Destiny's Road (43 page)

He could see their relief. Jeremy was being difficult, but we got him to change the subject.

But who else could he ask?

He had questions. His family had pieces of answers, if there were answers. His family would protect him, knowing that Jeremy Winslow was fiction.

"Otterfolk," he said. "They drove Cavorite's crew crazy. Leaving Haunted Bay kills them. Here's an intelligent species that can't explore. What's intelligence for if not for seeking knowledge?"

"They're happy," Brenda said.

"Jeremy, we all read those old records," Harlow said. "One point Daryl Twerdahl made. The Otterfolk knew some of them were dying, but they kept coming back for more. The ones who lived had tales to tell... however they tell tales."

"So they'd die to learn more, but they can't," Jeremy said.

"Daddy, they've got us. We can show them things."

"Here's my point. Feeling the way they did about the Otterfolk, and knowing what Argos had done to them, how could Cavorite's people take away our access to space and leave us marooned?"

Lloyd said, "We had Cavorite. You had Columbiad."

Jeremy thought it over... and Lloyd was right.

He said little after that. He listened to in-group chat from his family, and a few tantalizing snatches of conversation from tables nearby.

Dessert was a mountain of fruit and sorbets. Chef Simonsen brought over a bottle of a sweet wine and poured them thimble-sized glasses. "Tasting wine isn't one of my skills," Jeremy admitted.

"You should start," the chef said severely.

Jeremy heard a big bell's bong before they had finished. "Ten minutes to bus time," Harlow told him.

He paid the bill just like a citizen, by speaking his name and a number to their waiter. Then he tried to get up. No birdfucking- Forgot. They had to help him to his feet, hut he was all right with crutches under him. He wondered if a tablespoon of wine (and a fortified fruit drink) could have thrown his balance off so badly.

In the morning the house was empty. But Jeremy remembered Harlow standing over his futon, looking down at him from what seemed a vast distance.

"Tomorrow, look up hydraulic empire," she'd said.

Karen turned just her head with a delighted smile. "Hi!"

'Hi. Did Nogales take you off the Novabliss?" She seemed far more alert than she had yesterday.

"Don't know. Nogales ... Rita? My doctor? She says I've got to stay out of the sun for a while. And the water. Till autumn!"

"Long time."

Karen said, "It means I can't help you with the pit."

Her hands were still bound but her shoulders moved restlessly. Karen still looked patchy. Better along her ribs and hip, but her shoulder and breast were worst. One big grayish patch of skin had sloughed off her shoulder onto the sheet. Jeremy wondered if he should remove it, or put it back. What was underneath was puffy and red touched with purple.

He said, "You can't talk to the Otterfolk either, and that's the fun part. I should have my knee back before the next caravan. I want to try some things in the kitchen. If any of it works out, we'll be working there instead of the pit-"

"Ah-hah! Brenda got you to Romanoff's!"

"Lucky guess."

"Yeah?"

"Brenda and Lloyd and Harlow took me last night. We're all staying at Harlow's-" except that Lloyd and Brenda went back this morning, and he chose not to tell his wife that.

"We had a good life, didn't we?"

What? Where did that come from? "So far so good," he said cautiously. And every bit of it stolen. He could put off telling her that for a little while yet.

"I used to wonder. Did you and Harlow?"

He didn't ask, Did we what? He spoke the truth while he had the chance. "Yes, while you were carrying Mustafa. We were careful. Your father never caught us."

"Mmm."

"But never after we were married, Karen."

"Good." She shifted a little. "It itches." She shifted again. "Burns. What did you call it? Novabliss? If you run across Dr. Nogales, I need some."

He found someone with a label and told him that Karen needed a doctor. That might get something done, but Rita Nogales should see her.

He looked into some rooms. He stopped at Reception and spoke with Lisa Schiavo. Then he went to the library, the obvious place to wait for a doctor.

CARAVAN

Again, a multitude of entries.

CARAVAN*MAP

Three klicks of the Neck and a twelve-klick stretch of land between the Road and the ocean were all shaded in tan. Call it twenty square klicks: all property of the caravans. A scatter of rectangles and a sprinkling of square dots just the far side of the spaceport (yellow), and another scattering just short of the Neck, and no other buildings in between.

To the west the Road ran off the map, and Jeremy wondered- WINDFARM*MAP restricted material. Access code?

WIND FARM

restricted material. Access code?

DESTINY TOWN

That was well mapped, with a zoom feature. He could sketch the details of Jeremy Hearst's life onto this. He should! But it felt too much like work, and there was something he wanted more.

CARAVAN *CARGO

Nothing. Wrong word?

CARAVAN*EXPORT

Nope.

If he knew exactly what wagons carried and what they needed, he'd know how to deal for it. Try:

CARAVAN*2739*REPLACEMENTS

Bandages. Whiskey considered as medicine. Paint from Spiral Town, oil from Twerdahi Town, silver fern tea from the Shire. Did the caravans carry high-tech medicine? It wasn't listed, and he'd never seen such. Not for yutzes, at least.

Ammunition, guns, gun oil and cloth, the cylinder on the little reboring thing in Tucker wagon... shark guns and tools to maintain them. Nothing about Spadoni or... he didn't know a proper name for "prole guns."

Better not try CARAVAN*SPADONI*SUPPLIES. A computer might be told to alert somebody. Try

CARAVAN*2739*SALES

This year's outgoing. Speckles and spices. Basic farming and clothmaking tools, and some half familiar terms that were also tools. Cookware: not the magical stuff nothing sticks to. Toys and shells and other luxury goods. Preserved meat, root vegetables, spices, some of which had been sold to Wave Rider. Nothing much to learn.

CARAVAN*2739*PURCHASE

This year returning: clocks and paint and Begley cloth. Spices again, and salt. Shire tea. Smoked fish from Haven. Whiskey, liqueurs, and cheeses. Wave Rider kept some of these in stock.

For twenty-seven years he'd watched and eavesdropped on caravan merchants, merchants from Terminus and Destiny Town, and the Winslow clan. He had a very good idea what passed along the Road, and Wave Rider was involved in all of this. Except- Prole guns. Replacement, purchase, maintenance: nothing at all. And speckles. If the route involved middlemen, he'd have seen something. The sterilized seeds must go straight from the Windfarm to wherever along the Road they did their loading.

He went back to CARAVAN and opened

ORIGIN*CARAVAN

In Will Coffey's vision, now more than two centuries old, caravans

were not for commerce, not for making wealth. They were a way to deliver speckles to Spiral Town. The impression would be that Spiral Town was the peak of civilization on Destiny; that sophistication dwindled with distance down the Road.

We've been swindled. The greed of merchants, is that a lie too? or a game the merchants play to entertain themselves?

A later entry: The caravans are working! They serve as recreation for some, for some a way of life, a forum for courtship for some, but for all a hedge against the danger of inbreeding. They allow us to learn more about the only other sapient species ever found. They maintain the stability of our control experiment.

All that vastness of stars staring down at us, and it's just us and the Otterfolk? But Argos might have heard more from Earth by now.

- Control experiment?

Base One, now Spiral Town, was to retain technology that was too heavy or fragile to transport. Visiting caravans would purchase the use of what they hadn't already stolen: paint and clocks and Begley cloth and, in later years, handcrafted work. .

A generation later they teased the paintmaker system into duplicating itself. On their next circuit they bought the duplicate from puzzled Spirals.

They didn't bother with the clock factory, but they tried it again with the Begley cloth weavers.

Jeremy read the results in bitter amusement. The little mechanical spiders in the walls and roof of the Apollo Caverns could be snatched by handfuls. Spirals never interfered. But they wouldn't dig anywhere else! Of course it was a safety measure, a part of their program. One wouldn't want mechanical vermin eating caverns into every hill and mountain on Destiny. But where was the damn code? Stored in the teaching tapes? Or lost with Argos?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY

A handful of listings.

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY* Shire restricted material. Access code?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Twerdahl T0~~ restricted material. Access code?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Tail Town restricted material. Access code?

Somebody somewhere was keeping genealogical records, and keeping them hidden.

He'd seen an ominous degree of continuity in the families that held the wagons. He remembered three generations in ibn-Rushd wagon. Outsiders not welcome? How could he learn?

AVALON

restricted material. Access code?

SPACE*SHUTTLE

Designs, vidtapes, test results, wow!

Six crashes in fifty-one years. No deaths mentioned. A vivid description of the tenth flight by the first humans to orbit. Say what? He'd read it and failed to believe it. He had to go back for it- The shuttle didn't have a pilot on board.

It was flown by onboard programs and a pilot on the ground. A box of varied design but rigidly exact size fit into the shuttle's rectangular cargo space. One such box was a cabin for two passengers and an array of tools.

Passengers had flown twice. That first pair of women went up to repair a satellite. The second pair... something political.

Jeremy felt massive disappointment. Had Mustafa ever said that he'd gone into space personally? He couldn't remember. But he'd daydreamed, from time to time, of persuading Mustafa to help him stow away aboard a shuttle. The space wasn't even there.

Harlow's words didn't make sense together. Maybe he'd remembered wrong. Try it anyway:

HYDRAULIC*EMPIRE

A political entity that controls its citizens has controlling the flow of water.

'Tuck my bird.'

"What?"

"Sorry."

It was no trivial thing. Thousands of years of Eastern despotisms had been of that nature. Water was life. Dig a canal system, guard the canals. If a town opposes the government, block the canals, dam or pollute the river, confiscate the wheat or rice.

Two towns in a drought? Strip one of food, send it all to the second. Gain the second town's support; make deadly enemies of the first, but it won't matter, they will die.

Hydraulic empires never died. No matter how far they slid into decadence, they lived on until destroyed by barbarians beyond the border.

Hydraulic empires grew with the rising level of communications and transport. On Earth a moment came at which one government could rule the world, forever. Afterward the United Nations controlled not just water, but communications via comsats, electric power from sunpower satellites, and every resource that could be labeled "limited." The United Nations in its last days had launched the Avalon expedition- Last days?

He skimmed, picking it up little by little.

Ah. They'd grown their own barbarians. They'd been brought down by a coalition of populations throughout the solar system, each as great or greater than the population of Destiny. There followed two hundred years of stagnation before one civilization stretched from Sol to the far comets, one empire with a stranglehold on... what?

Reading between the lines- Everything. The Web controlled everything that flowed. Water, hydrogen, information, diet supplements, placement of orbiting habitats, and kinetic energy. Especially kinetic energy. What moved through interplanetary space averaged twenty klicks per second. Fusion explosions were nothing compared to that. Every habitat in motion within Sol system was assigned its orbit. Keep to it or be treated as a meteor.

In a spasm of creativity the Web had launched Argos and a third expedition- restricted material. Access code?

The thrust of the lecture was that Sol system had become one vast resource-control empire, sluggish, but able to make long plans. There weren't any barbarians because there was no outside. A million years from now it would still he in place.

Outsiders and their barbaric ideas would not be welcome in Sol system.

There was no home to return to.

'Jeremy."

He looked up. "Rita! Karen's itching like crazy. Did you take her off Novabliss?'

"I cut the dose as per your suggestion."

'Right, and it's great to hear her making plans again, but now she's itching-"

"I'll go see her. Come along.'

Rita's tendency was to outrun him, and what the hell, he knew the way. But she glanced back and then waited. "How's the leg?"

"I did eight blocks last night."

"I guess we can take the cast off after we see Karen."

"I've been reading about hydraulic empires."

Silence: she was fishing through her head. "Sol system? That old tenthyear lecture? It's a reason why we can't go back, but that's just mind games, Jeremy. Anyone can think of reasons why we shouldn't do what we can't do anyway."

"Suppose a government didn't control water. Just speckles."