Star's Reach by John Michael Greer Page B

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