“Trey,” she said again, and then started crying. I’m not going to try to write out how the conversation went from there, because she cried for a good long while, and when one person’s crying and the other’s trying to calm her down, the words that get said don’t make a lot of sense when they’re written out on paper. After that, I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and things more or less went from there, which doesn’t make things any easier to write down. What it amounted to, though, is that she tried to convince me that she wanted to go with me, when we both knew that the one thing on Mam Gaia’s round belly she wanted more than anything else was to stay at Star’s Reach and spend the rest of her life studying the messages from the Cetans and the other aliens, and I had to find some way to get her to do the thing she wanted to do without making her feel that I didn’t want her. Of course it didn’t help that it was starting to sink in that I probably wouldn’t ever see her again, and that wasn’t an easy thing.
Still, it wasn’t as though I had a choice. Though I hadn’t whispered a word of it to any of them, of course, I already knew exactly what I’m going to do as soon as I shoulder my pack and head back east toward the settled country along the Suri River. I’m going to get rid of my ruinman’s leathers as quick as I can and get some ordinary clothes, then head as fast as country roads will take me to the Hiyo valley, and find Plummer or get found by him, I don’t care which. That’s not just because I need to drop out of sight for a while, though of course that’s part of it.
I don’t know if anyone who’s not a ruinman will understand the rest of it. A lot of what ruinmen do is dangerous, more of it is boring, and nearly all of it is hard work, as hard as anything anybody does in Meriga nowadays. Even when we’re breaking concrete to get at the metal inside or doing some other chore that isn’t exactly a bubbling mug of fun, there’s always the hope that next day or the next season might just bring something wonderful. That’s not always the easiest thing to believe, especially since so many ruins have gotten stripped clean and it’s getting harder for new misters to find anything that will even so much as earn them a living, but the hope’s there, and it’s a lot of what keeps ruinmen going.
When we left Jennel Cobey and his man Banyon burning on the sand and came down the stairs into Star’s Reach, though, I found the thing that every ruinman in Meriga used to dream of finding, the biggest and richest ruin of them all. If I’m lucky and a building doesn’t flapjack on top of me or something, I could work as a ruinman for twenty or thirty or forty more years, but there’s nothing I could find, not even if I found every one of the lost cities of the dead lands out west, that would be worth mentioning in the same breath as what’s around me right now. That’s why, or a good bit of why, I plan on taking Plummer up on his offer—and whatever path might be on the other side of the door he opened for me that night at the sirk in Madsen, it’s a path I know I have to walk alone.
So Eleen and I talked, when we weren’t doing other things, and somewhere in the middle of it all she agreed that she was going to stay and I wasn’t, though I was a little preoccupied at the time and don’t remember exactly when that got settled. Finally, though, we were lying there in bed; I was on my back and she had her head on my shoulder and the rest of her about half draped over me, and after a bit she started crying again, very quietly, and I lay there and stroked her hair and felt the empty aching space that was going to be part of my life once I started walking again.
That’s when I decided that we really did love each other. It’s a funny thing, for we both spent a lot of time wondering about that, and talked about it now and then. I also knew, from the look she’d given Tashel Ban earlier when I’d said I planned on leaving, that the two of them would probably end up in bed together not too long after I was gone, if they hadn’t done it already. Still, love is like that. As Plummer said, human beings don’t have to make sense, and when love sits on one side of the balance and everything else you ever wanted is on the other, love doesn’t necessarily come out ahead.
She cried for a long while, then lay there quietly with me for a longer one, and then all of a sudden propped herself up on one arm and said, “There’s one thing more we need to settle. The Cetan paper you were reading this morning—do you remember it?”
The change of subject left me blinking for a moment, but then I got my head clear enough to answer. “The story about the sea voyage?”
“Yes. It’s their account of how they first got to the place where spaceships used to take off, before their old world ended. They sent that to the people here maybe twenty years before the message from Delta Pavonis IV came through, and they wanted the people here to send them something like that from our world. There’s some discussion of that in the records we’ve found, but the people here hadn’t settled anything when communication stopped.”
I nodded. “And?”
“Tashel Ban and I were talking about that the other day, and we both remembered that there’s a story right here very much along the lines of the one the Cetans sent us. So we wanted to know if you’d be willing to leave the notebook you’ve written here, so we can translate your story into the language we use to talk to the Cetans, and send it to them.”
I gaped at her for a good long moment and then said, “Can you do that? Translate it?”
“Yes. Berry showed me how he put together his message, and we’ve also got computer programs that are set up to handle the translation, so it shouldn’t even be that difficult.”
I stared at her for another long while, thinking of blobby yellow Cetans sitting in pools of gasoline rain, reading all the things I’ve written since we came to Star’s Reach. I know that it’ll be whatever they use instead of computer printouts, and in their language of magnetic fields, but damn if I didn’t keep on imagining them turning the pages of my notebook, looking at the ink and the paper.
“If you think they’ll be able to make any sense of it,” I told her finally, “yes, you can have the notebook.”
She thanked me, and I kissed her, and before long we were going at it again, long and slow and gentle this time, because we both knew that this was pretty much certain to be our last time together. Afterwards, we lay close, and when I was sure she had gone to sleep I got up, went to my desk, turned on the little light there, and sat there staring at my notebook for a good long time before opening it and starting to write. I’ve thought more than once about what it would be like if someone from the Neeonjin country were to come here and read this, but the Neeonjin country might as well be one room over compared to where it’s going to go.
I wonder what the Cetans will think of it. Will they ever really know what a ruinman is, or what jennels are, or what Shanuga or Memfis or drowned Deesee look like? They don’t have parents or children or lovers, they don’t make babies, they just crawl up out of the gasoline ocean in little pieces and come together, and go back to it again and fall apart. Will they even be able to figure out what Eleen and I were just doing, or why?
I think of that, and then I wonder just how much we’ll ever know about the Cetans and their world, and let’s not even talk about the thirty-eight other intelligent species out there who are waiting to hear from us. It’s a big universe, and it shows just how little of the universe I can know that right now, the couple of meedas between me and Eleen feel as wide and cold as the spaces between the stars.
Thirty: How the Old World Ended
This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, and as soon as I was washed and dressed, while Thu and Berry got breakfast made and Eleen and Tashel Ban printed out papers for the ruinmen, I read back over the story I’ve written in this notebook. I realized, somewhere in the middle of the night, that some of what I’ve written down mentions things I promised Plummer I wouldn’t tell anyone, and flipping through the pages first thing, I found myself reading what I’d written about the talk we had in the field in Madsen, with the river on one side of us and the big tent of the Baraboo Sirk on the other.
I had no idea what to do. If I
hadn’t promised Eleen to leave the notebook with her, I could just have taken it with me when I left, but I didn’t want to break my promise to Eleen any more than I wanted to break my promise to Plummer—well, and in the latter case there were the Swords to think about, and the very calm way he’d talked about throats getting cut. So I was paging through the notebook, trying to figure out if I could tear out just the pages that mattered or something, and then breakfast was ready. I stuffed the notebook in one of the drawers of the old metal desk and left it at that.
All through breakfast I was thinking about that. Back when I was writing most of it, though I wondered now and then whether anyone else would ever read the notebook, I couldn’t ever quite make the thought look real. We were in Star’s Reach, after all, and the rest of Meriga and everything else seemed very far away. Now that the rest of Meriga was about to come knocking on our door, I wondered how on Mam Gaia’s round belly I could have been such an idiot, but the morning didn’t have any answers for me.
About the time we got things cleaned up, Thu came down the stair from outside to announce that he could see a dust cloud off to the east. We’d decided the day before what to do, so as soon as the last copies of the papers were printed out, Berry and I went down the stair and set out for the old east entrance where the trapped room was, while the others went to the big room with the printers and notebooks down below the living quarters, and started getting things set up for the newcomers.
It was a strange journey, going along the big corridor on fourth level through the middle of Star’s Reach. Berry didn’t say much, and I said less. Pretty soon, I thought, I was going to be walking back to Cansiddi all alone with a pack on my back, and a while later, he would be riding to Sanloo with Thu and a guard of young ruinmen, and nothing would ever bring back the time we’d spent wandering around Meriga or digging up the jungle outside of Wanrij or trying to figure out what was hidden here at Star’s Reach. So we walked together, the way we’d walked down that road north from Shanuga the day we started this long journey of ours, and got to the trapped room a lot sooner than I wanted to.
I turned off the trap, we both waited the couple of heartbeats it takes for the charge to go away, and then we crossed the floor where Jennel Cobey died, unlocked the door at the far end of it, and walked out into the sand and the pale sunlight of my last day at Star’s Reach.
The dust cloud looked a lot bigger, but it was still just a dust cloud, with no sign yet of the people who were making it. We walked up out of the hollow and went to the closest antenna housing; it was flat on top and low enough that you could climb up and sit, and that’s what we did. The wind blew by, spraying sand against my back and whipping around us on its way toward the Suri River and the green and settled lands off beyond.
“You know what I’m thinking about?” Berry asked all of a sudden.
“Nope. Tell me,” I said.
“The way I talked you into picking me as your prentice, back in Shanuga. You have no idea how glad I am that it worked.”
“Maybe not,” I told him. “But I know how glad I am.”
He grinned and put an arm around me, and I put one around him, and we sat there and waited until the first dark shapes of people and horses came into sight in the distance. One hundred forty-three misters and senior prentices make a mother of a lot of dust, and when they’ve got horses loaded up with enough food and gear to keep going through the rains and out the other side, it’s a mother with babies. I was glad that the wind was blowing toward them and not toward us.
Not too long after that, they were close enough to see us. We got off the antenna housing, stood there and waved, they waved back, and a little later one of them broke from the front of the column and came running forward. It was Conn; he came up to us, panting, gave Berry a mock-serious bow, and then threw his arms around me. “Here we are!” he said. “Everything’s fine?”
“Ready and waiting,” I told him, and he laughed. “Star’s Reach,” he said. “I slapped myself this morning, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming all this.”
Then the others came up, and damn if one of them wasn’t Orin, the mister who’d offered me a chance to join the Memfis guild. He hadn’t forgotten, either, and after he’d given me a big backslapping hug, he said, “Well, Sir and Mister Trey, you seem to have done pretty good for yourself after all.”
I laughed and said, “Put it down to plain pigheaded stubbornness.”
There was dust and shouting and horses whinnying and jostling all around us. Berry was talking to Conn, and then all of a sudden he heard something off in the middle of the noise that jerked him around as though somebody had a string tied to his nose. A moment later he was running through the crowd of ruinmen and horses. Orin turned to look, blinked, and after a moment said, “Is that who I think it is?”
I just nodded. Orin’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “Of all things.”
Then Berry was back, and somebody else was with him. It took me a moment to recognize the other person as Sam, Cob’s prentice from the empty nuke in Tucki. It took me longer still to notice that Sam had a bundle wrapped in cloth cradled in one arm. While I was figuring all this out, Berry walked straight up to Conn and said, in an outraged voice, “You didn’t tell me!”
“Sam made us promise,” Conn said. Berry glared at him and walked right past him to me. “Trey,” he said, “you remember Sam, don’t you?”
“Of course.” To Sam: “Glad to see you here. I hope Cob’s all right?”
“More or less,” said Sam. “He fell off a ladder and I had to get him to the guild hall at Lekstun—it was pretty bad. I don’t think he’ll work again, though he’s got enough money to be fine. So I came west. Is this really Star’s Reach?”
The last part of that more or less slipped by me, because I’d finally figured out what the bundle was that Sam was carrying. I looked at Berry, who was beaming, and then back at the bundle, and Sam noticed and pulled back the cloth a little. Yes, it was a baby, with a little lick of red hair on its forehead just to tell you whose grandchild it was.
Orin was staring past me by then. He turned to face Berry. “Yours?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’ve already got yourself an heir.”
You could just about watch Berry the ruinman turn into Sharl sunna Sheren the next presden of Meriga as the question sank in. “Yes.”
“Well, damn. A lot of people are going to be happy if we won’t have to go through this same nonsense again. Any chance you can get yourself a couple more, just to be sure?”
Sam turned bright red, but managed to say, “We’ll do our best.”
Everybody laughed at that. “Trey,” Berry said to me, “we’d settled that if this happened, we’d name him after you—if you don’t mind.”
I’m not exactly sure what words I used to tell him I didn’t mind at all, because I had my arms around both of them and my face was wet. Still, we got that sorted out, and Berry went off with Sam and the baby, and that left me to get the ruinmen, the four failed scholars they’d brought, and all the horses and gear and everything inside. The horses didn’t like the smell of the trapped room at all, but there was a big room close to the eastern door that made a pretty good stable; and once they were settled and a few of the prentices got talked into staying to take care of them, the rest of us went on into Star’s Reach.
If I needed a reminder of how big and dark and silent Star’s Reach seemed when we first arrived here, that would have done it. As we went down the stair to fourth level and along the big central corridor to the room below our living quarters, everyone but me was staring this way and that, talking only in low voices and not much even then. I got them to the room with the printers and the books of numbers; Tashel Ban was there and so was Eleen. With their help I got everyone up the stair to the living quarters, and we spent the next hour or so getting the newcomers settled into the rooms we’d cleared for them. Some of the prentices got working on a meal, and then the failed scholars gathered in the
common room to talk with Eleen, while the rest of us went back down the stairs to the room below.
We’d hauled all the desks and low dividing walls out of the way and brought in chairs for everyone, so the ruinmen sat down and Tashel Ban stood in front and started talking. He’d figured out a way to get pictures from the computer up onto a big white screen, so I got to see it all again, and watched Conn and the others get told in a couple of hours everything we’d learned since we got here. I heard some pretty hot language, but toward the end I don’t think anyone said a word; they were all staring with round eyes as Tashel Ban talked about the message from Delta Pavonis IV.
Then it was over. Tashel Ban had the briefing documents he’d printed out all stacked on a table, and made sure all the misters got a copy of everything, and then we all went back up the stairs for lunch. I spent the meal and a good while after it talking with some of the senior misters about how much metal there was that could be salvaged and sold, and what had to be left. I had my finder’s rights to sell off, and that’s a complicated thing when the money to pay for it will be coming in a bunch at a time for years. Meanwhile some of the prentices who’d heard Tashel Ban got sent to take care of the horses and wash the dishes, and the ones who hadn’t went back down the stair so that Tashel Ban could say the whole thing over again for them.
By the time we’d finished sorting out the metal, the money, and the rest of it, I was ready to go hide in my room or something. Until the ruinmen arrived, I hadn’t noticed just how used I’d gotten to the quiet of a big empty site with only five people in it. Now that it was as loud and busy as a ruinmen’s camp always is, well, let’s just say I didn’t have much trouble telling the difference. When I got up from the table, though, Orin said, “One other thing. A few of us need to talk to you about something private.”
I could see from his face that he meant really, really private. “Sure,” I said. “Down below, maybe?”
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