Eleen drew in a sharp breath and closed her eyes, but said nothing.
“Does anyone disagree that those are our choices?” I asked then. Nobody did, and after a moment I nodded. “Then I want to hear what everyone thinks we should do. Tashel Ban, maybe you can go first.”
“If I must.” He didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “When I offered to come with you here, Trey, I had hopes: not Anna’s hopes, but closer to them than I like to recall. I hoped that if we could get here, find messages from some other world, and figure out how to read them, that might teach us how to live on this planet without damaging it, and still have some of the things they had in the old world. Not all of them, not even most of them, and not in our lifetimes—but some of them, someday.
“Maybe we will, even so, but there’s nothing here that helps with that, and much that speaks against it. Do you remember what the message from Delta Pavonis IV said, about how they can’t teach us anything we aren’t ready to learn? That’s something I had learned already from the Cetan messages. Even something as simple as their way of turning sunlight into electricity—and that’s a very simple thing, something we could have figured out long ago if we happened to be looking in the right place—even that took most of a hundred years of work by people here at Star’s Reach to understand, because Cetans don’t think like us or build things the way we do. Maybe some of the other aliens out there think a little more like human beings, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
“I still think it’s worth saving what we’ve found, and sharing it. Those solar spheres the people here worked out from the Cetan formula would be worth having, and we might be able to figure out a few more tricks like that, given enough time. But—” He leaned back, and let his hands fall into his lap. “If the rest of you think that it’s too dangerous, for whatever reason, I’m not going to fight for it. I’ve read messages from aliens, and seen a little of what they and their worlds look like. Maybe that’s enough.”
The room was silent again for a while, and then Thu laughed his deep ringing laugh.
“This is a rich irony,” he said. “Shall I speak next?” I nodded, and he went on. “You will all no doubt remember our arguments in Sanloo, where Tashel Ban spoke of the hope he has just described, and I spoke of my fear of what human beings might do with any equivalent of the old world’s technologies. He says that what we have found here has betrayed his hopes. Equally, it has betrayed my fears.
“He has reminded us of one part of the message from Delta Pavonis. I will remind you of another part, the part that spoke of making the usual mistakes and suffering the usual consequences. If so many species have done to their own worlds what we did to ours, and struggled back from the results of that folly the way we are doing, then who can pretend that it was merely bad luck that brought the old world down in flames? Who can ever claim again that we can repeat the same stupidities and avoid the same results? And especially—” He tapped the table with one finger. “—especially when some of those others, such as the Cetans, suffered much more than we did.
“I distrust the technologies that can be found here at Star’s Reach, and what human beings might do with those in the future. I know that some message from another species might someday teach human beings something far less harmless than the solar spheres you have mentioned. I know, for that matter, that it is possible that the message from Delta Pavonis is filled with lies, and the beings who sent it intend some harm by it. Even so, if the rest of you decide that it will be best to share what we have found with the priestesses, the government of Meriga, and the world, I will not demand that the matter be settled in the circle.”
Something like a knot came undone inside me then. “Eleen?” I asked.
“I don’t want the knowledge to be destroyed,” she said simply. “If everything we’ve gotten from the Cetans has to be printed out, bundled up, sent to Melumi and locked in a vault for a thousand years, I won’t object, but I don’t want it destroyed. Maybe it’s just because I was trained as a scholar, but the thought of seeing all that knowledge lost isn’t something I can face. If the rest of you decide that that’s what has to be done—” She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do.” Opening them again: “But there are places such things could be kept safely for a very long time, if that’s what it comes to.”
“Do you think they need to go someplace like that?” I asked her.
“No,” she said at once. “No, I think it would be better if everyone in Meriga knew about the Cetans and what happened to them, and about the others—the ones from Delta Pavonis, and all the rest. I think—I think it would be better if we could keep on communicating with the Cetans, and take up the others on their offer, but I know the rest of you may not agree with that. I’ll yield on that if I have to, but I want to see the knowledge preserved.”
“Berry?” I asked.
He looked up from the table. “I’m thinking about what will happen when word gets out. Whatever we decide, once people learn where Star’s Reach is, they’re going to start heading this way. Some of them will just want to see it, the way people want to see Melumi or Troy, but some of them may have other plans, and the men and guns to put those plans into action.”
“We came too close to that already,” said Tashel Ban, “with Jennel Cobey.”
“Exactly,” said Berry. “So whatever decision we make, we need to keep that in mind, and do something to make our decision more than empty wind.”
“That said,” I asked him then, “what do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t want to see the messages from the Cetans destroyed. I’m not at all sure I want to see everything handed out all anyhow to the world. If my mother was still alive, I’d say we should contact the government and the priestesses and let them deal with it, but right now? Until a new presden gets chosen, it’s up to Congrus to decide, and I don’t even want to think about the kind of mess they’d make of it. So I don’t know.”
Another silence came and went. “Trey,” Eleen asked then, “what do you think?”
I looked from face to face. “I think,” I said then, “that we’re asking questions that are too big for five people to answer. I’ve got my own preferences—I’d like it if more people found out about the Cetans and the others, I’d like to see those solar spheres turning sunlight into electricity all over Meriga and the rest of Mam Gaia; I’d like to have people keep talking with the Cetans, and take the others up on their offer to talk—but are those the right choices? I don’t have any idea. If there are answers here at Star’s Reach, it’s going to take a lot of people a lot of time and work to figure them out. That’s more than we can do.
“I think that what we need is to get more people here. We need ruinmen, scholars, and priestesses, to start with, because they’re used to ruins and things left over from the old world, but sooner or later there need to be people who are trained to do the work that needs doing here, and can keep it going for a good long time.”
Eleen was staring at me by then. “What you’re suggesting,” she said, “is a guild.”
I hadn’t thought of the word, but the moment she said it I knew it was the right one. “Yes,” I said. “Not like the group that was here in the time of Anna’s parents, closed off from the rest of Meriga, but something like the ruinmen, the radiomen, the scholars—” Plummer’s guild of rememberers, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “A guild that can work with the priestesses and the government to make sure that what happens here doesn’t do anything wrong or illegal, and still keep the conversations going with the Cetans and the others.”
“You’ll need scholars,” she said, “and I don’t know how many of those you can get to leave Melumi.”
That’s when I figured out the last part of it. “We’ll just ask the ones that aren’t at Melumi any more.” I could see their faces: Mam Kelsey at the Shanuga camp, Maddy the cook at the Wanrij roadhouse, Lu the harlot, others I’d met along the way. “The failed scholars. How
many of them get turned away from Melumi every year?”
“Anything up to a dozen,” she said. I don’t think she was seeing the same faces I was, but she was lookng past me then, at something I couldn’t see.
“That might work,” said Tashel Ban. Then: “It would take money, quite a bit of it.”
“There’s a lot of metal here that isn’t needed any more and could be sold for scrap,” I told him. “That’ll be enough to make a good start. After that—well, how much do you think the chemists would pay to know how to make those solar spheres?”
Tashel Ban whistled. “A very pretty figure.”
“I bet plenty of people would pay a couple of marks to have a picture from Tau Ceti II to hang on the wall, too,” I said. “The money won’t be a problem.”
“As Berry has said,” said Thu then, “your guild will need to be armed, especially at first.”
“That’s why the first thing I think we should do is get a bunch of ruinmen out here,” I said. “Not to strip the place—I have finder’s rights on it, and they’ll honor that—but to make sure that nobody else will try to take it. People don’t often mess with us.”
“I well remember,” Thu said, with a slight smile.
“Time might be an issue there,” said Eleen. “One of you would have to go back to Cansiddi, talk with the guild there, get enough ruinmen together—”
I shook my head. “I left notes on how to get here at the Cansiddi guild hall, in case we didn’t come back. They’re sealed and locked away, but all it would take is one radio message from me to get them to open it. And if I know ruinmen at all, once word got around that I went west from Cansiddi into the desert, dozens of young misters with no other call on their time headed for Cansiddi on the off chance that they might be able to get in on the dig.”
They were all looking at me by then, Berry nodding, Eleen still staring at something none of us could see, Tashel Ban giving me his owlish look, Thu unreadable as always.
“It would be a gamble,” Thu said finally.
“If you’ve got a better idea,” I told him, “I’d be happy to hear it.”
He allowed a smile, said nothing. I glanced at the others. Berry was still nodding; Eleen had stopped looking past me at whatever it was, and had begun to smile; Tashel Ban frowned, and then said, “It’s a gamble, no question. Shall we cast the bones?”
So that’s what we did. It took the rest of the day for Tashel Ban to get his transmitter put together, tested, and hooked up to an antenna that could toss signals toward Cansiddi and the rest of Meriga. Thu sat in the room with him, watchful and quiet as a hawk in the air, and the rest of us tried to find other things to do and mostly didn’t manage it. Finally, about the time the sun threw its last red light into the glass skylights where the people here before us grew their vegetables, Tashel Ban came out blinking from the radio room and called us all in.
The transmitter and receiver were sitting side by side, two metal boxes with dials on them, on an old metal table. A low hiss came out of the receiver. We stood around them, looked at each other.
“If anybody has second thoughts,” I said, “now’s the time to say something.”
Nobody did. Tashel Ban looked at each of us, sat down on a metal chair in front of the radio gear, turned some switches, picked up the microphone and talked into it: “Cansiddi station. Cansiddi station. Message traffic. Am I clear?”
The hiss turned into a voice. “This is Cansiddi station. You’re clear. Go ahead.”
“Message for the Cansiddi ruinmen’s guild from the misters at the Curtis dig.”
“Copied,” said the voice.
“They’re going to need more help here. Contract terms are on file at Cansiddi. Let us know how many misters and prentices are available.”
“Copied,” the voice repeated. “Anything else?”
“No. Curtis station out.”
“Cansiddi station out and waiting,” said the voice.
Tashel Ban turned some switches again, and set the microphone down. “That’s all. They’ll have a prentice run the message to the Cansiddi ruinmen tomorrow, and we’ll probably get an answer this time tomorrow evening.” He looked at me. “If they’re ready to answer.”
“They will be,” I told him. I hadn’t talked to the misters at the Cansiddi guildhall about Star’s Reach, much less told them what was in the packet of papers they locked up. All I did was tell them to wait for a message from a dig at Curtis, or if they didn’t get one in two years, open the packet anyway. Still, ruinmen are ruinmen, and I knew it was a safe bet that rumors spread all through the guild by the time we were out of sight of Cansiddi on the road west.
“I hope they will be armed,” Thu said then.
“For a dig this far out from settled country,” I said, “of course.”
The news from Sanloo always starts a little after full dark, and Tashel Ban was already twisting the dial on the receiver, past louder and softer hisses and something that was probably a voice too soft and blurred to hear, some other message going to some other radiomen’s guildhall a long ways off. Most nights I listened, but just then I wanted to be alone for a little while. I’d walked a long hard road from the underplaces of the Shanuga ruins to Star’s Reach and the things we’d found there, and now it was over, or close enough that the last few steps were hardly worth counting. Pretty soon there would be work to do and choices to make, but before that happened I wanted to sit for a while and look at nothing much, and let everything that happened along the way sink in for a time.
So I left the room. Eleen left with me, and put her arms around me for a while; when she looked up again her face was wet, but the look on her face told me she was relieved, not sad. She kissed me, and then she smiled, let go of me, and without a word went off somewhere else. I watched her go, and wondered again whether the two of us loved each other or not. Then, though part of me wanted to follow her, I went to the room where the alien-books and the stories were sitting in their boxes, next to the bare bookshelf, and stood there for a long moment.
That’s where I was when I heard Berry shout: “What?”
Things were very quiet for a while, and then footsteps came down the hall. I went to the door in time to see him go past. His face was hard and closed, and I don’t think he saw anything in front of him; he certainly didn’t see me. I waited until he was past, then went out into the hall. Half of me wanted to go back to the radio room and find out what happened, but the wiser half said to go after Berry, and so I turned to follow him as the door to his room shut with a slam.
There’s a fine art to figuring out what to do when that happens, and it has a lot to do with the person. The very few times that Gray Garman slammed the door to his room, the senior prentices made good and sure that nobody made the least bit of noise for the rest of the night, and right about dawn one of them would open the door, find Garman slumped in his chair, dead drunk and passed out, and get him into bed. Then everything would be all right. Conn, who became Garman’s senior prentice when I found the letter in the ruins, was just the opposite; somebody had to knock on the door right after he slammed it and go talk him down, or he’d decide that none of us liked him and stay in a foul mood for days.
I’d never heard Berry slam a door before, but I knew him well enough to guess how long to wait. I stood at his door for what seemed like a good long while, then tapped on it.
“Please go away.” His voice was muffled by the door.
“Berry,” I said, “it’s Trey.”
A silence came, sat there for a while, and went somewhere else, and then the door opened.
I stepped in, and Berry pushed the door shut. “There’s nothing you can say,” he told me.
“I didn’t plan on saying much,” I said. “Not least because I don’t know what happened.”
He considered that. Then: “They had a formal viewing of my mother’s body today. There were questions in Congrus about what killed her—the usual political thing. What they didn’t know until they
had the viewing is that my mother was a tween.”
I’m not sure how long I stared at him before I realized that my mouth was open, and closed it.
Berry turned away from me, faced the bare concrete wall. “And so none of it had to happen.” His voice was shaking. “She—he—didn’t have to pretend I didn’t exist, send me off to the ruinmen—all of that. She could have done what her mother must have done. I—” In a whisper: “I could have been Presden. If she could pretend, so could I.”
Maybe it was his voice, or the way his shoulders tensed and rose, but all at once I thought of the time Jennel Cobey and I went to see the Presden in Sisnaddi, and the gray, gaunt, guarded old woman who was waiting for us in the room full of books. “Maybe she didn’t want you to have to live like that,” I said. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have to hide something like that for a whole lifetime.”
“I would have done it,” Berry said.
“Knowing that you couldn’t ever have a lover like Sam.”
His head snapped around, and he stared at me. After a moment: “I didn’t think you knew about me and Sam.”
“I just about tripped over the two of you when I was visiting Cob’s dig, before I went to Sisnaddi.” He blushed, and I went on: “How your mother—” I was going to say got pregnant with you, but stopped, because I’d thought of one way that might have happened and didn’t want to mention it.
Berry laughed, though, a short hard laugh like a dog barking. “I already thought of that,” he said. “Yes, my mother may also have been my father.”
“I didn’t know tweens could do that,” I said, for want of anything better.
“Some can have babies, some can father them. Some can do both. Some can’t do either one. What I heard from older tweens is that you just never know.” The hard bright brittle tone was slipping away from his voice. All at once, he turned and sat down on his bed as though all the strength had gone from his legs. “Trey,” he said then, “it’s not just that. Someone in Sisnaddi talked. The news bulletin said that there were rumors that there was a child, a tween. Rumors.” Another laugh, desperate. “With the right year and my real name attached. Every jennel in Meriga with an eye on the succession will have soldiers hunting for me by now.”
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