It was as clear a dismissal as I’ve ever heard. “Sir and Cunnel,” I said, bowing, and left the barn as quickly as I could, so fast that Berry had to trot to keep up. Behind me I could hear the shovels biting into the ground, the priestess chanting a litany, and the man sobbing as they dug a pit to bury him alive.
I heard the details later, after we got to Troy. The man was a glassblower, and one of his prentices had gone to the cunnel with word of the secret gas well. Maybe he was tired of paying for compost-gas, or maybe the farms in that part of Mishga don’t have enough pigs and loms to keep a local digester fed with manure, and the man was having trouble getting enough gas for his work. The story I heard didn’t say, but it was probably one or the other; it usually is when they catch someone in one of the crafts using fossil fuels, which happens somewhere in Meriga every few years or so.
Sometimes it’s not for craft work, and the people involved have their own reasons, but those don’t matter; if they get caught, they get buried alive. I know the reasons for that as well as anyone, but knowing it isn’t the same thing as remembering the way the glassblower’s voice sobbed and babbled as the scrape of the shovels and the slow patient drone of the litany marked the last minutes he’d ever have on the outside of Mam Gaia’s round belly.
About the time we got far enough away that we couldn’t hear any of those, Berry and I looked at each other, and decided that we weren’t going to stay the night in that town after all. We kept walking until the sun went down, and just about the time we were about to start looking for a camping place, Berry spotted a bright flash through the pines up ahead. We hurried up the road by the day’s last light and found a dozen travelers sitting around a fire and starting to share out dinner. They welcomed us cheerily enough, and we sat around the fire with a couple of traders up from Naplis and a troupe of actors who saw what was going on in the town we’d just passed and decided, sensibly enough, that there’d be no one interested in their play that day. We had a pleasant night and a good breakfast the next morning, and started toward Troy as soon as it was light enough to see the road.
It took us another day to get there. The road was busy; there’s a ferry across from Genda at Troy, and a lot of trade crosses there, and so Berry and I had plenty of company on the way. The day was clear and cool, with a few stray clouds and a sharp wind blowing out of the west, and the road veered down slowly toward the water. Before long we got close enough to see the white sails of the lake schooners heading up to Troy or down to Leedo and the ports further east. From where we were, in among farm wagons and a herd of loms on their way to market, the thought of sitting on board a schooner and letting the wind do all the work was pleasant enough, but thinking that didn’t keep us from making good time.
There’s a place where the road to Troy tops a low hill, and I heard later that people who travel that road a good deal get used to travelers stopping dead in their tracks right at the crest. That’s certainly what Berry and I did, at least until a lom bumped into me from behind and reminded me that getting out of the way was probably a good idea. I did, and so did Berry, and then we stood there for a long moment and stared at the distant gray shape, taller than anything else in Meriga, that jutted up above the trees off in the distance.
That was Troy Tower. It used to have another name, back in the old world, but I don’t think even the ruinmen who tend it remember what that was. There used to be a couple of dozen like it, too, just in Troy, and dozens more in every city in Meriga, and the drowned cities of the coast used to be one of them right next to another for kloms on end, or that’s what people say. Now there’s just one of them, and it belongs to the ruinmen.
Troy is where the first ruinmen’s guild got started, as I wrote a while back. All the other towers and factories and buildings in Troy and around it got stripped right down to bare dirt by those first ruinmen, but they left Troy Tower alone at first, and later on started using it as a guildhall and a place for records and the like. Nowadays there aren’t many ruinmen there, just the few who keep the Tower standing and take care of what’s in it, but as I wrote earlier, it’s still a place that every ruinman wants to visit if he hasn’t been there already.
Pilgrims come there all through the dry season, too. Troy Tower isn’t a holy place, pretty much the opposite in fact, but the pilgrims come and look at it and say their prayers and plant a tree somewhere in the space where Troy used to be, back in the old world, before the ruinmen rooted every scrap of the city out of the ground. There’s something in one of the priestesses’ litanies about how we water the trees with our tears, and some of the pilgrims do just that, though I don’t know that it does the trees any more good than plain water.
The pilgrims haul plenty of that up from the shore, too. There are racks of wooden buckets down near the water north of the town, and all through the dry season, so I was told, you can pretty much count on seeing pilgrims: fetching buckets, filling them, and going around to water any young tree that doesn’t look as though its roots got wet that day, murmuring a prayer for blessings or forgiveness or something all the while. How many of them get their prayers answered I’m not about to try to guess, but there are certainly a lot of healthy young trees around Troy, and that’s something.
We certainly saw a lot of trees, at any rate, as Berry and I got moving again and followed the road right up to Troy. It’s not a big city these days. Maybe a few thousand people live inside the walls, and there’s maybe a hundred soldiers in the fort next to the ferry, which faces across the water toward the bigger Gendan fort on the other side. We didn’t have any reason to go inside the walls, and so we turned off the road right outside the gate and found the path that went straight to Troy Tower.
From the hill on the road the Tower looks too big to be real. From right up underneath, it looks even bigger, but it’s as real as a building can get, all gray and brown stone and windows, soaring up to bump against the bottom of the clouds. When we got there, Berry and I both stood there staring up for what seemed like a long time, and then walked up to the door at the foot of it.
There was a big archway there, and back in the old world there had been a row of doors beneath it, but most of them had been walled up, and the one that was still open was a plain wooden door with a little window in it, like the ones you’d find down at Troy town in buildings two stories tall and twenty years old. I almost laughed when I saw the door. Imagine a horse with an ant’s feet or a jennel wearing the kind of straw hat poor farmers teach their children how to weave, and that’s about how that little piece of our world looked, there at the foot of the old world’s last big tower.
We knocked on the door and waited, wondering about the people wearing feathers who were carved into the stone here and there. After a little while, the door opened and an old man in ruinman’s clothes looked out. He brightened up when he saw us, and after we’d given him the words and signs ruinmen use to test each other, he wanted to know all about who we were and where we’d come from. Once I said my name, of course, he knew exactly who we were and what we were there for, but we could have been on our way to crack concrete in Cago for all he seemed to care. His name was Jorey; he showed us around, introduced us to the dozen or so old ruinmen who lived there, and found us a room.
The guild hall and sleeping rooms were all on the first six floors, it turned out. The records were above that, and then above that it was empty all the way up to the top. At the top, Jorey said, there was a place where you could see everything for kloms around, and the elevator would get there if the wind turbines had charged the batteries enough. That sounded worth seeing, so after we’d stowed our gear in our room on the third floor and had a meal, I asked about the elevator.
It was the only one of a whole row of elevators that was still working. The wind had been blowing pretty well, Jorey told us, well enough that it would get the two of us to the top, but he wasn’t prepared to bet on a third. So he showed us how the thing worked, and we went inside, pushed the button, and waited. A moment l
ater the thing lurched and started up; Berry looked as calm as though he’d been standing on solid ground, and though I didn’t feel half so confident—the jerks and rattles as the elevator climbed were enough to frighten anybody—I wasn’t going to let on that I was nervous.
Finally, after I don’t know how long, the elevator sighed to a stop and let us out. There was almost nothing on that level. The ruinmen had stripped away everything that wasn’t actually holding the tower up to lighten the burden on the girders further down, so we stepped out onto a bare metal floor that boomed like a drum beneath our feet, and the only thing there, except for bare metal walls, was a stair going up. We went up, and came out into a little room of glass and iron beams at the very top of Troy.
From there, you could see just how huge the city used to be. Even though every other building was gone, the pattern of the old streets was still there, reaching out to the edge of sight in every direction but south, where the water broke the pattern. On the far side of the water was Genda, and the streets started right back up there too, wherever the Gendan town and fort didn’t cover them. I stood there and tried to imagine what it had been like in the days when Troy Tower was just one of the towers at the center of town, and the Troy within the walls now was a little corner of town beside the water, next to a ferry that they probably didn’t need in those days. The Shanuga ruins were big, or I’d thought so, and I’d climbed up on some of the tallest ruins still standing to get a look at them more than once, but Troy was bigger than big. Like the tower, it was so big it was hard for me to remember that it was real.
Troy was an important town in the old world. It wasn’t as big as Cago, which is the biggest ruin above water anywhere in Meriga, or the drowned cities of the coast, which would be one big ruin reaching from halfway up Nuwinga all the way down to Deesee if the seas hadn’t risen, but it’s where the ancients built their cars, and built them by the million. There was even a war fought over it, or so I heard once from a storyteller in Ilanoy. An army from somewhere else in Meriga spent ten years trying to capture it, and they finally did, by some trick or other. The man who thought up the trick was called Dizzy, if I remember right, and after the war was over it took him ten more years to get back to his home in some town up in Nyork, I forget which one.
Later on, when we were digging in the wrong place in Arksa and spending the rains in Memfis, I heard some other stories about Dizzy. They said that he played one of the brass horns the players use down in Memfis and Sanloo, and that he was one of the best ever, right up there with another player called Sashmo. Some of the players knew tunes he’d come up with, and even though I don’t know the first thing about that kind of music, I could tell they were good. I figure Dizzy must have been to Memfis before the war, and learned to play the horn there.
One time when Plummer and I were traveling together, I said something about Dizzy, and Plummer told me that there were two different people with the same name. Maybe so, but I still wonder sometimes. After spending so much time on the roads myself, walking alongside elwuses and traders and puppet-actors and all, it’s just too easy to imagine Dizzy wandering the same way I did, stopping at every village to play his horn and catch coins in an old battered hat as he made his long slow way back home.
I didn’t know about Dizzy yet when Berry and I stood there at the top of Troy Tower and watched afternoon turn to evening, and I don’t know that I’d have thought of him if I had known. All I could think of was how big Troy used to be and how little it was now. Berry went around the room a bit at a time, leaning on the rail and staring outward with an expression on his face I couldn’t read at all. Me, I just stared. I don’t think either of us said five words to the other all the time we were up there, but finally the sun got close to setting and we looked at each other and decided to go back down. So we went down the stair to the little room with the metal floor and got onto the elevator, and it clanked and rattled downward and finally let us out on the fourth floor where we’d started. We had dinner with the other ruinmen, and made an early night of it.
The next morning we got up about the time the sun did, got some breakfast, and I asked Jorey about the records. “Skeega?” he said. “Yes, those’ll be here. Every ruin that used to be in Mishga, plus most of the states all around. If there isn’t a guildhall any more, the records are here.” He turned to one of the other old ruinmen. “Shor, where’s the records from Skeega?”
“Ninth floor,” said Shor, without even looking up from his breakfast. “Northeast part, over against the light well.” I’d already learned that each floor in Troy Tower was shaped like a letter H, so the rooms in the middle could get some light and air, so I knew what he meant.
“Ninth floor,” Jorey repeated. “You’ll have some company there, I think. Isn’t that fellow from Nuwinga working on that floor?”
“That’s right,” said Shor, and went back to work on his breakfast.
That had my curiosity up, no question. Nuwinga used to be part of Meriga back before the Second Civil War, and these days it’s about as close as Meriga has to a friend among countries, but I’d never met anyone from there. Nuwingans are great sailors but they don’t travel by land a lot, and Shanuga’s kind of hard to reach by ship.
So I had more than one thing in mind as we trudged up the stairs to the ninth floor—it had to be the stairs, because the wind had died down overnight and there wasn’t enough electricity to work the elevator. The ninth floor, it turned out, was about a dozen big rooms that were full of old metal cabinets, and the cabinets were full of papers and records and journals from something like three hundred years of digs all over one side of Mishga. We didn’t have too much trouble finding the papers from Skeega, but when we found them it turned out they weren’t arranged in any order we could figure out, just lined up in the cabinets, drawer after drawer and row after row of them.
There was a table and some chairs over against one wall, so we had a place to work, and I knew enough about how ruinmen keep their records that it wasn’t too hard for me to sort out what was worth looking at from the rest, and show Berry how to do the same thing. That was about the only thing going for us that first day, though. If the man from Nuwinga was anywhere around, he didn’t show himself or make a noise, and we went through more paper than I want to think about, looking for the letters WRTF or the words they might stand for, and finding nothing.
We stopped for lunch around noon, then went right back up and kept at it until the sun got low enough that we didn’t have enough light to work by. The next morning we went up again, and settled in for another day of turning pages. Before long we were both so deep in the work that I don’t think either of us heard the man from Nuwinga until he said, “I hope you won’t mind an interruption.”
Berry and I both looked up from the papers we were reading. He was standing by the door, a short stocky man in clothes that weren’t quite the same as anything you’d usually see in Meriga, though it would take some telling to say just how. He had a square craggy face and big hands, and he talked about half as fast as people talk in Tenisi.
“Not a bit,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
“If you happen across something that has to do with radios, could you let me know? I’m in the room across the way.”
Berry and I looked at each other, and then I said, “We’ll do that. We’re looking for something that has to do with radios ourselves, actually. I’m Trey sunna Gwen.”
The man gave me a blank, owlish look for a moment, and then his eyebrows went up. “You’d be the ruinman who found the letter about Star’s Reach.”
“That’s the one.”
He thought about that, then: “We should talk about that some evening. There’s not much about radios that I don’t know. The name’s Tashel Ban, by the way.” Then: “Well, we all have work to do.” He turned and went out the door.
That’s how I met Tashel Ban. I didn’t know a thing about him other than what he’d said, of course, and it hadn’t yet occurred to me tha
t it would take more than a ruinman’s skills to make sense of Star’s Reach if we found it. If somebody had told me that a few years after that I’d be standing inside Star’s Reach next to him, watching him talk a computer into turning a bunch of gibberish into a note that someone here wrote for someone else more than a hundred years ago, I’d have been surprised. If that same someone had told me that the person standing next to me as I watched him tap at the keyboard would be Eleen, the scholar from Melumi I’d bedded half by accident when the rains came, I’d have been startled. If I’d been told that the other people in the room, other than Berry, were the last king of Yami and the last living person born at Star’s Reach, well, my mouth would have been open wide enough to catch rabbits, and let’s not even talk about what I didn’t know about Berry yet. Of course that’s the way it turned out, but we all had long journeys of our own to travel before any of that happened.
Sixteen: On Gasoline Oceans
We did it. Well, to be fair, Eleen and Tashel Ban were the ones who did it, they were following a trail marked out by the people here at Star’s Reach before us, and what they did mostly depended on some others a very long way away from here who might or might not be people at all; but the thing is, it’s done.
I was hauling paper up from a storeroom on the seventh level when it happened. The paper’s in big metal bins down there, and you have to open a bin and then go into another room for a while until the inside of the bin airs out; the bins were pumped full of nitrogen to keep the paper from turning brown, and you can pass out if you breathe too much of it all at once. So I came trudging up the stair to the big room where the one working computer is, expecting nothing much, and found everyone clustered around the screen with the kind of look on their faces you see when people are watching somebody getting born or getting reborn.
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