Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  These days, of course, if a road’s still good enough to drive a wagon on it, that means either you’re very lucky or you’re on a road that’s been fixed up for the army not too long ago. We were lucky, or rather Cob was, because he had to get the metal from the old empty nuke out to buyers, and it would have been a mother with babies to get done if there hadn’t been the road. As it was, Berry and I had to jump off a couple of times and help get the wagon across some difficult place or other.

  Finally, though, we started passing farms, a few at first and then a lot of them, and the road got better in the rough sort of way that happens when country folk do it themselves. Some of the people in the fields waved to Cob, and he waved back, which surprised me; around Shanuga nobody but another ruinman will greet a ruinman, or give him the time of day. Then the fields gave way to houses and shops around a big central market square, and we were in Lebna.

  Cob drove the wagon straight to one corner of the market. There were a bunch of men sitting there playing cards, but they put the cards away and got up as soon as they saw Cob coming. Two of them were blacksmiths by the leather aprons they wore; I couldn’t place the rest, but I guessed they were craftworkers of some sort, looking for metal for their trades.

  “Well now,” one of the blacksmiths said to Cob. “Got yourself some help, I see.”

  He meant Berry and me, of course. “Nah,” Cob told him, “just a couple of ruinmen from Shanuga heading north.”

  The whole bunch of them got very quiet, and I knew that word must have gotten out. The blacksmith who’d spoken turned to me, and said exactly what I thought he was about to say. “From Shanuga, eh? They say the ruinmen down there found something out o’ the usual.”

  “News to me,” I told him. “What was it?”

  “Some kind o’ paper about Star’s Reach.”

  I used some hot language, then: “Come on.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Nothing like that turned up when I was there, but it’s been most of a month. Some folks have all the luck, I guess.”

  I could see that the blacksmith didn’t believe a word of it, but he nodded after a moment, and went to look at Cob’s metal. Berry and I said our goodbyes to Cob and left him to his customers. There was a fair crowd there for the market, and plenty of sellers pitching everything from vegetables and ironwork to bolts of cloth and bottles of whiskey, but we pushed through the crowd and got out of there just as fast as we could without seeming to hurry.

  Lebna wasn’t that big of a town in the old days, and it’s a lot smaller now than it was; I spotted plenty of old concrete foundations in the pastures and open country we passed through on the way in. Still, the houses seemed to go on forever as Berry and I took a dirt road north out of town. It didn’t help that my mind was running full out the whole way. Word of the discovery couldn’t have gotten to Lebna without running down the Hiyo valley first. That meant that Luwul, where we’d hoped to cross the Hiyo River, would be full of the news, and so a likely place for trouble. We could go west or east and miss it, but I had no way of knowing which would be best, or whether either one might land us in an even worse place. That’s what ran through my mind, over and over again, while we kept walking and I tried not to imagine watchful eyes peeking out at us between the curtains of the houses we passed.

  Finally we got into the farm country north of town, the houses got sparse, and loms out in the pastures turned their heads on their long necks to watch us go by. Forest lined the edge of the distant fields like a green haze, and the green hills beyond that rose up one crest after another toward the sky’s edge. Once we got in among the trees, I knew, we’d have an easier time dodging anyone who wanted to follow us, but the forest was still quite a ways off, and the road we were on wound from side to side as though it wasn’t in any hurry to get where I wanted to go.

  “Do you think—” Berry started, and then stopped; he’d seen the man up ahead just a moment after I did.

  A farmer, for certain, or at least he looked like one; shirt and trousers of homespun, bare feet, straw hat, and a lazy look that could have had anything at all behind it. He could have been standing just like that, leaning up against a fence post, in the Tenisi hills where I was born. What got my hackles up, though, is that he just happened to be standing right where the road split into two, one branch going a little west of north, the other a little bit east.

  “Afternoon,” I said to him as we came up to the fork.

  “Afternoon,” he replied.

  “D’you happen to know which road goes to Luwul?”

  He nodded to the left hand fork. “That’s the one.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure thing. You two have a good day, now.”

  We passed him by, and headed along the road to the left. Pretty soon it veered further left, then swung straight again on the far side of a clump of trees. I glanced back to make sure we were out of sight of the ford, and then around to make sure nobody else was watching. “Now,” I said to Berry, “we figure out how to cut back across to the other road without being spotted.”

  That’s what we did, too. A little further on a creek cut across the road; it had willows growing along the bank, all thick with leaves, and there weren’t any farmhouses or people in sight beyond it. As soon as we were past it, we ducked into the field and hurried across, staying close to the willows. It got mud on our boots, but a quarter of an hour later we were on the other road. Mam Gaia’s blessing was with us; there was nobody else on the road just then, and the forest was close by.

  As soon as we got under the trees, I said, “Now we find a place to hole up for the rest of the day, someplace where we can see the road and not get seen.”

  Berry took this in. “You think somebody’s going to come after us.”

  “Those people at the Lebna market guessed who we are. Bet you a mark to a mud-turtle, too, that that farmer wasn’t just standing there to hold up the fencepost.”

  He thought about that, then grinned. “If you’re right, he’ll send them down the road to Luwul. Still, I’m not convinced we’ve got anyone after us at all, Mister Trey.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” I said.

  Rumble from up ahead warned us, and we ducked off the road and hid in the bushes until the wagon rolled past. By the time it was gone, both of us had spotted a bit of gray concrete ruin on a low hill not far from the road, and once it was safe to move, we scrambled through the underbrush and climbed up to it. It wasn’t much, part of two walls rising out of four hundred years of dirt and fallen leaves, but there wasn’t any sign that other people were in the habit of going there, and it had a good view of the road down below. I went to take a look, saw the wagon rolling out of sight toward Lebna and a couple of farm folk heading toward a distant house.

  “Look at that,” Berry said from the other side of the ruin. I went over and looked where he was pointing, and damn if the other road wasn’t right out in plain sight away in the middle distance. Something was moving along the other road, the one to Luwul the farmer sent us down. Trees got in the way, and then all of a sudden they came out into a clear patch: five riders on horses, riding hard. Farmers don’t ride that way, and I didn’t know of any reason why soldiers would be in the middle of Tucki when the nearest fighting was off in the mountains where Meriga runs cheek by jowl with the coastal allegiancies. That didn’t leave a lot of options.

  “There’s your answer,” I said to Berry. We watched them until they were out of sight.

  We kept watch turn and turn about all the rest of that day, and got what sleep we could. Once the sun was down, we used the last bit of light in the sky to get back down to the road, and then got moving quick and quiet. We’d talked it over, and neither of us could think of a better plan than traveling by night and not by day, and staying off the road when there was anybody else likely to be on it. By the time we got going on the road, the moon was up; it wasn’t much past the new, a thin crescent up against the first stars, but it gave us a little h
elp finding our way.

  I’d spent more than a little of the day we hid in the ruin wondering what to do if we came to another fork in the road, but as it turned out I needn’t have worried; a few muddy tracks veered off one way and the other, but even by the little light the moon gave us, it didn’t take much more than a look to tell which way the main road went. Once we went past a farmhouse where one flickering light still showed in a window. Another time a dog somewhere off in the distance started barking, and that had my hackles up, because wild dogs are not something you really want to risk facing out in the open. Still, it must have been a farm dog yapping at the night wind; there was never more than the one dog barking, and the sound came from the same place, ahead of us, beside us, behind us, until we couldn’t hear it any more.

  That was a long night, as long as the first one Berry and I spent out in the forest, and Berry and I didn’t say more than a handful of words to each other from dusk to dawn. Partly we both wanted to hear hoofbeats or footsteps as soon as we could, but there was more to it than that. In the old world they used to shine bright lights all night long, so that people didn’t have to see the stars and feel small by comparison. Nowadays nobody has enough electricity to do that, and the priestesses would forbid such a thing even if we did; they say that we need to be reminded now and then of just how small and unimportant people are, and how big the universe is, so we don’t make the same mistakes the ancients did. If they’re right, Berry and I got a good double helping of Mam Gaia’s favorite lesson that night.

  The sky was clear, and we were a long way from the nearest city; the moon was thin enough that it didn’t drown out more than a few small stars, so we got to see the Milky Way just as bright as it gets, and more stars than anyone this side of the old world could ever count. The moon crept across the sky, and all the true stars moved with it; a couple of false stars, the ones the ancients put up in the sky, cut across the sky following their own angled paths; and once one of them fell out of the sky in a sudden line of light that ended somewhere off to the east.

  When I was small and my father was still alive, the priestess who ran the little temple down in the village where I got my schooling used to say that when the very last false star finally dropped back to Mam Gaia, that would be the sign that people had worked off the debt we owed to the rest of life for what the old world did. That’s not anywhere in the holy books, but even now that I know that, and know what the false stars are and why they got put up there in the first place, I still feel a little better whenever I watch one burn up in the air.

  Anna was the one who told me about the false stars. That happened much later in my story, just a few months ago, after the whole band of us left Cansiddi and crossed the Suri River and left settled country behind for Mam Gaia alone knew what. We were maybe a week out of Cansiddi on the night I’m thinking of, and none of us really knew Anna very well yet, since Cansiddi was where she joined us; but that night I couldn’t sleep, and she was sitting up by the fire, and right about the time we got to talking, one of the false stars fell out of the sky, good and bright, off to the west of us.

  “What is it your priestesses call them?” she asked me, meaning by that, or so I guessed, that they weren’t her priestesses.

  “False stars.”

  “That’s hardly a proper name for a satellite. They’re nothing like stars, you know.”

  “I don’t,” I told her. “Where I grew up, we didn’t learn a lot about them.”

  Anna nodded, after a moment, and gave me one of her sidelong glances. “No, I imagine not.” Then, when I thought she wasn’t going to say anything else: “They’re just machines, put up above the air so they can do their job better. The ancients put thousands of them up there for one reason or another. There were still a few in working order when I was a girl.”

  “What sort of things did they do?”

  She didn’t usually talk much, but for some reason this night was different. “Some of them looked down at the earth and sent back pictures. Some of them listened for radio signals from the ground and sent them down somewhere else. A lot of them were put there to learn something about space, or the sun, or the stars, and send that back down to people on the ground. And then there were some that were part of the Star’s Reach project: long gone by my grandparents’ time, for they weren’t needed by then.”

  I was looking up at the sky as she talked, and another false star came past, this one still following its path across the sky. I pointed to it. “There’s one.”

  “Probably,” she said, with a thin smile I couldn’t read at all. “It might be something else.” She wouldn’t say anything else, so I never did find out what else it might have been.

  Still, the night when Berry and I walked under the stars toward Melumi, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the false stars, and by the time the first whisper of gray showed up over the hills to the east I was tired enough that I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. We were well away from farmland at that point; the road wound through low hills thick with trees, and so we started looking for a place to spend the daylight hours as soon as we could see anything at all. Being ruinmen, of course the first thing we looked for was a glimpse of old concrete, partly because a sturdy ruin offers a bit of shelter and more than a bit of concealment, and partly because most people nowadays won’t go anywhere near a ruin unless they have to.

  We both spotted the same rough gray shape at about the same moment, maybe half an hour before sunrise, when everything was getting light enough that I was starting to worry about being seen. It was maybe half a klom from the road, partway up a shallow slope; that was enough for us, and after a brief muttered conversation we left the road and picked our way through the forest, trying to leave as little trace and make as little sound as possible in case somebody came along the road just then. That took some time, and so it was nearly full light when we reached the ruin and ducked in through an empty doorway half full of earth and leaf-litter. We were both inside before we found out that we weren’t alone in the ruin.

  Something rustled and moved in the dim light, and something else flashed like steel. I grabbed my pry bar and jumped to one side, a trick I’d learned in the fighting circle. Berry flattened himself against the nearest wall and drew his own bar. For a moment, while I tried to get the shadows behind the knife facing me to turn into a human shape, nobody moved.

  “Well, now,” said a voice with just a bit of waver in it. “And what do two ruinmen want with an old man minding his own business?”

  I found my own voice after a moment. “Nothing at all. We were looking for shelter.”

  “At sunrise, in the middle of the Tucki woods?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I pointed out.

  He allowed a dry laugh. “I suppose you could.” Another long moment passed as he sized us up, and we tried to do the same with him. Then: “If you’ll put those very threatening pieces of iron away, this—” The knife blade twitched in his hand. “—will also go away. It occurs to me that we may have interests in common.”

  I guessed at what he meant. “Like not being seen.”

  “Among other things.”

  I lowered my pry bar; he lowered his knife; we both put our weapons away; out of the corner of my eye I saw Berry do the same thing, though his face was still tense with mistrust.

  “I may have the advantage of knowing something about you,” the old man said then. The sun was coming up and putting light in through holes in the ruin, and so I could just about see him by that point, a lean figure with a mostly bald head and eyeglasses round as moons. “Or I think I might. There’s certainly been quite a bit of talk about a ruinman and his prentice going to Melumi with a very important letter.” He waved a hand. “No, you don’t have to tell me if that’s you or not. Do you have anything in the way of food, by the way? I can contribute some very respectable ham and part of a loaf of bread. Also whiskey, if that’s of interest.”

  It wasn’t, but the food was, and we’d
been given some things by Cob the day before, so we managed to have a creditable meal there inside the ruin.

  “My name’s Plummer,” the old man said as we ate, answering a question I hadn’t quite asked. “Or one of my names. In my line of work, a man sometimes needs more than one.”

  “Must be some line of work.”

  By way of answer he pulled a glass bottle out of his pack and set it on the concrete between us. I didn’t have the least idea what it was, but Berry did. “Medicine?”

  “Exactly,” Plummer said. “I make it and sell it. Entirely natural ingredients, of course, but these days half the people in Meriga think that anything other than plain dried herbs is an affront to Mam Gaia, and now and then some of them are rather too fond of expressing that opinion with sticks and stones.”

  “Which is why you’re hiding here,” Berry said.

  “A regrettable fact.” Plummer shook his head. “I had to leave Dannul in something of a hurry several days ago. Two of the farmers there took exception to my presence at the market, and went to gather their friends and a selection of weapons. I had reason to think they might try to follow me past Lebna. So you find me here.”

  I thought about that while I chewed on a piece of ham. “This is pretty far past Lebna,” I said when I’d swallowed. “Did you know there was a safe place here?”

  Plummer gave me a long careful glance through those glasses of his. “I can answer that question,” he said finally, “but there’s an inconvenient detail attached. If you communicate that answer to someone who shouldn’t know it, someone will cut your throat. I don’t mean that as a threat, not at all; merely an observation of fact.”