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.
We got down to Shanuga toward evening three days later. There are bigger cities in Meriga, and I knew that even then, but I’d never seen any settlement bigger than the couple of market towns you could reach from our farm in a day’s walk, and they had maybe two hundred people each. Shanuga has twenty thousand. It has buildings seven and eight stories tall, with windows of glass salvaged from the ruins, and wind turbines turning slow and silent on top of them; it has walls around it, big and gray and sturdy, with gates going through here and there.
I learned later, after I became a ruinman’s prentice, that the walls were made of chunks of old freeways, cut up more or less square and mortared together. That’s what gets used for city walls all over Meriga, since there are plenty of freeways to tear down and not much point in using them when the fastest thing we’ve got to move on them is an oxcart or a messenger’s horse. I didn’t know that then; all I knew was that the walls were the biggest things made by people that I’d ever seen.
The guards at the city gates watch the people passing by through narrow windows. They looked down at my mother and me, saw a couple of harmless poor folk from the hills heading into the city like a hundred others must have done that day, and probably forgot all about us in the time it takes to blink. Me, I was staring openmouthed at everything around us, and my mother had to speak to me twice to get me to pay attention and follow her into the shadow of the narrow streets. She’d been to Shanuga to visit her family a few times since she married my father, and so the city wasn’t anything like as unfamiliar to her as it was to me.
Her older sister had a tavern inside the walls of the city. I don’t remember it well; I lived there for only a few weeks and visited only a couple of times after my mother died, which wasn’t that many months after I prenticed with Gray Garman. Most of what I remember is the narrow stairway in back going up and up and up, five floors to the little room they could spare for my mother and me. One floor down was where Aunt Kell lived, with two daughters and whoever she had as her good time boy that week; two and three floors down were rooms that people could hire for the night, or longer if they wanted; four floors down, on the street level, was the public room, and below that was a basement full of barrels of beer, some aging, some brewing, some with a spigot stuck in them and a mark drawn with charcoal to tell the barmaids whether it was good enough to drink sober or bad enough not to give to anyone who still had wits enough to notice.
My mother went to work right away, cooking and cleaning for the tavern guests. There wasn’t much I could do just then, so I mostly stayed out of the way. Once the rains stopped for good, I knew, the crafts would be taking prentices, and my mother and Aunt Kell meant to find me a place with one; that seemed like a good idea to me, too, though I hadn’t yet gotten past the shock of having my life tossed into the compost by some Jinya cavalryman I’d never know. Still, as the rains finished and the first bits of clear weather started to show up, it happened more than once that I came down for a meal with my mother and Aunt Kell and her daughters and her good time boy, and Aunt Kell and my mother would stop talking and look at me, and then there would be one of those busy silences where it seemed like all the words that weren’t being said kept chattering to themselves off where you can’t hear them.
It was the night after one of those times that I dreamed my first dream about Deesee. Now of course I learned growing up to pay attention to my dreams and watch for the ones Mam Gaia sends, but up to then I’d never dreamed anything that would make a priestess pay the least attention. This one was different. I don’t think it came from Mam Gaia, though; damn if I know who or what sent it to me, but if it hadn’t come to me I can tell you for certain that I wouldn’t be writing these words by lamplight in Star’s Reach now.
Like so many dreams, it didn’t so much start as unroll from something else too dim to recall. The first thing I remember was that I was walking down a city street so wide you could have built a block of Shanuga houses in the middle of it with room to pass on both sides. There were buildings to either side of the street, too, high and pale, with windows lined up in ranks like soldiers in a parade, except all the same size and all the same color. I was the only person I could see anywhere in the city, but not the only thing living; there were schools of fish swimming here and there between the high pale buildings, and when I breathed out my breath turned into bubbles and went rising up toward the silvery sky maybe fifty meedas above me.
None of that seemed strange to me, and I kept on walking. I was supposed to meet somebody in the drowned city, and I turned a corner to get to where I knew I was supposed to go. Ahead of me was what looked like a big grassy meadow with trees, except the grass and the trees were all seaweed that moved back and forth as the water took it. That meant I was getting close, and I hurried a bit more as I walked.
Finally I reached the seaweed meadow, and looked up and to my right, and that was when I figured out where I was.
People call it the Spire nowadays; it had a longer name in ancient times, but I don’t remember it just now. Until the night that it fell, you could see it for kloms along the Lannic coast, rising up pale and stark from the sea, a square shaft of white stone with a pointed top. I had never seen it back when I had this first dream, nor for many years later, but I knew what it was and what it looked like; back when my father was alive, I played with other boys whose families kept pictures of it in their homes. There was an old story that as long as it stood there, sparkling in the mist off beyond the breakers, the drowned city beneath it might still someday rise up from the sea, and the old world and all its treasures would come back again. I never met anyone who admitted they believed the story, but I never met anyone but a priestess who insisted it was just a story, either.
But that was what I was looking at: the Spire, or the lowest part of it, rising up from its hill to pierce what I’d thought was the sky, and I knew then was the surface of the sea. The one I was supposed to meet would be waiting there, I knew, and I started up the hill toward the base of the Spire. Just then the world began to shake all around me, and the Spire shuddered and swayed; and all of a sudden I was in my bed in the little room on the fifth floor of Aunt Kell’s tavern, being shaken awake by one of Aunt Kell’s daughters so I’d be up in time for breakfast.
I thought about that dream all day, while sitting up in the little room and watching the clouds clear and the last few flurries of rain blow past. I thought about Deesee, the dead drowned city where the presdens of Meriga used to live before the lights went off and the seas rose up and the old world toppled into ruin like so many of the old towers I’ve helped salvage since I became a ruinman’s prentice. I thought about the old world itself, and all the scraps and pieces of itself that lie scattered all over Mam Gaia’s round belly, so that you can hardly dig in the ground anywhere in Meriga and not find something made back then. Finally, after a good long while, I thought I knew what the dream was trying to tell me.
We ate dinner early in the tavern, so that everyone got fed and the dishes cleaned up before the evening got too lively downstairs. It wasn’t that many hours after breakfast, then, that I came down for dinner, and again my mother and Aunt Kell suddenly stopped talking and looked at me. I knew what they were talking about, and right then I knew what I had to say.
“Momma, I want to prentice with a ruinman, if one’ll take me.” That’s what I put into the silence they’d made. “Aunt Kell, do you know any?”
Aunt Kell glanced at my mother, then back at me. “Happens I do,” she said.
“Would you write a letter to him, if Momma gives her leave?”
Aunt Kell looked at my mother again, and my mother looked at her. “It’s an honest trade,” Aunt Kell said, “and if he makes mister he’ll never want for money.”
“And it’s Mam Gaia’s work,” my mother said. Then, to me: “Trey, if that’s what you wish, you’ve got my leave.”
I whooped and grinned, but there was something in her voice that left me feeling cold as metal, somewhere down deep where I couldn’t quite figure it out. There’s a kind of peace that you see when somebody’s gotten past something and can go on with life, and then there’s a kind of peace you see when somebody’s gotten past something and just wants to be done with living; I didn’t know that difference yet, but I think I must have sensed it. My mother smiled, but there was next to nothing behind the smile: a little relief, maybe, that she had done the last thing she needed to do and could let herself fall into the hollow place where her heart had been.
Thinking of it now, I’m not even sure how much of that I sensed then, how much of it I put into the memory after she caught a coughing disease six months later and died, and how much of it got tangled up after that, when I thought about what had happened and tried to piece together the pattern of my life. Memory’s a tricky thing; I think I remember that first dream of Deesee as though I was still having it right now, but sometimes I wonder how much of that memory comes from later dreams, or from what I saw from the Lannic shore when I went to the place by Deesee where every question has an answer, and saw the Spire rising out of the sea beyond the breakers, a few hours before it fell. If my life got caught up in the one big story old Plummer talked about, that day on the road to Sisnaddi, how much of what happened before then got rewritten by the storyteller so it would fit the tale he wanted to tell?
Still, there’s no doubt about what happened next. A few days after I had the dream, when the rains finally stopped for good, Aunt Kell wrote a letter to the ruinman she knew and had one of her daughters run it over. I never did hear whether the ruinman wrote back or just sent word, but seemingly he had room for a new prentice and was willing to have a look at me. My mother got me dressed up and combed my hair till it hurt, and then the two of us walked the dozen blocks or so from Aunt Kell’s house to the street with no name where the ruinmen live.
Everybody in Shanuga knows where that street is, and most of them would shave between their legs with a broken rock before they’d go there. It’s on the south end of town, just outside the walls through a gate most other people won’t use, and the street turns into a muddy road after a bit and heads straight toward where the old ruins loom up out of the river mists, tall and gray and stark like bones against the round green shapes of the hills beyond. The ruinmen’s houses are like every other house in Shanuga, narrow and close together as though they were drunk and leaning on each other’s shoulders to keep from falling over, and they have signs hanging in front of them like the shops of any of the other guilds in town.
Just before the houses end and the street turns into a road, though, the ruinmen’s guild hall stands there, and it looks like a bad dream. Other guilds have halls that look like houses, only twice or three times as wide and a couple of stories taller. The ruinmen are, well, ruinmen, and don’t do anything the same way as anybody else. Their guild hall in Shanuga is a big gray round thing made of metal that stands way up in the air like a ball perched on a stick. I learned later that the ruinmen a century ago took one of the huge water tanks the ancients put up on the hills here and there, hauled it down to the edge of town, put it up on its base and used scrap steel from the ruins to reinforce it and put floors into it. It really is one of the scariest things in town, unless you’re a ruinman, in which case it’s your second home.
We didn’t go there, though I stared at the thing looming up above the end of the street all the way from the gate to the front door of the house where we were headed. My mother knocked on the door; a prentice answered; they exchanged a few words, and then he let my mother and me in and left us in a couple of chairs in the little front parlor.
A little while later Mister Garman came down the stairs from above. He wasn’t Gray Garman yet, or at least there wasn’t more than a little bit of gray in his hair back then, but he had the same frown as always and the same habit of saying little and listening a lot. I know he had some questions for my mother, and a few for me, but I honestly don’t remember a word of what was said. For all that I’d been jumping up and down at the thought of becoming a ruinman’s prentice, I was as scared at that moment as I’ve ever been since. Mister Garman was big and muscled and scarred, and I guessed even then that trying to wheedle or coax him the way I could my mother or Aunt Kell was a waste of breath.
Finally Mister Garman was satisfied, and sent the prentice for the papers. My mother couldn’t read or write, but she was used to making her mark on papers and taking it on faith that they said what they were supposed to say; I could just about spell my own name and the easier words of the litanies, so I wasn’t much help figuring out the papers, but I signed my own name on the line where it was supposed to go, and that made me one of Garman’s prentices until I made mister, got reborn, or quit and walked away, whichever happened first.
My mother hugged me and left. Mister Garman told the prentice to take care of me, and went somewhere else, and the prentice—his name was Jo; he got reborn when a floor dropped out from underneath him two years later—took me upstairs to the big room where the prentices slept, showed me the pallet where I’d be sleeping and the chest where I got to put my things, and then led me back down two flights to the workshop where the rest of the prentices were busy getting tools ready for the season that was about to begin. I got introduced to all of them, and then right away got put to work rubbing oil into somebody’s leather coat, with an older prentice keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t skimp on the rubbing.
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.