Destiny's Road (27 page)

She lifted Jemmy's head and slid her knee underneath. In that position she fed him spoonfuls of vegetable stew. It was nice.

It might have been erotic too, but Jemmy was just too tired. His attempt to impress her by feeding himself got as far as trying to free his hands from under a sheet. Too weak. Too hungry to bother. He hadn't eaten much when his protesting belly made him stop.

He asked, "Where am I?"

"You're serious?" Smiling, Willametta curled over to see his eyes. "Yeah. This is the Windfarm."

"Who found me?"

"Henry saw you first," Willametta said. "I thought Andrew would be angry. He's a trusty. He keeps track of us. But then-" She stopped. "Maybe tomorrow you can feed yourself, Andrew."

Questions yammered in his head. Two Andrews? Trusty? Where are the toilets? "Where are my things?"

"Andrew, you were carrying speckles. Speckles means you're ready to run! The probes kill you if they catch you!"

He looked up at her.

"We stashed the speckles. Clothes too. The trusty will give you a poncho when you can work." She handed him an oddly shaped pan. "This you piss in until you can get up."

The room faded. When his strength came back he looked under the sheet and found that he was wearing scarlet-yellow-orange shorts, way too big, with a drawstring.

He woke when everyone came in glistening wet. They left their ponchos at the far end where the airlock was. The kitchen and tables were there too, and they ate without much talk, though Jemmy could sense eyes on him.

Willametta fed him again.

They dimmed the lights.

Jemmy snapped awake. The brightening of the lights was like dawn flashing through a curtain suddenly swept back. He'd never seen artificial lights this bright. The others were all tumbling out of their beds. A sudden whiff of bread: they were tearing a loaf apart. They ate fast while they dressed.

Voices: "I'd kill a probe for a jar of strawberry jam."

"What size?" and a trickle of laughter.

They pulled ponchos out of a box at the far end of the big room, a machine that had throbbed all night, just audible through the muted roar of the storm. There were glare-orange ovals on the backs of the ponchos, a blue thread along the sleeves. They weren't all alike, not quite. Half-beard's had a broader orange curve down the front, a bigger oval patch in back.

They flowed out through the massive airlock. Jemmy counted as they cycled through: five women and fourteen men including Half-beard. Three stayed behind. There was the woman who couldn't get out of bed and complained a lot. There was a small muscular man with straight black hair and a bristly-black angry jaw, and an older woman whose tunic markings matched Half-beard's.

The woman loomed over him for a time, studying him. She was tall and dark, broad across shoulders and hips. She must weigh more than Jemmy did, despite being just short of gaunt, her big breasts slack and empty. By her size and her air of command, she reminded him oddly of Marilyn Lyons and Willow Hearst of the spring and fall caravans. She was of their kind, but starved to the bone.

Jemmy found himself avoiding her eyes. He was just as glad when she and the angry man disappeared through a door.

He lost interest, and dozed. Later he remembered sounds like quarreling or lovemaking... or storm sounds mingled in his dreams.

The smells of cooking woke him.

The man fed the bedridden woman, who appeared to be pregnant, not sick. At the big woman's orders he fed Jemmy and took Jemmy's bedpan.

There was no day or night out there. Jemmy (Andrew. Why Andrew? They could have picked a name closer to his own, and they had another Andrew.) "Andrew" could hear thunder. It never quite stopped. But there was day and night in here.

He'd lost his sense of time aboard Carder's Boat. Maybe he could rebuild his memory of the voyage from the phases of Quicksilver.

He'd guessed right about the storm. Heated air rises from a sea of molten rock, a rip in the world's crust. Air at ground level flows in to replace it. Air moving inward on a spinning ball, must spin... a hurricane pattern that must have been running for centuries if Cavorite's crew had come to see.

Oh, that was it. Air flows in, so face the wind to get out. Take the easy way out and you'll end on the easiest path to run a Road... assuming that Cavorite's crew meant to lead the Road right into a storm!

Why would they do that?

He'd found plants arrayed in rows; then the Road; then a plantation house. What would be grown here? He could feel the answer tapping at his mind. It was right on the tip of his tongue. .

Prison Cuisine

stable storm, like Jupiter's Red Spot or Uranus's Dark Spot, but we haven't had as long to observe it. There's got to be a heat source under it, and it has to be geothermal. It may be a potassium source.

-Alan Waithe, Geologist

Morning. The big woman and her paramour stayed behind again. The man gave Jemmy a fist-sized chunk of bread, then water. They both sat on Jemmy's bed and watched him eat.

"Get up," she said.

Jemmy rolled out of bed, landed on his hands and knees. Mostly he'd stopped hurting, but he was weak. She watched him pull himself to his feet. He asked, "Where's the toilet?"

"Shimon, go with him."

There were doors at this end of the room, marked with silhouettes of a man and a woman. Yesterday afternoon, these two had disappeared into the women's room for an hour or two.

The men's room was bigger than he'd guessed, with urinals, toilets, basins, towel racks, showers, and a tub. Partitions around showers, tub, and toilets had been ripped out and the marks painted over, badly. The walls were smooth stone like the rest of the barracks.

He turned a spigot. Burning hot water roared into the tub. Shimon was amused. He helped Jemmy climb in. He even got a towel for him; and then he watched as Jemmy got himself clean.

"How'd you get that scar on your hand?" he asked.

Jemmy tried to explain. His voice was rusty. He'd almost forgotten how to form words. He'd burned himself holding a gun wrong when he fired at an advancing line of sharks, and now there was a ridge of

pink between thumb and wrist... and Shimon nodded and gave every sign of being fascinated.

When Jemmy tottered back to bed Shimon was supporting him with a hand on his elbow, under the woman's critical eye. Lying down was bliss.

The woman said, "I'm Barda. You do what I say. You do what anyone says if he wears the orange."

"I call you Barda?"

"You call me Barda. I call you Andrew. Gatherers like Shimon, here, call me Trusty unless we're alone. They call you Trusty. You use their given names. It's good if you can learn their family names too. Barda Winslow," she thumped her chest. "Shimon Cartaya," she thumped Shimon's. "Willametta Haines. Amnon Kaczinski, the big guy. Duncan Nicholls, you call him Duncan Nick. Denis Bouvoire if you need some machine unjammed. There's a Dennis Levoy too, don't get them mixed up. Rita and Dolores Nogales, the twins. You noticed them."

"The huge pale guy, yes. Amnon? Twins, no."

"Most men notice Rita and Dolores."

"There's a dark guy who looks young and old....rippled, maybe, but quick-"

"Rafik Doe. Came here at fourteen, near ten years ago. He won't give his real last name to anyone. Records say he killed a whole trader family with a yutz gun. You notice anyone else?"

"No."

"What've you guessed?"

"The other trusty, he's Andrew Dowd." Barda slurred her speech like Half-beard, and he tried to imitate that. It might buy his life. Prison workers who asked a stranger to lie would want to be sure he could!

"You wear the orange too. You're both bosses, trustees. I'm supposed to be him. Is he supposed to be sick?"

"If he gets sick they make someone else trusty. If someone finds you now, you're just someone we pulled out of the storm. Naked. Can you walk?"

He felt fifty feet high and made of glass, but Jemmy walked down as far as the box (which was bigger than Barda, and chugging again) and back. He set his hand unobtrusively on a bedpost to hold himself up, and asked, "Pulled naked out of the storm, right. Where are my clothes supposed to have gone?"

"What d'you think?"

"Torn off by the wind?" Better-"Shredded by the plants."

"Good."

"What really happened to them?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I saw a big bird the same color as your clothes-"

"Firebird," she said.

"The biology lessons say that when something is colored like that, to stand out, it's a signal. Could be a horny bird making himself easy to find, or a flower calling a bee. Could be it's poison and it's warning all the bird eaters away. Stop, Jam inedible! You wear the firebird's colors so the Destiny predators won't bother you."

She nodded. "Now, 'Andrew,' I want to know all about you. Come on down to the kitchen." She took his elbow and they walked.

Everything that wasn't beds or washrooms was down at the airlock end. There was considerable space here: the huge stove, a line of hanging cookware, locked bins, the dining table and benches, an enormous heap of black twisted logs drying for firewood, and the chugging box.

The box was bigger than a coffin. It was settler magic, but it bore signs of later crude repairs. Below a glass hatch was a churning storm of brilliant colors. It was a dryer for wet clothes.

Barda gestured, and he sat at the table. Shimon set out a heap of vegetables from a bin. Barda sat across from Jemmy and began to chop and peel.

"I can help," Jemmy said. "I was a caravan chef."

"You just watch. I don't want you fainting."

She listened while she worked. Her expression didn't give away much. He could watch her muscles tense and relax, and watch the knife move. She was very fast, running on automatic, and her emotions went straight to her knife hand.

He couldn't watch Shimon, who busied himself tending the stove, feeding the pregnant woman, and watching Jemmy suspiciously.

When Jemmy told of killing Fednick, the knife didn't pause.

She knew of the caravans, but she listened sharply to what he had to say of towns along the Road, and cooking. At one point she said, "What you know about pit cooking isn't worth a fart in the wind, in the Winds." And she chuckled for a long time.

The pile of vegetables grew, and he asked, "Barda, are we vegetarians?"

"They'll bring a bird in tonight if they can. Everything else gets carted in. They don't give us red meat. I think it spoils too quick. When we take in enough kilos of seeds, sometimes they give us a radiated sausage. Keep talking."

The battle with bandits excited her. When he spoke of the Otterfolk, she was rapt, her knife hand slow and forgotten. She loved the theft of the speckles can. She looked queasy when he described sunburn.

She smiled (knife speed increased) when he spoke of swimsuits aboard Carder's Boat. "The boat must have been rifled for anything anyone could use on land. Even cookware. And somebody left a burner going. The towels had all rotted, but the older stuff must be settler magic."

"We wondered. Six baggy shorts and seven old windbreakers and no hat, no jacket. You were wearing three windbreakers on over each other!"

He drifted with the current aboard Carder's Boat, fed by Otterfolk. Barda looked wistful. He took his surfboard into the Winds and her knife action turned angry. "You must be some kind of crazy and some kind of lucky. We lose gatherers in the Winds every year."

"When I found the Road I knew I'd be all right."

"Not the plants? You didn't know the plants? Black core, orange branches, green tips?"

"Never saw them before."

"Yeah, why would you?" Barda stood and stretched elaborately. "They're speckles. We grow speckles."

"And you're prisoned here."

She didn't answer.

"Barda, you're faster than lightning with that knife. Can you cook as well as you carve?"

She shrugged. A silence grew, and then she said, "Daddy owns the Swan. It's the best inn and restaurant in Destiny Town, he says."

"There's a Destiny Town?"

Shimon laughed incredulously. Barda started to laugh, then changed her mind. "If you don't know Destiny Town, you're a big bright target, 'Andrew.' Just don't ever mention Destiny Town, okay? I can't tell you enough to fake it."

"Just tell me if the Road ends there."

"Yes, of course-"

"Have you seen Cavorite?"

His intensity startled her; then she laughed. Jemmy said, "I've followed Cavorite all this way from Spiral Town. Have you seen it?"

"Not up close. They take children through for tours, but Daddy-" She didn't say anything while she shaved a potato naked. Then, "Me and my four brothers, we were free labor. Daddy never took us anywhere unless it was for the Swan, or for cooking, or for customers. I did every part of making an inn work before I was twelve. I saw the top of

Cavorite once because we went to Romanoff's. Cavorite is right down the Road from Romanoff's. The top is round and there's a glitter from the windows. If you need to know more-"

Jemmy waved it off. "I've been through Columbia. That's the other lander in Spiral Town. Unless Cavorite was damaged or painted... ?" She didn't know. "Better not talk about that either. So tell me about Romanoff's?"

"That is the best restaurant in Destiny Town. When Daddy was a boy the Swan was outside town, just beside... I won't tell you where the Swan is."

Jemmy smiled. "What if I get hungry?"

"I don't want this... scum thinking they can hide out at the Swan. Anyway, Daddy thought he was going to move the Swan. The town was growing up around us, and we had to buy more and more of our food-"