Star's Reach (9 page)

It’s because of that third kind of poison,
the priestesses say, that so many women can’t have babies and so
many men can’t father them, and that’s also why so many of the
babies that do get born are sick from birth and die young. Still,
you also get babies who are born different rather than sick. You
get green children, for one. When they’re young, there’s something
in their skin that feeds the little green one-celled plants the
priestesses talk about so much, and so they turn a nice grass green
a few weeks after they’re born and stay that way until they get
into their teen years, and then the little plants go away and their
skin turns brown again. Up in Mishga and Skonsa and Aiwa you get a
lot of people with a coat of hair all over them like bears; down in
the border country near Meyco you get a lot of women with four
breasts instead of two, and men with four nipples: there’s a lot of
that sort of thing.

Then there are tweens. There are more of them
than the others, and they’re called tweens because they’re not
really men or women but something in between. The two of them I’ve
ever seen with their clothes off had something like a set of each
kind between their legs, and little breasts you’d never notice
under a shirt. The priestesses say that tweens count as men,
meaning they can’t be priestesses or belong to Circle; most other
people aren’t too sure what to make of them, and there are places
where they’re not welcome. Even before Berry and I traveled
together, that last thing seemed stupid to me, but then people do
nearly as many stupid things nowadays as they did back in the old
world.

I got the fire fed, and saw that Berry was
watching me. “You know,” he said, “I should probably tell you my
story – about where I came from and how I got to be Garman’s
prentice.” He looked down. “Since I’m your prentice now, and there
are some things you ought to know.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He drew in a breath, just a bit raggedly, and
began.

Six: The Gray Towers

I’ve been trying for two days now to figure
out the best way to write about what Berry told me that night in
the forest, and tore half a dozen pages out of the notebook before
I realized I’d better work it out before I wrote another word. Part
of the problem is that I don’t know who’s going to read this, if
anyone ever does. For all I know we might die here at Star’s Reach,
and Meriga could have a fourth civil war once Sheren dies and
there’s no heir to step up and become Presden, and the next people
to come this way might be from the Neeonjin country, or someplace
even farther away that nobody on this side of the world has heard
about for four hundred years. What can I write that they’ll
understand?

Take Nashul, where Berry said he’d been born
and grew up. I’ve never been there, but they say it looks a lot
like Shanuga, only bigger—the same gray walls made of old world
concrete and mortar, the same tall narrow houses and winding narrow
streets inside the walls, the same places outside the walls for
things nobody wants to think about, and a ruinmen’s hall out there
somewhere that looks like somebody took a bad dream and tried to
build it out of salvaged metal. Most cities in Meriga look like
that if they’re big enough to have walls at all, so unless you’re a
ruinman and know how towns used to look in the old world, or work
in another trade that knows the same things, it might never occur
to you that towns haven’t always been that way.

It’s just too easy, though, for me to picture
somebody who’s walked all the way over the mountains and the dead
lands from the Neeonjin country, with straw sandals on his feet and
a couple of swords at his belt, like the Neeonjin man in a picture
book I had when I was little. He turns on a light and sits down
here at this steel desk, and opens this notebook all anyhow, and
the first thing he reads is me going on about the walled cities
we’ve got here in Meriga. The priestesses say that there are places
on Mam Gaia’s round belly where there aren’t any cities at all,
either because there aren’t enough people or because there are laws
against it. If they don’t have towns in the Neeonjin country or the
ones they have don’t look like ours, whoever reads this will
probably decide I was drunk or dreaming when I wrote, and use the
rest of the notebook to light a fire to cook his dinner.

Here in Meriga, though, cities have gray
walls and narrow streets and everything else I mentioned earlier.
Nashul’s like that, and Nashul’s what Berry started talking about
first, that night in the forest where the two of us sat and tried
to pretend we weren’t scared of what might be moving around out
there in the darkness.

“I was born in Nashul inside the walls, as I
said,” he told me. He was facing our little fire, turned half away
from me, with his arms folded around his knees. “Born up high, like
they say, but raised down low. My mother’s mother was a big name in
Circle, big enough that whether my mother got into Circle mattered
a lot to the family. So my mother went playing, once she got to the
age that girls do that.”

There’s another thing: Circle. You find
Circle everywhere in Meriga and Nuwinga; they’ve got it in Genda
and the coastal allegiancies, too, except it’s not quite the same,
and nothing like as powerful; down in Meyco they don’t have it at
all, and I don’t suppose anybody knows what mothers do or don’t do
in the Neeonjin country or the Arab countries across the sea, or
anywhere else further off. Ask anybody who’s in Circle and they’ll
tell you that it’s as old as people are on Mam Gaia, that women
already got together in Circle in the days when everyone lived in
caves and made tools out of rocks, the way the priestesses said we
all did a long time ago, long before the old world got started.
Maybe that’s so, but I never saw a word about Circle in old books,
not even when I was in Sisnaddi for most of a year searching the
archives in what I thought was the last chance I had to find Star’s
Reach.

Now if I could sit down with that Neeonjin
traveler over a meal and a couple of beers, I could tell him about
Circle, or as much about it as a man is ever going to know. I’d
tell him what I learned from Plummer, and talk about how back in
the days after the old world died and ours was born, maybe one
woman in a dozen was able to have healthy babies, and the ones who
could banded together to help each other, when there was no other
help from anywhere else. I’d tell him how those circles of women
spread and linked up with each other, and linked up with the
priestesses, too, until pretty soon every town and city had Circle,
and if you wanted to make something happen, even if you were the
presden, you pretty much had to hope that Circle wasn’t against it.
There’s a reason why most of the presdens Meriga’s had for the last
two hundred years have been women.

“And you were what happened,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

I let out a whistle. “That must have caused a
flutter or two.”

“That’s what they told me.” With a little
laugh: “They were all set to bring my mother into Circle as soon as
I was born. They’d already made all the plans for the ceremony, and
then I came out tween and the whole thing had to be hushed up in a
hurry. They’d probably just have pressed a pillow over my face and
solved the problem that way, except my mother’s family were Old
Believers and she wouldn’t let the birth women do that.”

Then there are the Old Believers. I’d never
yet met one of them, that night when Berry told me his story,
though I’ve met them since. They don’t worship Mam Gaia and they
don’t watch their dreams for messages from her; they’ve got a god
of their own who’s dead, except he’s not really dead, and they talk
to him instead of listening for what he has to say. They say that
in the old world most everyone believed the way they do, and one of
them I met in Memfis told me that what happened to the old world
was their god’s doing, not Mam Gaia’s or just what happens when you
do enough dumb things for long enough and the consequences finally
gang up and clobber you.

But the Old Believers won’t kill newborns,
even those that are born horribly sick and won’t live for more than
a couple of hours anyway, and there’s all kinds of other things
they won’t do, and some things that we won’t do don’t bother them a
bit. There are a few Old Believer families who are big names in
Circle or in the army, but they mostly keep to themselves, in their
own villages and their own cramped little quarters in cities, where
they make and sell things that the priestesses say are wrong but
people want anyway.

“So I got sent outside the walls,” said
Berry. “They found a woman who’d had a dead child and was willing
to nurse me instead, and paid her to go live off by herself in a
little house off by itself. So that’s where I grew up, and that’s
most of what I remember of Nashul.”

He stopped for a bit, so I asked, “She was
the one who taught you to read?”

That got me a quick glance. “Nah, I had a
teacher who visited three times a week for a while. When she
stopped coming, I was old enough to go to school with the
priestesses. I was seven by then, and Ranna—that’s the name of the
woman who took care of me—she told me that my mother had a healthy
baby and had gotten into Circle after all, and so I’d better get
used to living like everyone else.”

It took me a moment to catch what Berry
meant. “If she hadn’t –”

“There’d be no reason to pretend I didn’t
exist.” A shrug. “So she had her healthy baby and for all I know
she’s a big name in Circle now.”

“Ouch.”

He went on as though he hadn’t heard. “So I
went to school with the priestesses for a while, and then it came
time for me to prentice with somebody, and I got told that I could
go into any trade I wanted, but it wasn’t going to be in Nashul. So
I said I wanted to be a ruinman, and about six weeks later some men
came and got me and everything I had and put it all in a wagon and
drove halfway across Tenisi to Gray Garman’s house on the ruinmen’s
street in Shanuga.”

I waited until I was pretty sure he was
finished, and said, “I remember when you showed up and we had you
shake the robot’s hand.”

That got me another glance, and then a sudden
grin. “When we all went back upstairs and met Mister Garman, that
was the first time I can think of when I really felt that somebody
was happy to have me around.” Then: “Garman knew I was a tween, and
a couple of prentices found out—when you sleep in a tent with
somebody, it’s not too easy to keep your middle covered up all the
time. But nobody made any kind of fuss about it. I was just another
prentice.”

“And now you’ve got a mister dumb enough he
thinks he can find Star’s Reach.”

“And still pinching myself sometimes to make
sure I’m not just dreaming that.” Then, suddenly serious: “But if
you ever wondered why I can read and do numbers and talk like a
jennel, when I’m Berry sunna nobody, Mister Trey, now you
know.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. I’m glad you can
read; that could be a mother of a lot of help.”

He grinned again. “I’m hoping.”

We talked about some other things after that,
though I don’t remember a word of it, and finally got sleepy enough
that the night around our little camp didn’t seem half so
threatening. So we wrapped up in our blankets, and I went to sleep
thinking about Berry’s story, and Tam, who I haven’t written about
yet and need to.

That might have had something to do with the
dream I had that night. I was in Deesee again, walking down the
wide empty streets with the fish swimming down them and the surface
of the water all silver and rolling fifty meedas overhead. This
time Tam was with me; she had her blue dress on, the one I tore
once when we were playing, and her hair was tied up in a scarf, the
way she used to wear it when she wanted to annoy her family. We
walked down the street and turned to see the Spire soaring up from
its low hill. Tam tried to say something to me, but all that came
out of her mouth was bubbles of air that drifted up between us, so
she pressed her body up against mine.

Right then I woke up. The first gray light of
dawn was starting to filter down through the forest. Berry was
sound asleep and still wrapped up in his blanket, but he’d moved up
against me, no doubt for the warmth. I lay there and thought about
Tam, wondering what she’d made of her life since she had her baby
and got into Circle. After a bit, I got up, and Berry woke up; we
washed up by the riverbank and got something to eat, then
shouldered our packs and found our way back to the road.

The old dream about Deesee kept on coming
back to me, night after night, while Berry and I walked north out
of Tenisi and started across Tucki. That was about the only
interesting thing that happened for most of two weeks, though. The
road we followed ran west and then north through forest, for the
most part, with villages or scattered farms here and there when the
soil was good or somebody’s great-grandparents just up and decided
that this was where they were going to build their house.

It’s a funny thing, but the further we
traveled from cities and the poorer the folk we met, the better the
welcome we got. Close to Shanuga, as I wrote earlier, we were lucky
to get a place to sleep in a hayloft and a cold meal on the back
steps, but as we got deep into Tucki, as often as not we ate at the
table with the family and slept on a pallet in a room of our own.
Nobody seemed to care that we were ruinmen. In fact, it was pretty
much the opposite; half the time, when we stayed the night at some
farmhouse, sooner or later the farm folk would mention some scrap
of ruin over on one corner of the property and ask if I thought
there was anything in it that might hurt anyone. It happened fairly
often that Berry and I went out the next morning at first light and
followed somebody over to an old gray lump of concrete wet with
dew, poked around it, scanned it for radiation and poisons, and
left the people there feeling a good bit easier.