Star's Reach (5 page)

No one objected. Garman gave me one of his
rare smiles and went to his chair. Jonus nodded once, and that was
settled.

The rest of the meeting was pretty dull;
misters’ lodges usually are, though I didn’t know that yet. A
couple of younger misters who were working claims next to each
other on the west side of the ruins had gotten into a quarrel about
who had the right to a little building right on the line between
them, and had the common sense to bring it to the lodge instead of
going to the circle to settle it with knives. A couple of senior
misters working the underplaces close to the river warned of water
getting into the deep parts of the ruin. Jonus passed the bucket
for money to pay Mam Kelsey’s wages, and I panicked a bit before I
remembered that she wouldn’t cost me anything yet since I didn’t
have a claim of my own. The bucket went round a second time for
money for ruinmen who couldn’t work any more, and I found a few
coins for that, and then the meeting was over.

By the time we filed out of the tent, Jonus
first as the oldest mister and me dead last as the youngest, the
sun was well west of noon and the clouds had started to break up
after dropping a little rain somewhere else. By then the prentices
had gone from talking low to arguing at the top of their lungs, and
somebody had dragged out a barrel of the small beer the misters let
prentices drink in the ruins. You couldn’t get away with giving
beer to boys of ten back in town, but nobody came out to the ruins
but ruinmen, their prentices and failed scholars, and the few
priestesses who were willing to get that close to the leavings of
the old world, and so nobody made a fuss about it. It’s true enough
that they had little reason to worry, for you had to drink one
mighty lot of the stuff to get noticeably tip-overish from it.

Still, the prentices did their level best to
get lively with what they had, and once the rest of the misters
headed off to their tents or wherever, I was surrounded by a
fair-sized mob. Until a few hours before I’d been their equal, and
they weren’t ready to let me forget that just yet. So I got dragged
over to the barrel and handed a big wooden mug of beer, and had to
repeat the story of how I’d blundered my way into the hidden room
in the underplaces, and nearly gotten reborn, and got past that to
find something that everybody in Meriga had been looking for one
way or another since about an hour and a half after the last of the
old towers went dark and the last airplanes fell out of the sky.
Then I had to repeat it again, and again, with more beer, as more
prentices joined the crowd and more barrels followed them.

Then somebody who hadn’t seen it wanted to
know what the letter said. I remembered about half of it, and some
of the others remembered more, but neither the beer nor the
excitement helped us get it straight, and the potuses and the nraos
got mixed up with a lot of nonsense, and none of us could say any
of the odd words without sounding like we were talking backwards.
Before long we were all laughing too hard to stand up. Conn topped
it off by guessing what a potus might be, and I’d be lying if I
said his guess was anything clean. Before long we were discussing
the difference between an ornl and a ceti, or some equally clear
and important point, while clutching our sides and rolling on the
ground.

Things went on like that for quite a while.
Some of the younger prentices finally got bullied into fixing food
for everyone before the misters got too tired of waiting, and I got
handed a big bowl of bean soup and a wedge of hard bread almost as
large. That might have helped steady me a little, except that it
came with another big wooden mug of beer, and there were more after
that.

Night got close and dark around us, and we
got quieter, though it took a while. Most of the younger prentices
went off to their tents, and one or two of them got noisily sick on
the way. A little later, the prentices who worked for other misters
asked blessings on our dreams and headed off to their parts of the
camp; I’m pretty sure some of them got sick, too, from the way they
were weaving as they walked, but if so they weren’t so loud about
it. Then it was just me and Mister Garman’s prentices in a circle
lit by little lamps, with the stars peeking down through great torn
gaps in the clouds above us and the stink of spilled beer around
us, talking about other times and the ones who’d been there with us
and weren’t with us now, the ones who quit their prenticeships and
the ones who got reborn.

Finally we ran out of things to say. A gap
like the ones in the clouds was opening between me and the others,
and it wouldn’t close again, I knew, even if they all lived to
become misters themselves. I’d seen the same thing happen from the
other side often enough, but even so it wasn’t easy to sit there in
the pale lamplight and know that something that had been the
nearest thing to a family I had after my father and mother died was
gone now.

When the silences had gotten long enough to
be uncomfortable, I tried to stand up. That wasn’t the best move,
it turned out, for it landed me on the ground with a thump. You
have to drink a mighty lot of small beer to get tip-overish, as I
said, but I must have drunk a mighty lot that day and then a bit. I
tried to stand up again, without much more luck.

The others laughed and teased me, which broke
the silence for the moment. Berry, who was the only one of the
younger prentices still there, came over and helped me stand up. I
wished the rest of them good dreams and, leaning on Berry, managed
to walk the thirty meedas or so to my tent without ever quite
falling over.

When we got to the tent, he more or less
poured me into a sitting position on my cot and then stood there
facing me for a long moment. “I’m the one who went and got Mister
Garman when the floor fell in,” he told me then, saying it in the
way that lets you know a favor is going to be asked before too much
longer.

“I’m grateful,” I managed in response.

“You’re going to take finder’s rights to the
letter.” Then, all in a rush: “You get to take one of Gray Garman’s
prentices as your first prentice. I want you to pick me.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to get
my brain to work. “I haven’t settled what I’m going to choose,” I
protested, but he just grinned, and said, “You’re not gutless
enough to turn down finder’s rights to Star’s Reach.”

He was right, of course, though he could have
said
not smart enough
just as truly. “If I do,” I tried
again, “I’m not going to have more than half a dozen marks to my
name. How do you think I’m going to feed a prentice? I’ll have to
hire out at other mister’s sites, for certain.”

“Then you can hire me out too.” The grin
faltered. “Trey—Mister Trey—for a chance at Star’s Reach I’ll eat
dirt and run naked and sleep under a bush for the rest of my life.
Anyone would. I bet you have twenty prentices sitting in front of
this tent when you get up tomorrow.” The grin was gone, and he
swallowed visibly. “But I want you to pick me. I—I know I’m not
even your best choice. But I had to ask.”

I sat there looking at him for what seemed
like a long while, thinking about the one time I’d wanted something
that bad, and asked for it, and gotten it. Anyone else would
probably have turned him down flat, or put off the decision until
morning and turned him down that way, and I tried to talk myself
into doing either one, and failed. “You’ll do,” I said.

Berry’s face lit up like a lamp. “You mean
it?”

“I mean it. I’ll tell Garman first thing
tomorrow.”

He put out his hand, and I clasped it,
sealing the deal. He grinned, then, and said, “Just like the
Robot’s Hand. Mister Trey, you have the best dreams anyone ever
had. I’ll be here with my things first thing tomorrow.”

A moment later he was gone. I went to the
door of the tent, thinking about the Robot’s Hand, and then fell to
my knees and got very sick with as little noise as I could
manage.

Something woke up in the deep places of
Star’s Reach during the night, for no reason we can tell.

I blinked awake all at once out of some dream
about of the Tenisi hills of my childhood, knowing something was
wrong but not knowing what. The room was dark except for a little
glow from the lamp in the corner where Thu keeps watch. Thu wasn’t
there; he stood in the doorway looking out into the corridor
beyond, a black shape against not-quite-darkness.

A moment later I knew what brought him there.
A faint vibration came up through the concrete around us, deep and
steady. I recognized it at once as old world machinery. You don’t
find that in working order often in ruins, but it does happen, and
when it does it usually means the worst kind of trouble.

I was on my feet before I quite realized it.
Thu glanced back at me and made a quick silent gesture: come.

I got my feet into my boots, threw on my
ruinman’s jacket, got my toolbelt around my waist. A moment later I
was standing beside him at the doorway. He pointed to the stair,
but I was already looking at it, and the dim light that came up
through it.

“I’ll wake the others,” I said in less than a
whisper. He nodded, never looking away from the stair’s mouth.

A few moments later we were all awake. “The
light and the sound came at the same moment,” Thu told us, his
voice low. “Nothing else. No sound or sign of anyone.”

“Could the machines have turned themselves
on?” Tashel Ban asked.

All of us looked at Anna. She tilted her
head, thinking. “It’s possible,” she said after a moment. “There
were certainly machineries that worked by themselves, but I wasn’t
allowed down into the lower levels—none of the children were.”

“Someone must go,” said Thu. He meant he
should, and I had been about to say the same thing about me, so I
just grinned. He gave me a look and nodded once, and the two of us
went to the door together. The first time Thu and I met, he did his
level best to kill me, and there’s nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly
I trust more.

Five levels down and one room over from the
stair was most of a wall covered with lights and screens. A couple
of days earlier, when we’d searched those rooms, they were dark and
dead, but now the lights were on and the screens lit up. Our
earlier footprints were the only ones in the dust on the floor, so
Thu went back up the stair to tell the others while I looked at the
blank glowing screens and thought about the robot’s hand.

Eleen and Tashel Ban both told me, when I
asked them last night, that the way to write a story like mine is
to start at the beginning and go on step by step until you get to
the end. She’s a scholar from Melumi and he’s more or less what
they have in Nuwinga in place of scholars from Melumi, and they
both know a lot more about writing than I do, but try as I might
this thing I’m writing won’t follow their advice. If Plummer was
right, and my story is part of his one story, it got started a long
time before I did, and there’s no way to keep the earlier parts of
it out of the part I meant to tell.

So I’m going to have to take some pages here
to write about the Robot’s Hand, even though that part of the story
happened to me more than ten years before Gray Garman and I found
the letter in the Shanuga underplaces. If other people ever read
this, they might be able to understand the rest of the story I want
to tell without knowing about the Hand, but they won’t understand
me or Berry or the ruinmen, and I’m not sure at all that they’ll be
able to figure out why Berry and I turned our backs on the life
we’d been living among the Shanuga ruinmen and went looking for a
place nobody had been able to find for more than four hundred
years. To explain the Hand, though, I’m going to have to go a bit
further back, to a gray rainy morning when I was nine years old and
the world I thought I knew had just fallen apart around me.

That was after my father was called up to
fight the coastal allegiancies and never came back from the war. My
mother waited out the rest of that year hoping the news was wrong,
but the men who straggled back from the Cairline coast had little
hope to offer. He’d been in the front ranks at Durrem, they said,
when the Jinya cavalry broke through our lines, and those who
didn’t run fast got reborn in a hurry. My father wasn’t the kind of
man to turn and run.

When the rains came and went without word,
and everyone knew that there wasn’t any use in hoping further, my
mother sent for a priestess to say the litany for him, and then set
about selling our farm. If ours had been a bigger family she might
have been able to keep it, but it was just the two of us, and I
wasn’t old enough for the heavy work. With the war and all, there
were enough empty farms that she couldn’t get much for it, but she
got enough to get us to her family in Shanuga and maybe enough to
find me a place as a prentice there.

So we gave away everything we couldn’t take
and hadn’t been bought by the farm’s new owners, loaded up the rest
in a couple of packs, and started walking one cool wet morning down
out of the hills toward Shanuga. I don’t remember much of anything
about the journey, though it took us three days and I’d never been
anything like that far from home. I’d cried when we first heard my
father wasn’t coming home, and cried again when it became pretty
much clear that was true, and then again when my mother told me we
had to leave the farm, but somehow none of that was quite real to
me until I shouldered the pack and followed her out through a gate
I’d known since I was born, and that I suddenly knew I’d never see
any more. There were no tears bitter enough for that, and I simply
trudged along in the mud behind my mother, thinking of nothing,
feeling nothing but a huge cold empty space where my life had
been.