Star's Reach Read Free Page B

as well be the true story, and not whatever lies
sent young Calley off to die.”
    She let out a sharp sigh, but did not argue.
My father took a long slow draw from his pipe, let the smoke
trickle out, and said, “The stars are suns like ours, just a lot
farther away. They teach you that at school yet, boy?”
    “Yep,” I told him; the priestess who taught
us at the temple down in the village had said something about it
that very week.
    “Good. Those suns have worlds turning around
‘em, the way Mam Gaia turns around our sun, and in the old days
they thought there were people on some of those other worlds. Not
people like us. A-lee-in, they used to call ‘em: that means
different.”
    “Different how?” I wanted to know.
    “That’s just it. Nobody knew. You know the
spyglass Cullen has?” I did, and wanted one of my own desperately
just then. “In the old days they made spyglasses big as this farm
and chucked ‘em up in the sky so they could see the stars better,
and even through those, the other worlds were smaller’n a pinprick.
They’re that far away. But the people who live on those worlds, if
there are any, aren’t Mam Gaia’s children. Maybe they’ve got purple
skin, and eyes like bugs, and big claws to git you with.” His hands
turned into claws and lunged toward me, and I squealed with
laughter and rolled back out of reach.
    “Back in the old days they tried all kinds of
ways to figure out if there were people on those other worlds,” my
father went on. “Finally, so the story goes, somebody figured that
they probably used radios, same as we do, and started listening. Of
course the other worlds are so far away the signal’s less’n a
whisper by the time it gets to us.”
    “Like the Sisnaddi station,” I said. We had a
little crystal radio, and sometimes at night, if you jiggled the
thing just right, you could just hear the big station at Sisnaddi
playing patriotic music and talking about the news.
    “Like that, but so much fainter you can’t
imagine it. So they built antennas big as towns and radios bigger’n
this house, and when those didn’t do the job, they built even
bigger ones. Finally, just about the time the old world ended, they
built the biggest antennas and radios of all, at a place called
Star’s Reach, and the story is that they did it. They got a message
by radio from one of those other worlds, circling one of the suns
out there.” His gesture swept across the stars.
    He said nothing for a long moment, and
finally I asked, “What did it say?”
    “Nobody knows.” He took another draw from the
pipe, breathed out a plume of smoke that scented the night around
him. “They got the message, the story says, and it got passed
around to all the scholars they had in those days, who could figure
things out like that, but nobody could work out what it meant. Then
the old world ended and the lights went out forever and that was
the end of it.
    “But that wasn’t really the end of it.” His
voice went low, and dead serious. “Because ever since the old world
ended, people have gotten so caught up in that story that they’ve
gone off into the ruins looking for Star’s Reach, hoping they can
find the message and figure out what it means. And it kills them,
the way it killed Calley. He must have gotten too close to
something nuclear, and it poisoned his bones and his blood. There’s
plenty of that, and plenty of other poisons that choke you or blind
you or get in through your skin and leave you twisting like a
half-dry earthworm before you die, and plenty of pits you can fall
into and old rotten towers to fall on you and squash you like a
bug.
    “And here’s the thing. Nobody’s ever found
Star’s Reach, or anything to show that Star’s Reach was ever a real
place. It might just be a story. They used to tell lots of
make-believe stories, in the old days, about all those other worlds
and what might be out there. The whole business about Star’s Reach
might be one of those,