Star's Reach (33 page)

There were twenty cabins and maybe thirty
people to fill them, and at least as many more who couldn’t afford
cabin fare and would be sleeping all anyhow down on the freight
deck, in among the barrels and sacks and wooden crates the
roustabouts were hauling on board to replace what other roustabouts
were hauling off. From the walkway that went all around the cabin
deck, I could see most of Proo, the little bustling town near the
water and the ruins reaching far back into the farm country behind
it.

The pilothouse of the nearest of the big
white packet boats went up almost twice as far above the water as
the
Jennel Mornay
, and it seemed to be looking down with the
kind of raised-eyebrow look a red-hatted Circle elder gives a
ruinman who’s made the mistake of crossing her path. After a few
more minutes, the packet boat let out a whistle, the paddlewheel at
the stern slowed, stopped, and then started turning the other way,
pulling her stern first out into the river. It was a gorgeous
sight, everything a Tenisi farm boy could hope for in a riverboat;
it’s just that this particular Tenisi farm boy was on the wrong
boat.

Still, when the last of our cargo was on
board and the
Jennel Mornay
’s whistle sounded, it was still
a sight to watch as we pulled away from the levee, backed out into
the river, turned and started downstream. Ugly little thing though
it was, the
Jennel Mornay
handled well, and before long we
were churning down the river at a fair pace.

Plummer came out onto the walkway about the
time Proo got lost behind a bend of the landscape behind us. “A
pleasant day,” he said, “made even more pleasant by the number of
kloms I would otherwise have had to walk. I hope the two of you
find the boat agreeable?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that it looked
like it got put together out of what was left over when the other
boatbuilders had taken their pick. Still, he must have seen it in
my face, and laughed his dry little laugh.

“There are advantages,” he said, “to a
riverboat that doesn’t attract rich passengers. Even so, I trust
that neither of you play cards or dice.”

“Not usually.”

“I recommend avoiding it altogether here.
I’ve heard that someone once brought honest dice on board a Misipi
riverboat, and the Misipi itself rose up and refused to let the
boat pass until they were thrown overboard and replaced by the
usual kind.”

A man standing against the rail near us heard
this, and burst out laughing. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then,
turning: “Well, Mam Gaia’s bright green underthings! Plummer. Good
to see you again.”

Plummer beamed. “Likewise. This,” he said to
Berry and me, “is Slane, an old friend of mine. Slane, Trey and
Berry are more recent friends. You’re headed to Memfis, I would
guess.”

“For the moment.” He looked me up and down,
glanced at Berry, blinked and took a long hard second look.
“You?”

“I have business in Sanloo,” said Plummer.
“These two? Memfis and points west.”

By then I’d taken as good a look at Slane as
he’d taken at me. He had the sort of clothes that seem expensive
but aren’t, and the sort of look that seems casual but isn’t; if he
had dice in his pocket, and I guessed he did, the river probably
wouldn’t rise up and stop the
Jennel Mornay
.

“Fair enough.” To Berry and me: “You two been
to Memfis?”

“Not yet,” I told him.

He seemed to think that that was funny, and
cuffed me on the shoulder. “Good. That’s good. You’ve heard of
Dell, haven’t you? Memfis is Dell’s home town. Fact is, he’s a good
friend of mine.” He laughed again. “You’re from, where, Joja or
east Tenisi?”

“Shanuga,” I said, impressed despite
myself.

“I rarely miss a voice. Well, Trey from
Shanuga, the Misipi valley’s a different world from the rest of
Meriga, and Memfis is a different world from the rest of the Misipi
valley. It’s an easy place to get into trouble. Still, don’t you
worry; you’re a friend of Plummer’s, you’re a friend of mine—and
Dell’s.” He laughed again, and right then the whistle sounded up
above the pilothouse—we were coming up on some little town, I
forget the name of it, where the
Jennel Mornay
had a stop to
make—and his laugh got caught up in the screech of the whistle and
spread from one bank of the river to the other.

I spent a lot of the trip south along the
Misipi like that, watching from the rail and talking to Plummer or
Shane or both of them as the
Jennel Mornay
stopped at one
little town after another. Every few hours through the day, some
little town came into sight, the
Jennel Mornay
puffed up to
the levee and sat there for a good long while as things got
offloaded and a few people clattered down the landing stage, and
then bales and barrels and sacks got hauled on board by the
roustabouts to go downriver to Sanloo or Memfis and a few more
people clattered back up. Once that was done, it was back out into
the river, but that still meant that maybe one hour in three went
into pulling up to the levee, pulling away from the levee, or
sitting there with nobody but the roustabouts doing much of
anything at all.

Come evening, whatever little town came next
was where we stopped for the night. They say that riverboats used
to travel by night a long time ago, but these days there’s too much
danger from snags and sandbars. A good pilot might risk a night run
when the moon’s full and there’s money to be made, but usually the
risk’s not worth taking, and so come evening the boats tie up at
the nearest town. The ship’s officers eat dinner in the main cabin
with the passengers who can afford cabin fare, the crew eats down
on the main deck with the passengers who can’t, and everybody but
whoever’s on watch goes to sleep until first light tells the
engineer it’s time to heat up the boiler again.

Thinking back on the trip down the river, it
occurs to me that that’s one of maybe three times in my life that I
haven’t had much of anything to do for a good long time. The first
time was during the few months between when my mother and I went to
Shanuga after my father didn’t come back from the war, and when I
got taken on as a ruinman’s prentice; the second was on the
riverboat heading for Memfis; and the third time—well, that’s here
and now, because even though I’m sitting in the biggest ruin that’s
left in Meriga, there’s not that much for a ruinman to do just at
the moment, other than turn the pages of old books about aliens,
and wonder what Eleen and Tashel Ban are going to find next, and
tell the story of how I got here in the pages of a notebook that
nobody’s probably ever going to read.

I didn’t even have that much to do on the way
downriver to Memfis, and Berry was mostly down on the main deck,
making friends with the engineer and watching the steam engines
run. I’d have done the same thing at his age, and might have done
it even at mine if I didn’t have as much to think about as I did.
Fairly often I’d run into Plummer and we’d talk about this and
that, and now and again I’d end up talking to Slane when he wasn’t
busy rolling dice or playing cards in the main cabin, but I had a
lot of time to myself, too, and spent most of it standing on the
walkway that ran along the outer edge of the cabin deck, thinking
and watching the Ilanoy forests and fields roll by.

That was when I understood, deep down, just
how small Meriga is nowadays compared to what it was back in the
old world. By that I don’t mean just that it lost all the land it
did to the Meycans and the Neeonjin and the coastal allegiancies
and Nuwinga, or all the dead lands between the Suri River and the
Neeonjin country that nobody lives in any more because it’s all
dust and sand and only gets a few senamees of rain a year when it
gets that much. What I mean is that even the land that’s still
inside Meriga’s borders these days fits Meriga the way my father’s
overalls fit me when I was five years old. There’s just not that
many people in Meriga, not compared to how many there used to be,
and it shows.

I saw that over and over again as the banks
of the river rolled past. We’d come to some town with a hundred
buildings or so, the sort of lively little market town you find all
through Meriga where farmers bring their crops in for sale and buy
what they need from the blacksmith, the potter, the leatherworker
and the other crafts, and one glance from the walkway around the
cabin deck showed the traces of the same town back in the old
world, when it was ten or twenty or fifty times bigger. Sometimes,
too, we’d pass long stretches of riverbank where there wasn’t a
town at all any more, and there would be the traces of an old town,
all overgrown with trees or sticking out here and there in the
middle of a pasture.

The two big towns we passed on the way down
to Memfis, Yoree and Sanloo, made the point even harder to miss.
Yoree’s a town of decent size, and Sanloo’s one of the dozen
biggest cities in Meriga, but if you look at either one from the
river you can see that they’re both tiny next to what they used to
be. The main ruins in both of them got stripped down to the ground
a long time ago, since a prosperous town needs metal and what’s
close at hand gets dug up first. Still, if you know what to look
for, and any ruinman does, the lines of the old streets and what’s
left of the foundations of old buildings go as far as you can see
upriver and down.

Now and then, too, we’d come to a place where
the ancients tossed a bridge right across the river; there were big
cracked shafts of concrete rising up from the water, and what was
left of ramps going up on either side. Sometimes, when the road
that used to run to the bridge still gets some use, I’d see a
ferryman’s house on one side or the other and a square-bowed boat
tied up next to it, or scooting across the river like a water bug
with the ferryman sculling for all he was worth at the stern.
Still, more often than not, what was left of the bridge would just
be sitting there in among the trees and the water reeds with
nothing else anywhere in sight, cracked and streaked with long red
lines of rust, and only there because it wasn’t yet worth a
ruinman’s time to get out there with a raft, crack the concrete
open, and haul what was left of the iron to a metal merchant. If
the people on the
Jennel Mornay
had been the only people
left alive anywhere on Mam Gaia’s round belly, I don’t think what
was left of those bridges or the empty places that used to be towns
could have looked any more lonely.

So that’s some of what I was thinking about
as one day turned into another and the
Jennel Mornay
’s big
stern wheel churned the green water into foam. Finally one evening
we got to the place where the Ilanoy flows into the Misipi. It was
just after dinner, which was soup, brown bread, and the cheap
yellow beer they make up and down the Misipi Valley, which I hadn’t
yet gotten used to back then. We ate it the way all the cabin
passengers on the
Jennel Mornay
ate every meal they got,
which was sitting at long benches on either side of a long table
running down the middle of the main cabin, with the thrum of the
steam engines down below making the plates and mugs rattle loud
enough that talking wasn’t too easy.

About the time I finished my soup, the
whistle sounded up above us, three times, long and slow. Slane was
eating with us, as he usually did, and looked up suddenly. “When
you finish that,” he said, “you might just want to step outside.
There’s something worth seeing.”

I’d figured out already that what Slane
didn’t know about traveling on riverboats wasn’t worth worrying
about, so I downed the last of my beer and got to my feet. “Which
side?”

“Right hand.”

I guessed what he was talking about by then,
and went outside the way he’d said. Berry was right behind me,
since some things are even more interesting than a steam engine. It
was as nice an evening as you could ask for, with puffs of clouds
scattered over the sky like loms grazing in a field. The Ilanoy was
good and wide by then; the land to the left—to port, I ought to
say, since it was on a boat—was the same sort of thing we’d been
passing for days, bluffs with wetland trees and water reeds all
along their feet, but the land to starboard was low, with trees
rising up just high enough that I couldn’t see past them to
whatever was on the other side of them. Then the land to starboard
wasn’t there any more; the
Jennel Mornay
’s whistle sounded
again, three more times, and all of a sudden we were out on the
Misipi.

I’ve never seen another river half so big. It
was wider than a lot of lakes, with brown water rolling up out of
the southwest just at that point—it bends a lot, and when the
Misipi decides to bend, there’s not much that can argue with it.
The far bank was a low line of green in the middle distance at
first, and then we pulled away from the Ilanoy bank toward the deep
water more or less in the middle. There were two more riverboats
paddling south toward Sanloo within sight of us, and four of them
paddling north, maybe headed all the way up to Meyaplis. One of
them whistled back to us, but there was more than enough river for
everybody, and pretty soon they were out of sight to the north and
we were passing others, steaming upstream past us as we steamed
down.

After a while Berry said his goodbyes and
scampered back down to the main deck, and a couple of other people
who’d come out when the whistle sounded went back inside. I walked
forward to the front of the cabin deck, where I could see the whole
river in front of me and both banks off in the middle distance, and
just stood there taking it in. Sanloo was another day or so
downriver, Slane had told me earlier, and Memfis not too many days
beyond that; I knew I needed to start thinking about what would
happen once we got to Memfis—dealing with the local ruinmen’s
guild, trying to find the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility,
and if we were lucky, juggling all the details of running a dig,
which I’d never done by myself, much less with one of the most
powerful jennels in Meriga looking over my shoulder and paying the
bills—but that wasn’t what was on my mind just then. So I stood
there at the rail and watched the river and the banks move
past.