Star's Reach

Star's Reach

Copyright
©
2014 by John
Michael Greer

Published 2014 by Founders House Publishing,
LLC

Cover art
©
Fotografieco/Dreamstime.com

Cover art
© Markus
Gann/Dreamstime.com

Cover Design © 2014 Founders House
Publishing

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Full Contents

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About The Author

Copyright

There’s a certain irony in the fact that this
tale of the deindustrial future first appeared in serial form as a
monthly blog post on the internet, that most baroque of modern
industrial society’s technosystems. That said, I’m grateful to all
those who read, praised, and criticized the story in its original
form, and thus contributed mightily to whatever virtues it may
have.

My gratitude and thanks are also due to Harry
Lerwill and Dana Driscoll for their help revising and editing the
manuscript, and to Shaun Kilgore for seeing it into print.

One: The Place of Beginnings and
Endings

One wet day on the road that runs alongside
the Hiyo River toward Sisnaddi, Plummer told me that every story in
the world is just a scrap of the only story there really is, one
big and nameless tale that winds from the beginning of things all
the way to the end and sweeps up everything worth telling in
between. Everybody has some part in that story, he said, even if
it’s just a matter of watching smoke from a battle over the next
hill or listening to news that’s whispered in the night. Some
people wander further into the story and then wander right back out
of it again, after they’ve carried a message or a load of firewood
that settles the fate of a country or a dream. Sometimes, though,
somebody no different from any of these others stumbles and falls
into the deep places of the only story there is, and gets picked up
and spun around like a leaf in a flood until finally the waters
either drown him for good or toss him up gasping and alive on the
bank.

Plummer said all of that between one mouthful
of cheap Tucki whiskey and the next, as we sat and waited out the
rain under the shelter of a ragged gray ruin left over from the old
world, and I nodded and said nothing and decided he was drunk. Now,
though, I’m not so sure. Yesterday I got to the one place on Mam
Gaia’s round belly I’d given up expecting ever to come, and nearly
got reborn doing it. As the five of us who made it here sat in the
darkness and waited for nightfall and wondered if we would live to
see morning, the thought came to me more than once that this
journey I’m trying to write out just now is part of something a
mother of a lot bigger than the travels of one stray ruinman from
Shanuga—bigger, for that matter, than the different roads that led
each of us here, bigger than Shanuga or Meriga itself.

For all I know, Plummer may be right. If he
is, I know to the day when his one story caught me up and set me on
the road to Star’s Reach. It was the morning of the sixth of Semba
in the thirty-seventh year of Sheren’s time as Presden, four
hundred years and some more after the old world ended and ours
began. That was the day I turned twenty. It was the day I became a
ruinman, and I nearly got myself reborn then, too.

I was in the Shanuga ruins that morning, down
in the underplaces of a big building that must have soared way up
above its neighbors before storms and clumsy scavengers brought it
down. Now most of it lay sprawled over two blocks of smaller ruins,
filling up one of the old streets in between. Streaks of rust ran
down the concrete and showed where rain liked to pool and flow in
the wet season, but there was good metal in the ruin as well, and
maybe reason to hope that valuables might have been left in the
buildings that got buried in the rubble when the old tower went
down.

Still, that was work for other ruinmen. When
the guild misters held a lodge after the rains and pulled shards
from a pot to settle who got what part of the dry season’s
diggings, Mister Garman drew the piece that stood for the
underplaces of the tower. Gray Garman, we called him—we in this
case meaning his prentices; he was tall and lean and dark, with a
head of tight curled gray hair and a short gray beard and a frown,
more often than not, that twisted his mouth to one side and made
him look as though he was thinking about something dead.

He hadn’t been frowning the morning he told
us what the draw had given us, and for good reason. The underplaces
of the old towers are dangerous, worse even than the upper floors
of a tower that hasn’t quite gotten around to falling over or
pancaking, but there’s no place you’re more likely to find the sort
of salvage that can pay for a dozen sparse seasons in a single day.
Once the rains stopped and the ground dried out enough, then, we
went to work on it, clearing rubble out of the old stairwells and
shoring up places where cracks ran through the concrete and might
bring all of it down on our heads. As it turned out, though, Garman
might as well have frowned; whether the tower was abandoned and
stripped before the old world ended or cleared by scavengers in the
drought years afterwards, we never did figure out, but room after
room was as empty of salvage as it could be.

We spent most of two months making sure we’d
been through all of it, every closet and corridor, and finally
Garman decided it was time to start cracking the concrete. By this
time some of the other misters and their prentices had much better
finds, and made sure we knew about it; Mister Calwel, who was as
close to an enemy as Garman had, found a parking garage that fell
in with half a dozen cars still in it, and got to haggle with the
metal merchants over that while we were coming back with empty
hands.

Garman told us first thing that morning, the
morning I turned twenty, that we’d go to work breaking the building
down the following day. I didn’t mind the extra time off, since
there’s no harder work in the ruinman’s craft than pounding
concrete with hammers to get the metal inside it, and the girders,
rebar, and iron pipe you get from it don’t bring that much money.
Still, I had another reason to want a day’s delay. All the time we
spent searching the building, I’d been chased by the feeling that
we’d missed something, and I wanted another look at it before we
went to work with the hammers.

I told Garman as much, not long after he’d
announced the day off. I expected him to frown and tell me not to
waste my time. He frowned, sure enough, but said nothing for a long
moment and then nodded once. “Well,” he said. “Let me know,
Trey.”

“I’ll do that, Sir and Mister,” I told him,
and went to get my tools. That year I was his senior prentice, and
so had tools of my own: pry bar, grapplehook, hammer and chisels,
thin-blade knife and wide-blade knife, a couple of electric lamps,
and a bag of special things for papers and the like, since Gray
Garman did jobs for the scholars in Melumi now and then and knew
what they wanted. With a belt full of tools, a steel hat on my
head, and ruinman’s leathers already caked with a dry season’s
dust, I felt ready for anything, and I went from our camp by the
river to the stairwell we’d cleared.

One of Garman’s other prentices, a boy of
thirteen or so named Berry, waved to me as I got to the stairwell;
he was up above in the tangled wreck of the tower, pulling wire out
of a conduit—that was one of the ways prentices could make a few
spare marks in off hours, salvaging wire to sell the copper. I did
the same thing the day before and had a big tangle of heavy copper
wire in my pocket, nicely stripped of its insulation and ready to
sell when the metal merchants next came by. I waved back and
started down.

Down below the air was cold and still and
damp. I tapped the switch on the electric lantern and tried to get
my thoughts clear, emptying out the chattering mind the way the
priestesses teach. What had we missed? I let the question sink into
silence, waited for a moment, and then headed deeper in, following
nothing I could name.

Two levels down and over toward the river
side was a big square room with a couple of closets on one side.
We’d shored the ceiling here with timbers, because that side of the
building had taken more damage than the others, and a bit of light
filtered down through the holes where old ventilation ducts used to
run. The closets were empty, like everything else down there, and
we’d added to the empty look by taking off the metal doors and
their frames and hauling them away to sell. For all I could see,
the room and its closets had nothing more to offer than the rest of
the ruin, but something just wouldn’t let me pass them by.

So I went around the room a senamee at a
time, checking the walls and the floor for any sign of an opening
that had been sealed up or hidden. When I found nothing, I went to
the closets. The first had nothing better to offer, but as I
crossed to the second I felt the little prickle of knowledge that
said I’d been right. There on the floor, where the door frame had
covered it, a seam split the concrete; the closet’s floor had been
poured at a different time than the room’s, and though it was hard
to tell in the dim light from the lantern, the floor of the closet
looked more recent: a little coarser and visibly more cracked.

If Mam Gaia had given me the brains she gave
geese, I would have stopped then, gone back up to the surface and
found a half dozen prentices to help. Instead, I went into the
closet, set the lantern down in the doorway, and started to crouch
down so I could get a better look at the floor. I was maybe halfway
there when the floor creaked, lurched beneath my feet, and fell
away.

I jumped for the door the moment the floor
shifted, but it dropped too fast, and the best I could do was catch
myself on a couple of pieces of broken rebar below the doorway as a
crash and a great choking cloud of dust came up from below. The
lantern teetered and then fell, just missing my head; I got a brief
glimpse of a little square room below me, and then the lantern
struck a piece of fallen concrete. I heard glass break and the
light went out, and then the rest of it rolled onto the floor.
Light flared again, brief and blue-white, like lightning, and the
lightning-smell the scholars call ozone tinged the air.

That was when I knew just how close I was to
getting reborn.

The ancients did a thing, clever and nasty,
with certain places here and there in the ruins. They took big
cylinders that turn out a steady trickle of electricity—nobody
knows exactly how they work, but if you cut one open your radiation
detectors go crazy and everyone nearby will be dead by day’s end,
so it was something nuclear—and wired them up to banks of metal
plates that are shielded from one another so they hold a charge.
Wires from those plates go to thin metal strips in the floor of the
entrances to the places I mentioned. You can’t see the strips
unless you know what to look for, and if you step on the wrong two
of them at the same time, the charge goes through you and you
fry.