Star's Reach (53 page)

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.