Star's Reach (54 page)

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 not 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.

“Some of the details,” Eleen said then,
sourly. “I suppose that means that the electors are grumbling
because they have to talk to a tween.”

“Or a ruinman,” I said, grinning. “At least
he’s not a lumberman. Can you imagine how they’d have carried on if
that was how things had turned out?”

That chased the strange look off Berry’s
face, and he laughed and aimed a swat at me, which I ducked. All of
us laughed, and for a moment it was just the five of us again,
instead of four of us and the next presden of Meriga and a mother
of a lot of people reading about it all in some history book that
hasn’t even been written yet. Tashel Ban offered everyone another
drink, I took him up on it, and so did Berry, and then the
announcer finished saying whatever it was that he was saying, and
we went off to our rooms and I sat at my desk and thought about
jennels.

Most ruinmen never get to meet one, and even
though things turned out the way they did, I’m not sorry that I
knew Jennel Cobey. That’s partly, well, because most ruinmen never
get to meet one, but it’s also because Cobey Taggart was one of the
most likeable people I’ve ever known. He never forgot for a moment
that he came from an old proud Tucki family that was some kind of
relation to the presden, but he didn’t go around expecting everyone
else to remember that all the time, the way some jennels and
cunnels do. When he talked with me, it felt like I had every bit of
his attention for that moment, and it didn’t matter that I was a
ruinman with dirt on my leathers and he might just become the next
presden.

That was true all through the time I knew
him, but it was even more true while we were traveling out here to
Star’s Reach. On that trip he wasn’t surrounded by soldiers and
servants, the way he usually was. He had his man Banyon with him,
but that was all, and the two of them ate the same food and sat at
the same campfire as the rest of us, and kept watch at night over
the horses and the camp when their turns came; and we talked about
everything and nothing, not just as travelers do but as
friends.

That’s the way it was, all along the journey
from Cansiddi west to here. It was a special time, too, though
there again I didn’t recognize that until we were almost to Star’s
Reach, where it ended. I wonder to this day if it was a special
time for him, or for that matter if he had any idea how it was
about to end.

I’ve written already about how we found the
two fences and then came in sight of the low blunt concrete shapes
of the antenna housings, and found the door half buried in the
sand. There were high thin clouds overhead and gray sandy desert
all around us, and the sun was well over to the western side of the
sky. If we’d gone walking into the antenna housings for another
couple of kloms we would have found the door to the living quarters
where we’re staying now and spared ourselves some searching, though
of course we didn’t know that yet. We got to work right away with
shovels and cleared the sand away from the door, and I got the lock
picked, and finally hauled the thing open despite the shriek of the
hinges.

Inside was darkness, and a smell I more than
half expected and recognized at once, the lightning-smell you get
when there’s a mother of a lot of electricity flowing very close
by. As my eyes got used to the dim light inside, I could see the
thin lines of metal crossing the floor, full of current.

“Trapped,” I said.

“Can you turn it off?” Jennel Cobey asked,
looking past me into Star’s Reach.

“If it’s a standard trap, I think so.” Then,
staring into the darkness, I saw the little red light on the far
side of the room. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll need to get my tools.”

“Do it,” he said, in a different voice. I
turned away from the door, startled, and only then saw that he had
drawn his gun. Back behind him, Banyon had another gun out, and
moved away from the door to cover everyone else in the group.

“I’m sorry to say there’s been a change of
plans,” Jennel Cobey said then, to all of us. “Don’t move or say
anything, and there won’t be any trouble. Otherwise—well, Banyon
and I will both start shooting, and the rest of my people will be
here in a few minutes once they hear the shots. Yes, there’s been a
party following us the whole way. All of you—” He motioned to
everyone but Banyon and me. “Get over there, away from the door.
Trey, you’ll get your tools and disarm the trap now.”

He followed me as I went to the horse that
had my gear in its pack, got the things I needed, and went back to
the door. I could feel the gun pointed at me the whole way.

While I did that I was trying to think,
trying to figure out why he was doing what he was, and what he was
going to do next, and a thought I didn’t like at all was settling
in somewhere in my belly, cold and heavy as old metal. If he wanted
a contract dig, he didn’t need the guns. He didn’t need them if he
meant to do anything the laws allowed, and if he planned on doing
something else, it was pretty clear what his next step would have
to be, once he’d gotten me to open the door to Star’s Reach.