Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  We got bad news over the radio tonight. I mentioned earlier that we agreed to let Tashel Ban get his radio receiver working so we could start listening to broadcasts from the station in Sanloo. He spent that evening getting the thing working and hooking it up to one of the big radio antennas built into the roof of Star’s Reach, and at least one of us listens to it every night once radio waves start bouncing off whatever it is that bounces them back from the high thin air.

  Until now, we could have spared ourselves the trouble. All we got was the same things I used to hear when I listened to the little crystal radio my father had, the one that could pick up signals from Sisnaddi sometimes: an hour of music, though it wasn’t always the patriotic stuff they always play on the Sisnaddi station, and a few minutes of news. The one thing we got from that was that nobody had started fighting yet, but then we all knew that nobody would, not so long as Sheren still lived.

  That was before tonight. Most of the news bulletins were the usual stuff, a band of Jinya raiders caught and driven off by our soldiers in Wesfa Jinya, a namee that washed away parts of three towns in Nuwinga, negotiations with Meyco over a trade treaty, that sort of thing. Then, at the end: “The presden’s staff in Sisnaddi said yesterday that because of the presden’s illness, this year’s meeting of Congrus has been called off. We don’t have any other details at this time.”

  Tashel Ban and I were in the radio room—that’s what we call the little room, probably somebody’s sleeping room back before Star’s Reach was abandoned, where he set up the receiver—when that came over the loudspeaker. When we heard the last little bit of music the Sanloo station plays before it goes off the air, Tashel Ban let out a whistle. “Cancelled,” he said. “Not postponed. That’s bad.”

  “I heard she was sick again,” I said; people had been talking about it in Sanloo.

  “It’s been on and off for years. Cancer, or that’s what they say in Lebnan.”

  That was no surprise—that she had cancer, I mean, and also that Tashel Ban’s family in the Nuwinga capital would know about it. Something like half the people in Meriga who live past childhood die of it. You can be as careful as you want, but there are so many poisons still left over from the old world that the odds are pretty good that sooner or later you’ll get enough in you to start something growing that shouldn’t. Ruinmen know a lot about that, more than most people, because if you’re a ruinman and the ruins don’t take you, it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s how you’re going to get reborn.

  We’ll tell the others tomorrow morning, but Berry was another matter. I went and tapped on his door as soon as the radio was shut down. He was still awake, doing something that left paper scattered all over the table in his room; I told him about the bulletin and what Tashel Ban said, and he gave me a dismayed look and thanked me in a way that told me he really didn’t want to talk. I wished him good dreams, and came back here to the room Eleen and I share.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about that will happen once Sheren is gone, but that’s not what I want to write about, not tonight. We’ve still got enough food left to stay here for a month, or maybe a little longer. Eleen and Tashel Ban are chasing down everything the people here found out during the last years before they killed themselves, and that probably won’t take all of a month; then we have some decisions to make, and so do I, and one way or another I’ll have plenty to do after that. That means I have a month or less to finish writing down my story, or as much of it as I have time to tell.

  Most of what’s left to tell happened in Memfis, or on the dig just west of it near Wanrij in Arksa. I spent the better part of three years going back and forth between those two places, and a lot of things happened there—a lot of things in one sense, and not much in another, since most of it was just doing what ruinmen do when they have a ruin to dig up. Thinking about my story today, while I sprayed resin over another alien-book, I spent a while wishing I could write about everything that happened in those two and a half years, day by day, and then half decided to skip the whole thing and pick up the day I left Memfis, walking alone up the road beside the Misipi, knowing right down to my bones that I’d failed and been an utter fool besides.

  Still, now that the pen’s in my hand, I know that neither of those is really what I want to do, or maybe it’s that neither of them is how the story wants to be told. What I want, or the story wants, is to write about Memfis, because that’s where the trip that brought me to Star’s Reach swung around the way a door swings on its hinges, where I could have succeeded and lost any chance of getting here, and failed instead in the one way that got me where I needed to be.

  I’ve written already about how I got to Memfis and what happened right after I got there. I haven’t written much about Memfis itself, though, and that’s something that needs doing, because Memfis is the biggest city in Meriga and one of the biggest in the world, and it’s not like anywhere else. By that I don’t just mean that it’s not like anywhere else I’ve ever been, though that’s true enough; it’s got fifteen neighborhoods by most counts, though some people say seventeen, every one of them bigger than Shanuga and as different from the next one as Shanuga is from Troy or Cago. What I mean is that people who’ve sailed around the world and visited a hundred ports—and I met some of those in Memfis—will tell you that Memfis isn’t like any other place they’ve ever been, either.

  Part of it is the river trade, which I wrote about earlier, and which runs through Genda and Meyco but doesn’t stop on either end. The Meycan Empire goes a long ways south, but there are other countries even further south, all the way down to Nardiga, which used to be covered with ice and now is all trees and grass and cattle. Genda goes up to the North Ocean, and on the far side of that there’s a bunch of countries, Norj and Rosh and half a dozen others, that didn’t fall to the Arabs when so many countries on that side of the Lannic did.

  You can sail from Nardiga straight up the Lannic to the North Ocean and get to Rosh that way, but as Slane said on board the Jennel Mornay, you’ll have to take your chances with Jinya pirates on our side of the ocean and Arab pirates on the other. Since the Arabs are still fighting with Norj and Rosh and the others over who’s going to follow what religion, and Jinya pirates are, well, Jinya pirates, your chances of getting through into the North Ocean that way aren’t so good. That’s why, after our Third Civil War was over and the river trade started up, so much freight started coming up from the South to Memfis along routes Meyco’s navy keeps good and safe, and so much started coming across the North Ocean under the guns of Genda’s navy, and then down through Genda to Cago. Memfis was already a big city by then, but it was the river trade that turned it into one of Mam Gaia’s biggest.

  It was already a big city because there aren’t many places anywhere in the world that you can get so much to eat out of the water. That’s one of the first things I learned once Berry and I got there. From Memfis south for well over a hundred kloms, the Misipi widens out into something that’s almost ocean but not quite, wide enough from east to west that when you stand on one shore you can’t see to the other. The priestesses call it an estuary; people in Memfis just call it Banroo Bay, after a city that’s down under the water toward the mouth of it, and depend on it for a good half or more of what they eat.

  Back before the Third Civil War there were still places in Banroo Bay where there were too many poisons left over from the old world to risk eating anything. Now you can just about dip a net into the water anywhere and pull up something good. There are villages and towns all around Banroo Bay where people keep themselves fed and make their money doing something not too different from that, and a lot of people in Memfis make their living from the water the same way. I used to look out from my window high up in the Memfis guild hall toward the end of the rains, when it was safe to sail but the roads weren’t dry yet, and watch the little boats heading out before dawn to bing back fish, crabs, shrimp, seaweed, and just about anything else that lives in the water and is good to eat.<
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  They don’t bring back whales, of course, nor seals or porps or any of the other mammals, who are too high on the food chain. The priestesses say the mouth of the Misipi is probably clean now, but nobody really wants to find out the hard way that it’s not quite clean enough. Go to the markets in Memfis, though, and you can get just about anything else that anybody on Mam Gaia’s round belly likes to eat, and some things I’m amazed that anybody eats at all, but most of the time when you sit down to dinner at a Memfis table you’re going to get rice, which grows like weeds in the low country to either side of the Misipi’s mouth, and fruit, which grows in the hill country further back so well it puts weeds to shame, but also a mother of a lot of seafood.

  Well, really, there’s a mother of a lot of everything, because Memfis is rich—rich from the river trade, rich from the ships that come there from all over Mam Gaia’s round belly, rich from the seafood out of Banroo Bay, rich from the farms and orchards, and rich from plenty of other things, too, including good unstripped ruins within reach of the Memfis ruinmen. It’s rich even compared to other rich towns in Meriga, and let’s not even talk about what it looks like to a farmer’s child like me from the Tenisi hill country. I figured out pretty soon after Berry and I got to Memfis that it was a good long ways past anything I was used to, but I didn’t realize just how far until the rains came rolling up off the Gulf of Meyco.

  That was after I finished healing up from the knife wound Thu gave me, and after I finished making all the arrangements with Jennel Cobey and the Memfis ruinmen for the next season’s dig. That took a lot of time and a lot of work, and I spent more days than I like to remember going over the papers and making sure nothing got missed. Then I took them to a couple of misters from the Memfis guild who were making a point of helping me out and had them go over the same papers with me. All of that paid off when we started digging, but I didn’t know that at the time; all I knew when the clouds started piling up blue-black in the southern sky was that I was tired of all the papers and negotiations, really tired, and wanted to relax for a bit.

  Then the rains started, and I got my wish and then some.

  The rains in Memfis aren’t like the rains we get inland in Shanuga or Melumi. There you get plain heavy rain, enough to soak you to your skin if you stay out in it for a while, and boats have to pull up to the shore and get covered with tarps or they end up flooded after a bit. In Memfis the rain comes down like an ocean that somebody poured on your head. The clouds aren’t just the blue-black you get elsewhere, they’re literally dark as night, and if you’re caught out on the water in a boat you might as well just start swimming because the boat’s going to be full of water and heading toward the bottom long before you have any chance to get it to land. The small boats they use to bring in fish and everything else get hauled out of the water as soon as the clouds come in sight, and get stacked upside down in the big indoor fish markets close to the water; the riverboats take their smokestacks down and go into big sheds; and any sailing vessels that get caught in Memfis by the rains—most of them are far away over the ocean by the time the rains come—batten down their hatches and hope for the best.

  You don’t just go anywhere when the rains come, though, the way you do in most other places. Every one of Memfis’ fifteen or seventeen neighborhoods has its own way of dividing itself up and its own rules about who goes where; none of it’s written down or official, but you can end up dead in a gutter if you ignore it and somebody decides to get upset. The ruinmen at the Memfis guild hall explained all of that to Berry and me, and once the clouds started rolling in I made some plans about where to go once the rains started.

  It turned out that I could have spared the trouble, because I’d made some good friends among the youngest Memfis misters by the time that happened, and the evening that the thunder rolled and the lightning snaked across the black sky, a couple of them came pelting up the stairs, laughing, and pulled me with them back down the stairs and out into the street.

  That was my first time meeting the Memfis rains, and I gasped and spluttered and laughed pretty much the way I would have if they’d tossed me into Banroo Bay, which couldn’t have made me any wetter. The two misters who’d come to get me were as drenched as I was, of course, and so were all the other misters and prentices who were spilling out of the guild hall and the tall narrow houses on either side. Everyone was laughing and whooping and splashing each other with water, but they were also drifting down the street toward the big covered market where the ruinmen and the chemists and a few other guilds buy their groceries. Light was pouring out of the market’s windows and doors, and a kind of music I’d never heard before was blaring out over the pounding rain.

  Inside all the stalls had been cleared away from the middle, leaving plenty of bare tile floor. The musicians were up at one end on a platform, with instruments you don’t see in other towns. The kind of music they play in Memfis isn’t something you hear in most other parts of Meriga, either, though I’ve heard that Sanloo and some of the other river towns have bands that play it too. It’s got its own rhythms and notes that bend and slide and wail, and a lot of it gets played on horns, which nobody else but the army uses these days. I never did learn much about it, other than that it’s what Dizzy played when he was on his way home to Nyork after the fight over Troy, and that it’s the best dancing music I’ve ever heard, but most people in Memfis know a lot about it, and there must be more than a hundred bands that play it there.

  So the musicians had their place, and they were starting to play. Around the other three sides of the building, all the stalls had their usual signs taken down. The ruinmen had most of one side, the chemists had half of another, and each of the other guilds had their places, which I learned later they’d had since the market was built more than a hundred years ago. There were big fancy banners hanging from the ceiling where the signs for the stalls usually go, and down below on the tables was more food and drink than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time. Prentices from all the guilds were hauling in covered pans and kettles and barrels and tarp-covered boxes, and when they ran out of room to put anything more on the tables they stacked things up in the spaces behind. I’d already figured out that there was going to be a mother of a party, a mother with babies and a grandchild or two, but it was when one of the misters I was with told me that all the food and drink was free that I started to realize just how rich Memfis is.

  I was right, though; it was a mother of a party. There must have been more than a thousand people inside the market by the time the dancing started, and we were all wet and happy and, before long, pretty thoroughly drunk as well. Most of the women were wearing thin little dresses that didn’t hide much at the best of times, and given a good dousing with rain—well, let’s just say you didn’t have to wonder what they’d look like if things got friendly enough that the dresses came off. Me, I did my share of dancing and drinking, and I must have had something to eat, though I don’t remember the details too clearly, and I ended the night by stumbling back out into the rain with a couple of women from the picker’s guild, laughing and kissing all the way to the place where they lived, which might have been all of six doors down from the market. Things were very friendly by then, and the dresses came off pretty quick once we got someplace private; from the sounds I heard through the walls to either side, we weren’t the only people being friendly there, either.

  I woke up with the kind of pounding head that’s practically welcome, since it reminds you of what kind of night you had the night before. Things got lively again, and finally I kissed them both and stumbled back to the ruinmen’s guild hall. I bathed and got something to eat and slept for a while, and then damn if we didn’t head on down to the market and do it all again.

  That’s Memfis in the season of the rains, one party after another, night after night, until the skies dry out and everyone gets back to doing the work that pays for all that food and drink. By the time a couple of weeks have gone by it’s not quite so crowded or s
o wild as it is when the rain first comes down, but every night until the rain stops there’s food and drink and music for everyone who happens to come by, so long as they’re where they should be. That’s Memfis, too; the burners and smelters and a couple of other guilds have their own parties in another covered market about a klom from the ruinmen’s guild hall, and ruinmen don’t go there if they don’t want to get beaten or worse, and of course nobody from the guilds outside the Memfis city walls is going to get past the guards and wander into one of the parties inside the walls.

  I didn’t mind that the first year, when I was half drunk on Memfis and the other half on pretty Memfis women. I minded it even less the second year, when I was more than half drunk on running my own dig for a successful season, and still thought that Star’s Reach might be one shovelful of dirt away. The third year, when I knew for certain that the dig was a failure, dancing and drinking and spending the nights with pretty Memfis women beat the stuffing out of sitting in my little room in the Memfis guildhall, and facing the fact that everything I’d done since I fell through the floor in Shanuga and found the dead man’s letter had brought me to a bare blank wall with no way forward. Not that sitting in the little room would have gotten me any closer to Star’s Reach, or to anything else but misery. There are times when getting drunk and falling into bed with someone you’ve just met is as reasonable as anything else you can do.

  But the other side of my story, or this part of my story, is the two seasons I spent digging in the Arksa jungle, hoping that I was going to find Star’s Reach or at least some clue of how to get there. If I had all the time in the world I could tell that in some kind of order, from the day we first broke ground a month after the rains to the day we packed up the last of the tools and went back to Memfis, but we’re not that many weeks from running out of food, and I still have other things I want to write down for—well, for whoever reads this, if anyone ever does. It’s my part of the one big story Plummer talked about all those days and kloms ago on the road to Sisnaddi, and if nobody ever reads it, at least I had the chance to tell it.