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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 child 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 shake the robot’s
hand, and ever after that there’s a line between you and everyone
who hasn’t gone to meet the robot. 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. I know it’s 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 doing of it. 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 to think
that I’m as close to doing that as I write these words as anyone
has been since the old world ended.

Five: The Road to Melumi
     
     
    The morning after the day I found the letter
came way too early. I dragged myself off of my cot about the time
first light came up in the east, found some cold water to wash
with, and made myself about as presentable as somebody who hasn’t
had time to sleep off one mother of a lot of beer is likely to get.
The face that looked back at me from the little tin mirror over the
washbasin wasn’t much different from the one that blinked back the
morning before, barring the cut on my cheek, but I felt different.
At the time, I thought that was a matter of becoming a ruinman and
a mister of the guild, or maybe squeaking past getting reborn by a
senamee or two. Looking back, though, I think it was probably the
beer.
    Finally I got dressed in ruinman’s leathers
and left my tent, and damn if Berry wasn’t right: there must have
been twenty prentices waiting for me with hopeful looks. Some were
just about as old as I was, and some were so young they must have
signed on with their misters just before that season, but it took
all of one look to tell me that every one of them was hoping I’d
pick him and nobody else to be my first prentice. I had just about
enough wits in my head to raise a hand before they all started
talking at once. “Already chose my prentice,” I told them. “Sorry.”
A couple of the youngest ones burst into tears, and all of them
gave me the kind of look that makes you feel like you just stomped
their puppy or something.
    That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest,
and I waited until they were leaving and walked a bit unsteadily
over to Gray Garman’s tent. I’m sure the man slept sometime, but in
all the years I worked for him I could count the times I saw him
sleeping or washing up or anything on the fingers of one foot. This
morning was no different. He had his tent flap open, and waved me
in when I stopped just outside. Berry was there already, clean and
bright-eyed and doing his level best not to jump out of his skin
with excitement, but Garman just looked me up