Destiny's Road (42 page)

In due time Cavorite returned to Base One emptied of Earthlife seeds and infant animals, and loaded with samples of rock and Destiny life, maps, refined potassium and speckles.

What had gone wrong at Base One?

They found plumbing redirected to sterilize sewage with heat, then vent it above croplands. That would have done the job, if the job had been more than ten percent finished! Maybe they were stopped by the stench.

Livestock implied manure. Manure had even been raked into heaps, but the heaps lay untouched. Nobody had picked through them for saltpeter. Then again, there wasn't much. Potassium must first be put into fertilizer to feed the grass! Grass didn't make nerves.

As their intelligence dropped, had they forgotten what was at stake? Cavorite's crew might speculate, but there was nobody to ask. There were nobody at Base One who could still talk coherently.

The records that followed were nearly incoherent with medical jargon. Here Jeremy sensed a rage shared but never expressed. Twerdahl's crew had fed and washed and dressed their former colleagues, dressed the sores and treated the illnesses caused by dirt and randomly deposited sewage, and cleaned up after them until they grew to detest them.

Jeremy found reference to discipline problems, and murky speculation as to what constitutes rape and consent, theft versus custody, murder versus euthanasia, for people who had ceased to be people.

This wasn't in the teaching tapes at Spiral Town! But Barda Winslow had tried to tell him.

Some of the sick ones recovered some of their intelligence, some of their memory. Not all. Central-nervous-system nerves, once dead, don't grow back.

Cavorite's crew came to realize that they had become the primary colony on Destiny.

They founded Terminus far enough outside the Winds to escape the continual howling- "Move it," someone said. Before he could react, someone was handing

Jeremy his crutches and lifting him to his feet. "Set?"

"Ah-" Wait, I want to look up- The man sat down. A doctor. He erased Jeremy's file and called up something else.

-Caravans!

If Jeremy's sudden rage showed through, the doctor hadn't seen it. Jeremy was on crutches and still getting his balance, and that was as well. He had time to visit Karen before he saw Rita Nogales.

Karen was awake but a bit fuddled. He tried to tell her what he'd learned about speckles, Cavorite, Argos, the Windfarm, Destiny Town. She listened. She tried to comfort him, as if he'd suffered a personal injury. Presently she fell asleep.

"Looks good," Nogales said, turning the luminous interior of a human knee before her eyes. "A doctor like Itchy Wald does a neater job, but he spends too much time probing around in the joint. Trauma. Brendan is brisk. So, stay on crutches and don't do much walking for another day, then maybe we'll take the cast off."

"Would you look in on Karen before you go?"

"Sure."

He started to stand. "I should catch a bus-"

She said, "Wait, wait, wait. You owe me a story."

He sat down. "You owe me, I think. Andrew was going to use the prole gun on you all."

"No birdfucking allowed' I knew that speckles-shy birdfucker-"

"It's the law-''

"Go on."

"I was expecting it, Rita. He turned around and I yelled and jumped him. The rest piled on. Of course he tried to kill me later... ." He told her more than he'd told Brenda, but again he left out the speckles. I did it, I made them into a restaurant before I had to leave, and now I knew how!"

Running from the Swan, Jemmy Bloocher might have begged a ride from the inbound caravan. Go to Destiny Town, the end of the Road, Cavorite. In the instant that was possible, he'd remembered what the Windfarmers had called him.

Crab shy. A stranger in a place where he didn't understand the rules. He'd done that before. And generally messed it up.

He'd gone outbound instead.

From Barda's description he'd had no trouble finding Wave Rider. "All I had to do was get Harold Winslow to give me a chance."

"The daughter?"

"Karen? She was two months pregnant when I got there. She never told me who. Maybe I've served him dinner. Maybe not. Turnover's high in the caravans, or he might be from the spaceport. Rita, are you thinking I targeted the innkeeper's daughter?"

"Didn't you?''

"No no no. I only wanted to make myself a pit chef. I wasn't staying. And Barda didn't know Harlow. She worried me. Karen was just the little sister. Then we, I started noticing her, we started talking while she was pregnant with Mustafa."

"Tell me about her. She's my patient too. I can tell by her skin, she gets a lot more sunlight than most human beings."

"Karen was the one who talked to the Otterfolk before I came. She swims, and Wave Rider has a pier; she didn't have to bull her way through the waves. She gave birth in the water. Later I taught her to surf."

"But Otterfolk don't talk, do they?"

"Karen taught me to read their dance. That's her word, dance." He talked about Karen and himself. He was never boss at Wave Rider. He never owned any part of the restaurant. Any investment was emotional. Karen had never demanded that he show ambition.

"She has you by the balls."

"They're still there."

"Show me."

He shied off. Rita laughed.

He'd stayed nearly faithful. Pressed, he admitted four affairs in those twenty-seven years. As for Karen, he was sure only of a wagonmaster who may have been Mustafa's father. He was an old man now, and Mustafa flew the orbital shuttles.

"Yeah, you weren't staying. Twenty-seven years?"

He didn't laugh.

She said, "I'm a real doctor now, a surgeon. It's what Dolores wanted to be. When she, when that birdfucker-"

"Dolores had empathy."

"She couldn't stand to cut a person open. For me that's the easy part. Wanting to fix something broken, that's easy too. Jeremy, if Medical knew I was in the Windfarm, they might ease me out. Might not."

"I'd be in worse trouble than you." They'd kill me, he didn't say. Reassure her, yes, but he didn't want Rita Nogales thinking in terms of extortion.

"Well, I'll go look in on her. Anything else you want," she shrugged and didn't finish.

He found Harlow, Lloyd, and Brenda waiting in Reception to take him to dinner.

Hydraulic*Empire

We have to stop meeting in Cargo/Rec. It's gotten too small. The grandchildren are growing up.

-Anonymous

Cavorite was just across the Road.

Jeremy stood rapt, until he realized that they were trying to help him sit down on a bench. Lloyd said, "We'll get a bus pretty soon."

"It's only eight blocks? Let's try it." Jeremy turned away and began his swinging progress. Crutches then foot. Crutches, foot.

Harlow said dubiously, "If it starts to hurt-"

"What's it like?" Jeremy asked.

"Cavorite?"

"Yes."

"Two stories tall, and you bump your head a lot, Daddy. Everything's near the base," Brenda said. "Rooms, cargo, motors and pumps and cooling, even the system that makes fuel and air. Everything that has any mass. The upper part is all hydrogen tank."

"They build the new shuttles the same," Harlow said.

''I know."

You want every part of a spacecraft as light as you can make it, see? Tanks you can make into frothy-walled balloons. Motors, you can't lighten those much ~f you want to run them a few hundred times, and motors have to be at the aft end. Now, the cargo, one trip you leave it in orbit, the next you're bringing it back for repair. You never know where your center of mass will becoming home, so you don't know how the ship will fly unless you put the cargo hold where the motors are. Now most of your mass is at the tail. It's going to fly butt first coming back, so you beef up the tail against reentry, and you might as well pile all the rest of the mass there too.

"Mustafa had a test coming up," Jeremy said. "We all had to hear him lecture."

And the new shuttles aren't fusion, they run on kerosene and liquid oxygen, so they have to be really light. They come home like a silver birthday balloon weighted at one end. So even if the motors don't light at the last second, it doesn't crash, see, Daddy?

He and Mustafa never said stepfather, stepson to each other. He'd learned more about the shuttles before Mustafa's tests... . They fueled the shuttle right on the beach, electrolyzing seawater then liquefying the hydrogen and oxygen (those rounded structures!); then ran it up those tracks.

The fur hat blazed ahead of him, brighter than Quicksilver or any moon. Crutches, foot, crutches, foot. A pit chef developed massive arms. Jeremy was in the swing of it and outrunning the others by the time they reached Romanoff's.

He stopped, blinking in the hot light at a flight of stairs. "This I'll have to take slow."

"No, Daddy, they've got a lift."

Romanoff's dining hall was an awesome sight, ablaze with holograms of chandeliers, the kind that had candles in them. The headwaiter moved them through the crowd with some care. The restaurant was laid out in levels, with steps up or down every few meters. Jeremy was watching his feet and the crutches. He didn't get a chance to gawk until they were seated.

Tables of half a dozen were common. Families shared dishes around, just like Spiral Town families. A young couple turned out, at second glance, to be a stunning young woman and a creaky older man with a startling young face of superskin.

Harlow asked, "How's Karen?"

"Hanging on. Dr. Nogales has her on Novabliss for pain. And she wanted Karen's life story."

"What's she say?"

No birdfucking allowed. Something about Romanoff's made it impossible even to whisper that. "She didn't make any promises. Brenda, you sent me to the library-"

The waiter came. Jeremy asked him about some menu items and the man got bogged down in questions. He went to get the chef.

Several minutes of shoptalk ensued, much to his family's amusement. The cuisine sounded like Spiral Town, but Chef Simonsen knew pit cooking. He had been a merchant on Hearst wagon.

Jeremy realized, barely in time, that Jeremy Hearst had not! That Jeremy, raised in Destiny Town, had learned pit cuisine from a Spadoni wagon merchant and from lessons filed under CUISINE*BARBECUE. That Jeremy was an apprentice learning from a master.

His family listened to this line of fiction with much interest. Simonsen went back to his kitchen. Harlow had ordered drinks, and Jeremy sipped something fruity and alcoholic. Brenda asked, "About the library-"

"I spent the whole day there. We were never taught that our ancestors were mindless idiots for eleven months! More than a Destiny year!"

Brenda began to turn pink. Harlow asked, "Shake you up?" She was not quite amused, and not shocked.

"You knew."

"Every child learns that."

"Brenda? You? The other kids too?"

"You all got well. Daddy, you haven't changed."

But Jeremy Winslow's children knew him as a Crab shy who worked the pit at Wave Rider. The wonder was that they gave their father any respect at all.

"You'd have died without us," Lloyd said casually.

"Sure, we owe you. My ancestors owe yours. But I think they robbed us too."

"Robbed-?"

Dinner came: communal dishes, separate plates. Lloyd waited until they had served themselves. Then he repeated, "Robbed you?"

Jeremy pointed up at the hologram chandeliers. "Settler magic all around us. Megas of electric power-"

"That's from Quicksilver," Lloyd said.

Jeremy said, "That's power beamed from Quicksilver to relay satellites to guide spots all over Destiny Town and way beyond. They could be sending power to Spiral Town too, couldn't they?"

"We could reset them," Harlow admitted.

"I see a lot of tugs-"

"There's just one factory, Jeremy."

"Lloyd, it's nearly the same design as the power plants on Quicksilver, or a Begley cloth weaver unit seen under a microscope, or Destiny Town's Varmint Killer. It's unmistakable. Your tug factory was designed in Sol system. More to the point, it will accept a signal to reproduce itself."

"I don't actually know that."

"Cavorite made a lot of trips in eleven months. Speckles to Spiral Town, home with a loaded cargo hold every time, right?"

His family was embarrassed. Jeremy kept his voice down. "I can see it. Your ancestors stripped us. There's nothing of settler magic left in Spiral Town but," now he came to think of it, "a handful of computers, a paint machine, thousands of electric lights, the Road, Varmint Killer, and a cave in a hillside where Begley cloth comes from," and he couldn't suppress the smile.

Lloyd smiled back. "Quite a lot."

"Well, that cave was just too big to steal, I guess, and the rest isn't valuable enough."

Harlow said, "Jeremy, suppose you're right, suppose Cavorite carried some communal supplies away from Base One. You did survive."

"So far. Harlow, they took too much. Everything's wearing out."

"Mmm."

Was he annoying his family without reason? It wasn't as if he'd evolved any kind of answer. He turned his attention to dinner.

The food resembled Spiral Town cuisine, with an emphasis on sauces and potatoes and a variety of salads, light on the speckles. Hey, this wasn't a potato. Shreds of black in the pork-and-broccoli, yellow-green in the duck dish, were certainly Destiny spices. There were spiky yellow-green disks in a brown sauce: more Destiny plants, and his family was careful cutting off the rind.

Jeremy's taste and belly and intellect feasted all together. What flavors has Simonsen matched here?

It became a lively family discussion. He's done something to these almonds. How can our kitchen do this? and this?