Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  Things went on like that for quite a while. Some of the younger prentices finally got bullied into fixing food for everyone before the misters got too tired of waiting, and I got handed a big bowl of bean soup and a wedge of hard bread almost as large. That might have helped steady me a little, except that it came with another big wooden mug of beer, and there were more after that.

  Night got close and dark around us, and we got quieter, though it took a while. Most of the younger prentices went off to their tents, and one or two of them got noisily sick on the way. A little later, the prentices who worked for other misters asked blessings on our dreams and headed off to their parts of the camp; I’m pretty sure some of them got sick, too, from the way they were weaving as they walked, but if so they weren’t so loud about it. Then it was just me and Mister Garman’s prentices in a circle lit by little lamps, with the stars peeking down through great torn gaps in the clouds above us and the stink of spilled beer around us, talking about other times and the ones who’d been there with us and weren’t with us now, the ones who quit their prenticeships and the ones who got reborn.

  Finally we ran out of things to say. A gap like the ones in the clouds was opening between me and the others, and it wouldn’t close again, I knew, even if they all lived to become misters themselves. I’d seen the same thing happen from the other side often enough, but even so it wasn’t easy to sit there in the pale lamplight and know that something that had been the nearest thing to a family I had after my father and mother died was gone now.

  When the silences had gotten long enough to be uncomfortable, I tried to stand up. That wasn’t the best move, it turned out, for it landed me on the ground with a thump. You have to drink a mighty lot of small beer to get tip-overish, as I said, but I must have drunk a mighty lot that day and then a bit. I tried to stand up again, without much more luck.

  The others laughed and teased me, which broke the silence for the moment. Berry, who was the only one of the younger prentices still there, came over and helped me stand up. I wished the rest of them good dreams and, leaning on Berry, managed to walk the thirty meedas or so to my tent without ever quite falling over.

  When we got to the tent, he more or less poured me into a sitting position on my cot and then stood there facing me for a long moment. “I’m the one who went and got Mister Garman when the floor fell in,” he told me then, saying it in the way that lets you know a favor is going to be asked before too much longer.

  “I’m grateful,” I managed in response.

  “You’re going to take finder’s rights to the letter.” Then, all in a rush: “You get to take one of Gray Garman’s prentices as your first prentice. I want you to pick me.”

  I stared at him for a moment, trying to get my brain to work. “I haven’t settled what I’m going to choose,” I protested, but he just grinned, and said, “You’re not gutless enough to turn down finder’s rights to Star’s Reach.”

  He was right, of course, though he could have said not smart enough just as truly. “If I do,” I tried again, “I’m not going to have more than half a dozen marks to my name. How do you think I’m going to feed a prentice? I’ll have to hire out at other mister’s sites, for certain.”

  “Then you can hire me out too.” The grin faltered. “Trey—Mister Trey—for a chance at Star’s Reach I’ll eat dirt and run naked and sleep under a bush for the rest of my life. Anyone would. I bet you have twenty prentices sitting in front of this tent when you get up tomorrow.” The grin was gone, and he swallowed visibly. “But I want you to pick me. I—I know I’m not even your best choice. But I had to ask.”

  I sat there looking at him for what seemed like a long while, thinking about the one time I’d wanted something that bad, and asked for it, and gotten it. Anyone else would probably have turned him down flat, or put off the decision until morning and turned him down that way, and I tried to talk myself into doing either one, and failed. “You’ll do,” I said.

  Berry’s face lit up like a lamp. “You mean it?”

  “I mean it. I’ll tell Garman first thing tomorrow.”

  He put out his hand, and I clasped it, sealing the deal. He grinned, then, and said, “Just like the Robot’s Hand. Mister Trey, you have the best dreams anyone ever had. I’ll be here with my things first thing tomorrow.”

  A moment later he was gone. I went to the door of the tent, thinking about the Robot’s Hand, and then fell to my knees and got very sick with as little noise as I could manage.

  Four: Shaking the Robot’s Hand

  Something woke up in the deep places of Star’s Reach during the night, for no reason we can tell.

  I blinked awake all at once out of some dream about of the Tenisi hills of my childhood, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what. The room was dark except for a little glow from the lamp in the corner where Thu keeps watch. Thu wasn’t there; he stood in the doorway looking out into the corridor beyond, a black shape against not-quite-darkness.

  A moment later I knew what brought him there. A faint vibration came up through the concrete around us, deep and steady. I recognized it at once as old world machinery. You don’t find that in working order often in ruins, but it does happen, and when it does it usually means the worst kind of trouble.

  I was on my feet before I quite realized it. Thu glanced back at me and made a quick silent gesture: come.

  I got my feet into my boots, threw on my ruinman’s jacket, got my toolbelt around my waist. A moment later I was standing beside him at the doorway. He pointed to the stair, but I was already looking at it, and the dim light that came up through it.

  “I’ll wake the others,” I said in less than a whisper. He nodded, never looking away from the stair’s mouth.

  A few moments later we were all awake. “The light and the sound came at the same moment,” Thu told us, his voice low. “Nothing else. No sound or sign of anyone.”

  “Could the machines have turned themselves on?” Tashel Ban asked.

  All of us looked at Anna. She tilted her head, thinking. “It’s possible,” she said after a moment. “There were certainly machineries that worked by themselves, but I wasn’t allowed down into the lower levels—none of the children were.”

  “Someone must go,” said Thu. He meant he should, and I had been about to say the same thing about me, so I just grinned. He gave me a look and nodded once, and the two of us went to the door together. The first time Thu and I met, he did his level best to kill me, and there’s nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly I trust more.

  Five levels down and one room over from the stair was most of a wall covered with lights and screens. A couple of days earlier, when we’d searched those rooms, they were dark and dead, but now the lights were on and the screens lit up. Our earlier footprints were the only ones in the dust on the floor, so Thu went back up the stair to tell the others while I looked at the blank glowing screens and thought about the robot’s hand.

  Eleen and Tashel Ban both told me, when I asked them last night, that the way to write a story like mine is to start at the beginning and go on step by step until you get to the end. She’s a scholar from Melumi and he’s more or less what they have in Nuwinga in place of scholars from Melumi, and they both know a lot more about writing than I do, but try as I might this thing I’m writing won’t follow their advice. If Plummer was right, and my story is part of his one story, it got started a long time before I did, and there’s no way to keep the earlier parts of it out of the part I meant to tell.

  So I’m going to have to take some pages here to write about the Robot’s Hand, even though that part of the story happened to me more than ten years before Gray Garman and I found the letter in the Shanuga underplaces. If other people ever read this, they might be able to understand the rest of the story I want to tell without knowing about the Hand, but they won’t understand me or Berry or the ruinmen, and I’m not sure at all that they’ll be able to figure out why Berry and I turned our backs on the life we’d been living among
the Shanuga ruinmen and went looking for a place nobody had been able to find for more than four hundred years. To explain the Hand, though, I’m going to have to go a bit further back, to a gray rainy morning when I was nine years old and the world I thought I knew had just fallen apart around me.

  That was after my father was called up to fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. My mother waited out the rest of that year hoping the news was wrong, but the men who straggled back from the Cairline coast had little hope to offer. He’d been in the front ranks at Durrem, they said, when the Jinya cavalry broke through our lines, and those who didn’t run fast got reborn in a hurry. My father wasn’t the kind of man to turn and run.

  When the rains came and went without word, and everyone knew that there wasn’t any use in hoping further, my mother sent for a priestess to say the litany for him, and then set about selling our farm. If ours had been a bigger family she might have been able to keep it, but it was just the two of us, and I wasn’t old enough for the heavy work. With the war and all, there were enough empty farms that she couldn’t get much for it, but she got enough to get us to her family in Shanuga and maybe enough to find me a place as a prentice there.

  So we gave away everything we couldn’t take and hadn’t been bought by the farm’s new owners, loaded up the rest in a couple of packs, and started walking one cool wet morning down out of the hills toward Shanuga. I don’t remember much of anything about the journey, though it took us three days and I’d never been anything like that far from home. I’d cried when we first heard my father wasn’t coming home, and cried again when it became pretty much clear that was true, and then again when my mother told me we had to leave the farm, but somehow none of that was quite real to me until I shouldered the pack and followed her out through a gate I’d known since I was born, and that I suddenly knew I’d never see any more. There were no tears bitter enough for that, and I simply trudged along in the mud behind my mother, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing but a huge cold empty space where my life had been.

  We got down to Shanuga toward evening three days later. There are bigger cities in Meriga, and I knew that even then, but I’d never seen any settlement bigger than the couple of market towns you could reach from our farm in a day’s walk, and they had maybe two hundred people each. Shanuga has twenty thousand. It has buildings seven and eight stories tall, with windows of glass salvaged from the ruins, and wind turbines turning slow and silent on top of them; it has walls around it, big and gray and sturdy, with gates going through here and there.

  I learned later, after I became a ruinman’s prentice, that the walls were made of chunks of old freeways, cut up more or less square and mortared together. That’s what gets used for city walls all over Meriga, since there are plenty of freeways to tear down and not much point in using them when the fastest thing we’ve got to move on them is an oxcart or a messenger’s horse. I didn’t know that then; all I knew was that the walls were the biggest things made by people that I’d ever seen.

  The guards at the city gates watch the people passing by through narrow windows. They looked down at my mother and me, saw a couple of harmless poor folk from the hills heading into the city like a hundred others must have done that day, and probably forgot all about us in the time it takes to blink. Me, I was staring openmouthed at everything around us, and my mother had to speak to me twice to get me to pay attention and follow her into the shadow of the narrow streets. She’d been to Shanuga to visit her family a few times since she married my father, and so the city wasn’t anything like as unfamiliar to her as it was to me.

  Her older sister had a tavern inside the walls of the city. I don’t remember it well; I lived there for only a few weeks and visited only a couple of times after my mother died, which wasn’t that many months after I prenticed with Gray Garman. Most of what I remember is the narrow stairway in back going up and up and up, five floors to the little room they could spare for my mother and me. One floor down was where Aunt Kell lived, with two daughters and whoever she had as her good time boy that week; two and three floors down were rooms that people could hire for the night, or longer if they wanted; four floors down, on the street level, was the public room, and below that was a basement full of barrels of beer, some aging, some brewing, some with a spigot stuck in them and a mark drawn with charcoal to tell the barmaids whether it was good enough to drink sober or bad enough not to give to anyone who still had wits enough to notice.

  My mother went to work right away, cooking and cleaning for the tavern guests. There wasn’t much I could do just then, so I mostly stayed out of the way. Once the rains stopped for good, I knew, the crafts would be taking prentices, and my mother and Aunt Kell meant to find me a place with one; that seemed like a good idea to me, too, though I hadn’t yet gotten past the shock of having my life tossed into the compost by some Jinya cavalryman I’d never know. Still, as the rains finished and the first bits of clear weather started to show up, it happened more than once that I came down for a meal with my mother and Aunt Kell and her daughters and her good time boy, and Aunt Kell and my mother would stop talking and look at me, and then there would be one of those busy silences where it seemed like all the words that weren’t being said kept chattering to themselves off where you can’t hear them.

  It was the night after one of those times that I dreamed my first dream about Deesee. Now of course I learned growing up to pay attention to my dreams and watch for the ones Mam Gaia sends, but up to then I’d never dreamed anything that would make a priestess pay the least attention. This one was different. I don’t think it came from Mam Gaia, though; damn if I know who or what sent it to me, but if it hadn’t come to me I can tell you for certain that I wouldn’t be writing these words by lamplight in Star’s Reach now.

  Like so many dreams, it didn’t so much start as unroll from something else too dim to recall. The first thing I remember was that I was walking down a city street so wide you could have built a block of Shanuga houses in the middle of it with room to pass on both sides. There were buildings to either side of the street, too, high and pale, with windows lined up in ranks like soldiers in a parade, except all the same size and all the same color. I was the only person I could see anywhere in the city, but not the only thing living; there were schools of fish swimming here and there between the high pale buildings, and when I breathed out my breath turned into bubbles and went rising up toward the silvery sky maybe fifty meedas above me.

  None of that seemed strange to me, and I kept on walking. I was supposed to meet somebody in the drowned city, and I turned a corner to get to where I knew I was supposed to go. Ahead of me was what looked like a big grassy meadow with trees, except the grass and the trees were all seaweed that moved back and forth as the water took it. That meant I was getting close, and I hurried a bit more as I walked.

  Finally I reached the seaweed meadow, and looked up and to my right, and that was when I figured out where I was.

  People call it the Spire nowadays; it had a longer name in ancient times, but I don’t remember it just now. Until the night that it fell, you could see it for kloms along the Lannic coast, rising up pale and stark from the sea, a square shaft of white stone with a pointed top. I had never seen it back when I had this first dream, nor for many years later, but I knew what it was and what it looked like; back when my father was alive, I played with other boys whose families kept pictures of it in their homes. There was an old story that as long as it stood there, sparkling in the mist off beyond the breakers, the drowned city beneath it might still someday rise up from the sea, and the old world and all its treasures would come back again. I never met anyone who admitted they believed the story, but I never met anyone but a priestess who insisted it was just a story, either.

  But that was what I was looking at: the Spire, or the lowest part of it, rising up from its hill to pierce what I’d thought was the sky, and I knew then was the surface of the sea. The one I was supposed to meet would be wait
ing there, I knew, and I started up the hill toward the base of the Spire. Just then the world began to shake all around me, and the Spire shuddered and swayed; and all of a sudden I was in my bed in the little room on the fifth floor of Aunt Kell’s tavern, being shaken awake by one of Aunt Kell’s daughters so I’d be up in time for breakfast.

  I thought about that dream all day, while sitting up in the little room and watching the clouds clear and the last few flurries of rain blow past. I thought about Deesee, the dead drowned city where the presdens of Meriga used to live before the lights went off and the seas rose up and the old world toppled into ruin like so many of the old towers I’ve helped salvage since I became a ruinman’s prentice. I thought about the old world itself, and all the scraps and pieces of itself that lie scattered all over Mam Gaia’s round belly, so that you can hardly dig in the ground anywhere in Meriga and not find something made back then. Finally, after a good long while, I thought I knew what the dream was trying to tell me.

  We ate dinner early in the tavern, so that everyone got fed and the dishes cleaned up before the evening got too lively downstairs. It wasn’t that many hours after breakfast, then, that I came down for dinner, and again my mother and Aunt Kell suddenly stopped talking and looked at me. I knew what they were talking about, and right then I knew what I had to say.

  “Momma, I want to prentice with a ruinman, if one’ll take me.” That’s what I put into the silence they’d made. “Aunt Kell, do you know any?”

  Aunt Kell glanced at my mother, then back at me. “Happens I do,” she said.

  “Would you write a letter to him, if Momma gives her leave?”

  Aunt Kell looked at my mother again, and my mother looked at her. “It’s an honest trade,” Aunt Kell said, “and if he makes mister he’ll never want for money.”