Seven: The Robot's Hand

Something woke in the deep places of Star’s Reach last night, for what reason we don’t know.

I blinked awake all at once out of some dream about of the Tenisi hills of my childhood, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what. The room was dark except for one hooded lamp over in the corner where Thu keeps watch. Thu was not there; black shape against not-quite-darkness, he stood in the doorway looking out into the corridor beyond.

A moment later I knew what brought him there. A faint vibration came up through the concrete around us, deep and steady. Machinery: it could have been nothing else.

I was on my feet before I quite realized it. Thu glanced back at me; whites of his eyes glinted, the one pale thing in his night-dark face. One hand made a quick silent gesture: come.

Feet into boots, ruinman’s jacket a tough second skin: reactions from my prentice days, those. A moment later I was standing beside him at the doorway. He pointed to the stair, but I was already looking at it, and the dim fitful light that came up through it.

“I’ll wake the others,” I said in less than a whisper. He nodded, never looking away from the stair’s mouth.

A few moments later we were all awake. “The light and the sound came at the same moment,” Thu told us, his voice low. “Nothing else. No sound or sign of anyone.”

“Could the machines have turned themselves on?” Tashel Ban asked.

All of us looked at Anna. In the dim light of the lamp, wrinkles faded from her face, and I could almost see the girl she had been when she left Star’s Reach so many years ago. “It’s possible,” she said after a moment. “I remember so little.”

“Someone must go,” said Thu. He meant he should, and I had been about to say the same thing about me, so I just grinned. He gave me one of his unreadable looks, then nodded once, and the two of us went to the door together. The first time Thu and I met, he did his level best to kill me, and there’s nobody on Mam Gaia’s face I trust more.

Five levels down and one room over from the stair was most of a wall covered with lights and screens and dials. A couple of days earlier, when we’d searched those rooms, they were dark and dead, but now the lights were on and the screens lit up. Our earlier footprints were the only ones in the dust on the floor, so Thu went back up the stair to tell the others while I looked at the blank glowing screens and thought about the robot’s hand.

I wrote yesterday about how my mother and I came to Shanuga after my father died in the wars, and how I dreamed of sunken Deesee and decided to become a ruinman’s prentice. Not too many days after that, when the rains finally stopped for good, Aunt Kell wrote a letter to the ruinman she knew and had one of her daughters run it over. I never did hear whether the ruinman wrote back or just sent a message, but seemingly he had room for a new prentice and was willing to have a look at me. My mother got me dressed up and combed my hair till it hurt, and then the two of us walked the dozen blocks or so from Aunt Kell’s house to the street with no name where the ruinmen live.

Everybody in Shanuga knows where that street is, and most of them would shave between their legs with a broken rock before they’d go there. It’s on the south end of town, just outside a gate in the town walls nobody else likes to use, and the street turns into a muddy road after a bit and heads straight toward where the old ruins loom up out of the river mists, tall and gray and skeletal. The ruinmen’s houses are like every other house in Shanuga, narrow and close together as though they were drunk and leaning on each other’s shoulders to keep themselves upright, and they have signs hanging in front of them like the shops of any of the other guilds in town.

Just before the houses end and the street turns into a road, though, the ruinmen’s guild hall stands there like a bad dream. Other guilds have halls that look like houses, only twice or three times as wide and a couple of stories taller. The ruinmen are, well, ruinmen, and do things differently. Their guild hall is a big gray round thing that stands way up in the air like a ball perched on a stick. I learned later that the ruinmen a century ago took one of the huge water tanks the ancients put up on the hills here and there, hauled it down to the edge of town, put it up on its base and used scrap steel from the ruins to reinforce it and put floors into it. It really is one of the scariest things in town, unless you’re a ruinman, in which case it’s your second home.

We didn’t go there, though I stared at the thing looming up above the end of the street all the way from the gate to the front door of the house where we were headed. My mother knocked on the door; a prentice answered; they exchanged a few words, and then he let my mother and me in and left us in a couple of chairs in the little front parlor.

A little while later Mister Garman came down the stairs from above. He wasn’t Gray Garman yet, or at least there wasn’t more than a bit of gray in his hair yet, but he had the same frown as always and the same habit of saying little and listening a lot. I know he had some questions for my mother, and a few for me, but I honestly don’t remember a word of what was said. For all that I’d been jumping up and down at the thought of becoming a ruinman’s prentice, I was as scared just at that moment as I’ve ever been since. Mister Garman was big and muscled and scarred, and I guessed even then that trying to wheedle or coax him the way I could my mother or 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 chose to walk 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 building fell on him two years later – took me upstairs to the big room where the prentices slept, showed me the straw bed 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 there it was; 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 Bill, “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 Neeyonjin country on the far side of the mountains, as from our little corner of the world. When my father was still alive, he 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 Bill 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 Bill. 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 floow,m until we finally got to the cold damp silence of the cellar. Nobody brought a light, so it was blacker than black. Bill 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 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?” Bill 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,” Bill 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 though looking for me. I knew that they were looking for me; 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?” Bill said to the others. “He reached right out. Come on.”

Still laughing and whooping, the whole lot of them more 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 black 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. Bill pushed me a step out in front, and then said in a voice that could have passed for a gentleman 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 to their families, and there were a few who mentioned boys who did just that, up and quit after two bleak meals and a lot of hard work, or who bolted out the door into the night because they were too afraid of meeting the robot.

I didn’t mention that I’d had my share of hard work and scant meals as a farmer’s only son up in the hills, though that was mostly because I was too well fed and comfortable by the time the point seemed worth making. Still, I did my share of the cleaning when it came to that, and the dining room and kitchen were close to spotless when we got up the next morning.

It’s a funny thing, the robot’s hand. Every ruinman’s prentice, not just Garman’s, gets to meet the robot or do something enough like it that the differences don’t matter, and ever after there’s a line between you and everyone who hasn’t shaken the robot’s hand. The old world is a little less distant, maybe, and the things that people outside the ruinmen’s guild think and say seem a little less important. Certainly, as I lay in bed and tried to quiet my mind enough to sleep, the night after I found the dead man’s letter in the Shanuga underplaces and got started on the road to Star’s Reach, the robot’s hand was what kept coming to mind; I imagined myself going down some other stair, in some vast ruin I could barely imagine, and shaking a hand that didn’t have another prentice on the other side of it.

Maybe that’s what the ancients who built Star’s Reach were trying to do, in their own way. It’s certainly one of the things that sends ruinmen down into the underplaces of the old world’s dead cities, when the pay’s so often poor these days and so many of us get reborn in the process. To touch something that thinks but isn’t human, or isn’t the kind of human we are nowadays: it’s a heady thing, and it makes my head spin sometimes to think that I’m as close to doing that as I write these words as anyone has been since the old world ended, or close to it.