Star's Reach by John Michael Greer Page A

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