Free Star's Reach by John Michael Greer Page B

the
kitchen at Mister Garman’s camp back at the Shanuga ruins, but we’d
eaten well enough until then. Once we got a fire started, Berry
tossed one of the cakes of soup into a tin pail of water on top,
and it turned into something not half bad in short order.
    So we ate some of the bread and drank the
soup, and the night got darker. Wind made noise in the branches
above us, and other things made their own little noises lower down.
I tried not to show it, but I was on edge, and when a wild dog
barked somewhere off in the middle distance, Berry and I both just
about jumped out of our skins.
    “Nervous?” I asked him.
    “Yes.” Then: “I’ve never spent a night out in
the forest.”
    “Me neither.”
    Even in the dim flickering light from what
was left of the fire, I could see his eyebrows go up. “I heard you
were a farm boy from the hill country.”
    “True enough. Doesn’t mean we slept under
trees, you know.”
    That got me a quick glance, to make sure I
wasn’t angry, which I wasn’t. “I was born in Nashul,” he said after
a moment. “Inside the walls.”
    I let out a whistle. “No kidding. How’d you
end up a ruinman’s prentice?”
    “I—I’m a tween, you know.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “Is that—” He didn’t finish the sentence, not
that he needed to.
    I didn’t give him time, either. “Garman ever
give you trouble over that?”
    “Not once.”
    “That’s good enough for me.”
    His face said “thank you” better than words
could have. I put a couple of sticks onto the fire, so neither of
us had to say anything for a moment.
    I don’t think they had tweens in the old
world, either, or if they did I’ve never read anything about them.
The priestesses say that they’re one of the things that happened to
us because of all the poisons the people of the old world dumped
everywhere they could think of. Some of those were fast poisons,
and that’s part of why so many people died during the years just
after the old world ended, and some of them were slow poisons, and
that’s part of why there still aren’t a twentieth as many people as
there were back then. Some of them, though, were the kind of poison
that gets inside you and messes things up, not for you, but for
your children and their children, and of course that’s another part
of the reason why there are so few people nowadays compared to how
many there were back then.
    It’s because of that third kind of poison,
the priestesses say, that so many women can’t have babies and so
many men can’t father them, and that’s also why so many of the
babies that do get born are sick from birth and die young. Still,
you also get babies who are born different rather than sick. You
get green children, for one. When they’re young, there’s something
in their skin that feeds the little green one-celled plants the
priestesses talk about so much, and so they turn a nice grass green
a few weeks after they’re born and stay that way until they get
into their teen years, and then the little plants go away and their
skin turns brown again. Up in Mishga and Skonsa and Aiwa you get a
lot of people with a coat of hair all over them like bears; down in
the border country near Meyco you get a lot of women with four
breasts instead of two, and men with four nipples: there’s a lot of
that sort of thing.
    Then there are tweens. There are more of them
than the others, and they’re called tweens because they’re not
really men or women but something in between. The two of them I’ve
ever seen with their clothes off had something like a set of each
kind between their legs, and little breasts you’d never notice
under a shirt. The priestesses say that tweens count as men,
meaning they can’t be priestesses or belong to Circle; most other
people aren’t too sure what to make of them, and there are places
where they’re not welcome. Even before Berry and I traveled
together, that last thing seemed stupid to me, but then people do
nearly as many