Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  It’s just too easy, though, for me to picture somebody who’s walked all the way over the mountains and the dead lands from the Neeonjin country, with straw sandals on his feet and a couple of swords at his belt, like the Neeonjin man in a picture book I had when I was little. He turns on a light and sits down here at this steel desk, and opens this notebook all anyhow, and the first thing he reads is me going on about the walled cities we’ve got here in Meriga. The priestesses say that there are places on Mam Gaia’s round belly where there aren’t any cities at all, either because there aren’t enough people or because there are laws against it. If they don’t have towns in the Neeonjin country or the ones they have don’t look like ours, whoever reads this will probably decide I was drunk or dreaming when I wrote, and use the rest of the notebook to light a fire to cook his dinner.

  Here in Meriga, though, cities have gray walls and narrow streets and everything else I mentioned earlier. Nashul’s like that, and Nashul’s what Berry started talking about first, that night in the forest where the two of us sat and tried to pretend we weren’t scared of what might be moving around out there in the darkness.

  “I was born in Nashul inside the walls, as I said,” he told me. He was facing our little fire, turned half away from me, with his arms folded around his knees. “Born up high, like they say, but raised down low. My mother’s mother was a big name in Circle, big enough that whether my mother got into Circle mattered a lot to the family. So my mother went playing, once she got to the age that girls do that.”

  There’s another thing: Circle. You find Circle everywhere in Meriga and Nuwinga; they’ve got it in Genda and the coastal allegiancies, too, except it’s not quite the same, and nothing like as powerful; down in Meyco they don’t have it at all, and I don’t suppose anybody knows what mothers do or don’t do in the Neeonjin country or the Arab countries across the sea, or anywhere else further off. Ask anybody who’s in Circle and they’ll tell you that it’s as old as people are on Mam Gaia, that women already got together in Circle in the days when everyone lived in caves and made tools out of rocks, the way the priestesses said we all did a long time ago, long before the old world got started. Maybe that’s so, but I never saw a word about Circle in old books, not even when I was in Sisnaddi for most of a year searching the archives in what I thought was the last chance I had to find Star’s Reach.

  Now if I could sit down with that Neeonjin traveler over a meal and a couple of beers, I could tell him about Circle, or as much about it as a man is ever going to know. I’d tell him what I learned from Plummer, and talk about how back in the days after the old world died and ours was born, maybe one woman in a dozen was able to have healthy babies, and the ones who could banded together to help each other, when there was no other help from anywhere else. I’d tell him how those circles of women spread and linked up with each other, and linked up with the priestesses, too, until pretty soon every town and city had Circle, and if you wanted to make something happen, even if you were the presden, you pretty much had to hope that Circle wasn’t against it. There’s a reason why most of the presdens Meriga’s had for the last two hundred years have been women.

  “And you were what happened,” I said.

  “Pretty much.”

  I let out a whistle. “That must have caused a flutter or two.”

  “That’s what they told me.” With a little laugh: “They were all set to bring my mother into Circle as soon as I was born. They’d already made all the plans for the ceremony, and then I came out tween and the whole thing had to be hushed up in a hurry. They’d probably just have pressed a pillow over my face and solved the problem that way, except my mother’s family were Old Believers and she wouldn’t let the birth women do that.”

  Then there are the Old Believers. I’d never yet met one of them, that night when Berry told me his story, though I’ve met them since. They don’t worship Mam Gaia and they don’t watch their dreams for messages from her; they’ve got a god of their own who’s dead, except he’s not really dead, and they talk to him instead of listening for what he has to say. They say that in the old world most everyone believed the way they do, and one of them I met in Memfis told me that what happened to the old world was their god’s doing, not Mam Gaia’s or just what happens when you do enough dumb things for long enough and the consequences finally gang up and clobber you.

  But the Old Believers won’t kill newborns, even those that are born horribly sick and won’t live for more than a couple of hours anyway, and there’s all kinds of other things they won’t do, and some things that we won’t do don’t bother them a bit. There are a few Old Believer families who are big names in Circle or in the army, but they mostly keep to themselves, in their own villages and their own cramped little quarters in cities, where they make and sell things that the priestesses say are wrong but people want anyway.

  “So I got sent outside the walls,” said Berry. “They found a woman who’d had a dead child and was willing to nurse me instead, and paid her to go live off by herself in a little house off by itself. So that’s where I grew up, and that’s most of what I remember of Nashul.”

  He stopped for a bit, so I asked, “She was the one who taught you to read?”

  That got me a quick glance. “Nah, I had a teacher who visited three times a week for a while. When she stopped coming, I was old enough to go to school with the priestesses. I was seven by then, and Ranna—that’s the name of the woman who took care of me—she told me that my mother had a healthy baby and had gotten into Circle after all, and so I’d better get used to living like everyone else.”

  It took me a moment to catch what Berry meant. “If she hadn’t –”

  “There’d be no reason to pretend I didn’t exist.” A shrug. “So she had her healthy baby and for all I know she’s a big name in Circle now.”

  “Ouch.”

  He went on as though he hadn’t heard. “So I went to school with the priestesses for a while, and then it came time for me to prentice with somebody, and I got told that I could go into any trade I wanted, but it wasn’t going to be in Nashul. So I said I wanted to be a ruinman, and about six weeks later some men came and got me and everything I had and put it all in a wagon and drove halfway across Tenisi to Gray Garman’s house on the ruinmen’s street in Shanuga.”

  I waited until I was pretty sure he was finished, and said, “I remember when you showed up and we had you shake the robot’s hand.”

  That got me another glance, and then a sudden grin. “When we all went back upstairs and met Mister Garman, that was the first time I can think of when I really felt that somebody was happy to have me around.” Then: “Garman knew I was a tween, and a couple of prentices found out—when you sleep in a tent with somebody, it’s not too easy to keep your middle covered up all the time. But nobody made any kind of fuss about it. I was just another prentice.”

  “And now you’ve got a mister dumb enough he thinks he can find Star’s Reach.”

  “And still pinching myself sometimes to make sure I’m not just dreaming that.” Then, suddenly serious: “But if you ever wondered why I can read and do numbers and talk like a jennel, when I’m Berry sunna nobody, Mister Trey, now you know.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. I’m glad you can read; that could be a mother of a lot of help.”

  He grinned again. “I’m hoping.”

  We talked about some other things after that, though I don’t remember a word of it, and finally got sleepy enough that the night around our little camp didn’t seem half so threatening. So we wrapped up in our blankets, and I went to sleep thinking about Berry’s story, and Tam, who I haven’t written about yet and need to.

  That might have had something to do with the dream I had that night. I was in Deesee again, walking down the wide empty streets with the fish swimming down them and the surface of the water all silver and rolling fifty meedas overhead. This time Tam was with me; she had her blue dress on, the one I tore once when we were playing, and her hair
was tied up in a scarf, the way she used to wear it when she wanted to annoy her family. We walked down the street and turned to see the Spire soaring up from its low hill. Tam tried to say something to me, but all that came out of her mouth was bubbles of air that drifted up between us, so she pressed her body up against mine.

  Right then I woke up. The first gray light of dawn was starting to filter down through the forest. Berry was sound asleep and still wrapped up in his blanket, but he’d moved up against me, no doubt for the warmth. I lay there and thought about Tam, wondering what she’d made of her life since she had her baby and got into Circle. After a bit, I got up, and Berry woke up; we washed up by the riverbank and got something to eat, then shouldered our packs and found our way back to the road.

  The old dream about Deesee kept on coming back to me, night after night, while Berry and I walked north out of Tenisi and started across Tucki. That was about the only interesting thing that happened for most of two weeks, though. The road we followed ran west and then north through forest, for the most part, with villages or scattered farms here and there when the soil was good or somebody’s great-grandparents just up and decided that this was where they were going to build their house.

  It’s a funny thing, but the further we traveled from cities and the poorer the folk we met, the better the welcome we got. Close to Shanuga, as I wrote earlier, we were lucky to get a place to sleep in a hayloft and a cold meal on the back steps, but as we got deep into Tucki, as often as not we ate at the table with the family and slept on a pallet in a room of our own. Nobody seemed to care that we were ruinmen. In fact, it was pretty much the opposite; half the time, when we stayed the night at some farmhouse, sooner or later the farm folk would mention some scrap of ruin over on one corner of the property and ask if I thought there was anything in it that might hurt anyone. It happened fairly often that Berry and I went out the next morning at first light and followed somebody over to an old gray lump of concrete wet with dew, poked around it, scanned it for radiation and poisons, and left the people there feeling a good bit easier.

  Mind you, I could have skipped the morning walk and told every one of them what I’d find. Outside of the old cities, if you find a small ruin out by itself, just a bit of concrete sticking up out of the grass like a rotten tooth in a green gum, you can bet it’s nothing more than the foundation of a house or a shop from the old world, and anything dangerous got washed away a long time ago. It’s the big ruins that can still kill you, and nobody farms too close to those—the priestesses wouldn’t stand for it, the jennel or cunnel who has land in the area would put a stop to it, and I don’t think anybody’s dumb enough to try it in the first place. So the ruins we checked on that trip north were no threat to anybody. I could have told the farmers as much without looking, but it made them feel better to have Berry and me out there in our ruinmen’s leathers sweeping the ground with radiation counters, and it seemed like a fair return for their hospitality.

  So we made our way north. Now and then we spent a day or two in country that didn’t have a single house anywhere in sight, and Berry and I got used pretty quickly to sleeping in the forest. Sometimes the cracked gray road beneath our feet was the only sign that any human being had ever come that way since Mam Gaia shaped that part of her belly; sometimes we passed through what was left of some town the people of the old world put someplace that didn’t have good soil or running water or any of the other things people nowadays need and they seemingly didn’t. We must have walked through half a dozen places full of low gray shapes of concrete mostly overgrown with vines and the like, with mounds here and there where something big had tumbled down a couple of hundred years back. Most of the mounds showed traces of digging, and there was plenty of broken concrete that had been cracked open for the metal, showing that we weren’t the first ruinmen to come that way.

  There came a stretch of the journey where we didn’t see a trace of anything human for most of two days. We didn’t think much of it until late on the afternoon of the second day, when we crested a rise and found ourselves face to face with a couple of huge gray shapes, cracked and crumbling at the top, that rose out of the forest in the middle distance like giant ghosts.

  I knew from one look at Berry’s face that I didn’t have to tell him what they were. Without a word, I got out my radiation counter and scanned the road at our feet.

  “Nobody said that there was a nuke this way,” Berry said then.

  “Might be an empty,” I reminded him. “I’m getting nothing but background.”

  He gave me a dubious look, but followed when I started down the road.

  I didn’t blame him for the look. There are safe ruins like the ones the farmers had in their fields, and there are dangerous ruins like the one in Shanuga where I nearly got reborn, and then there are nukes. You find them here and there all over Meriga, and most of them are dead zones with fences all around a couple of kloms out from the ruins and nobody living anywhere nearby, especially downstream. The priestesses put prayer flags on the fences, partly to ask Mam Gaia to heal the land there, partly because anybody who goes past the fence and messes with what’s inside is going to be too busy getting reborn to have a lot of time for prayers.

  I learned about nukes from Gray Garman, of course. Every ruinman’s prentice learns about them from his mister, since the only thing the priestesses will tell you about them is that they’re evil and if you go there you’re going to get reborn in a hurry. That’s true enough as far as it goes, but a ruinman needs to know more.

  What Garman taught me was that there are two things to worry about when you’re dealing with a nuke. The first is the reactor building itself. For some reason the ancients didn’t take the time to shut everything down properly when the old world ended, so the old fuel rods and everything are still there, but the machines that used to keep them cool and safe haven’t been working for more than four hundred years. Nobody knows what’s inside nowadays, because the radiation has you doubling over and vomiting before you get much past the door of the building, and you don’t last long after that.

  But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is the used fuel rods. Those are in what used to be pools of water, sometimes inside the reactor buildings, sometimes in buildings of their own nearby. I read once in Sisnaddi, when I was searching the archives there, that people spent years back in the old world bickering about what they were going to do with the fuel rods and all the other dangerous stuff that came out of the nukes, and they ended up never doing much of anything at all with them except leaving them in the pools of water.

  Of course once the old world ended and there wasn’t anybody to make sure the pumps kept water flowing into the pools, things started going bad in a hurry. The fuel rods got red hot, and a lot of them caught fire, or melted their way down to groundwater and leached out into the ground, or simply turned into dust that blew here and there on the wind, and a mother of a lot of land around the old nukes ended up contaminated enough to kill you quick or slow. You can’t see the contamination, or taste it. Unless you’ve got a radiation counter, you don’t have any way of knowing it’s killing you until you take sick and the doctor tells you that all she can do is send for the priestesses.

  I had a radiation counter, and I wasn’t about to let something like that happen to me or Berry from being too brave to use it. As we went down the road, I kept the thing in my hand and listened to it click. It didn’t show anything above normal, and as we kept walking and the counter kept clicking mildly to itself, both of us got a little more confident. It didn’t hurt that the road didn’t seem to be heading straight at the cooling towers, either.

  So we kept on walking, and the towers seemed to drift slowly to one side as we went. Finally we got alongside them; the counter still wasn’t showing anything but normal, but just then we noticed two things. The first was a cleared trail heading straight toward the towers from the road, with a pair of saplings tied together in an X marking the place where it hit the road—one of
the old ruinmen’s signs. The second was a thin line of smoke rising from someplace close to the nearer tower.

  Berry looked at me, and I looked at him. “You sure that counter’s working?” he asked.

  “Checked it in Shanuga,” I reminded him.

  “Maybe you’re right, then, Mister Trey.”

  He meant what I’d said earlier about the nuke being an empty. That was something else Garman taught me, though I heard about it later, and in more detail, too, from Plummer one time when we were traveling down the Misipi on the Jennel Mornay. During the years just before the old world ended, the ancients tried to make up for everything else they were running out of by building lots of nukes. Most of those never got finished, and so now and then, when you see the big round towers rising up out of the forest, there’s nothing there but a bunch of old concrete. Most people won’t go near them anyway, just in case, but some ruinmen make a living out of breaking down the empties for the metal that’s in them—sometimes a sparse living, if all they find is rebar and girders in concrete; sometimes a pretty good living, if all the wiring and pipes got put in, and if you’re very lucky some of the machines that they used to run the nukes.

  We looked at each other again, and I shrugged, and we turned off the road and went down the trail past the crossed saplings.

  Sure enough, the radiation counter never did pick up anything more than background, and the trail didn’t lead us up to a fence strung with prayer flags. Instead, we clambered down a dirt trail and came out of the forest under the shadow of one of the towers, and found ourselves just about face to face with a ruinman and his prentice loading chunks of old pipe onto a wagon. They looked at us and we looked at them, and then I greeted them with the old words that ruinmen use so other ruinmen know they’re members of the guild. That was all it took; the other ruinman gave us a nod and an assessing look. “You fellows looking for work?”