Star's Reach (7 page)

That’s how I spent the rest of the day,
except for a spare little meal of bread and thin soup around noon
and another meal, even scantier, come sunset. I worried a bit about
whether I’d get enough to eat as a prentice, but I didn’t have a
lot of other choices just then, and I knew it; my name was already
on the papers, and it wasn’t as though I had anywhere else to go.
Then it was up to the sleeping room. I thought it was early for
sleep, and of course it was, but everyone but me knew what was
about to happen.

As soon as the door closed I realized that
everyone was looking at me. “Trey,” said the senior prentice, a big
redhead nineteen years old named Bil, “You ever had anybody in your
family who was a ruinman or a ruinman’s prentice?”

“No,” I admitted.

Bill considered me for a moment. “Then you
didn’t know that putting your name on a bit of paper isn’t all
there is to becoming a prentice here.” He waited for an answer.
Finally I said, “What do I have to do?”

He leaned toward me, and in a loud whisper
said, “We’ve got a robot in the cellar. If you’re going to be a
prentice here, you’ve got to meet the robot.”

For all I know, it’s only in Meriga and
Nuwinga that people like to scare each other silly by telling robot
stories late at night, and if anybody ever reads these words, it’s
as likely they’ll come to Star’s Reach from Genda, or Meyco, or the
Neeonjin country past the dead lands on the far side of the
mountains, as from our little piece of Mam Gaia’s belly. My father
could tell a robot story in a way that would make the chairs
shiver. He had a way of making robot sounds, too, so when the robot
finally showed up, you didn’t have to imagine the clanking and
buzzing it made as it headed toward whoever was about to be
buttered all over the walls.

So the half of me that believed what Bil was
saying was terrified, and the half of me that figured he was
telling a story was fascinated. “Okay,” I said, and my voice shook
enough to make the story sound pretty convincing, even to me.

“Good,” said Bil. In a quieter whisper:
“We’ve got to go all the way down the stairs, and not wake Mister
Garman. Not a sound.”

A moment later we were all trooping down the
stairs, barefoot and silent, down floor by floor until we finally
got to the cold damp silence of the cellar. Nobody brought a light,
so it was blacker than black. Bil took my arm and led me somewhere,
then had me sit down on something flat that I guessed was a wooden
box. “Wait here,” he whispered. “The robot’s on its way.”

I sat there for a while, and had just about
decided that the joke was to leave me in the cellar and slip back
upstairs to sleep, when I heard something somewhere in the darkness
ahead of me: a faint cold clank, like metal landing on stone.

“You hear it?” Bil was still close by, though
I hadn’t known it.

“Yes,” I said, and this time my voice was
shaking for real.

Another clank followed, a little louder. Then
there was a long silence, and then more clanks, a slow steady beat
of them, as though something was walking on metal feet: something
that was getting closer to me in the cellar. After a bit I could
hear a faint buzzing and beeping that would be the machinery inside
it.

“Here it comes,” Bil hissed at me. I didn’t
answer, because I’d seen two tiny red lights ahead of me. They
turned this way and that, as if they were looking for me. I knew
that that was exactly what they were doing; I knew they were the
robot’s eyes.

The clanking and buzzing got louder, and
louder, and the little red dots of its eyes got closer and loomed
up above me. I could just about see a darker shape against the
darkness, and imagined its glinting metal and wires.

“Put out your hand,” Bill whispered to me
then. “You’ve got to shake the robot’s hand.”

I don’t think more than a tiny sliver of me
still thought that it was all just a joke by then, but there was
still only one thing I could do. I bit my lip and drew in a breath
and put out my hand, and felt cold metal touch it, then suddenly
clamp hard around it and move it up and down in quick mechanical
jerks.

Then, blinding, light: a dozen electric lamps
turned on all at once, and along with it laughter and whoops that
rang off the cellar walls. It took a moment before I could see
anything, and only then did I see the robot: another of the senior
prentices, of course, with a glove covered with pieces of metal on
his right hand, and a hat on top of his head with two little red
lamps on it. All the other prentices were gathered around him, and
some of them had noisemakers in their hands: pieces of metal to tap
on the stone floor, little toothed wheels that made a buzzing sound
when you turned them, and reed whistles to make the beeps.

“You see that?” Bil said to the others. “He
reached right out. Come on.”

Still laughing and whooping, the whole lot of
them more than half dragged me back up the stairs to the dining
room on the fourth floor. Mister Garman was sitting in a big chair
at the head of the table, dressed in the formal clothes of a guild
mister, and straight in a line down the table in front of him was
as much food as I’d ever seen in one place.

The prentices lined up on the other side of
the room, and got as silent as they could. Bil pushed me a step out
in front, and then said in a voice that could have passed for a
jennel of the presden’s court in Sisnaddi, “Sir and Mister, the
newest apprentice, Trey sunna Gwen.”

“Has he shaken the robot’s hand?” Mister
Garman asked in the same oh-so-formal tone.

“He has, Sir and Mister.” Then, grinning:
“Put his hand right out.
And
we didn’t have to drag him down
the stairs.”

“Then let the feasting begin,” said Mister
Garman. He got up from his chair, with the closest thing to a
genuine smile on his face that I ever remember seeing there, and
walked to the door. He turned to me and said, “You’ll do well,
Trey.” Then, to the others: “Don’t make him do all the cleaning—but
this room and the kitchen had better be spotless tomorrow
morning.”

The moment he left the room, everyone made
for the food, but there was more than enough to go around, meat
pies and sweetcakes and just about anything else good you care to
think about, and birch punch to drink, which I’d never had before.
I gathered from the talk that the scant meals and the hard work
were parts of whatever test I’d taken and passed, for some of the
prentices laughed about how they’d all but had to be dragged down
to the cellar, and others how they’d just about decided to give up
and go back to their families, and there were a few who mentioned
boys who did just that, up and quit after two bleak meals and a lot
of hard work, or who bolted out the door into the night because
they were too afraid of meeting the robot.

I didn’t mention that I’d had my share of
hard work and scant meals as a farmer’s only child up in the hills,
though that was mostly because I was too well fed and comfortable
by the time the point seemed worth making. Still, I did my share of
the cleaning when it came to that, and the dining room and kitchen
were close to spotless when we got up the next morning.

It’s a funny thing, the robot’s hand. Every
ruinman’s prentice, not just Garman’s, gets to shake the robot’s
hand, and ever after that there’s a line between you and everyone
who hasn’t gone to meet the robot. The old world is a little less
distant, maybe, and the things that people outside the ruinmen’s
guild think and say seem a little less important. Certainly, as I
lay in bed and tried to quiet my mind enough to sleep, the night
after I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga underplaces and
got started on the road to Star’s Reach, the robot’s hand was what
kept coming to mind; I imagined myself going down some other stair,
in some vast ruin I could barely imagine, and shaking a hand that
didn’t have another prentice on the other side of it.

Maybe that’s what the ancients who built
Star’s Reach were trying to do, in their own way. I know it’s one
of the things that sends ruinmen down into the underplaces of the
old world’s dead cities, when the pay’s so often poor these days
and so many of us get reborn in the doing of it. To touch something
that thinks but isn’t human, or isn’t the kind of human we are
nowadays: it’s a heady thing, and it makes my head spin to think
that I’m as close to doing that as I write these words as anyone
has been since the old world ended.

Five: The Road to Melumi

The morning after the day I found the letter
came way too early. I dragged myself off of my cot about the time
first light came up in the east, found some cold water to wash
with, and made myself about as presentable as somebody who hasn’t
had time to sleep off one mother of a lot of beer is likely to get.
The face that looked back at me from the little tin mirror over the
washbasin wasn’t much different from the one that blinked back the
morning before, barring the cut on my cheek, but I felt different.
At the time, I thought that was a matter of becoming a ruinman and
a mister of the guild, or maybe squeaking past getting reborn by a
senamee or two. Looking back, though, I think it was probably the
beer.

Finally I got dressed in ruinman’s leathers
and left my tent, and damn if Berry wasn’t right: there must have
been twenty prentices waiting for me with hopeful looks. Some were
just about as old as I was, and some were so young they must have
signed on with their misters just before that season, but it took
all of one look to tell me that every one of them was hoping I’d
pick him and nobody else to be my first prentice. I had just about
enough wits in my head to raise a hand before they all started
talking at once. “Already chose my prentice,” I told them. “Sorry.”
A couple of the youngest ones burst into tears, and all of them
gave me the kind of look that makes you feel like you just stomped
their puppy or something.

That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest,
and I waited until they were leaving and walked a bit unsteadily
over to Gray Garman’s tent. I’m sure the man slept sometime, but in
all the years I worked for him I could count the times I saw him
sleeping or washing up or anything on the fingers of one foot. This
morning was no different. He had his tent flap open, and waved me
in when I stopped just outside. Berry was there already, clean and
bright-eyed and doing his level best not to jump out of his skin
with excitement, but Garman just looked me up and down the way he
always did, waved me to a chair, and said, “You decided?”

He meant the letter or the finder’s rights to
Star’s Reach: one a big chunk of easy money but nothing more, the
other nothing more than a hope, maybe, but a hope of finding the
thing every ruinman dreams of finding. I sat down on the chair,
looked at him, and said, “I keep on telling myself that I ought to
have some brains.”

For once, Garman laughed. It was as dry as an
old granny’s whatnot and as short as a dumb ruinman’s life, but it
was still a laugh. If he’d suddenly sprouted feathers I don’t think
I’d have been more surprised. “If I was twenty years younger,” he
said, “I’d be telling myself that.” Then: “Berry says you picked
him.”

“That’s right.”

Garman nodded once. “Good choice. He’ll be of
use.” Berry lit up like a lamp; Garman didn’t say that sort of
thing lightly. “The original’s going to Shanuga today for auction,”
Garman went on, “but a copy needs to go to Melumi right quick; Mam
Kelsey’s talked with them by radio and they want it. You headed
that way?”

I hadn’t even begun to make plans yet, but it
suddenly seemed like the best possible idea, not least because I
guessed what Garman had in mind. “I was thinking that,” I lied.

“Good.” He pulled two copies of the letter
off a table next to his chair, handed them to me. “One for you and
one for the scholars. And here—” He tossed me a leather bag that
landed in my hand with a clink. “Ought to be about a fifth of what
they’ll pay. That’ll keep the two of you in food on the way.”

A fifth of the price was courier’s wages, but
from the hard plump shape of the bag, he’d rounded up a good bit. I
pretended not to notice, and thanked him.

“Don’t mention it.” He leaned forward, then,
and gave me one of his looks. “Now listen. You two go fast, keep
mum, and stay off the main roads. Some people might kill to get
this before the Versty does.” He handed me another sheet of paper.
“This might help.”

I read the paper. It was a letter from him to
some mister in the Cago ruins, up north on the lakes, saying the
Shanuga ruins didn’t have room for a new mister and asking the Cago
ruinmen to find a place for me. “If anyone asks, that’s why we’re
traveling.”

“That’s right.” Then: “And it’s close enough
to true, anyway.”

I knew what he was talking about, of course.
The Shanuga ruins still had a lot of metal in them, but raw metal
doesn’t pay a ruinman much, and the good finds—old machines and
rare metals and documents—had been getting scarcer since before I
was born. I’d already heard of towns where they’d closed the guild;
they only allowed a certain number of misters, and a prentice
couldn’t make mister unless somebody had just died or he was ready
to go somewhere else. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that there might
not always be somewhere else to go. That came to mind later, after
I’d traveled a bit and learned just how close the ruinmen’s guilds
had gotten to digging themselves out of business.

After that we had some papers to sign for
Berry, so the laws would treat him as my prentice and not Garman’s.
Garman put his name on the lines and I put mine, and then Berry
surprised the stuffing out of me by reading the papers and signing
his own name nice and neat in the right place. Then we said our
goodbyes and Garman cuffed me on the shoulder, one mister to
another, and Berry and I left the tent and went to get some food
before we started.