Destiny's Road (16 page)

Cavorite had curved from its path, rising into the sky. Had flown downslOpe to explore, charring the soil. Returned and continued the Road.

They were approaching a river and a bridge. The wagons were two hours behind them. Hal was telling Dannis Stolsh, "We ran back as far as Doheny wagon. I had two bites in me the size of walnuts. Not one of us went past Doheny. We just swarmed up and in, you wouldn't believe how fast. It was crowded in there, and all men, too, and Bryne Doheny trying to bandage the holes. We could hear the little monsters batting against the walls-"

Tim didn't know enough to get a handle on this, and he didn't want to interrupt.

The merchants were still quarreling. Eduardo Spadoni waved downslope and barked something sharp. He strode away fast, and Joker lagged to give him room. In a minute that put him alongside Tim.

Tim wanted to see his face. He asked, "Joker. Is it a nickname?"

Now Joker's anger wasn't showing. He wore that bland look: secrets. He pronounced his name, differently from what Tim had been saying, and spelled it out: "D-Z-H-O-K-H-A-R. An old name, not meant to be laughed at. My uncle's name is the same, but the family calls him Joe."

"Dzhokharr," Tim tried to imitate Joker's pronunciation. "What did Hal mean, bites the size of walnuts?"

Joker stared, then barked sudden laughter. "I remember that. Some turkey hunters ran into a hive of firebees in the salt dunes ten days down the Road from here. I could see men running back and climbing all over Doheny wagon and wedging their way in. Then the chugs, they all folded into their shells in a wave that ran right down the caravan. I just gaped, but Father, he got us inside. We all had to hide in the wagons, and some of us got bit. Stopped us for three hours. So, Tim, are you glad you joined a caravan?"

"Oh, yes."

Water roared around rocks, plunging down toward a sea lost to distance and mist. The river was wide here. The massive bridge was watersmoothed boulders embedded in smooth, homogenous rock: poured rock, like several structures near the hub of Spiral Town. Tim showed his awe and hid his recognition.

Over the bridge they went, then downstream, spreading out.

After that nobody got much exercise. The men with poles dropped their lines into still pools in the white water. They sat on smooth rocks and talked or dozed. When anyone shouted, Tim or Hal moved briskly to get the net under whatever was flopping on a line. The fish were Earthlife, three or four species. Dannis spread a sheet well back from the stream and cleaned the fish on that.

The mist cleared for an hour in the afternoon. Tim could see all the way to the sea. There was a rectilinear feature along the shore: houses, many.

"The Shire?"

"Right."

"Why didn't they build along the Road?"

"They don't like us," Joker said. "They'd die without us, so they keep their manners. They'll cook us dinner if we bring the food. They don't fish or hunt much, so they don't get enough fat. There's another thing about the Shire," Joker said. "You don't rub up against Shire women."

He'd already heard that. Tim said, "A yutz wouldn't anyway."

"Here, a merchant doesn't either."

The Shire was spread along five or six klicks of shore, four klicks downslope from the Road. Over that distance a dozen men carried forty pounds of fish in a net hammock, following a worn dirt path that in no way resembled cooled lava.

There wasn't any beach. Waves smashed against rock cliffs, and only spray showed above the edge.

From a central building the houses reached two arms out along the bluff. They were squarish, with peaked roofs, like the houses of Twerdahl Town. Differences became clearer as they came near. These were smaller. Some had been shored up. They were all the same color: weathered wood. Roofs weren't as high. Walls leaned.

The hunting party beat them down. They'd killed something as big as a small man. Its head was shot to shreds, and puncture wounds showed along its body too. They were showing it to admiring Shire folk when the fishers arrived.

"Boar pig," Hal told him.

A score of children swarmed around the carcass and the hunters from the caravan. Adults hung back, except for a dozen elder men. Those elders came to meet the fishing party.

The merchants' bias against haste might have worked against them. Fresher fish would have made a better gift. The Shire elders chose not to notice. They exclaimed over the fish as they had the boar, gave both to the women's care, and took the merchants off to the big central building that Tim had already dubbed City Hall. It was older than the other houses, and better built; and it had once had windows.

The Shire women were setting up to cook dinner. When Tim announced himself as a chef, they just looked at him, then closed a circle with Tim outside.

Tim was starting to feel left out. The children didn't want to talk, only to look. He watched the women at work for a bit, ignoring Hal's grin. Did they think, did Hal think, would Rian think that he was interested in them?

The Shire women enveloped themselves in shapeless robes. It was hard to see what they were like. One woman seemed bent and twisted, and too young for it. One or two who might be in their teens and twenties moved like they were in their thirties and forties. The way they moved and stood formed groups, with merchants and yutzes and Shire men outside. They closed themselves off from strangers, men and women alike, and only the Shire elders spoke to the elder merchants.

Joker's warning, Hal's warning, seemed superfluous.

The Shire had agriculture, at any rate. There were mushrooms big as a man's hand, corn and squashes and potatoes and unidentifiable flowery green stalks. It was all set steaming between blankets of Destiny ferns over a bed of coals.

The pig got the same treatment. An hour later, the fish did too.

The Shire men were settled in conversational circles, idle but for their busy hands. They ignored the men of the caravan, and Tim respected their wish. But Hal stood above one old man for a time, then called, "Tim? Bord'n? You've got to see this."

The old man was seated against the tilted wall of a house. His skin was dark and seamed, his curly hair gone nearly white. His legs were thin and knobby. There was something distorted about him. Maybe something about the line of his jaw? He'd been working on the pale inner surface of an oval of hard gray stuff nearly a meter long, using tiny pointed picks. Now he grinned up, showing good white teeth set nearly at random, basking in Hal's admiration.

"This's Geordy Bruns," Hal said.

The picks left dark scratches, or else Geordy Bruns had rubbed lampblack into them for shading. He'd carved a seascape: clouds and sea and dark bluffs, the same bluffs Tim could see to the northwest. A man in the middle distance, his back turned, looking up at a tinier human shape on the bluff. Tim turned the picture in his hands. A woman?

"It's amazing," he said, "how much you've shown with so few lines." Geordy Bruns nodded happily. Tim handed it back, carefully, and asked, "What is this?"

The Shireman's voice was rough, his accent twisted. "Scrimshaw. This's a lungshark's backplate."

Tim studied it. The polished surface had a pearly iridescence. Hal said, "They're littler, but elsewise they're not so different from a chug's. You can go to a caravan's campground and pick up a hundred."

Most of the Shire men were working scrimshaw carvings. Scenes differed; skills did too. Geordy Bruns showed a finished plate, a line of bas-relief skulls, all Destiny life, all clearly derived from some common ancestor. The middle one was certainly a chug. Another man had carved a crude view of Landing Day, as two featureless cylinders descended on inverted candle flames. A man Tim's age was instructing a younger one in technique, practicing on a chipped shell. They stopped uneasily until Tim stopped watching them.

The rest of the caravan arrived near sunset.

The men of the Shire distributed dinner. Some of them ushered the children into their own circle. When Geordy Bruns stood to take his meal, Tim saw that his back was twisted.

These women might know only one way to cook, but it worked. Fish, pig, potatoes and mushrooms and greens, they all tasted wonderful. Tim became certain that they'd used a different Destiny plant to flavor each coal bed. He should have watched more closely.

And finally it came to him to wonder-"Bord'n!"

"Tim?"

"Where on Earth are the chugs?"

"Well, they can't use the bluffs, can they? We turned them loose a couple of klicks up the Road, where they can get to a beach. It's still a good run for them."

"Sharks?"

"We stayed to shoot a few. That's why some of us are late."

Quicksilver was gone, and the sun was a last sliver of light on the sea. Against the dying red sky the silhouettes of human shapes showed their origin clearly. Tim saw it, the common thread. In their stance, in their walk, the Shire folk were distorted. Too many were sick, one way and another. Like Jemmy Bloocher's father: crippled, twisted.

He'd been seeing it half the afternoon: how they set wide privacy bubbles around traders and yutzes both. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, did they think outsiders were the twisted ones? And the traders were being meticulously polite- Tim watched Rian and Senka together. Senka's walk was always an invitation, and Rian's too. Not tonight! Senka's walk was clumpy, jarring. Rian tottered alongside, imitating her, two cripples keeping their balance with each other's help, with jaws set in anger against what the universe had done to them. Rian caught him looking, and winked.

The Shire elders and the merchants emerged from conference. Master Tucker and Damon ibn-Rushd accepted fish from two Shire men, then vegetables from another pair. Arms well extended with their plates. Keeping their distance. The senior yutzes knew the drill too.

Whatever was wrong with the Shire folk....as it contagious?

That was in the teaching programs too. Humankind had evolved alongside tens of thousands of parasites. The parasites kept pace easily:. they died faster so they evolved faster. In Africa and Asia the parasites ruled. Mankind had come later to Australia and the Americas and the polar ice caps; parasites that preyed on humans, were fewer there.

The Destiny expedition had brought no parasites at all.

But disease and parasites would evolve eventually, given enough prey. Ways to fight infections, diseases, and plagues were in the teaching programs.

He couldn't ask a merchant, of course. Tim Bednacourt had never seen those teaching programs. He could hardly ask the children. Boys and girls were moving among the yutzes and merchants, and Tim couldn't shy from them: they were friendly and curious, unlike their elders. But he couldn't quite make sense of their accents.

So Tim Bednacourt began to sing.

He picked a song the yutzes had taught him, a ballad of terror and courage, "Grendels. in the Mist." No sex in it, no gender references. A simple chorus shouted at the top of one's voice. It sounded splendid in the dusk. Other voices joined him one by one: yutzes, a few merchants, now a woman's voice, now another, now a girl.

The full moon had risen above the mountains. Quicksilver would have been brighter, but the moon cast as much light. Quicksilver was a point; the moon showed a clear disk. In its light you could walk around obstacles and make out human shapes, but not faces, not even body language. Communication wasn't easy.

But they could sing.

Now the Shire women were singing, and the men listened.

City Hall was crowded, and blazing daylight outlined the door. With the wagons six klicks uphill, the entire caravan had stayed for the night. The building was one huge room with alcoves at the corners. The sleepers all tended to gather at the center.

Tim wriggled his way out of a knot of women and men and made his way out. Children cheered as he emerged into the morning, and he waved back. And froze.

He was in the crater left by Cavorite.

It hadn't showed yesterday evening. It showed vividly in daylight.

City Hall had been built on a foundation of melted and recooled lava, a concave dish.

Cavorite must have come straight down.

Cavorite's crew had examined this site and found it good.

But why not bring the Road right down to the Shire?

He was on their track. One day he'd know.

The caravan cruised past the Shire the next morning. Of the Shire's alleged hundred people, nearly forty adults and fifteen children had climbed six klicks uphill to walk alongside the wagons, to haggle or just to watch.

Tim moved up and down the line, passing out bread. He'd wondered if Doheny wagon would be empty, but Bryne and Lucia Doheny were selling toothbrushes, dental floss, bandage cloth, and crudely blown bottles of clear fluid.

Tim recognized these. The bottles held flavorless, nearly pure alcohol. Merchants sold them in Spiral Town as antiseptic. Kids too young for it watered it with fruit juice and drank at secret parties.

The Shire folk were paying off in scrimshaw.

One artist left a carved plate at Dionne wagon and staggered away with a stack of uncarved shark plates as high as his eyebrows.

Geordy Bruns had traded a plate for flour and dried meat and another for dental tools. Tim saw him dropping back as if tired. The trouble with the merchants' way was that some good customers hadn't the strength to keep up.

Tim joined him to see what he still had.

It was the plate with the skulls on it. Geordy pointed them out proudly: platyfish, juggernaut, chug, lungshark, sand trap shark, Otterfolk.

Tim said, "Wait," and jogged ahead.

Sixth from the end was ibn-Rushd wagon. Damon looked at Tim curiously as he clambered through the driver's alcove to the roof. Tim dug into the roof trap and had what he wanted.

Geordy looked through Tim Hann's worldly possessions. They weren't much. Any valuables of Jemmy Bloocher's had stayed in Twerdahl Town.