Twenty-Seven: When the Spire Fell

 

 

The first night after our messages went out we were all in the radio room early, waiting for whatever it is after sunset that makes the high thin air start bouncing radio waves back to the ground. Tashel Ban had the receiver on by the time I got there. Berry and Thu were in the room already, and Eleen arrived not long after I did, while the loudspeaker was still hissing to itself. After another few moments Tashel Ban, who was sitting at the table, nodded to himself, glanced back over his shoulder and said, “Any time now.”

He must have heard something in the hiss that the rest of us didn’t. Before he could turn back to the receiver, a voice came through: “Curtis dig. Curtis dig. Message traffic. Am I clear?”

Tashel Ban had the microphone in his hand before the voice was finished talking. “This is the Curtis dig, and you’re clear. Go ahead.”

“Message from the Cansiddi ruinmen’s lodge for the misters at the Curtis dig.”

“Copied,” Tashel Ban said. “Go on.”

“Contract terms are acceptable. Misters Cooper and Damey are on their way with prentices and gear. Prices for most metals are up, so there should be no trouble getting more help if you need it. That’s all.”

“Copied and out,” said Tashel Ban. “Thank you.”

“Cansiddi out,” said the loudspeaker.

As soon as Tashel Ban had the transmitter off, I let out a whistle. “That’s better than I was expecting.”

All the others but Berry gave me the sort of look you get when you’re talking nonsense. “Two misters?” Thu asked. “That seems—inadequate.”

“One hundred forty-three misters and senior prentices,” Berry corrected him. “They should be here in two weeks or a little less.”

It was Tashel Ban who caught on first. “Good,” he said. “Do ruinmen often use code?”

I grinned and said, “When there’s need.”

“That’s a better response than I expected, too,” Berry said then. “There must have been a crowd of them waiting at Cansiddi.”

I thought about the places I’d seen where every last scrap of metal had been broken out of concrete and hauled away before I was born; I thought about the places where the guild’s closed and new misters have to leave town and find somewhere else to work, because there aren’t enough ruins left to support more than the misters who are already there; and I figured I could guess why a hundred forty-three misters and senior prentices had been waiting around the Cansiddi guildhall on the off chance they might have a shot at helping dig up Star’s Reach. I could see from the look on Berry’s face that he was thinking about the same thing. It’s something that most ruinmen think about these days.

By then, though, Tashel Ban was turning knobs on the receiver again, because it was almost time for the news broadcast from Sanloo. I shut up and listened with everyone else.

The broadcast came through the hissing a little while after that. Most of it was the same thing as usual. Sheren’s funeral had finally been scheduled, and the presden of Nuwinga and the meer of Genda were both going to be there. The emperor of Meyco wasn’t, but he was sending one of his younger brothers, which is more than Meyco usually does. Some Jinya pirates got caught raiding merchant ships in the waters south of Memfis, there was a sharp little sea battle the pirates lost, and the lot of them got hauled ashore to a navy base in Banroo Bay whose name I almost remember, where they’re going to be tried and hanged over the next few days. There were bits of news out of the government in Sisnaddi and the army along the border with the coastal allegiancies, nothing important.

Then, at the end: “Last night’s radio message from Sharl sunna Sheren, who claims to be the late presden’s heir, seems to have taken everyone by surprise.” A scratchy recording of Berry’s voice followed: “I’m calling a meeting of the council of electors in Sanloo on the twentieth of Febry, a month and a half from now. I’ll present proofs of my identity and ancestry there, so the electors can decide on my candidacy.” After a few clicks and pops, the announcer went on. “There’s been no word yet from the electors about whether they’ll consider the claim.”

That was all, and then the broadcast ended. We all looked at each other. “At least,” Tashel Ban said, “it’s being discussed.” With that not very comforting reflection, we wished blessings on each other’s dreams and headed off to bed.

We spent the next day figuring out where to put a hundred forty-three ruinmen, and starting to get the rooms ready for them: a mother of a lot of work, and I was tired enough that I crawled into bed with Eleen without taking the time to write anything. That night, there wasn’t anything at all in the news bulletin, not even a mention of Berry. The next night, though, after another day of hard work, we listened to one of the important jennels say that Meriga had enough good candidates for presden, and didn’t have to go looking for them among tweens and ruinmen. Eleen spat a piece of hot language at the radio when that came through, which startled me, but Tashel Ban shook his head.

“Not at all,” he said. “Jennels aren’t fool enough to say whatever comes into their heads. If he’s that worried about Berry’s case, the wind’s blowing the right way.”

The evening after that, there was news. Half a dozen of the less important jennels, I think it was, sent an open letter to Congrus saying that Berry’s claim should be considered. None of them were electors, and the electors could ignore them if they wanted, but they were still jennels, and that counted for something. What they said was simple enough: by law, one of a presden’s children became the next presden unless there was some good reason to do something else; being a tween would probably be good reason, but there weren’t any other candidates in the direct line, and being a tween hadn’t stopped Sheren herself from being one of the best presdens we’d had since the old world ended, so if this Sharl sunna Sheren was who he claimed to be, his claim ought to be taken seriously.

That was promising, but the next two evenings went by without any news about Berry’s candidacy at all—not surprising, because those were the days set aside for Sheren’s funeral, and the news didn’t talk about anything else. Not that long ago, Berry would have spent those days jittering like a drop of water on a hot griddle, but not any more. I could just about hear him telling himself, no, a presden doesn’t do that. Still, it was probably just as well that the two of us spent those days finding a couple of disused kitchens down in the deep levels of Star’s Reach; hauling the pots and pans back up all those stairs didn’t leave him enough strength left to jitter.

It was the following evening that things changed, hard. Tashel Ban got the receiver working and then sat there, staring at it, as though he expected something to happen, and he wasn’t disappointed. After some final news from the funeral, the announcer said, “Meanwhile, the succession is on a lot of minds. Odry darra Beth of Sisnaddi Circle had this to say.” Pops and crackles, and then an old woman’s voice: “It was always a disappointment that Sheren was never able to become one of us, though of course now we know why. Circle had an excellent working relationship with her, and if her child is cut from the same cloth, I can’t imagine anyone in Circle objecting if the electors favor his claim.”

Tashel Ban let out a long low whistle. I didn’t know who Odry darra Beth was, but he did, and I could guess. The old women in red hats who run Circle don’t just do things on their own; you won’t hear one of them make an announcement unless the rest of them are pretty much in agreement with it. With the power that Circle has in Meriga, if the Circle elders were willing to accept Berry’s candidacy, he was past one big hurdle.

The announcer wasn’t done yet, though. “And this from Jor sunna Kelli, of the Sisnaddi ruinmen.” Berry and I gave each other startled looks as the radio crackled and popped; that was a name we both knew. “Mister Sharl is one of ours,” he said, in the kind of voice that sounds like gravel getting crushed, and warns you not to mess with the person who’s attached to it. “Whether he ends up presden or not is up to the electors. That’s the law in Meriga, and we’ll abide by it, but if anybody tries to make that decision for them, they’re going to answer to us.”

More crackles, then the announcer: “Still no word from the electors, but word is expected in the next day or so. This is Sanloo station, with this evening’s news.”

The music started to play, and we all looked at Berry, who mostly looked dazed. “I take it,” said Tashel Ban, “that Mister Jor is important.”

“Senior mister at Sisnaddi,” I told him. “Ruinmen don’t have a chief over them all, but if they did, it would be him.”

“So the threat is credible,” said Thu. “That may be helpful.”

“The Circle elder’s the one that interests me more,” Tashel Ban said. “They rarely involve themselves in the succession this early on. Well, we’ll see what happens.”

Berry shook his head, then, as though he was shaking himself awake, and said, “Well.” It seemed like a reasonable thing to say, and none of us had anything to add to it.

So we went to our rooms, and I kissed Eleen and watched her fall asleep, and then pulled out this notebook and sat here for a while deciding what I still have time to write. I’m not going to say much about the time I spent in the archives in Sisnaddi. Not much happened there, other than day after day with the archivists, trying to find something that would turn WRTF from a jumble of letters to a place I could find, and night after night in a little room in the ruinmen’s guild hall outside Sisnaddi, wondering how soon I would have to give the whole thing up.

I don’t even remember what day it was when I finally ran out of places to look in the archives. It was just before lunch, I remember that, and I sat there at the little desk where I worked, staring at the bare metal, trying to think, and failing, until the soft bell sounded to let everyone in the archives know that lunch was ready. I went and sat with the archivists, ate bread and soup, and tried not to think about the years I’d spent and the chances I’d thrown away chasing what looked just then like an empty dream. I really was up against the bare walls just then, and that’s probably why I thought about the place Lu the harlot told me about, the place at the Lannic shore by Deesee where every question has an answer.

If I’d been able to think of anything else to do, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Still, as I walked back to the guildhall and slumped in the hard metal chair in my room, the thought wouldn’t leave me alone. I pushed it away a dozen times, and tried to be reasonable and figure out what I was going to do now that Star’s Reach was just a story again, and a dozen times it came whispering back to me that I had one more chance to find the thing.

So I had my dinner and went to bed. I wasn’t expecting to sleep at all, but I dropped off after an hour or two of lying awake and staring into the darkness, and damn if I didn’t slip right away into one of my Deesee dreams.

It wasn’t much different from the others I had down through the years, except this time there were lots of people in drowned Deesee with me, walking the wide streets and going into and out of the big white buildings where all the windows looked the same. Gray Garman went past me, nodding a greeting the way he did, and then all of a sudden Tam ran up to me, gave me a kiss, and hurried away. Slane the riverboat trader was there, and Cash the elwus and his motor Morey, and a lot of ruinmen I knew from Memfis and Shanuga, and scholars from Melumi and traveling folk from the roads I’d walked and, well, just about everyone I’d ever met on my search for Star’s Reach. They were all going different places, but somehow they were all walking with me, too, down the street to the place where the hill rose up, green and smooth and grassy, to the foot of the Spire.

I stopped there, and they stopped, too. They were waiting for me, I knew, and there was someone else waiting for me, up there at the foot of the Spire. I was scared, more scared than I’ve ever been in a dream or waking life, of taking that first step onto the grass. I looked around, trying to find some other way I could go, but the people who were with me pressed right up close behind me, and the only way I could go was straight ahead, up the grassy slope, to where a dead man was waiting.

That’s when I woke up. I was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm, and my heart was pounding, but I knew what I had to do. The sky was just starting to lighten up; I packed my gear, got breakfast, let the prentice who had charge of the rooms that day know that I wouldn’t be needing my room that night, and walked out the door before I had time to have second thoughts.

There’s a lot more of Meriga west of Sisnaddi than east of it, but you wouldn’t know that from the countryside close by. Hiyo’s green and prosperous, and it has more towns than empty ruins, which is something you can’t say of most other parts of the country. I didn’t have a lot of money left, so inns were out of the question, but there were plenty of farms where a traveler can get a night’s sleep in the barn and a breakfast on the kitchen steps for a couple of bits.

There weren’t any guildhalls where I could stay, though. Even where there were big towns, and there were some good-sized ones, there were no ruinmen. All that country had every scrap of metal and everything else worth taking stripped from the ground a long time before I was born.

It took me a good while to cross Hiyo, and then cut through the little neck of Wesfa Jinya that you go through before you get to Wes Pen, and Pisba. Pisba’s in a valley where two rivers come together to make the Hiyo River, and it’s shaped like a wedge. It’s also full of soldiers, because Pisba is about as far east as you can go and still be in Meriga.

There’s a ruinmen’s lodge in Pisba, and it’s the only ruinmen’s lodge anywhere I know of that’s inside the city walls. Everything in Pisba is inside the city walls. Even the farmers who work the fields around Pisba live inside, because raiders come from further east so often. The guards on the bridge I crossed seemed to be used to traveling ruinmen, and let me past with only a couple of questions; the ruinmen in the guildhall were friendly as ruinmen usually are, but they wanted to know where I was headed, and when I told them—I didn’t say anything about the place where every question has an answer, just that I wanted to go look at Deesee and the Spire—they got very quiet.

“You ever been out east of here?” one of the misters asked me, and when I said I hadn’t, he gave me a long look and said, “Let me show you something.”

He was back a moment later with a paper map. “You see this highway? You keep on it and you might just stay alive. You know what’s out there?

I did, or at least I’d heard stories about it. “That’s the burning land, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

It was evening when I got to Pisba, and I planned on leaving the next morning, so I talked with him and some of the misters after dinner, and found out everything I could about the road east and south toward Deesee. Still, when I left the next morning, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the ruinmen there didn’t expect to see me again.

I bought a bunch of food at a shop before I went out through the gates of the city, and it was a good thing, because nobody lives further east, not until you get to the coastal allegiancies. Everything was green and quiet at first. I think it was three days out of Pisba when I saw the first plume of smoke coming out of a hill off to one side, and not much more than a day after that it was all over the place, filling the air with haze and the stink of sulfur.

Everyone in Meriga knows about the burning land, but not too many of them know what happened and why. I didn’t, not until I went that way. This is the way the ruinmen in the Pisba guild hall explained it to me.

Wes Pen used to be just Pen, and it was a big state running east almost all the way to the Lannic. It had a lot of coal, oil, and gas under it, and since it was close to the big cities of the Lannic shore, all of those got dug up pretty thoroughly. First they put in mines and dug as much coal out of them as they could, until that ran out, then they drilled for oil and pumped it until that ran out, and then they drilled some more and pumped chemicals down into the ground to get more of the oil and gas, until those ran out.

Then somebody figured out how to pump more chemicals into the coal, down where the mines couldn’t get, to turn the coal into gas they could pump out. This was toward the end of the old world, when they were desperate for fossil fuels even though the weather was going crazy from all the fossil fuels they’d already burned, and seemingly nobody asked enough hard questions. Different parts of the country had different laws about what you could pump into the ground, and the laws in Pen basically didn’t stop anybody from doing anything, so people started drilling wells and pumping the chemicals down and pumping gas out. For a while they were happy, or as happy as you can get when the weather’s going crazy and everything around you is right on the edge of falling apart.

Then the coal down underground started catching fire. Nobody’s quite sure why, but something happened whenever the chemicals and the coal got to old mine tunnels that brought them into contact with air, and the coal underground started burning. At first they tried to hush it up, and then they claimed that it was just some kind of rare accident, but eventually every place they put those chemicals down wells caught fire, because the chemicals spread in the groundwater until they got to an old mine shaft and started another fire. Of course then they had to stop the drilling, but before then they’d drilled a lot of holes all over Pen and pumped a lot of the chemicals down them.

So there were underground fires burning under most of Pen. They’re still burning today, and they’ll still be burning for a long time to come, because there’s a lot of coal down there still, and you’ve got sinkholes opening up here and there to let more air get down and keep the fires going. If you want to get through the burning land, you’ve got to know where the fires are and where the smoke collects, and that changes from one year from the next. If you want to get metal from ruins there, you can do it, but it’s risky, because you never know when the place where you are will suddenly start smoking under your feet. If you want to live there or farm there, you’re just plain out of luck.

I just wanted to get through, and enough other people want to get through for one reason or another that the ruinmen in Pisba and a few other places keep track of which roads might be safe. Even so, you never know when the ground’s suddenly going to start smoking under the road, or just collapse from a sinkhole without any warning at all. If you’re lucky, that doesn’t happen; if you’re not, nobody ever hears from you again, and that’s the end of it.

I was lucky. There were times the highway I was on had sinkholes and smoking ground close by, and there was one long stretch where the smoke was so thick that I just had to keep walking, a day and a night and most of the next day, because I knew if I lay down and tried to sleep it was a pretty safe bet I’d never wake up again. Still, there were other parts of the countryside that were green and beautiful, with the last scraps of ruined farms and farm towns here and there to remind you what it was like before people got greedy and careless and messed it up for hundreds of years to come.

Finally I came down out of the hills and saw the bright silver line of a river looping and curving through woodland. From the map I saw in Pisba, I knew that it was the Tomic, the river that ran by Deesee in the old world.

I knew something else, too, from the ruins down by the river. Even from there I could see that they’d been shoveled up all anyhow by people who didn’t know how to do a proper dig, and just wanted whatever metal they could get. I was outside of Meriga, and if I met anyone at all between there and Deesee, it would be Jinyans—the people who killed my father. I drew in a breath, and started down the road.

The days I spent after that, walking along the Tomic, were the strangest part of the whole strange journey that brought me here to Star’s Reach. I had no idea what I was looking for or where I might find it, and it was sinking in by then that following a story I heard from a harlot in a little town in Ilanoy might not be the brightest idea, especially since it took me all the way outside of Meriga and into the nobody’s-land between us and the coastal allegiancies. Still, it felt like walking over the trapped floor in the Shanuga ruins, where the whole journey started: not something you necessarily want to do, but once you start, there’s nothing to do but finish.

So I followed the old crumbling road alongside the Tomic, watched the water rush past me toward the Lannic, and got used to water in the river, wind in the leaves, and my own boots crunching on the old road being the only sounds there were. I’ve been in plenty of places where you could walk for a day and not see any sign that people had been there since the old world ended, but this seemed emptier still, and of course I knew why. Every few years raiders from the coastal allegiancies come through here trying to push their way into Wesfa Jinya. Every few years the Merigan army marches the other way to return the favor, and there are plenty of safer places to start a farm if you want to do that or, well, anything else. It must have been full of towns and farms before the old world ended, and maybe someday it will be full of both again, but as long as we’re at war with the allegiancies, the Tomic valley is going to stay empty.

Day followed day, and I followed the river. After I forget how long—it must have been a week or so, maybe a little more—the mountains turned into hills and the hills spread out and hid their feet in the forest, and when the breeze blew in my face I started to catch a hint of the salt smell I’d gotten to know so well when I was living in Memfis. That’s the way the breeze was blowing one sunny morning when I heard hooves on the road ahead.

That was in a place where the road ran straight for a while, and by the time I’d thought of running into the woods to hide, the riders were in sight. There were four of them, coming straight up the road, and I knew that if I tried to run they’d chase me down like a deer, so I just kept walking.

They slowed their horses and stopped maybe twenty paces ahead, waited while I walked up: four men, three of them younger than I was and the fourth a good bit older. They were wearing brown homespun clothes and big floppy hats, and they all had long hair, long beards, and a couple of pistols each stuck into leather holsters that had seen a lot of hard wear. Their horses, though, were big and strong and skittish, the kind that jennels and cunnels ride in Meriga.

I walked up to within a couple of paces of them and stopped. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and the oldest one finally said, “Who the hell are you?”

I told him my name.

“You out of Meriga?”

“Yes.”

“Ruinman?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell you doin’ here?”

I knew that if they thought I was lying they’d kill me without a second thought, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like a lie, except the truth. “I’ve been looking for Star’s Reach for getting on five years now,” I told them. “I hear there’s a place down by the Deesee ruins where—where every question has an answer. Nothing else worked, so I figured I’d try that.”

They looked at each other, then back at me. “Where’d you hear that?” the oldest one asked.

“From a harlot in Ilanoy,” I told him.

They looked at each other again, this time for a good long while. Finally the oldest one leaned forward in his saddle. “There’s a place like that,” he said. “You go straight down this road all the way to the sea, and then turn to your left hand and walk along the water a good bit until you see a chair made of chunks of concrete. That’s where it is; you sit down there before the sun sets and you don’t get up again until it rises. Got that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good.” He leaned forward a little more. “Now if you go straight there and come straight back and go home, and don’t stick your nose into anyplace it shouldn’t get, you’re gonna be okay. And if you don’t—well, then you better pray real hard, because you’re gonna wish you never got born. Got that?”

“Yessir,” I said, the way that soldiers do, and he nodded, and the four of them snapped their reins and rode right past me at a trot, two on each side. When they were past, one of the younger ones turned around in the saddle and called back, “You find Star’s Reach, you tell the aliens hi for us, you hear?”

I promised I would, and they trotted on up the road. After a bit, I turned and started walking the other way. For a while I wondered if they would come back after me and see where I went, but the hoofbeats faded out and from then on it was just my boots crunching on what was left of the road, and the sounds of the river and the wind. The sun rose up in the sky ahead of me, and moved past to my right side, and sank toward the hills behind me, and all the while the salt smell on the wind became stronger and stronger, until finally the forest fell away into scrub pines and beachgrass, sand and pieces of driftwood covered what was left of the old road, and I went up and over a dune and stood looking out at the sea.

There were waves rolling up to the beach in lines of foam and sweeping out again in flat sheets of water, and big gray masses of concrete rising up here and there, with waves crashing into them and seaweed and things growing all over them. It was a long moment before I noticed them, though, because I was looking at the Spire. It was just like the pictures I saw when I was little, a tall white shape rising up straight out of the water well out to sea, and the light of the afternoon sun shone on it and made it blaze like a still and silent flame.

I have no idea how long I stood there looking at it. Finally, though, I remembered the directions I’d been given, turned left, and walked north along the beach.

I’ve written more than once about the times along the way from Shanuga to Star’s Reach when I saw how much bigger and more crowded everything was in the old world, and how small and sparsely peopled Meriga is nowadays. As I write this, I’m thinking of the ruins of Cago, and how they stretch for kloms and kloms along the shores of Lake Mishga. I’m thinking of the towns and cities that used to be on the banks of the Ilanoy and Misipi Rivers and aren’t there any more. I’m thinking of the view from Troy Tower—and none of them, not even all of them put together, were like walking along that beach.

Ahead there were rounded masses of concrete rising up out of the water and the sand as far as I could see, and further, and I knew that the same thing went pretty much without a break all the way up into Nuwinga, and I also knew that all of that was just the western edge of the drowned cities of the coast, which used to go a hundred kloms or more further east before the sea rose up and swallowed them all. I thought of the millions and millions of people who used to live there, more people than there are in all of Meriga nowadays, and now there was just one stray ruinman a long way from home, wandering past the little that was left of it all. The wind went whispering past me, picking up sand and tossing it against my boots and my legs, and I wondered whether the dust of old bones was mixed in with it.

That’s what I was thinking as I walked north along the shore, and the waves rolled and splashed, and the sun sank closer to the western hills. I started to wonder after a while if I’d walked right past the chair made of concrete the man from Jinya mentioned, and what would happen if they found me a couple of kloms past the place I was looking for. About the time I was starting to get really worried, though, I walked up most of the way into the dunes to get around a big ragged mass of concrete, and saw not too far ahead a clear space and something that might be a chair. I kept going along the beach, and after a while, I got to it.

I really had no idea what to expect when I got there. Back when Lu the harlot first told me about the place where every question has an answer, I’d wondered if it was some kind of installation from the old world, with computers, maybe, that would take your question, check it against data that got lost everywhere else in the world, and give you the answer in glowing letters on a screen. Later on, I’d made any number of guesses about it, but all of them were wrong.

There was a rough chair made of big chunks of concrete half buried in the sand, and a circle made of more chunks of concrete, not much more than knee-high, rising out of the sand like an old woman’s teeth. Here and there people had taken sticks and driven one end into the sand, and tied strips of cloth to the upper end, so that the cloth fluttered in the wind. That was all. There were some big masses of concrete further south, and much more to the north, but right there the beach was flat empty sand and the sea stretched out into the east, unbroken except for the Spire, a little south of straight ahead.

I stood there for a long moment, looking at the chair, and felt like a complete fool. I couldn’t think of any way a chair of salvaged concrete in the middle of nowhere was going to answer the question I came to ask. Since there wasn’t anywhere else for me to go, and the sun was maybe an hour from setting, I sat down on one of the chunks of concrete in the circle, and ate some bread and sausage and dried fruit I bought in Pisba. The sun got low, and the wind turned cool and then cold, and finally I laughed out loud and got up and went over to the chair. The seat and the back were both flat smooth pieces of concrete, which was better than I’d been expecting. After a long moment, I sat down.

Nothing happened right at first, or nothing that I noticed. I settled back and looked out at the Spire as the setting sun turned it gold, and then orange, and then the color of blood. Then, finally, night closed in, and I waited.

To this day I have no idea what actually happened then. I know what I saw. Even here in Star’s Reach, sitting at this desk in a little pool of light and listening to Eleen’s breathing, I can close my eyes and remember every bit of it, but I’m pretty sure that some of it couldn’t have happened at all, and I have no idea whether the things that could have happened actually did.

At any rate, this is what I remember.

I sat there for a while, waiting for I didn’t know what. The sun went down behind me, the stars came out ahead, and the wind along the beach blew cold. Then there was a flash of orange light out to sea, right along the horizon, and I stared at it for a long moment before I realized that the moon was rising. It was a few days past the full, big and golden. As it rose, the light shining from it seemed to make a path across the sea right up to where the waves were splashing a couple of meedas from my feet.

That’s when everything went silent. All at once the wind stopped, and the waves weren’t moving any more. The moon stood there, right on the horizon, and as the path of light stretched across the ocean, wherever the moonlight touched the water, it started flowing away, back out from the beach toward the deep places of the Lannic. I know perfectly well that water doesn’t do that, but that’s what I saw: the water drawing back, forming a path of wet sand just as wide as the light from the moon. On both sides of the path, the sea stood black like a wall.

I don’t remember thinking that any of this was out of the ordinary. I don’t remember thinking anything at all. I simply got up from my chair and started walking across the bare wet sands ahead of me, following the path down into drowned Deesee.

It wasn’t anything like my dreams, though. In my dreams the water is like air and the sun is shining on the top of it, turning the surface of the water to silver, and the buildings are all just the way they were when Deesee was above water and the presden and her jennels ruled half the countries on Mam Gaia’s belly. The path I followed, though, was all sand and stones and seaweed, with crabs scuttling around, and fish lying there gasping in pools of salt water. There wasn’t much left of the buildings close to the beach, just low masses of concrete hammered to roundness by hundreds of years of waves and tides, but as I went further and the sand turned to mud, I passed ruins covered with barnacles and mussels and sea anemones, with roofs fallen in and every bit of metal corroded by the salt water, but still looking like buildings. I passed the hulks of old cars, stepped over poles that used to hold lights up so they could shine on the streets.

I have no idea how long I walked down between the black walls of water into the heart of Deesee. Finally, though, I got in among the part of it I remember from my dreams, with the big white buildings with windows lined up like soldiers on parade, except that the buildings were half-fallen and stained with mud, and draped all over with great blades of kelp. Still, I knew what came next, and I wasn’t wrong. I passed what was left of the buildings and reached the big open space with the hill in the middle of it, and the Spire rising up above all. The top of it was above the water, glowing in the moonlight; all around it the sea rose up black and motionless, and there was nowhere else to go.

Up at the foot of the Spire, someone was waiting for me.

I saw him as soon as I got to the base of the hill. The light was dim and I couldn’t make out anything but a human shape at first, but I knew who it was. As I climbed the hill, the details came clear one by one: the stiff heavy clothing that soldiers used to wear in the old world; the funny broad hat, flat on the top, with a bill in front and a bit of flashy metal above that; more bits of metal here and there on the clothing, especially on the shoulders and right above where his heart was; the face, lean as a hawk’s, looking toward me with a look I couldn’t read, not yet. The face was only familiar from my dreams, but I knew the rest of him well enough, since the day I found his corpse sprawled on the table next to the letter about Star’s Reach, down there in the underplaces of the Shanuga ruins.

I was within a few steps of reaching him when I saw that he had the letter in one hand. He held it out to me so that I could see it, and read the words on it. I looked at it, at him, and that’s when I knew that he wanted me to understand it. He wanted me or somebody to find Star’s Reach. His face didn’t change at all, but I could see hope and longing in his eyes. He waited until he knew I’d recognized the letter, and then turned it over so that I could see the single word Curtis written in gray on the back.

Yes, I wanted to say, I know. That was you. That was your name back then. For some reason or other I couldn’t speak, but I think he must have heard me anyway, for he shook his head, a sudden brisk move, and pointed at the word again with one finger.

I didn’t see his lips move and I didn’t hear anything, but all at once I knew what he was trying to tell me. Not my name, he was saying, and not any other person’s name, either—it was the name of a place.

All at once I could see him, huddled in the shelter down under some government building in Shanuga when it was still called Chattanooga and the ruins weren’t ruins yet. He was listening to the radio we’d found, waiting for a message, and when it came he copied something down on a sheet of paper, looked something up in a book, and then copied down one word onto the back of the letter. They’d told him the name of the town where he was going to go once it was safe, once they could get him out of Chattanooga and send him to Star’s Reach, and he’d written down the name of the town on the back of the original message so he wouldn’t lose it. Then things went wrong, and it never got safe enough to get him out of there, and the food ran out and he died. I saw all of that in less time than it takes to blink.

Then we were standing there under the Spire again, facing each other, him in his stiff old world clothes and me in my dusty ruinman’s leathers, and suddenly the ground beneath my feet began to shake. He looked up at the Spire with fear in his face. I looked up too, and damn if the Spire wasn’t swaying back and forth above us, moving in wider and wider arcs.

All of a sudden I wasn’t in Deesee any more. I was sitting in the chair made of concrete slabs by the beach, in the place where every question has an answer, and it felt as though I was being shaken awake. I looked around, but there was nobody shaking me. The moon was high in the south, and it no longer made a path across the sea in front of me, but the ground shook again, and the sea began to draw away, just as it did earlier, except this time it was all drawing back, as far as I could see to either side.

Back when I was writing about my first dream of Deesee, I must have mentioned the old strange stories about the Spire. When I was a child, people used to say that as long as it still stood tall above the sea, out there beyond the breakers, the drowned city at its feet might just rise up out of the waters someday, and if it did, the old world and all its treasures would come back again. Just for a moment, as I sat there and stared, I wondered if that was what was happening, if somehow learning the key to Star’s Reach was bringing something even more wonderful.

Then the ground beneath my feet shook again, and I knew what I was seeing.

There’s a place called Greenlun I’ve mentioned before, off to the east of Genda, between the Lannic and the North Ocean. It’s covered with trees now, but in the old world it was covered with a layer of ice a couple of kloms thick, and when they messed up the climate in the last years of the old world, all the ice broke up and melted, and the meltwater flowed into the sea. That’s part of why Deesee is underwater now. The priestesses say, though, that when the ice melted, the land started to rise because all that weight was off it, and ever since they’ve had big earthquakes all along the eastern coasts of Genda and Nuwinga and the coastal allegiancies—earthquakes and namees. A namee’s a really big wave that’s stirred up by an earthquake, and you know one is coming because the sea draws back from the land.

The moon gave enough light that I could just about see the land around me. Back behind the dunes and maybe half a klom further inland, there was a hill with trees on top of it—not much of a hill, and maybe not high enough, but it was the only high ground in sight. I knew there wasn’t a lot of time, so I got up and grabbed my pack and ran for the hill. It wasn’t an easy run, since there was driftwood back behind the dunes that I had to dodge, and once I got to the hill the brush clawed at me and scratched my face as I ran. I was panting and bleeding by the time I got well up the hill, and I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and turned around and looked back toward the sea.

There before me was Deesee. I could see all of it, the Spire rising up above the half-fallen buildings caked with mud and seaweed, reaching north and south as far as I could see and east to a blackness that had to be the ocean. I stood there, forgetting everything else, and as I watched, the ground shook again, hard. Then the Spire began to lean toward me: slow at first, then faster and faster, until finally it crashed to ruin in the black mud.

Then the sea rose up and came rushing back into its place.

I turned and sprinted the rest of the way to the top of the hill, found the tallest and stoutest tree that I could, and scrambled up it. By the time I got up as high as I thought I could safely go, Deesee was drowned again. I read once about somebody who got through a namee alive by clinging to the top of a tree, so I found a good sturdy branch high up. By then I could hear the water boiling and surging, and I looked and saw it rushing up the slope toward me, black as the walls of the sea on either side of the path I’d followed to the Spire. I sucked in one last breath and put my arms and legs around the branch as tight as they’d go and prayed to Mam Gaia, the way you’re supposed to do when you’re about to get reborn.

The wave covered the hill and rose about halfway up the tree, but it never quite got up to me. A moment later the crest was past, and the tree hadn’t given way. I clung to the branch for I don’t know how long, shivering with the cold and certain that I was about to die.

All around me, the only things I could see were the tops of trees on the hill, and black water all around. After a while, the water stopped moving inland and started moving back out to sea, until it was back where it belonged; a second wave came rushing in a little after that, but that one only got about halfway up the hill, and I think there was a third and a fourth wave, too, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure about much of what happened during the last part of that night.

The next thing I remember for certain is waking up a little after dawn, still up there in the tree, still clinging to the branch, cold as old concrete and aching from head to foot, but more or less alive. I blinked and shook myself. Slowly, because my muscles didn’t want to move, I clambered down to the ground and stood there, trying to get my thoughts to do something other than circle around and around the fact that I probably should have been fish food just then.

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.