Twenty-Six: Waiting for the Thunder

 

 

“She was almost right,” Eleen said.

We were outside, not far from where we’d taken the bodies of the ones who died at Star’s Reach before we came. There wasn’t much left of them, a few odd scraps of bone here and there in the dust, but they had company now. We did our best to save her, but Anna knew exactly what she was doing when she turned the knife on herself.

So we found an old table and hauled her outside on it, the way we hauled what was left of the people her parents knew, to send her back into the circle. Eleen said the litany for her, we stood there for a while, and then we walked a little ways off, over to one of the big angular lumps of concrete that hid the antenna elements from the wind and sand. After a while, the silence got too heavy to bear any longer, and we started talking, quietly, about what had just happened.

“When I was going through the files we’d reconstructed, I found messages among the people who ran things here, talking about the same things Anna mentioned,” Eleen said. “From the very beginning, there were always a few people who worked here who thought that aliens were already visiting Mam Gaia in flying saucers, and would come down and rescue humanity someday. As long as they did their jobs, the others didn’t concern themselves, just as they didn’t worry about the few who were Old Believers and wanted time off one day out of every seven to talk to their god.

“As the years went by, though, more and more people here came to believe in the flying saucers. The others worried about that, but the believers couldn’t be spared—Star’s Reach had mostly shut itself off from the rest of Meriga by then, because of the troubles that led up to the Third Civil War, and even if they’d gone looking for help there was nobody else in Meriga or anywhere else who knew how to do the things they needed to get done.

“So the people in charge worried but didn’t do anything, and the number of believers grew, until finally everyone at Star’s Reach either believed in the flying saucers, or shared the same hope that a more advanced civilization would contact them and help humanity if they just kept working on the project. I can’t fault them for talking themselves into that belief. They needed some reason to keep on, some way to convince themselves that what they were doing mattered to anybody but themselves. So they traded messages with the Cetans and waited for someone else to contact them. And—” She spread her hands, palm up, and let them drop.

“You didn’t say anything about this before,” I said then.

“I didn’t think it was important. There were many other documents; I could have bored you all for hours every evening, talking about everything we found. It never occurred to me that those messages would explain why they killed themselves.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Berry said. “They got the message they were waiting for.”

“Except it wasn’t what they were waiting for,” Eleen pointed out. “Like Anna, they believed, or hoped, that the aliens who contacted them would be so far ahead of us that they could come here, give us back the kind of energy sources we had in the old world, fix everything we did to Mam Gaia—all that, and more. They wanted the old world back again, and they thought the aliens would give it to them. And what they got instead was what we just heard.”

None of us said anything for a little while, and then Thu spoke. “The question that occurs to me is whether the message was telling the truth.”

“I don’t know,” Eleen admitted. “I don’t know of any way we could know.”

“One part of the message is certainly true,” said Tashel Ban. “Delta Pavonis IV is a gas giant with an atmosphere that looks green to us. Scientists discovered that before the old world ended—and as far as I know, that information isn’t in the computers here at Star’s Reach.”

Thu nodded. “But that does not tell us whether the beings who sent the message might respond to a reply with something more than a radio message.”

“Like a spacecraft?”

“Or a great many spacecraft.”

Tashel Ban shook his head. “If they could do that, they wouldn’t have had to send a message and wait for a reply. They could have sent a spacecraft as soon as they detected our signals, found out whatever they wanted to know, and followed up with a fleet, if that’s what they had in mind. But—” He held up one finger. “If they could do that, we’d have been visited a long time ago; Delta Pavonis is only twenty light years away.” He held up a second finger. “And we’ve been receiving messages from the Cetans all along. They apparently got the same message we did; I don’t know whether they answered or not—we haven’t taken the time to decode the messages from them that are stored in the main computers down below—but they’ve been trying to talk to us ever since, and waiting for a reply. If somebody came calling from Delta Pavonis IV, that didn’t disrupt the Cetans’ transmissions at all.”

“There’s one thing more,” said Eleen then. “I mentioned the debate about whether progress could go on forever. There was one argument against that theory that nobody ever managed to push aside. It’s called Fermi’s paradox, after the scholar who first thought of it.”

“I have heard of it,” said Thu.

“I haven’t,” I said.

Thu nodded, and Eleen went on. “Even when scholars still believed in the Big Bang, they knew the universe had been around for at least thirteen billion years, and there had been plenty of stars with planets long before Mam Gaia was formed. If other intelligent species evolved during those thirteen billion years, and interstellar travel is possible, then they would have been all over the galaxy long before our time, leaving traces we couldn’t miss. There are no such traces. The most likely reasons for that are either that we’re the first intelligent species to evolve in this galaxy, or that interstellar travel isn’t possible. Once we contacted the Cetans, the first reason stopped being a possibility—two intelligent species less than eleven light years apart means that intelligent species are fairly common. That leaves the other, which most scholars back then didn’t want to think about.”

“None of that is conclusive,” said Thu.

“True,” said Tashel Ban. “If you want conclusive proof, though, it’s twenty light years away.”

“Or ten,” said Berry.

“True enough,” Tashel Ban replied. “The Cetans probably know one way or another by now. I wish we could ask them.”

“Actually,” said Berry then, “we can.” The pale tense look he’d had since we heard about his mother wasn’t exactly gone, but there was something past it, something that flickered and glowed like a flame.

“In theory, yes,” said Eleen. “But we’d have to finish working out the code—”

“Not just in theory.” He glanced from Eleen to me to Tashel Ban to Thu. “Let me show you.”

So we left Anna to the wind and the blowing sand, and went down into Star’s Reach again. Berry led the way to his room, opened the door, waved us in. The stacks of paper were still scattered all over every flat surface but the floor. He went straight to one stack on his desk, took a sheet of paper off the top, and handed it to Eleen. “I think you can read this.”

She glanced over it, then stopped, read it over again with eyes going wide. “Yes.”

“If you’re willing,” Berry said.

She nodded, considered the paper for a moment longer. “There’s a center from which movement radiates outward, linked to radio frequency and to this end of the communication—oh, of course. ‘Our radio station.’ Then there’s a reference to a previous state of flow, but the flow drops away to nothing—‘stopped transmitting to you.’ A spatial-subset indicator, and then interference patterns—‘because of local troubles.’ I think I can read the rest: ‘and was abandoned for a time. The troubles have ended, the sphere—no, the planet, our planet, is unharmed, and we have reoccupied the station. We will resume regular communication once we review past messages and finish learning how to send new ones.’”

We were all staring by the time she finished. “Berry,” I said then, “you worked that out yourself?”

“I kept wondering about the Cetans, what they must have been thinking after our transmissions stopped. It seemed only fair to let them know that our species is still here.” With a little shrug: “And I didn’t have much else to do, other than wash dishes and help with the computers when I could. So I started printing out messages and translations at night, and tried to figure out how the code worked.”

Tashel Ban had taken the paper from Eleen, and was reading over it. “The syntax is correct,” he said. “If we sent this, I’m quite sure the Cetans could read it.”

I was looking at Berry when I realized what had to happen next. “That’s not prentice work,” I said. “Give me your pry bar.”

He stared at me, then without a word went to his work belt, got the bar, and handed it to me. I hefted it, then flicked out the sharp end good and fast, catching him on the face just under the cheekbone. I heard Eleen gasp, but by then I was holding out the pry bar for Berry. “Take it, ruinman,” I told him.

He took it, and his face lit up the way mine must have, deep down in the Shanuga ruins where Gray Garman made me a mister. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something, and then gave it up and flung his arms around me. I patted his back and looked past him at the others. As he drew away, I said, “Eleen, Thu, Tashel Ban, I’d like to introduce Sir and Mister Berry of the ruinmen’s guild of—well, of Star’s Reach, for now.”

So of course they all congratulated him. While Tashel Ban was doing that, though, Thu turned to me. “For now,” he said. “It seems to me that certain decisions need to be made.”

“I know,” I told him, and he nodded, once, as though that settled something.

I waited until the congratulations were over and Berry was dabbing something on the cut I left on his face, and then said, “Well. We know as much as we’re going to know about what’s here, and you know as well as I do how much food we’ve got left. We’ve got some choices to make—but I’m going to need a little time first, to think about everything that’s happened.”

Nobody argued.

“An hour, perhaps?” This from Thu.

Nobody argued about that, either, and so I turned and went out into the hallway.

I knew where I needed to go, though I didn’t know why, not at first. The metal stair boomed beneath my footsteps, and the door groaned open, letting in a spray of dust and sand. A moment later I was outside, underneath the empty desert sky, with the concrete antenna housings stretching away into the distance on all sides and the low dark shape that used to be Anna, lying there where we’d left her.

I thought about what little I knew about her and her life, the circle through time that brought her back here to the death her parents managed to escape. I thought about the things she’d said about the false stars and the priestesses; I thought about the alien-books we both read, and the promises that sounded so true to her and so false to me, and where the difference was; and I stared past her, back eastwards to the place where the ground pretends to meet the sky. That’s when I figured out why she died, and why the people who were here at Star’s Reach before us died, and maybe, just maybe, why all those billions of people died when the old world ended: their universe was too small.

I don’t know if that will make the least bit of sense to anyone else who reads this, if anyone ever does. After I wrote those five words, I sat at the desk here in the little bare room I share with Eleen, with the point of my pen not quite touching the paper, for something like a quarter of an hour. I must have decided half a dozen times to scratch the words out, and half a dozen more times to spend the next half dozen pages trying to explain what I meant, and changed my mind each time.

Still, it’s simple enough. The people who wrote the alien-books, and most of the stories that were in the shelves with them, had all kinds of notions about what might be waiting out there between the stars, but they never dreamed that the universe was big enough to hold distances that couldn’t be crossed or problems that couldn’t be solved. It wasn’t that people back then were just plain wicked, the way the priestesses say. They really believed the universe was small enough that they could make it behave, the way Plummer says they used to make animals behave in sirks. That’s why they ignored so many of their problems until it was too late to do anything about them, and why they told themselves stories about flying saucers and space travel and how we were all going to go to the stars someday, where we’d find lots of people like us and lots of planets like Mam Gaia, because they never imagined the universe was big enough to hold anything else.

That’s what I figured out, as I stood there looking east across the desert. I figured out something else, too, which is that we’ve learned something now that they didn’t know, back in the old world. That was when I knew what I was going to say to the others.

I left Anna’s body to the wind and the dust, then, and went back down into Star’s Reach. I wasn’t the first one in the main room, though that was only because Thu was sitting in his usual chair at the table, where he’d probably been the whole time. He nodded to me; I nodded back, walked over to the table, and stood there waiting, because I couldn’t think of anything else. Everything I’d done and tried to do during the five years since I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga ruins came down to one decision we were going to have to make then and there. That two of the people I liked best on Mam Gaia’s round belly might have to go into the circle with knives to settle the thing didn’t help at all.

A door opened and closed down the hall, and Berry came in next, with the kind of brittle calm on his face you see when people are ready for a fight they don’t want but know they can’t get out of. He nodded to me and Thu, took his seat at the table, folded his hands and waited. About the time he settled into place, another door opened and closed, and Eleen came in; her eyes were red, as though she’d been crying, but she greeted everybody by name, went to her place at the table across from Berry’s and sat.

A good long minute went by, and then boots sounded on the stairway down to the rest of Star’s Reach. Tashel Ban came up them, his face grim. He didn’t say anything to anyone, just walked over to his chair, pulled it out, plopped down into it and sat there with his chin propped on his hands and his eyes staring at nothing in particular.

I sat down then, and looked from face to face, remembering all the roads we’d walked together in one way or another, and also remembering the others who walked part of them with us and weren’t there for one reason or another.

“The way I see it,” I said then, “we’ve got three decisions to make. The first is what to do about Star’s Reach, the second is what to do about the messages from the Cetans, and the third is what to do about this last message.”

“What to do about Star’s Reach?” This from Tashel Ban. “I don’t see much that we can do about that.”

“Turn it over to the ruinmen to break apart for scrap,” said Thu at once. “Find some way to preserve it in its current condition, so the conversation with the Cetans can continue. Abandon it, claim that we found nothing, and leave it for someone else to find.”

“More or less,” I said. “There’s also Anna’s choice, I suppose, but I don’t see much point in that.”

That got a moment of silence, then: “No,” Tashel Ban said. “I don’t see a point to the last of your three choices, either, and which of the first two we choose depends on what we decide about the Cetans and the others. That’s the real question, as I see it: do we tell the priestesses, your government, and mine what we’ve found about the Cetans and the others, or do we destroy the computer up here, erase the data from the mainframes down below, and hand the site over to the ruinmen?”

“How hard would it be to do that?” I asked.

“The second choice? Stripping the data from the mainframes would be very slow—my guess is that that’s why the people who were here before us didn’t do it. Destroying the computers up here? As long as it would take to toss each one of them down the stairwell.”

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.”

“What’s your real name?”

He stared up at me, and I could see the lump in his throat go up and down. “Sharl. Sharl sunna Sheren.” Then: “Mother of Life. You have no idea how long it’s been since the last time I said that aloud.”

I thought about that, and thought about him. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” He bent over, face in hands. “I just don’t know.”

It’s a funny thing, but when he said those words, I knew he had to say them, and I knew what I had to say in response. Thinking back on it a moment ago, as I sat here and listened to Eleen’s soft breathing and tried to think of what to write next, I wondered for a moment if I was remembering something out of the stories that were left here among the alien-books, or something from the stories my father used to tell when I was a child and he hadn’t yet been called away to the war that killed him. Then I thought of what Plummer said, about the one big story, and realized that he was right: there is only one story, and there was only one way it could go right then and there, in Berry’s bare little room in the ruins of Star’s Reach.

“I do,” I said. “You’re going to declare yourself a candidate.” Before he could answer: “If you’re going to say a tween can’t be Presden, you’re wrong. We just had one for more than forty years, and everyone knows it now.”

He stared up at me for a long moment, then said, “They’ll kill me.”

“They’re going to kill you anyway,” I reminded him. “What have you got to lose?”

Another moment, then: “I’d have to figure out how to go about it...”

“Tashel Ban will know.”

“That’s true,” he said. “That’s true.” He drew in a ragged breath, and just for a moment I could see the child he’d been back at Shanuga, all those years and kloms ago. “Trey—will you come with me?”

“Let’s go,” I said, and motioned toward the door.

A better storyteller than I am could probably make something out of what happened after that; what comes to mind now, thinking back on it, are little bright images like scraps of broken glass. I remember Tashel Ban’s hands moving in a pool of lamplight as he explained how presdens are chosen and how Berry—Sharl, I should probably say now, though it doesn’t come easily after this long—could proclaim himself and get the process going. I remember the table in the main room, all five of us sitting around it, while Berry told us what he meant to do and the rest of us listened and agreed. Then we were all in the radio room, with Tashel Ban turning switches on the transmitter, making sure a message would get bounced back off the high thin air to stations all over this end of Meriga, and handing the microphone to the thin red-haired ruinman who’d been my prentice not so long ago, and would probably be either Presden of Meriga or a corpse before much more time went past.

“My name is Sharl sunna Sheren.” His voice was calm, there at the last, as though he knew all along what he was going to do. “I meant to announce myself later on, after my mother’s funeral, but the news that came out today changed that. Unless there’s someone with a better claim, I am my mother’s heir and a candidate for the Presdency.

“You’ve heard the rumors; they’re true. I was born eighteen years ago and raised secretly in Sisnaddi. My mother didn’t want me to have to live the kind of lifelong lie she did, so as soon as I was old enough, I was prenticed out to the ruinmen. I’m a mister in the ruinmen’s guild now, and was working at a ruin when the news came about my mother.

“I’m not going to say where I am, for two reasons. One should be obvious. The other one—that’ll be known soon enough. Since as far as I know, there are no other heirs or candidates, I’m calling a meeting of the council of electors in Sanloo on the twentieth of Febry, a month and a half from now. I’ll present proofs of my identity and ancestry there, so the electors can decide on my candidacy.”

The words he’d rehearsed with Tashel Ban a few minutes earlier ended there, but he held onto the microphone, and after a moment went on. “One other thing. There have been a lot of rumors about this jennel and that one, about soldiers—about war. I want to ask everyone to put those rumors aside. We have laws in Meriga to decide who will be Presden, and whether or not the electors accept me, those laws need to be followed. The three civil wars we’ve had in this country should have taught us that there’s nothing good to be gained from a fourth. On the twentieth of Febry I’ll make my case before the electors in Sanloo; if any other candidates want to be considered, they can do the same; whatever the electors decide, I’ll accept it, and everyone else needs to do the same thing. That’s all. Thank you.”

He handed the microphone back to Tashel Ban. A moment later, the hiss from the receiver turned into a voice: “Copied.”

Then it was over, and we went one at a time back to our rooms. Eleen fell asleep almost at once, but it’s taken me a good couple of hours of writing to feel sleepy at all, and I don’t imagine that Berry will get any more sleep tonight than Thu ever does. When I was a prentice working in the Shanuga ruins and Gray Garman would set gunpowder charges to bring down a building, we’d see the flare of the fuse being lit, and then wait in a safe place until the charges boomed like thunder and the building came down. We lit the fuse on a mother of a charge tonight, a mother with babies and grandbabies all around, and there’s no safe place anywhere in Meriga or around it; all we can do now is wait for the thunder.