Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  That’s when everything went silent. All at once the wind stopped, and the waves weren’t moving any more. The moon stood there, right on the horizon, and as the path of light stretched across the ocean, wherever the moonlight touched the water, it started flowing away, back out from the beach toward the deep places of the Lannic. I know perfectly well that water doesn’t do that, but that’s what I saw: the water drawing back, forming a path of wet sand just as wide as the light from the moon. On both sides of the path, the sea stood black like a wall.

  I don’t remember thinking that any of this was out of the ordinary. I don’t remember thinking anything at all. I simply got up from my chair and started walking across the bare wet sands ahead of me, following the path down into drowned Deesee.

  It wasn’t anything like my dreams, though. In my dreams the water is like air and the sun is shining on the top of it, turning the surface of the water to silver, and the buildings are all just the way they were when Deesee was above water and the presden and her jennels ruled half the countries on Mam Gaia’s belly. The path I followed, though, was all sand and stones and seaweed, with crabs scuttling around, and fish lying there gasping in pools of salt water. There wasn’t much left of the buildings close to the beach, just low masses of concrete hammered to roundness by hundreds of years of waves and tides, but as I went further and the sand turned to mud, I passed ruins covered with barnacles and mussels and sea anemones, with roofs fallen in and every bit of metal corroded by the salt water, but still looking like buildings. I passed the hulks of old cars, stepped over poles that used to hold lights up so they could shine on the streets.

  I have no idea how long I walked down between the black walls of water into the heart of Deesee. Finally, though, I got in among the part of it I remember from my dreams, with the big white buildings with windows lined up like soldiers on parade, except that the buildings were half-fallen and stained with mud, and draped all over with great blades of kelp. Still, I knew what came next, and I wasn’t wrong. I passed what was left of the buildings and reached the big open space with the hill in the middle of it, and the Spire rising up above all. The top of it was above the water, glowing in the moonlight; all around it the sea rose up black and motionless, and there was nowhere else to go.

  Up at the foot of the Spire, someone was waiting for me.

  I saw him as soon as I got to the base of the hill. The light was dim and I couldn’t make out anything but a human shape at first, but I knew who it was. As I climbed the hill, the details came clear one by one: the stiff heavy clothing that soldiers used to wear in the old world; the funny broad hat, flat on the top, with a bill in front and a bit of flashy metal above that; more bits of metal here and there on the clothing, especially on the shoulders and right above where his heart was; the face, lean as a hawk’s, looking toward me with a look I couldn’t read, not yet. The face was only familiar from my dreams, but I knew the rest of him well enough, since the day I found his corpse sprawled on the table next to the letter about Star’s Reach, down there in the underplaces of the Shanuga ruins.

  I was within a few steps of reaching him when I saw that he had the letter in one hand. He held it out to me so that I could see it, and read the words on it. I looked at it, at him, and that’s when I knew that he wanted me to understand it. He wanted me or somebody to find Star’s Reach. His face didn’t change at all, but I could see hope and longing in his eyes. He waited until he knew I’d recognized the letter, and then turned it over so that I could see the single word Curtis written in gray on the back.

  Yes, I wanted to say, I know. That was you. That was your name back then. For some reason or other I couldn’t speak, but I think he must have heard me anyway, for he shook his head, a sudden brisk move, and pointed at the word again with one finger.

  I didn’t see his lips move and I didn’t hear anything, but all at once I knew what he was trying to tell me. Not my name, he was saying, and not any other person’s name, either—it was the name of a place.

  All at once I could see him, huddled in the shelter down under some government building in Shanuga when it was still called Chattanooga and the ruins weren’t ruins yet. He was listening to the radio we’d found, waiting for a message, and when it came he copied something down on a sheet of paper, looked something up in a book, and then copied down one word onto the back of the letter. They’d told him the name of the town where he was going to go once it was safe, once they could get him out of Chattanooga and send him to Star’s Reach, and he’d written down the name of the town on the back of the original message so he wouldn’t lose it. Then things went wrong, and it never got safe enough to get him out of there, and the food ran out and he died. I saw all of that in less time than it takes to blink.

  Then we were standing there under the Spire again, facing each other, him in his stiff old world clothes and me in my dusty ruinman’s leathers, and suddenly the ground beneath my feet began to shake. He looked up at the Spire with fear in his face. I looked up too, and damn if the Spire wasn’t swaying back and forth above us, moving in wider and wider arcs.

  All of a sudden I wasn’t in Deesee any more. I was sitting in the chair made of concrete slabs by the beach, in the place where every question has an answer, and it felt as though I was being shaken awake. I looked around, but there was nobody shaking me. The moon was high in the south, and it no longer made a path across the sea in front of me, but the ground shook again, and the sea began to draw away, just as it did earlier, except this time it was all drawing back, as far as I could see to either side.

  Back when I was writing about my first dream of Deesee, I must have mentioned the old strange stories about the Spire. When I was a child, people used to say that as long as it still stood tall above the sea, out there beyond the breakers, the drowned city at its feet might just rise up out of the waters someday, and if it did, the old world and all its treasures would come back again. Just for a moment, as I sat there and stared, I wondered if that was what was happening, if somehow learning the key to Star’s Reach was bringing something even more wonderful.

  Then the ground beneath my feet shook again, and I knew what I was seeing.

  There’s a place called Greenlun I’ve mentioned before, off to the east of Genda, between the Lannic and the North Ocean. It’s covered with trees now, but in the old world it was covered with a layer of ice a couple of kloms thick, and when they messed up the climate in the last years of the old world, all the ice broke up and melted, and the meltwater flowed into the sea. That’s part of why Deesee is underwater now. The priestesses say, though, that when the ice melted, the land started to rise because all that weight was off it, and ever since they’ve had big earthquakes all along the eastern coasts of Genda and Nuwinga and the coastal allegiancies—earthquakes and namees. A namee’s a really big wave that’s stirred up by an earthquake, and you know one is coming because the sea draws back from the land.

  The moon gave enough light that I could just about see the land around me. Back behind the dunes and maybe half a klom further inland, there was a hill with trees on top of it—not much of a hill, and maybe not high enough, but it was the only high ground in sight. I knew there wasn’t a lot of time, so I got up and grabbed my pack and ran for the hill. It wasn’t an easy run, since there was driftwood back behind the dunes that I had to dodge, and once I got to the hill the brush clawed at me and scratched my face as I ran. I was panting and bleeding by the time I got well up the hill, and I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and turned around and looked back toward the sea.

  There before me was Deesee. I could see all of it, the Spire rising up above the half-fallen buildings caked with mud and seaweed, reaching north and south as far as I could see and east to a blackness that had to be the ocean. I stood there, forgetting everything else, and as I watched, the ground shook again, hard. Then the Spire began to lean toward me: slow at first, then faster and faster, until finally it crashed to ruin in the black mud.

  Then th
e sea rose up and came rushing back into its place.

  I turned and sprinted the rest of the way to the top of the hill, found the tallest and stoutest tree that I could, and scrambled up it. By the time I got up as high as I thought I could safely go, Deesee was drowned again. I read once about somebody who got through a namee alive by clinging to the top of a tree, so I found a good sturdy branch high up. By then I could hear the water boiling and surging, and I looked and saw it rushing up the slope toward me, black as the walls of the sea on either side of the path I’d followed to the Spire. I sucked in one last breath and put my arms and legs around the branch as tight as they’d go and prayed to Mam Gaia, the way you’re supposed to do when you’re about to get reborn.

  The wave covered the hill and rose about halfway up the tree, but it never quite got up to me. A moment later the crest was past, and the tree hadn’t given way. I clung to the branch for I don’t know how long, shivering with the cold and certain that I was about to die.

  All around me, the only things I could see were the tops of trees on the hill, and black water all around. After a while, the water stopped moving inland and started moving back out to sea, until it was back where it belonged; a second wave came rushing in a little after that, but that one only got about halfway up the hill, and I think there was a third and a fourth wave, too, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure about much of what happened during the last part of that night.

  The next thing I remember for certain is waking up a little after dawn, still up there in the tree, still clinging to the branch, cold as old concrete and aching from head to foot, but more or less alive. I blinked and shook myself. Slowly, because my muscles didn’t want to move, I clambered down to the ground and stood there, trying to get my thoughts to do something other than circle around and around the fact that I probably should have been fish food just then.

  I don’t know how long it was before I finally walked over to the brow of the hill and looked east. The Lannic was blue and mostly calm, with long rolling breakers coming in from the far horizon to crash over masses of weathered concrete or rush landwards across the beach. I stood there looking out to sea for a long time, and finally realized what was missing.

  The Spire was gone. Either I watched it fall, or Mam Gaia sent me a true dream. I still don’t know which.

  I walked down to the beach then. I’m not sure if the chair and the ring of concrete chunks around it were gone, or if I somehow ended up at a different part of the beach. There was sand and seaweed and driftwood all over, but then there had been sand and seaweed and driftwood all over when I came there the day before. Still, whether the namee was a vision or a real wave, I had an answer to my question, and I also had a good long way to walk. I stood there looking out to sea for a while, seeing the smooth line of the horizon where the Spire used to be, and thinking about what it meant that it was gone.

  After a bit, I turned and walked south again, looking for the road back inland, up the Tomic valley. There was a big mass of weathered concrete right where I’d come down to the beach—not even a namee is powerful enough to wash those away—and I recognized it and turned, and headed back inland until I found the road back home to Meriga. Once I found it I sat down and ate some of the food I’d brought from Pisba, and finally got up and started west toward the mountains and the burning land.

  I didn’t see another human face until I was a day out of Pisba. I don’t know what happened to the Jinya horsemen I met on the way to Deesee, but I didn’t see them again. I don’t know how many days it took me, either, though I know I ran out of food halfway through the burning land and didn’t get another meal until I showed up at the ruinmen’s guild hall in Pisba and startled the stuffing out of the guild misters, who hadn’t expected me to make it back alive.

  All the way along the road, as I followed the Tomic as far as I could and then climbed up into the hills and started across the burning land, I had nothing to do but think. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t think much about Star’s Reach, or about whether or not I would be able to track down the place called Curtis once I got back to the archives in Sisnaddi. Mostly I thought about the Spire and the stories I mentioned, the ones that said that the old world might come back someday, so long as the Spire still rose out of the Lannic over drowned Deesee.

  I’m not sure that people really know what they believe until something comes along that makes it come true or makes it go away forever. All along the winding road from Shanuga to here, I believed I was going to find Star’s Reach. If somebody had asked me whether I believed that in Melumi or Memfis or Sisnaddi, or anywhere else along the way, I probably would have said no, but when we got within sight of the antenna housings and Star’s Reach stopped being a dream and turned into the place where I’m sitting now, it didn’t feel like a surprise, it felt like something that was always going to happen and just finally got around to it.

  Before I left Sisnaddi to find the place where every question has an answer, if anyone had asked me whether I believed the old stories about Deesee rising back up out of the sea, I’d have laughed and said no. On the road back through the burning lands, though, my thoughts kept circling back around to the Spire toppling in the moonlight, and the flat blue horizon I’d seen the next morning, standing there on the beach, and every time I thought of those what passed through my mind next was that now the old world was never coming back.

  Later on, when I was back in Sisnaddi getting ready for the trip out here, I heard more about the Spire, and that’s when I was finally sure that what I saw wasn’t just a dream. Word trickled back from the coastal allegiancies that the Spire was gone, just rumors at first, then messages passed from their priestesses to ours, and a few weeks before we set out for Star’s Reach some scholars who crossed over into Nuwinga from Nyork and negotiated some kind of deal with the Jinyans came back with pictures. Once that happened, in Sisnaddi and Sanloo and Cansiddi, I heard a lot of people talk about how the old world was finally gone forever, now that the Spire wasn’t there any more, and that’s when I knew that I wasn’t the only one who believed the old stories.

  Still, I’m not at all sure they’re right. So much of what we do in Meriga today is about the old world even more than it’s about ours. We plant trees and have laws against fossil fuels because of what happened in the old world, and we have a presden and jennels because they had those in the old world, and when a priestess wants to make sure people live the way they’re supposed to, the way that keeps Mam Gaia happy with us, she just has to remind them about how they did things in the old world and what happened because of that.

  It’s no wonder that people used to tell stories about Deesee rising back up above the water and bringing the old world with it, because the old world may be dead but it’s still here, sprawled over Meriga the way the man I found under the Shanuga ruins was sprawled over the table. I wonder how many more years will have to slip past before it finally goes away.

  Twenty-Eight: A Step Too Far

  Berry and I spent today getting the last of the rooms ready for the ruinmen from Cansiddi, talking and joking as we worked, and right as we were finishing it sank in that in a few more days it won’t just be the five of us here any more. It was Berry’s turn to cook, so he went off to the kitchen, and once he was gone I went to the room with the alien-books and sat there for a while, remembering the time we’ve been here and everything that’s happened, and I didn’t leave until Eleen came looking for me to tell me that dinner was ready.

  After dinner we all went to the radio room to find out if there was any more news about Berry. It’s been most of a week now since the Circle elder and the Sisnaddi ruinman added their bit to the talk about the succession, and I’m sure we haven’t been the only ones listening one evening after another to find out if the electors have anything to say. Until tonight, they didn’t, but tonight the announcer started off the news broadcast saying that Jennel Risher Macallun had made a statement.

  That had all of us listening, because Risher’s no
t just an elector, he’s also as important a jennel as you’ll find in Meriga. His family owns a mother of a lot of land in Inyana, and he’s been with the army since before he inherited the jennelship. When we lost at Durrem, in the war with the coastal allegiancies that killed my father, it was Jennel Risher who pulled what was left of the Merigan army together and got it back safe across the border in the teeth of everything the Jinyans and Cairlines could throw at him. I never heard anyone name him as a candidate for the presdency, so it’s a safe bet that he didn’t want it for himself, but no one was ever going to get it without Jennel Risher having a say in the matter.

  The radio crackled and spat, and started talking in the sort of growling voice you get when you’ve spent years downing way too much of the cheap whiskey that soldiers drink. “The electors have been talking about this Sharl sunna Sheren,” the voice said. “Informally, you understand. We were as surprised as everyone else. I won’t say all of us are pleased by some of the details, but the law is what it is, and the college agreed to meet him in Sanloo on the twentieth of Febry to consider his claim.”

  The announcer went on to say something else, but I don’t remember a word of it. I was looking at Berry. The rest of us had pulled chairs over to the radio and sat down, but he hadn’t, and so he was standing, staring at the radio with an expression on his face that I’ve never seen there before or since, strange and quiet and very far away. Looking at him, I knew down in my belly that he was going to become presden, and I knew that he knew it too. I had the oddest feeling just then, as though I was in two places at once, there in the radio room and somewhere else, reading about the scene in the radio room in a history book a long time from now.

  I think Tashel Ban felt the same thing. He got up and left the room without saying a word, while the radio chattered on about something else I don’t remember. I heard him rummaging around in his room close by, then the clink and clatter of glasses down in the kitchen, and then came back with a bottle of Genda whiskey and glasses for everyone, and poured us all a good solid drink. Nobody said anything. He raised his glass to Berry; Berry raised his in answer, we all did the same, and then drank it down.