The “few of us” amounted to Orin and two other misters, one from western Tucki and the other from Sanloo, I forget their names. We went down the stair and crossed the room behind the prentices, who were staring with wide eyes at something Tashel Ban has up on his screen, then ducked into the empty parts of Star’s Reach. Two levels down another stair and along a corridor was a meeting room, or something like one, with chairs in it and a big black table and a white board up on the wall with marks on it none of us had been able to read.
We sat down. I thought I could guess what this was about, and I wasn’t wrong. “We need to know what happened to Jennel Cobey Taggart,” Orin said.
I nodded. “I’m wondering how much you already know.”
Orin looked at the other two, who nodded, and then turned back to me. “Here’s what happened. About two months ago, the ruinmen’s hall in Luwul got contacted by the Taggart family. They knew he’d gotten himself reborn, and they knew that old world technology had something to do with it. They wouldn’t say a lot else, but they wanted to know if we’d heard anything about him messing with the kind of thing, well, that you don’t mess with.”
I took that in. “Nobody in the Luwul guild knew anything about that,” Orin went on, “but they did some checking around, and contacted ruinmen in other cities. That’s when I got involved. We decided we needed to find out what happened to the jennel, and why the family was being so tight-lipped about it all. We called in quite a few favors with the other guilds, and—well, I won’t go into it.
“We found out.” He leaned forward. “He’d been dabbling in the worst sort of old world technology. One of his servants tipped off the family. He had plans for an airplane, one that burned alcohol in its engine and could carry guns and bombs. He had some other things—I’m not even going to go into them, they’re that bad. He was—” I could see the bump on Orin’s throat go up and down. “He was planning on using those if the electors didn’t give him the presdency and it came to civil war. And he was planning on starting that here, where it could be done out of sight of anybody, and where there’s an old airfield close by. He knew that; he had some maps of this facility in his private papers.”
I closed my mouth after a moment.
“So we need to know what happened to him,” Orin said. “The Taggarts want to know—and so do the priestesses. This is not a small thing.”
I nodded, drew in a breath, and told them what happened. When I was done, Orin looked at the mister from Tucki, who nodded and said, “That matches what we got from the family.”
Orin turned to me and said, “That was a good piece of work. Still—” He leaned forward again. “The family’s trying to keep things quiet, for obvious reasons. The priestesses are willing to let them, so long as it doesn’t become a public scandal—then they’d have to call in the government, and there would be trials and a mother of a lot of very ugly things aired for everyone to see.”
“What Orin is trying to say,” said the mister from Sanloo, “is that some very important people would be glad if nobody ever hears what happened—and it would probably be a good idea for you to make yourself good and scarce for a while. Maybe a long while.”
We talked a while longer before we went upstairs, but I don’t remember more of it than a stray word here and there. I was trying to fit my mind around what I’d just heard. It all made sense in the worst possible way. I could imagine Cobey Taggart watching the plan come together, and realizing that if he just let me keep on blundering ahead, he could get rid of two dangers, Sheren’s heir and Thu, and take over a place where he could build his airplanes without anyone knowing about it. When they came buzzing out of the western sky to fire bullets and drop bombs on his rivals, who could be sure that they hadn’t been waiting at Star’s Reach?
All I had to do was find out where Star’s Reach was, and if I’d failed, he could have brought out his maps, handed them to me, and claimed that his people had found them in some unlikely place. All he had to do to fool me and make it work was to take a few risks, and he’d succeeded so often I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he might fail.
It was when we were going back up the stairs to the living quarters that I realized that I finally knew when the old world ended. Not that long ago, I thought like everyone else that it ended four and a half centuries ago. After I watched the Spire fall, if I really did see that, I wondered if the old world had ever ended at all. Both times, I was wrong, because the old world ended in the trapped room by the east entrance of Star’s Reach, when Cobey Taggart took his last step and his foot came down on metal. He couldn’t have brought the old world all the way back, not really, but he could have tried, and if he’d gotten far enough, he might have convinced other people to think the same way he did, and brought one last round of Mam Gaia’s fury down on all our heads.
Instead, he got himself reborn, and it’ll be Berry who comes riding out of Star’s Reach to become presden. I don’t think I’ll ever rest easy thinking about how little it would have taken to make things go the other way.
So that’s what I was thinking when we got back to the living quarters. Orin and the other two misters thanked me and went off to make sure their prentices were settled in, everyone else was somewhere or other besides the common room, and I stood there for a good long moment wondering what I was going to do.
Then I heard footsteps whispering down the stair to the surface. I turned just as Thu came down them. He stopped, motioned to me to come over, and very quietly said, “A friend of yours is waiting above.”
I stared at him for a moment, and all at once realized who it had to be. He put his finger to his lips; I managed a nod somehow; he stepped out of the way, and I went up the stair and out the door into the afternoon sunlight with my head spinning. There was someone sitting on one of the antenna housings close by, and he turned as I stepped out onto the sand. I didn’t need to see the round eyeglasses glint like moons to know that it was Plummer.
“Allow me to congratulate you,” he said, after we’d greeted each other. “For this very remarkable find, and—” He gave me one of his considering looks. “—for the details of your arrival, shall we say. Thu told me what happened, though of course I’ll want to hear your account as well.”
“You know,” I said, “I never would have guessed that he was a friend of yours.”
“Thu? If you mean a member of our guild, no, not at all. We have an arrangement with him, as we do with the priestesses and some others; with his family, I should say, for it was originally made with his great-great-grandfather. We have him review any book on technology before we put it back into circulation, and he does occasional work for us, when that’s needed.”
“As a Sword?”
“Essentially, yes.” He motioned for me to join him, and I climbed up and sat next to him on the antenna housing. Wind whipped sand around us, and the sun sank toward the haze in the western sky.
“I’m honored,” I said.
Plummer chuckled at that. “I hope I won’t disappoint you by saying that you weren’t the main reason he was here. No, that was your young prentice—I’m by no means certain what to call him now.”
“Sharl sunna Sheren. I’ll always think of him as Berry, but—”
“Understood. Thu believed he needed protection, and of course he was quite correct—and we were mistaken. Since Cobey Taggart had ample opportunity to kill young Sharl if he’d wished to do so, and since he’d also spared Thu’s life when killing him and throwing the body into Banroo Bay would have been the simplest option, we didn’t treat the rumors about his intentions as seriously as we should have. Things could have ended so badly.”
I thought about that for a while. “I wonder if anyone knows why Cobey didn’t kill Thu.”
“As it happens, yes.” Plummer shook his head, and chuckled again. “It’s quite funny, really. We found out from the Taggart family, who got it from some of the jennel’s servants after his death. He didn’t believe that the man who assaulted y
ou was actually the last king of Yami. He found it highly amusing that some ordinary Memfis street criminal had convinced you of something so very unlikely, and would laugh about it when he’d been drinking.”
I thought about that, too. “And Berry?”
“That was considerably more complicated. Did you ever find out who it was that was following you along the back roads of Tucki, when we first met?”
“If it was the same person who was following us in Inyana, yes.”
Plummer nodded. “Sheren kept watch over her child. If anything had happened to Sharl, and she had any reason to think that Cobey Taggart was involved, he would have died in some very unpleasant manner, and I’m sure that he knew it. He couldn’t act until he was certain she was dying, and not even then unless he was far enough from settled country that he could keep word from getting back to her while she still lived. We failed to take that into account.”
“And I helped the whole thing along,” I said, shaking my head.
Plummer looked at me for a long moment. “He would have come here one way or another, you know,” he said. “With you or without you. Because it was the first of those, and not the second, there won’t be a Fourth Civil War in our lifetimes. The gains of the last hundred years or so have the chance to become the foundation of something lasting, and not just one more of history’s might-have-beens.”
The wind rushed past us on its way to the green hills beyond the Suri. “Meriga is healing now,” Plummer said. “Not healed—it won’t be healed for many centuries to come, not fully—but it‘s healing. There’s strength and hope and a sense of possibility that might be turned to good purposes, or bad ones. All things considered, the country could benefit just now from a presden who’s earned his living with his own hands, who’s traveled from one end of it to the other on his own feet, who’s learned what it means to be disliked and distrusted for no better reason than the prejudices of the thoughtless. That might spare us some mistakes, and put some high hopes in reach.” He glanced at me. “Or not. There are no guarantees.”
“I suppose there never are,” I said.
Plummer nodded. “At the same time,” he said, “your find here may have quite some impact of its own. Thu told me some of what turned up here; I admit to a great deal of curiosity about the details.”
“I have a copy of everything we printed out. It’s down below, but I can get it for you.”
“Many thanks. And of course that brings up another matter we should discuss.”
“Your offer.”
“Precisely. Have you considered it?”
“Over and over again.” I drew in a breath. “I’d like to take you up on that—but there’s a problem, or might be.” I swallowed, then, and told him about this notebook, about the account I’d written of my journey here, and where Eleen and Tashel Ban wanted to send it.
He took that in, then: “Are you willing to place yourself under my authority as Cord?”
“Yes.”
“Even if that means that I tell you to destroy the manuscript?”
I’d already thought about that. “Yes.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said at once. “Can you arrange for it to be hidden once the translation has been made and sent to the Cetans?”
I thought of what Eleen said, when we were discussing the message from Delta Pavonis IV, about hiding everything we’d found for a thousand years, and nodded. “The scholar we have here is a good friend. She’ll do that if I ask her.”
“That will be quite adequate.” He paused, then went on. “Perhaps we can arrange with her to have the manuscript placed in one of our collections, once she’s finished with it. Fifty years from now, anyone could read it without danger. It’s simply the interval between then and now that’s at issue.” With another of his little smiles: “And I confess to a certain degree of vanity. It would be pleasant to know that beings on another planet will have heard of me. More to the point, of the work in which I’m engaged.”
“I wonder what they’ll think about that,” I said. All at once I could imagine a bunch of blobby yellow Cetans sitting in a pool of gasoline in some tilted-bowl building of theirs, under the golden sky of Tau Ceti II, talking to each other in their magnetic-field voices and trying to figure out who this Plummer person was in the strange story they’d gotten by radio from Mam Gaia all those light-years away. I grinned and said, “For all we know, some of them might be doing the same work.”
“An enticing thought.” Plummer looked at me for a moment, then said, “How soon would it be convenient for you to leave?”
I’d been wondering all along how soon he would ask that question, or one close enough to it that the difference wasn’t worth worrying about. “Whenever you like. Well, I’ll need to see to the notebook and get my things packed, but that’s all.”
“Excellent. It would be best if we could leave before nightfall.”
I got off the antenna housing. “So long as you won’t disappear when I turn my back.”
That got me a broad smile. “I can certainly promise that,” he said. “In fact, one of the first things you need to learn is how that’s done.”
“I’d like to know that,” I told him.
“We can begin as soon as you return,” he said.
There are voices outside in the hallway now, prentices talking with each other as they head for the kitchen and the evening’s chores. In a little while, when they’re gone, I’ll shoulder my pack and head up the stair and leave Star’s Reach behind, and Plummer and I will be on our way—where, I have no idea, and I’m not at all sure it matters to me just at the moment. The note for Eleen is on the bed we’ve shared. I’d be lying if I said the note was just about this notebook and what to do with it, but that’s one of the things I wrote about.
I wondered for a while if I should take something from Star’s Reach to carry with me wherever I go next, the way I’ve carried Tam’s yellow metal butterfly, the ring that used to be my mother’s, the star they sent her after my father died, and the few other things I’ve got in the little bag of keepsakes down at the bottom of my pack. Still, I decided against it, and I think that was the best choice. I’ll be carrying plenty with me anyway: the view from Troy Tower, the nights with Eleen and those other nights in Memfis during the rains, the lazy days on the canal boat and the riverboat, the stories I heard when we were camping at night with travelers on a dozen different roads, the slow arc the Spire made as it fell and the expression on Jennel Cobey’s face as he fell, too. It’s more than enough.
I asked Plummer about that, in a way, before I came back down into Star’s Reach. I’d just about turned to go, and then stopped and said, “One other thing,” and reminded him about what he’d said about the one big and nameless story that has all other stories in it.
He blinked. “I said that?”
“I think you were drunk.”
“That’s certainly possible,” he admitted.
“The thing I’m wondering is this,” I said. “If I’ve finally gotten out of the one big story, what do I do now?”
He thought about that for a moment. “If it’s true,” he said, “that all stories belong to that one story, you can’t leave it, because whatever you do is a story—whatever any of us do is a story, and part of other stories. As long as the end of the story you’re in isn’t the end of you as well, I suppose you find a new story that the rest of your life can tell.”
He paused, then, and glanced up at me. “In a way, you know, that’s what Meriga has been doing for the last four hundred years. The old world had its own favorite story, which said that we owned Mam Gaia and everything else and could make them all do whatever we wanted”—he gave me a little smile—“like animals in a sirk. That story didn’t have a happy ending, quite the contrary, and since then, we’ve been looking for another story to tell.”
“Well, most of us,” I said.
“True enough. Cobey Taggart wanted to go back to the old story, and look how his story ended.” He sh
rugged. “But most people know better now. It might just be possible now for us to find out what our new story should be, and get to work telling it.”
I thought about that as I came down the stair into Star’s Reach, walked down the corridor to this bare little room, turned on the lamp and got out this notebook as I’ve done so many times over the time I spent here. Plummer’s right, and not just about Meriga. Nuwinga and Genda and the coastal allegiancies are looking for new stories, if they haven’t found them already, and other people all over Mam Gaia’s round belly are busy looking for their own new stories—and they’ll find them, too.
I’m sure of that because there are others who’ve already done it. The Cetans might still be figuring out their new story, but the bubble-and-feather things from Delta Pavonis IV figured out theirs back before the first of Mam Gaia’s human children climbed down out of the trees in Affiga, and I don’t even want to think about how long ago some of those other species made—what was it the message said?—the usual mistakes and suffered the usual consequences, picked themselves up again and found some new story to tell with their lives and their worlds. If they could do it, I’m pretty sure we can.
And you know, I think I probably can, too.
***
There are three pieces of paper pasted on the inside back cover of the original notebook. The first is a handwritten note, which seems originally to have been pinned to the outside of the front cover:
My dear Lissa,
This is the manuscript I told you about. You may read it if you wish, but please don’t make a copy of it or show it to anyone else in the guild, and give it to (a word or name carefully blotted out with ink) as soon as possible. She’ll see to it that it gets to the place it needs to be.
With all my thanks and gratitude,
Eleen darra Sofee
Below this is a handwritten label:
Manuscript #338
Received into this collection on 14 Janwer,
Star's Reach Page 44
