Star's Reach (10 page)

Mind you, I could have skipped the morning
walk and told every one of them what I’d find. Outside of the old
cities, if you find a small ruin out by itself, just a bit of
concrete sticking up out of the grass like a rotten tooth in a
green gum, you can bet it’s nothing more than the foundation of a
house or a shop from the old world, and anything dangerous got
washed away a long time ago. It’s the big ruins that can still kill
you, and nobody farms too close to those—the priestesses wouldn’t
stand for it, the jennel or cunnel who has land in the area would
put a stop to it, and I don’t think anybody’s dumb enough to try it
in the first place. So the ruins we checked on that trip north were
no threat to anybody. I could have told the farmers as much without
looking, but it made them feel better to have Berry and me out
there in our ruinmen’s leathers sweeping the ground with radiation
counters, and it seemed like a fair return for their
hospitality.

So we made our way north. Now and then we
spent a day or two in country that didn’t have a single house
anywhere in sight, and Berry and I got used pretty quickly to
sleeping in the forest. Sometimes the cracked gray road beneath our
feet was the only sign that any human being had ever come that way
since Mam Gaia shaped that part of her belly; sometimes we passed
through what was left of some town the people of the old world put
someplace that didn’t have good soil or running water or any of the
other things people nowadays need and they seemingly didn’t. We
must have walked through half a dozen places full of low gray
shapes of concrete mostly overgrown with vines and the like, with
mounds here and there where something big had tumbled down a couple
of hundred years back. Most of the mounds showed traces of digging,
and there was plenty of broken concrete that had been cracked open
for the metal, showing that we weren’t the first ruinmen to come
that way.

There came a stretch of the journey where we
didn’t see a trace of anything human for most of two days. We
didn’t think much of it until late on the afternoon of the second
day, when we crested a rise and found ourselves face to face with a
couple of huge gray shapes, cracked and crumbling at the top, that
rose out of the forest in the middle distance like giant
ghosts.

I knew from one look at Berry’s face that I
didn’t have to tell him what they were. Without a word, I got out
my radiation counter and scanned the road at our feet.

“Nobody said that there was a nuke this way,”
Berry said then.

“Might be an empty,” I reminded him. “I’m
getting nothing but background.”

He gave me a dubious look, but followed when
I started down the road.

I didn’t blame him for the look. There are
safe ruins like the ones the farmers had in their fields, and there
are dangerous ruins like the one in Shanuga where I nearly got
reborn, and then there are nukes. You find them here and there all
over Meriga, and most of them are dead zones with fences all around
a couple of kloms out from the ruins and nobody living anywhere
nearby, especially downstream. The priestesses put prayer flags on
the fences, partly to ask Mam Gaia to heal the land there, partly
because anybody who goes past the fence and messes with what’s
inside is going to be too busy getting reborn to have a lot of time
for prayers.

I learned about nukes from Gray Garman, of
course. Every ruinman’s prentice learns about them from his mister,
since the only thing the priestesses will tell you about them is
that they’re evil and if you go there you’re going to get reborn in
a hurry. That’s true enough as far as it goes, but a ruinman needs
to know more.

What Garman taught me was that there are two
things to worry about when you’re dealing with a nuke. The first is
the reactor building itself. For some reason the ancients didn’t
take the time to shut everything down properly when the old world
ended, so the old fuel rods and everything are still there, but the
machines that used to keep them cool and safe haven’t been working
for more than four hundred years. Nobody knows what’s inside
nowadays, because the radiation has you doubling over and vomiting
before you get much past the door of the building, and you don’t
last long after that.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of
it is the used fuel rods. Those are in what used to be pools of
water, sometimes inside the reactor buildings, sometimes in
buildings of their own nearby. I read once in Sisnaddi, when I was
searching the archives there, that people spent years back in the
old world bickering about what they were going to do with the fuel
rods and all the other dangerous stuff that came out of the nukes,
and they ended up never doing much of anything at all with them
except leaving them in the pools of water.

Of course once the old world ended and there
wasn’t anybody to make sure the pumps kept water flowing into the
pools, things started going bad in a hurry. The fuel rods got red
hot, and a lot of them caught fire, or melted their way down to
groundwater and leached out into the ground, or simply turned into
dust that blew here and there on the wind, and a mother of a lot of
land around the old nukes ended up contaminated enough to kill you
quick or slow. You can’t see the contamination, or taste it. Unless
you’ve got a radiation counter, you don’t have any way of knowing
it’s killing you until you take sick and the doctor tells you that
all she can do is send for the priestesses.

I had a radiation counter, and I wasn’t about
to let something like that happen to me or Berry from being too
brave to use it. As we went down the road, I kept the thing in my
hand and listened to it click. It didn’t show anything above
normal, and as we kept walking and the counter kept clicking mildly
to itself, both of us got a little more confident. It didn’t hurt
that the road didn’t seem to be heading straight at the cooling
towers, either.

So we kept on walking, and the towers seemed
to drift slowly to one side as we went. Finally we got alongside
them; the counter still wasn’t showing anything but normal, but
just then we noticed two things. The first was a cleared trail
heading straight toward the towers from the road, with a pair of
saplings tied together in an X marking the place where it hit the
road—one of the old ruinmen’s signs. The second was a thin line of
smoke rising from someplace close to the nearer tower.

Berry looked at me, and I looked at him. “You
sure that counter’s working?” he asked.

“Checked it in Shanuga,” I reminded him.

“Maybe you’re right, then, Mister Trey.”

He meant what I’d said earlier about the nuke
being an empty. That was something else Garman taught me, though I
heard about it later, and in more detail, too, from Plummer one
time when we were traveling down the Misipi on the
Jennel
Mornay
. During the years just before the old world ended, the
ancients tried to make up for everything else they were running out
of by building lots of nukes. Most of those never got finished, and
so now and then, when you see the big round towers rising up out of
the forest, there’s nothing there but a bunch of old concrete. Most
people won’t go near them anyway, just in case, but some ruinmen
make a living out of breaking down the empties for the metal that’s
in them—sometimes a sparse living, if all they find is rebar and
girders in concrete; sometimes a pretty good living, if all the
wiring and pipes got put in, and if you’re very lucky some of the
machines that they used to run the nukes.

We looked at each other again, and I
shrugged, and we turned off the road and went down the trail past
the crossed saplings.

Sure enough, the radiation counter never did
pick up anything more than background, and the trail didn’t lead us
up to a fence strung with prayer flags. Instead, we clambered down
a dirt trail and came out of the forest under the shadow of one of
the towers, and found ourselves just about face to face with a
ruinman and his prentice loading chunks of old pipe onto a wagon.
They looked at us and we looked at them, and then I greeted them
with the old words that ruinmen use so other ruinmen know they’re
members of the guild. That was all it took; the other ruinman gave
us a nod and an assessing look. “You fellows looking for work?”

“On our way to a job in Cago,” I said.

“Well, drat.” He was getting on in years,
with gray all through his hair and beard and a couple of nasty
scars along his face. “We’ve got us a nice clean ruin here and not
half enough hands to make the most of it. Name’s Cob.”

“Trey,” I said, and shook his hand. “My
prentice here’s Berry.”

“Sam.” A motion of his head indicated his
prentice, a boy about Berry’s age. “Surely you’re at least looking
for someplace to spend the night.”

“Crossed our minds.”

He grinned. “Consider it done. Where you
fellows from?”

So I told him, and we got to talking, and
pretty soon Berry and I were helping him and Sam load the last of
the pipe into the wagon, because that’s what you do if you’re a
ruinman and you’re staying at somebody else’s site. By the time we
were done, Cob had explained that he’d be taking the wagon down to
Lebna, the nearest town, when morning came around, and offered
Berry and me a ride that far. Of course we agreed, and helped him
with a couple of other bits of lifting and hauling while the
daylight was still good, because again, that’s what you do.

Later on, the lot of us ate stew and pan
bread in a room Cob and Sam had cleared in the main building of the
nuke. We were close enough to where the containment vessel would
have gone that we’d all have been dead in minutes if it wasn’t an
empty, but that didn’t bother me any. Berry and I told as much of
the news from Shanuga as we could without mentioning Star’s Reach,
and Cob had plenty of news about Tucki and some from Sisnaddi
itself, which after all is just across the river from Tucki. They’d
been driving the wagon down to Lebna every week or so to sell
metal, buy supplies, and listen to the gossip, so some of it was
pretty recent, too.

I don’t remember most of it. I was tired, and
being around another ruinman made me a bit homesick for the Shanuga
ruins and the people I knew, but one thing I do remember. “They say
Sheren’s taken sick,” Cob said. “Mam Gaia bless her, she’s been
presden what, near forty years now? I’d always figured she’d
outlast me, and I hope she does. There’s going to be a mother of a
mess when she goes, they say.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he meant by that.
“Been a while since we had an election,” I said, guessing that
might be it.

“And it might be longer before we have
another one. There’s some who’d rather cast their vote with guns.”
He shook his head. “Damn fools. Like they’d gain anything by
that.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
A moment later, though, I happened to look Berry’s way, and he was
staring into the fire with an expression I’d never seen on him
before, eyes wide and mouth shut tight and every line of his face
holding something in. He noticed me looking at him, then, and put
on a different expression, fast, but I’d seen the earlier one, and
wondered about that for the rest of the evening.

Seven: The Way of Ruins

One of the things that makes this story hard
to tell in a straight line is that so much of it has to do with
ruins, and ruins have their own way of doing things. They all have
stories to tell, but they don’t tell them from beginning to end,
the way that Eleen and Tashel Ban say I ought to tell the story I’m
trying to write here. Ruins know how to wait, seeing as they’ve had
plenty of practice at it. They say a word here and a word there,
and it’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t figure out what they mean
by those words the first time you hear them.

If you’re a ruinman’s prentice, you either
learn that quick or you get reborn, because more often than not, if
a ruin’s going to kill somebody, it starts saying that to the
ruinmen in its own roundabout way days or weeks before anything
happens. I wrote something a while back about Shem sunna Janny, who
became a prentice the same year Conn and I did, and who looked at
Mam Kelsey’s book with me. He wasn’t stupid, but he never did
figure out how to listen to a ruin, and so he was pulling wire out
of a conduit one morning in a building we’d started taking down
when something inside gave way all at once, and a couple of floors
came crashing down on top of him.

The ruin had been saying that it was going to
kill someone since we started work on it that year. When the wind
blew, it creaked and shifted, and when we chopped pieces of it
loose and dropped them into a clear space below, it creaked and
shifted some more. Now of course plenty of ruins creak and shift,
and there are some that don’t and still end up dropping on
somebody, but that’s the way of ruins; you have to listen to them
talk, and then sometimes you can figure out enough to keep from
getting reborn. The other prentices stayed away from the ruin that
flapjacked on Janny when they didn’t have to go there, even though
it had plenty of wire and other things prentices can salvage. Janny
didn’t, and that was why we had to haul more concrete than I like
to think about to get to his body so a priestess could say the
litany for him and we could leave him out underneath the sky for
the wild things to bring back into the circle.

That’s the way ruins are. They tell you what
you need to know, but you can’t ever count on having an easy time
figuring out what they’re saying. The ruin in Shanuga where I found
the dead man’s letter and nearly got reborn was like that. It told
me everything I needed to walk straight here to Star’s Reach, but I
didn’t figure out what it was trying to tell me until I’d been to
Melumi and Troy, and traveled down the Misipi in a steamboat, and
gone digging in the Arksa jungle, and spent my time in Sisnaddi
half buried in the old archives, and went looking for the place
where every question has an answer near drowned Deesee, and all the
rest of it.