that there were stories about people who went there and asked questions nobody else could answer, and got the answer. I wondered at first if there was supposed to be a robot there, or something else from the old world that could answer questions, and then if it was like a Dell’s bargain; she laughed and said no, it was just a place where questions got answered, or that’s what the stories said. You crossed the burning land and went to the Lannic shore along the road west from Pisba, and there by the water, where the Spire rose out of the waves, you could find the answer to anything.

  “Maybe,” she said in a drowsy voice. “Maybe if you don’t find what you need at Sisnaddi, you should try going there. Better than nothing, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t feel like arguing, or doing much besides being there next to her; neither of us said anything for a while, and then she mumbled something I couldn’t make sense of, and pretty clearly fell asleep.

  I didn’t stay awake much longer, but somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up cold out of a dream about Deesee. I’d been walking through the wide streets with fish swimming past me and the water a silvery sky up above, and I couldn’t find my way to the Spire. I needed to know how to get there, and I couldn’t find the way. Then I was awake, and off past Lu’s shoulder a little window let in a flurry of stars.

  It was almost a year later, when I’d followed every last lead in the Sisnaddi archives out to a dead end, that I followed the hint I’d gotten in a harlot’s bed in a little Ilanoy town in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the stars that night knew enough to tell me to follow it sooner, but if they did know, they weren’t telling that either.

  I still had some long roads ahead of me, from there along the Hiyo to Sisnaddi by way of an empty nuke in the northern part of Tucki, from Sisnaddi east across the burning land to the beach where the Spire rises up out of the distant waves, and then back to Sisnaddi again with the thing I’d been trying to find all along, and then from Sisnaddi by way of Sanloo and Cansiddi and the desert to Star’s Reach, where I sit in a li
ttle pool of light with a pen in my hand and an old notebook on the desk in front of me. Getting here has been close to the only thing on my mind all that way—well, other than what’s going to happen between Eleen and me, and what’s going to happen to Meriga when the presden dies, and a few other things like that.

  Still, I got here, and pretty soon I’ll be finding out whether that was a good idea or not. Tashel Ban thinks he’s found the last thing the people at Star’s Reach put on the computer before they died.

  Twenty-Four: When the Door Opened

  The presden died today. We heard this evening when Tashel Ban tuned up the receiver and caught the broadcast from Sanloo. I was in the radio room with him, along with Eleen and Thu, when the loudspeaker crackled and hissed and started playing music. It wasn’t the music the Sanloo station usually plays, the lively sort of tune on tars and drums you hear all over Meriga; it was the slow sad old-fashioned music that always comes ahead of bad news.

  I guessed right away what it meant, went to the door, and shouted down the hall, since there was one person at Star’s Reach who wasn’t in the radio room just then and needed to be. Plates rattled in the kitchen, footsteps rang down the hall, and Berry came in just as the music stopped and the radio, or the man on the other end of it, started talking.