Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  There’s a lot more of Meriga west of Sisnaddi than east of it, but you wouldn’t know that from the countryside close by. Hiyo’s green and prosperous, and it has more towns than empty ruins, which is something you can’t say of most other parts of the country. I didn’t have a lot of money left, so inns were out of the question, but there were plenty of farms where a traveler can get a night’s sleep in the barn and a breakfast on the kitchen steps for a couple of bits.

  There weren’t any guildhalls where I could stay, though. Even where there were big towns, and there were some good-sized ones, there were no ruinmen. All that country had every scrap of metal and everything else worth taking stripped from the ground a long time before I was born.

  It took me a good while to cross Hiyo, and then cut through the little neck of Wesfa Jinya that you go through before you get to Wes Pen, and Pisba. Pisba’s in a valley where two rivers come together to make the Hiyo River, and it’s shaped like a wedge. It’s also full of soldiers, because Pisba is about as far east as you can go and still be in Meriga.

  There’s a ruinmen’s lodge in Pisba, and it’s the only ruinmen’s lodge anywhere I know of that’s inside the city walls. Everything in Pisba is inside the city walls. Even the farmers who work the fields around Pisba live inside, because raiders come from further east so often. The guards on the bridge I crossed seemed to be used to traveling ruinmen, and let me past with only a couple of questions; the ruinmen in the guildhall were friendly as ruinmen usually are, but they wanted to know where I was headed, and when I told them—I didn’t say anything about the place where every question has an answer, just that I wanted to go look at Deesee and the Spire—they got very quiet.

  “You ever been out east of here?” one of the misters asked me, and when I said I hadn’t, he gave me a long look and said, “Let me show you something.”

  He was back a moment later with a paper map. “You see this highway? You keep on it and you might just stay alive. You know what’s out there?

  I did, or at least I’d heard stories about it. “That’s the burning land, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  It was evening when I got to Pisba, and I planned on leaving the next morning, so I talked with him and some of the misters after dinner, and found out everything I could about the road east and south toward Deesee. Still, when I left the next morning, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the ruinmen there didn’t expect to see me again.

  I bought a bunch of food at a shop before I went out through the gates of the city, and it was a good thing, because nobody lives further east, not until you get to the coastal allegiancies. Everything was green and quiet at first. I think it was three days out of Pisba when I saw the first plume of smoke coming out of a hill off to one side, and not much more than a day after that it was all over the place, filling the air with haze and the stink of sulfur.

  Everyone in Meriga knows about the burning land, but not too many of them know what happened and why. I didn’t, not until I went that way. This is the way the ruinmen in the Pisba guild hall explained it to me.

  Wes Pen used to be just Pen, and it was a big state running east almost all the way to the Lannic. It had a lot of coal, oil, and gas under it, and since it was close to the big cities of the Lannic shore, all of those got dug up pretty thoroughly. First they put in mines and dug as much coal out of them as they could, until that ran out, then they drilled for oil and pumped it until that ran out, and then they drilled some more and pumped chemicals down into the ground to get more of the oil and gas, until those ran out.

  Then somebody figured out how to pump more chemicals into the coal, down where the mines couldn’t get, to turn the coal into gas they could pump out. This was toward the end of the old world, when they were desperate for fossil fuels even though the weather was going crazy from all the fossil fuels they’d already burned, and seemingly nobody asked enough hard questions. Different parts of the country had different laws about what you could pump into the ground, and the laws in Pen basically didn’t stop anybody from doing anything, so people started drilling wells and pumping the chemicals down and pumping gas out. For a while they were happy, or as happy as you can get when the weather’s going crazy and everything around you is right on the edge of falling apart.

  Then the coal down underground started catching fire. Nobody’s quite sure why, but something happened whenever the chemicals and the coal got to old mine tunnels that brought them into contact with air, and the coal underground started burning. At first they tried to hush it up, and then they claimed that it was just some kind of rare accident, but eventually every place they put those chemicals down wells caught fire, because the chemicals spread in the groundwater until they got to an old mine shaft and started another fire. Of course then they had to stop the drilling, but before then they’d drilled a lot of holes all over Pen and pumped a lot of the chemicals down them.

  So there were underground fires burning under most of Pen. They’re still burning today, and they’ll still be burning for a long time to come, because there’s a lot of coal down there still, and you’ve got sinkholes opening up here and there to let more air get down and keep the fires going. If you want to get through the burning land, you’ve got to know where the fires are and where the smoke collects, and that changes from one year from the next. If you want to get metal from ruins there, you can do it, but it’s risky, because you never know when the place where you are will suddenly start smoking under your feet. If you want to live there or farm there, you’re just plain out of luck.

  I just wanted to get through, and enough other people want to get through for one reason or another that the ruinmen in Pisba and a few other places keep track of which roads might be safe. Even so, you never know when the ground’s suddenly going to start smoking under the road, or just collapse from a sinkhole without any warning at all. If you’re lucky, that doesn’t happen; if you’re not, nobody ever hears from you again, and that’s the end of it.

  I was lucky. There were times the highway I was on had sinkholes and smoking ground close by, and there was one long stretch where the smoke was so thick that I just had to keep walking, a day and a night and most of the next day, because I knew if I lay down and tried to sleep it was a pretty safe bet I’d never wake up again. Still, there were other parts of the countryside that were green and beautiful, with the last scraps of ruined farms and farm towns here and there to remind you what it was like before people got greedy and careless and messed it up for hundreds of years to come.

  Finally I came down out of the hills and saw the bright silver line of a river looping and curving through woodland. From the map I saw in Pisba, I knew that it was the Tomic, the river that ran by Deesee in the old world.

  I knew something else, too, from the ruins down by the river. Even from there I could see that they’d been shoveled up all anyhow by people who didn’t know how to do a proper dig, and just wanted whatever metal they could get. I was outside of Meriga, and if I met anyone at all between there and Deesee, it would be Jinyans—the people who killed my father. I drew in a breath, and started down the road.

  The days I spent after that, walking along the Tomic, were the strangest part of the whole strange journey that brought me here to Star’s Reach. I had no idea what I was looking for or where I might find it, and it was sinking in by then that following a story I heard from a harlot in a little town in Ilanoy might not be the brightest idea, especially since it took me all the way outside of Meriga and into the nobody’s-land between us and the coastal allegiancies. Still, it felt like walking over the trapped floor in the Shanuga ruins, where the whole journey started: not something you necessarily want to do, but once you start, there’s nothing to do but finish.

  So I followed the old crumbling road alongside the Tomic, watched the water rush past me toward the Lannic, and got used to water in the river, wind in the leaves, and my own boots crunching on the old road being the only sounds there were. I’v
e been in plenty of places where you could walk for a day and not see any sign that people had been there since the old world ended, but this seemed emptier still, and of course I knew why. Every few years raiders from the coastal allegiancies come through here trying to push their way into Wesfa Jinya. Every few years the Merigan army marches the other way to return the favor, and there are plenty of safer places to start a farm if you want to do that or, well, anything else. It must have been full of towns and farms before the old world ended, and maybe someday it will be full of both again, but as long as we’re at war with the allegiancies, the Tomic valley is going to stay empty.

  Day followed day, and I followed the river. After I forget how long—it must have been a week or so, maybe a little more—the mountains turned into hills and the hills spread out and hid their feet in the forest, and when the breeze blew in my face I started to catch a hint of the salt smell I’d gotten to know so well when I was living in Memfis. That’s the way the breeze was blowing one sunny morning when I heard hooves on the road ahead.

  That was in a place where the road ran straight for a while, and by the time I’d thought of running into the woods to hide, the riders were in sight. There were four of them, coming straight up the road, and I knew that if I tried to run they’d chase me down like a deer, so I just kept walking.

  They slowed their horses and stopped maybe twenty paces ahead, waited while I walked up: four men, three of them younger than I was and the fourth a good bit older. They were wearing brown homespun clothes and big floppy hats, and they all had long hair, long beards, and a couple of pistols each stuck into leather holsters that had seen a lot of hard wear. Their horses, though, were big and strong and skittish, the kind that jennels and cunnels ride in Meriga.

  I walked up to within a couple of paces of them and stopped. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and the oldest one finally said, “Who the hell are you?”

  I told him my name.

  “You out of Meriga?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ruinman?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell you doin’ here?”

  I knew that if they thought I was lying they’d kill me without a second thought, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like a lie, except the truth. “I’ve been looking for Star’s Reach for getting on five years now,” I told them. “I hear there’s a place down by the Deesee ruins where—where every question has an answer. Nothing else worked, so I figured I’d try that.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. “Where’d you hear that?” the oldest one asked.

  “From a harlot in Ilanoy,” I told him.

  They looked at each other again, this time for a good long while. Finally the oldest one leaned forward in his saddle. “There’s a place like that,” he said. “You go straight down this road all the way to the sea, and then turn to your left hand and walk along the water a good bit until you see a chair made of chunks of concrete. That’s where it is; you sit down there before the sun sets and you don’t get up again until it rises. Got that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.” He leaned forward a little more. “Now if you go straight there and come straight back and go home, and don’t stick your nose into anyplace it shouldn’t get, you’re gonna be okay. And if you don’t—well, then you better pray real hard, because you’re gonna wish you never got born. Got that?”

  “Yessir,” I said, the way that soldiers do, and he nodded, and the four of them snapped their reins and rode right past me at a trot, two on each side. When they were past, one of the younger ones turned around in the saddle and called back, “You find Star’s Reach, you tell the aliens hi for us, you hear?”

  I promised I would, and they trotted on up the road. After a bit, I turned and started walking the other way. For a while I wondered if they would come back after me and see where I went, but the hoofbeats faded out and from then on it was just my boots crunching on what was left of the road, and the sounds of the river and the wind. The sun rose up in the sky ahead of me, and moved past to my right side, and sank toward the hills behind me, and all the while the salt smell on the wind became stronger and stronger, until finally the forest fell away into scrub pines and beachgrass, sand and pieces of driftwood covered what was left of the old road, and I went up and over a dune and stood looking out at the sea.

  There were waves rolling up to the beach in lines of foam and sweeping out again in flat sheets of water, and big gray masses of concrete rising up here and there, with waves crashing into them and seaweed and things growing all over them. It was a long moment before I noticed them, though, because I was looking at the Spire. It was just like the pictures I saw when I was little, a tall white shape rising up straight out of the water well out to sea, and the light of the afternoon sun shone on it and made it blaze like a still and silent flame.

  I have no idea how long I stood there looking at it. Finally, though, I remembered the directions I’d been given, turned left, and walked north along the beach.

  I’ve written more than once about the times along the way from Shanuga to Star’s Reach when I saw how much bigger and more crowded everything was in the old world, and how small and sparsely peopled Meriga is nowadays. As I write this, I’m thinking of the ruins of Cago, and how they stretch for kloms and kloms along the shores of Lake Mishga. I’m thinking of the towns and cities that used to be on the banks of the Ilanoy and Misipi Rivers and aren’t there any more. I’m thinking of the view from Troy Tower—and none of them, not even all of them put together, were like walking along that beach.

  Ahead there were rounded masses of concrete rising up out of the water and the sand as far as I could see, and further, and I knew that the same thing went pretty much without a break all the way up into Nuwinga, and I also knew that all of that was just the western edge of the drowned cities of the coast, which used to go a hundred kloms or more further east before the sea rose up and swallowed them all. I thought of the millions and millions of people who used to live there, more people than there are in all of Meriga nowadays, and now there was just one stray ruinman a long way from home, wandering past the little that was left of it all. The wind went whispering past me, picking up sand and tossing it against my boots and my legs, and I wondered whether the dust of old bones was mixed in with it.

  That’s what I was thinking as I walked north along the shore, and the waves rolled and splashed, and the sun sank closer to the western hills. I started to wonder after a while if I’d walked right past the chair made of concrete the man from Jinya mentioned, and what would happen if they found me a couple of kloms past the place I was looking for. About the time I was starting to get really worried, though, I walked up most of the way into the dunes to get around a big ragged mass of concrete, and saw not too far ahead a clear space and something that might be a chair. I kept going along the beach, and after a while, I got to it.

  I really had no idea what to expect when I got there. Back when Lu the harlot first told me about the place where every question has an answer, I’d wondered if it was some kind of installation from the old world, with computers, maybe, that would take your question, check it against data that got lost everywhere else in the world, and give you the answer in glowing letters on a screen. Later on, I’d made any number of guesses about it, but all of them were wrong.

  There was a rough chair made of big chunks of concrete half buried in the sand, and a circle made of more chunks of concrete, not much more than knee-high, rising out of the sand like an old woman’s teeth. Here and there people had taken sticks and driven one end into the sand, and tied strips of cloth to the upper end, so that the cloth fluttered in the wind. That was all. There were some big masses of concrete further south, and much more to the north, but right there the beach was flat empty sand and the sea stretched out into the east, unbroken except for the Spire, a little south of straight ahead.

  I stood there for a long moment, looking at the chair,
and felt like a complete fool. I couldn’t think of any way a chair of salvaged concrete in the middle of nowhere was going to answer the question I came to ask. Since there wasn’t anywhere else for me to go, and the sun was maybe an hour from setting, I sat down on one of the chunks of concrete in the circle, and ate some bread and sausage and dried fruit I bought in Pisba. The sun got low, and the wind turned cool and then cold, and finally I laughed out loud and got up and went over to the chair. The seat and the back were both flat smooth pieces of concrete, which was better than I’d been expecting. After a long moment, I sat down.

  Nothing happened right at first, or nothing that I noticed. I settled back and looked out at the Spire as the setting sun turned it gold, and then orange, and then the color of blood. Then, finally, night closed in, and I waited.

  To this day I have no idea what actually happened then. I know what I saw. Even here in Star’s Reach, sitting at this desk in a little pool of light and listening to Eleen’s breathing, I can close my eyes and remember every bit of it, but I’m pretty sure that some of it couldn’t have happened at all, and I have no idea whether the things that could have happened actually did.

  At any rate, this is what I remember.

  I sat there for a while, waiting for I didn’t know what. The sun went down behind me, the stars came out ahead, and the wind along the beach blew cold. Then there was a flash of orange light out to sea, right along the horizon, and I stared at it for a long moment before I realized that the moon was rising. It was a few days past the full, big and golden. As it rose, the light shining from it seemed to make a path across the sea right up to where the waves were splashing a couple of meedas from my feet.