This morning I was putting my tools in order for the day’s work and thinking about the last part of the journey to Melumi when I heard running in the corridor outside the room where we’ve had our camp since we arrived here. It turned out to be Tashel Ban, and that made me sit up, because people from Nuwinga don’t usually move any faster than they have to.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“Found a door.” He was panting hard. “In the computer room. Stairs and—a smell.”
I knew right away what he meant, as much from the look on his face as anything. Ruinmen get used to the smell of people who’ve been dead a long time, but most other people don’t, and it’s probably a good thing. As often as not, when you find dead people from the old world, what killed them hasn’t gone away.
So I loaded the last of my tools into my belt and put it on, and by the time I’d turned around to see where Berry was he had his belt and his leathers on as well, and was turning on a lamp to light the way there. Tashel Ban gasped his thanks, still panting, and stepped out of the way, and Berry and I headed down the corridor. We didn’t run. Ruinmen don’t run when they’re in a ruin, or at least those who do don’t live long enough to bother noticing; but I won’t say we dawdled much.
There were lamps burning in the computer room, and the light splashed out through the open door—we’d jammed it open, so Anna didn’t have to come and open it again any time we wanted to go in. Tashel Ban and Eleen had been working on what was left of the old computers, with as much help as Anna could give them, while the rest of us kept searching for the place where the last people at Star’s Reach lived and did their work. Eleen and Anna were both there in the big room, but I didn’t need to do much more than follow their glances to find the door Tashel Ban had mentioned. There was a big metal bookcase pulled away from its place against the wall, and the door was behind it, half open.
“We pulled down some of the books,” Eleen explained, “and the shelf moved. It’s not fastened to the wall; I don’t think it used to be there when there were people here.”
“So you looked behind it.”
“So we looked behind it.” With a worried look: “And figured out right away that it was work for you and Berry, not for us.”
“You didn’t go up there?”
“Not after smelling the air.”
I smelled the same thing as soon as I came into the room: like dust, but not quite, and with just a hint of something rotten. “Good,” I said, and glanced at Berry, who was already tying on a cloth dust mask. “Let’s see what’s up there.”
I could have said a lot more, and so could Eleen, but there’s an odd thing that happens with us, and I think it happens with a lot of people in the crafts, ruinmen and scholars and radiomen and all. There are plenty of times when Eleen and I are two people who are trying to figure out whether they love each other or not, but when there’s work to be done she’s a scholar and I’m a ruinman and we stop being much of anything else. So I put my mask on and pulled out my radiation counter, Berry raised his lamp, and we started up the stair.
The steps looked like they’d been cut out of the concrete long after Star’s Reach was built, but we still made good and sure the steps weren’t trapped, and we sniffed the air for the sour lightning-smell that tells you there’s electricity close by. There wasn’t, and the counter clicked slow and soft, nothing more than background radiation, which was comforting in its way. The stair ran more or less straight, and we’d climbed up more than a level, probably close to two, before we saw the dim gray light up at the top of it.
The stair climbed four levels in all, right up to the topmost level of the complex, and then opened out into a room, a large one. The light came from big skylights of glass block set into the ceiling. We looked around, and that’s when we saw the bodies.
There must have been fifty of them, all laid out neatly in a row with their heads close to one wall. They weren’t as far gone as the bodies you normally find in ruins, just shriveled up after spending the last however many years in dry desert air, and their clothes looked brittle but they weren’t quite gone to shreds yet. What I noticed first, though, was that they all had cups next to them; it was pretty clear that they’d all drunk something, lay back on the floor, and died.
Berry gave me a look with wide eyes, but neither of us said anything, or had to. You find things like that in old ruins often enough.
We searched the rest of the room, found two doors opening off it, and went down the corridors to look into the rooms beyond them. No question, we’d found the place where Anna’s people lived; there were long rows of bedrooms and a big kitchen, a couple of rooms where a few hundred people could gather and a lot more that would fit ten or twenty, and a big space under skylights where withered sticks in tubs of dry dirt showed where they’d grown vegetables. The room we found first had computers in it, a bunch of them on a long desk up against one wall, and other machines I didn’t recognize. It also had something else, something we didn’t notice until we were almost finished: a heap of black ashes, over near one corner of the room, that looked like it had probably been paper before somebody lit a fire.
I sent Berry down to get the others. By then everyone else was in the room below, and their footfalls came echoing up the stairs. Eleen got to the top first, and let out a little cry when she saw the bodies; Tashel Ban muttered some hot language under his breath; Anna drew in a sharp breath and then turned sharply away so that none of us could see her face. Thu, who came up last except for Berry, was the only one who didn’t make a sound; he glanced at the bodies, then at me, nodded once and that was it.
We did a little more searching and found another stairway, going up, that led to a door onto the surface. Once we found that, Thu and I hauled a couple of empty shelves from the room below and used them to carry the bodies outside half a dozen at a time. The desert was as quiet as it ever gets, and a wind was gusting up out of the south, pushing big heaps of white cloud with it. We laid the bodies out decently beneath the sky so they could go back into the circle. We don’t have a priestess here and Anna, who’s the oldest woman present, doesn’t know the litany, so Eleen said the words for the last people of Star’s Reach, while the wind blew across the bodies and sent shreds of their clothing fluttering off across the sand.
Afterwards, when Anna could talk again, we sat with her in the room where her people lived and died, and Eleen asked her about her last hours there.
“I recall very little,” Anna said. “It was a long time ago, remember, and I was very young. We left at night, I know that; it was dark outside, and my mother and I went with maybe two dozen others down into the lower levels and then out to one of the main doors—probably the one we entered originally. We sat outside, waiting for my father and a few more people. It was a long time before they arrived, and then we started walking in the dark. But I don’t remember much of what happened before that, not to anyone but me and my mother and father.”
She leaned forward, then, and stared at nothing any of the rest of us could see for a long while. Then: “There was shouting. Before my mother came and started gathering up our things, and telling me we had to leave. There was shouting, and angry voices that went on and on; I could hear them down the corridor as I played in our room. That wasn’t normal, and I wondered what it meant.” Then, blinking and looking at us: “That’s all.”
Tashel Ban came back then from the heap of ashes. “Paper,” he said, “and quite a bit of it. Unless something turns up elsewhere, that may be their records.”
“The computers might have something,” Eleen said without too much hope.
We spent the rest of the afternoon searching the rooms we’d found, or rather Berry, Thu and I did, with what help Anna could give us. That wasn’t much, though none of us could blame her. Not long after we started searching, we found the room that had belonged to her family, with things nobody had taken the time to pack scattered around. Among them was a little stick-figure drawing that looked like it was supposed to be two adults and a child, with her name written in a child’s block letters down at the bottom. She turned sharply away and left the room, and I heard her dry hard sobs from one of the other rooms. After a while she came back to help us search, but her thoughts were somewhere else.
Tashel Ban and Eleen were working on the computers all the while. We’d been searching the rooms for a few minutes when Eleen let out a whoop like nothing I’d ever heard from her. It turned out that this part of Star’s Reach still had power coming to it from power cores down below, and at least one of the computers would still run. After that they were silent for a long while, except for muttered words now and again as they worked.
Meanwhile we found everything we were going to find in the other rooms, which was quite a bit as far as salvage, but next to nothing that could help us in our quest. Anna’s family and the ones that left with them took what they could carry, but the dead left everything behind, clothes in the closets, pots and knives in the kitchen, tools next to the place where they’d grown their vegetables, and everything else you might expect people to have where they and their ancestors lived for all those years.
There were books here and there, sometimes one or two, sometimes a shelf of them, and we checked those to make sure they weren’t messages from some other world. One room had most of a wall covered with shelves, and most of those were full of books with brown brittle pages and cracked paper covers that used to have bright colors on them; all of them came from before the end of the old world, though, and the papers and records we wanted to find weren’t anywhere among them.
By the time we’d finished searching I was about as discouraged as a man can get. It didn’t matter just then that I’d done the thing that every ruinman in Meriga had been dreaming of doing for four hundred years, and found the biggest and most famous ruin of them all; it didn’t matter that I could pretty much count on being welcomed to the ruinmen’s guild anywhere I wanted to settle, and being rich as a jennel besides. I wanted to know what the people from that other world had been trying to say to us right when the old world ended, and it seemed unfair after coming all that way and getting so close, to have those messages turn out to be long strings of numbers nobody could read, and a heap of black ashes nobody would ever read again.
I wandered into the place where Anna’s people used to grow their vegetables with those thoughts in my head. The skylights of glass block overhead let in evening light, and just then something, probably a big ball of tumbleweed, went rolling past in the wind. I thought about the wind up above, blowing over what was left of Anna’s people on its way across the desert, and all at once I realized that the wind was saying something.
They found something, it said. They found something in that message from the stars, and drank poison and died. Are you sure you want to find it too?
I left the dead sticks in their tubs and went back out to the main room. The others had gathered there already, following some call I hadn’t heard.
“They tried to erase all the computer files,” Eleen said, “but they didn’t take the time to do it the right way. It’s as though they had a library, and instead of burning the books, they just tore all the covers off the books and mixed them together so you can’t tell which book is which, or even where one ends and another begins.”
“But the pages are still there?” Berry asked.
“The pages are still there.” Eleen rubbed her eyes. “Tashel Ban’s going to try to get one of the printers to work; we’ve got plenty of paper in the storerooms and two cartridges that were stored in nitrogen and still ought to work. If we can get a printer going, we’re going to print out everything that might be a document, and try to piece them together and make sense of them.”
The wind was on the other side of the glass blocks and a mother of a lot of concrete and steel, but damn if I didn’t hear its voice, saying the same thing it said to me in the place with the dead plants. Still, I knew what my answer had to be, and I knew it was the same answer every one of us would give. Whatever it was that Anna’s people found, we couldn’t stop without finding it ourselves.