places like that is another question, and one I can’t begin to
answer.
I didn’t have to wonder what the people who
used to work at Star’s Reach were doing in their maze, though. It
was a big one, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Shanuga; a lot of
the computers had obviously been stripped for parts a long time
back, but the hulks were still there and so were the wires, linking
each one to the others, and to dusty shapes on a table along one
wall. “Printers,” Tashel Ban said; he went down the row of them,
pushing something on them, and little red lights started blinking
on the sides of a couple of them. Above the printers were shelves,
and on the shelves were books of a sort; they were each a good six
or eight senamees thick, with covers on both ends, but the paper in
the middle had been punched and fastened together with a bit of
flimsy metal instead of being properly bound. That’s what we found
out when Eleen pulled one down and opened it.
“What is it?” I asked.
She couldn’t say a word, just looked at me as
though somebody had walked up behind her and hit her over the head,
so I went and looked over her shoulder. I’d guessed by then what
the books had to be, but seeing what was on the page was something
else again –
DATE RECD 04232112
197606348 671934867 130486713
496710396 713673104 975132348 240618946 720394352 797062309
475102346 713949751 309486723 094896713 049571304 986703047
246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 670479587
624390567 249567495 876340958
– and so on for page after page after page.
Every page had DATE RECD and a number on the top, and I could guess
well enough what that meant.
By the time I was up to noticing much of
anything beside the page, everyone else but Anna had gathered
around, and they were staring at the numbers pretty much the way
Eleen and I were doing. After a long moment, Tashel Ban turned and
walked down the row of shelves and printers, pulled down another
book, and opened it. “Same thing,” he said. “There must be a couple
of hundred of them.”
That’s how we found one of the things we came
to Star’s Reach to find, the reason Star’s Reach itself was built:
the messages from some other world around some other star that came
to the old world, our old world, right when it was falling apart.
We might have found them days earlier or days later, but that’s the
way of ruins; they choose their own time to tell you things.
We searched the rest of the room, but there
wasn’t much else there, just the maze with its desks and stripped
computers, and the long table with the printers and the books above
it. Then we went back and checked every single one of the
books—there were two hundred twelve of them—to make sure they were
all just the same strings of numbers, and none of the people who
sat at those computers had managed to turn the numbers into words
and read the messages. Anna says that she thinks they managed it,
at least partway. That’s what her mother and father and the rest of
them were doing, up to the time that they left Star’s Reach for
good, but if that happened none of it got left there in the room we
had found.
Eventually we finished searching and came
back to the room where we’re staying. Eleen took the very first
book off the shelf and brought it with her. She says she wants to
try to figure out if there’s a pattern in the numbers, and I’m sure
she’ll give that a try, but I think one of us would have brought
one of the books back with us even if she hadn’t come up with that
reason. You don’t come this close to the old world’s biggest secret
and then just leave it sitting on a shelf, even if you can’t figure
out a blessed thing of what it means.
Still, as I sit here at the desk in the
corner of our room and smell dinner cooking, what keeps coming to
mind are some of the other times that ruins have handed me a
secret, and for some reason the one that I remember best just now
is a place that
answer.
I didn’t have to wonder what the people who
used to work at Star’s Reach were doing in their maze, though. It
was a big one, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Shanuga; a lot of
the computers had obviously been stripped for parts a long time
back, but the hulks were still there and so were the wires, linking
each one to the others, and to dusty shapes on a table along one
wall. “Printers,” Tashel Ban said; he went down the row of them,
pushing something on them, and little red lights started blinking
on the sides of a couple of them. Above the printers were shelves,
and on the shelves were books of a sort; they were each a good six
or eight senamees thick, with covers on both ends, but the paper in
the middle had been punched and fastened together with a bit of
flimsy metal instead of being properly bound. That’s what we found
out when Eleen pulled one down and opened it.
“What is it?” I asked.
She couldn’t say a word, just looked at me as
though somebody had walked up behind her and hit her over the head,
so I went and looked over her shoulder. I’d guessed by then what
the books had to be, but seeing what was on the page was something
else again –
DATE RECD 04232112
197606348 671934867 130486713
496710396 713673104 975132348 240618946 720394352 797062309
475102346 713949751 309486723 094896713 049571304 986703047
246097240 956872349 587134967 130476139 587620958 670479587
624390567 249567495 876340958
– and so on for page after page after page.
Every page had DATE RECD and a number on the top, and I could guess
well enough what that meant.
By the time I was up to noticing much of
anything beside the page, everyone else but Anna had gathered
around, and they were staring at the numbers pretty much the way
Eleen and I were doing. After a long moment, Tashel Ban turned and
walked down the row of shelves and printers, pulled down another
book, and opened it. “Same thing,” he said. “There must be a couple
of hundred of them.”
That’s how we found one of the things we came
to Star’s Reach to find, the reason Star’s Reach itself was built:
the messages from some other world around some other star that came
to the old world, our old world, right when it was falling apart.
We might have found them days earlier or days later, but that’s the
way of ruins; they choose their own time to tell you things.
We searched the rest of the room, but there
wasn’t much else there, just the maze with its desks and stripped
computers, and the long table with the printers and the books above
it. Then we went back and checked every single one of the
books—there were two hundred twelve of them—to make sure they were
all just the same strings of numbers, and none of the people who
sat at those computers had managed to turn the numbers into words
and read the messages. Anna says that she thinks they managed it,
at least partway. That’s what her mother and father and the rest of
them were doing, up to the time that they left Star’s Reach for
good, but if that happened none of it got left there in the room we
had found.
Eventually we finished searching and came
back to the room where we’re staying. Eleen took the very first
book off the shelf and brought it with her. She says she wants to
try to figure out if there’s a pattern in the numbers, and I’m sure
she’ll give that a try, but I think one of us would have brought
one of the books back with us even if she hadn’t come up with that
reason. You don’t come this close to the old world’s biggest secret
and then just leave it sitting on a shelf, even if you can’t figure
out a blessed thing of what it means.
Still, as I sit here at the desk in the
corner of our room and smell dinner cooking, what keeps coming to
mind are some of the other times that ruins have handed me a
secret, and for some reason the one that I remember best just now
is a place that
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