Eleven: The Gray Towers

The old dream about Deesee kept on coming back to me, night after night, while Berry and I walked north out of Tenisi and started across Tucki. That was about the only interesting thing that happened for most of two weeks, though. The road we followed ran west and then north through forest, for the most part, with villages or scattered farms here and there when the soil was good or some farmer long since dead just up and decided that this was where he was going to build his house.

It’s a funny thing, but the further we traveled from cities and the poorer the folk we met, the better the welcome we got. Close to Shanuga, as I wrote earlier, we were lucky to get a place to sleep in a hayloft and a cold meal on the back steps, but as we got deep into Tucki, as often as not we ate at the table with the family and slept on a pallet by the fire along with everybody else. Nobody seemed to care that we were ruinmen. In fact, it was pretty much the opposite; half the time, when we stayed the night at some farmhouse, sooner or later the farmer or his wife would mention some scrap of ruin over one one corner of the property and ask if I thought there was anything in it that might hurt anyone. It happened fairly often that Berry and I went out the next morning at first light and followed somebody over to an old gray lump of concrete wet with dew, poked around it, scanned it for radiation and poisons, and left the farmer feeling a good bit easier.

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 government would put a stop to it, and by and large nobody’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. It happened now and then that 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 that part of the world rose up out of the waters; 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 of them: 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; clearly 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 anybody else 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 round gray shapes, cracked and crumbling at the top, that rose out of the forest 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 were nukes 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. There are some of them in Tenisi, and every one of them is a dead zone with a fence around it a couple of kloms out from the ruin 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 dying to have a lot of time for prayers.

I learned about nukes from Mister Garman, of course. Every ruinman’s prentice learns about them from his mister, since the only thing the priestesses will say about them is that they’re evil and if you go there you die; 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 fear when you’re dealing with a nuke. The first is the reactor building itself. The ancients didn’t exactly have a lot of time to shut them 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 the old containment vessels nowadays, because the radiation has you doubling over and vomiting before you get much past the door of the building, and you die pretty quickly after that.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is the used fuel rods, which were stored right around the old reactors in pools of water. I read once in Sisnaddi, when I was searching the records there for anything about Star’s Reach, that the ancients spent years bickering about what they were going to do with the fuel rods and all the other waste they got from running 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; you got red hot fuel rods catching fire, or melting into a puddle and burning their way down to groundwater and leaching out into the ground, or simply turning 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, fairly fresh, 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: ruinmen’s sign, that. 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 before we left 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 a good bit more detail, too, from Plummer one time. 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 about as often as not, 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 the empties down for the metal in them – sometimes a sparse living, if all they find are the iron rods in the 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 ordinary 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 some of 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 dry 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, close enough to where the containment vessel would have gone that we’d all have been dead in minutes if they’d had the time to finish the thing and get it loaded with fuel rods. 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 ruin’s and Gray Garman’s crew, but one thing I do remember. “They say Sheren’s taken sick,” Cob said. “Mam Gaia bless her, she’s been presden what, near twenty 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 swords and 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.

(to be continued...)