Star’s Reach
A Novel of the Deindustrial Future
John Michael Greer
Star's Reach
Copyright © 2014 by John Michael Greer
Published 2014 by Founders House Publishing, LLC
Cover art © Fotografieco/Dreamstime.com
Cover art © Markus Gann/Dreamstime.com
Cover Design © 2014 Founders House Publishing
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Full Contents
Start Reading
About The Author
Copyright
Author’s Note
There’s a certain irony in the fact that this tale of the deindustrial future first appeared in serial form as a monthly blog post on the internet, that most baroque of modern industrial society’s technosystems. That said, I’m grateful to all those who read, praised, and criticized the story in its original form, and thus contributed mightily to whatever virtues it may have.
My gratitude and thanks are also due to Harry Lerwill and Dana Driscoll for their help revising and editing the manuscript, and to Shaun Kilgore for seeing it into print.
One: The Place of Beginnings and Endings
One wet day on the road that runs alongside the Hiyo River toward Sisnaddi, Plummer told me that every story in the world is just a scrap of the only story there really is, one big and nameless tale that winds from the beginning of things all the way to the end and sweeps up everything worth telling in between. Everybody has some part in that story, he said, even if it’s just a matter of watching smoke from a battle over the next hill or listening to news that’s whispered in the night. Some people wander further into the story and then wander right back out of it again, after they’ve carried a message or a load of firewood that settles the fate of a country or a dream. Sometimes, though, somebody no different from any of these others stumbles and falls into the deep places of the only story there is, and gets picked up and spun around like a leaf in a flood until finally the waters either drown him for good or toss him up gasping and alive on the bank.
Plummer said all of that between one mouthful of cheap Tucki whiskey and the next, as we sat and waited out the rain under the shelter of a ragged gray ruin left over from the old world, and I nodded and said nothing and decided he was drunk. Now, though, I’m not so sure. Yesterday I got to the one place on Mam Gaia’s round belly I’d given up expecting ever to come, and nearly got reborn doing it. As the five of us who made it here sat in the darkness and waited for nightfall and wondered if we would live to see morning, the thought came to me more than once that this journey I’m trying to write out just now is part of something a mother of a lot bigger than the travels of one stray ruinman from Shanuga—bigger, for that matter, than the different roads that led each of us here, bigger than Shanuga or Meriga itself.
For all I know, Plummer may be right. If he is, I know to the day when his one story caught me up and set me on the road to Star’s Reach. It was the morning of the sixth of Semba in the thirty-seventh year of Sheren’s time as Presden, four hundred years and some more after the old world ended and ours began. That was the day I turned twenty. It was the day I became a ruinman, and I nearly got myself reborn then, too.
I was in the Shanuga ruins that morning, down in the underplaces of a big building that must have soared way up above its neighbors before storms and clumsy scavengers brought it down. Now most of it lay sprawled over two blocks of smaller ruins, filling up one of the old streets in between. Streaks of rust ran down the concrete and showed where rain liked to pool and flow in the wet season, but there was good metal in the ruin as well, and maybe reason to hope that valuables might have been left in the buildings that got buried in the rubble when the old tower went down.
Still, that was work for other ruinmen. When the guild misters held a lodge after the rains and pulled shards from a pot to settle who got what part of the dry season’s diggings, Mister Garman drew the piece that stood for the underplaces of the tower. Gray Garman, we called him—we in this case meaning his prentices; he was tall and lean and dark, with a head of tight curled gray hair and a short gray beard and a frown, more often than not, that twisted his mouth to one side and made him look as though he was thinking about something dead.
He hadn’t been frowning the morning he told us what the draw had given us, and for good reason. The underplaces of the old towers are dangerous, worse even than the upper floors of a tower that hasn’t quite gotten around to falling over or pancaking, but there’s no place you’re more likely to find the sort of salvage that can pay for a dozen sparse seasons in a single day. Once the rains stopped and the ground dried out enough, then, we went to work on it, clearing rubble out of the old stairwells and shoring up places where cracks ran through the concrete and might bring all of it down on our heads. As it turned out, though, Garman might as well have frowned; whether the tower was abandoned and stripped before the old world ended or cleared by scavengers in the drought years afterwards, we never did figure out, but room after room was as empty of salvage as it could be.
We spent most of two months making sure we’d been through all of it, every closet and corridor, and finally Garman decided it was time to start cracking the concrete. By this time some of the other misters and their prentices had much better finds, and made sure we knew about it; Mister Calwel, who was as close to an enemy as Garman had, found a parking garage that fell in with half a dozen cars still in it, and got to haggle with the metal merchants over that while we were coming back with empty hands.
Garman told us first thing that morning, the morning I turned twenty, that we’d go to work breaking the building down the following day. I didn’t mind the extra time off, since there’s no harder work in the ruinman’s craft than pounding concrete with hammers to get the metal inside it, and the girders, rebar, and iron pipe you get from it don’t bring that much money. Still, I had another reason to want a day’s delay. All the time we spent searching the building, I’d been chased by the feeling that we’d missed something, and I wanted another look at it before we went to work with the hammers.
I told Garman as much, not long after he’d announced the day off. I expected him to frown and tell me not to waste my time. He frowned, sure enough, but said nothing for a long moment and then nodded once. “Well,” he said. “Let me know, Trey.”
“I’ll do that, Sir and Mister,” I told him, and went to get my tools. That year I was his senior prentice, and so had tools of my own: pry bar, grapplehook, hammer and chisels, thin-blade knife and wide-blade knife, a couple of electric lamps, and a bag of special things for papers and the like, since Gray Garman did jobs for the scholars in Melumi now and then and knew what they wanted. With a belt full of tools, a steel hat on my head, and ruinman’s leathers already caked with a dry season’s dust, I felt ready for anything, and I went from our camp by the river to the stairwell we’d cleared.
One of Garman’s other prentices, a boy of thirteen or so named Berry, waved to me as I got to the stairwell; he was up above in the tangled wreck of the tower, pulling wire out of a conduit—that was one of the ways prentices could make a few spare marks in off hours, salvaging wire to sell the copper. I did the same thing the day before and had a big tangle of heavy copper wire in my pocket,
nicely stripped of its insulation and ready to sell when the metal merchants next came by. I waved back and started down.
Down below the air was cold and still and damp. I tapped the switch on the electric lantern and tried to get my thoughts clear, emptying out the chattering mind the way the priestesses teach. What had we missed? I let the question sink into silence, waited for a moment, and then headed deeper in, following nothing I could name.
Two levels down and over toward the river side was a big square room with a couple of closets on one side. We’d shored the ceiling here with timbers, because that side of the building had taken more damage than the others, and a bit of light filtered down through the holes where old ventilation ducts used to run. The closets were empty, like everything else down there, and we’d added to the empty look by taking off the metal doors and their frames and hauling them away to sell. For all I could see, the room and its closets had nothing more to offer than the rest of the ruin, but something just wouldn’t let me pass them by.
So I went around the room a senamee at a time, checking the walls and the floor for any sign of an opening that had been sealed up or hidden. When I found nothing, I went to the closets. The first had nothing better to offer, but as I crossed to the second I felt the little prickle of knowledge that said I’d been right. There on the floor, where the door frame had covered it, a seam split the concrete; the closet’s floor had been poured at a different time than the room’s, and though it was hard to tell in the dim light from the lantern, the floor of the closet looked more recent: a little coarser and visibly more cracked.
If Mam Gaia had given me the brains she gave geese, I would have stopped then, gone back up to the surface and found a half dozen prentices to help. Instead, I went into the closet, set the lantern down in the doorway, and started to crouch down so I could get a better look at the floor. I was maybe halfway there when the floor creaked, lurched beneath my feet, and fell away.
I jumped for the door the moment the floor shifted, but it dropped too fast, and the best I could do was catch myself on a couple of pieces of broken rebar below the doorway as a crash and a great choking cloud of dust came up from below. The lantern teetered and then fell, just missing my head; I got a brief glimpse of a little square room below me, and then the lantern struck a piece of fallen concrete. I heard glass break and the light went out, and then the rest of it rolled onto the floor. Light flared again, brief and blue-white, like lightning, and the lightning-smell the scholars call ozone tinged the air.
That was when I knew just how close I was to getting reborn.
The ancients did a thing, clever and nasty, with certain places here and there in the ruins. They took big cylinders that turn out a steady trickle of electricity—nobody knows exactly how they work, but if you cut one open your radiation detectors go crazy and everyone nearby will be dead by day’s end, so it was something nuclear—and wired them up to banks of metal plates that are shielded from one another so they hold a charge. Wires from those plates go to thin metal strips in the floor of the entrances to the places I mentioned. You can’t see the strips unless you know what to look for, and if you step on the wrong two of them at the same time, the charge goes through you and you fry.
There are one or two of these places in most of the old cities, and sometimes many more. The scholars say they were built as shelters for soldiers and rulers in the last days of the old world, and they may be right, for certainly it’s common enough to find the bones of people who hid there, in among old machines and cabinets full of papers. There are tools that ruinmen use to drain the charge out of such a trap, but I didn’t have any of them with me. The one thing I knew for certain was that if I lost my grip and fell, my chance of landing on concrete wasn’t good, and if I touched the floor, my chance of taking another breath afterwards was small enough not to notice. I truly expected to die.
I hung there in the darkness for what seemed like a long time and tried to think of some way to save my life. The doorway was out of reach, and trying to haul myself up to it brought down more pieces of crumbling concrete; no escape that way. Shouting for help was pretty clearly a waste of time, since there was nobody closer than Berry up above. Trying to wrestle my backup lamp out of the bottom of bag on my hip would give me a better look at what was going to get me reborn, but it might make me lose my grip and fall. So I clung to the rebar, mind racing, while the scents of dust and lightning rose up from underneath me.
It must have been less than a minute, though it felt like an hour, before I thought of the tangle of wire in my pocket. The thought of letting go of one the pieces of rebar that held me up was not exactly comforting, but no other plan came to mind. I tightened my right hand on the longer piece of rebar, reached down with the other, pulled the wire from the pocket of my coat and threw it toward where I thought I remembered the floor had been completely bare, then caught the rebar again before my right hand could slip.
Lightning flared again, and went still. After a moment a dull red glow and a hot-metal smell began to fill the room: the wire, heating up to cherry color from the current flowing through it. The light from the wire, dim as it was, gave me a gift I hadn’t expected: I could see, below me and a little to one side, a big piece of concrete that had landed flat on the floor. I gauged the distance, swung myself over that way and dropped.
A moment falling through near-darkness, and then my feet hit; I breathed out all at once and landed as soft as I could. The concrete shifted beneath my feet, but I kept my balance, and once the dust settled I was able to dig through the bag on my belt and pull out the backup lamp. Ruinmen always carry an extra way of making a light, and this was why; the lamp’s pale light blended with the glow from the copper wire burning out halfway across the room to give me a good look at the place that had almost killed me.
The room was much bigger than the closet above it, the walls rough, as though the concrete had been poured in a hurry. An iron ladder went down one wall from the broken ceiling to within a few feet of the floor; a hatch must have been sealed up above sometime after the shelter was built. There would be another entrance somewhere, but finding that could wait. Over to one side, a metal door led out of the room, and a tiny red light glowed next to it, the only warning the ancients gave of the death they’d woven into the floor. There would be a switch on the other side of the door that would turn off the current, if I could reach it.
I crouched, held the lamp close to the floor and made out the pattern of conductive strips on it. I’d crossed a floor of the same kind before more than once barefoot for practice, with Mister Garman watching, and the charge on the plates drained until a false step would bring a painful shock instead of sudden death. I’d never tried to cross such a floor in a ruin no one had cleared yet, and I was far from sure the copper wire discharged everything the trap had to offer. Still, unless I wanted to wait until someone came looking for me, I didn’t have a lot of other choices. After a moment, I stood up, pointed the lamp at the floor, and started toward the door.
To this day I don’t know if I did the thing right, or if the charge was simply low enough by then that my boots offered me enough protection against it. One way or another, though, I reached the door, and thank the four winds, it was unlocked. I had to lean against it to force it open; hinges that had been still for better than six lifetimes screeched their complaint but moved anyway. I reached through, fumbled for the switch on the other side, flipped it. The little light next to the door went green, and something hard and cold as old metal unknotted in me.
A murmur of sound from above caught my attention. After a moment, it turned into the drumming of feet. A familiar voice boomed: “Trey?”
“Down here, Mister,” I shouted back up. “Floor in the closet gave way, but I’m fine.”
“How far down?”
I glanced up. “About four meedas. There’s at least one more room down here.”
“Good.” Then, muffled: “Conn, Berry, get me that rope. Two more lamps, too.”
A moment later a rope came snaking down from above and Garman came down it hand over hand. Once he’d reached the floor, he glanced at me, at the green light, at the floor. “Room was trapped?”
“Good and proper,” I said. “Gave me a bit of trouble.”
“Well.” He was looking at me then with his frown. “It’s not prentice work to get past one of those. Give me your pry bar.”
I stared at him blankly for a moment and then handed him the tool from my belt. He hefted it, then with a flick of his wrist caught me with the sharp edge on the bent end just below one cheekbone, hard enough to draw blood. I managed not to flinch. Then he was holding the bar out to me, saying, “Take it, ruinman.”
I took it, dazed, while the prentices whooped—three of them had followed Garman down the rope, and a fourth was on the way. “Well, Mister Trey,” Garman said then with a faint smile at the formal courtesy, “did you check out the room back there?” A motion of his head pointed at the door behind me and the room beyond.
“Didn’t have a chance, Mister Garman. I was heading that way when you showed up.”
“Let’s see what they left for us,” he said, and motioned for me to take the lead.
By then my mind was trying to grapple with what had just happened. Going from prentice to ruinman, said the guild rules, took some proof of skill that none of the misters could quarrel with. Some prentices did it by plain hard work, and some by a chance find they followed up the right way, but you could also do it by landing yourself in deep trouble in the ruins and getting out alive. The thought dazzled me: after ten years as Garman’s prentice, I was a mister and a ruinman myself, and I was about to be the very first through a door that, beyond the last shadow of a doubt, nobody had opened since the old world stumbled to its end.
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