Destiny's Road (46 page)

A proud oak stood above the hillside, easily a quarter-century old. Duncan Nick's oak, where the women's cesspit had been. What was that growing around its base? To Jeremy's eye it stood out like settlermagic paint: greenery tinged with yellow, and orange flecks on black.

From the oak he traced narrow paths to a thicket of growth, greenand-black shadows with touches of orange. The other ancient cesspit. Broader paths led from Duncan Nick's oak down to the lodge, and to the lake, and east to the ridge-' 'Another way out," he said, pointing-and to a stand of fruit trees that must have replaced the old spice garden, with a hint of orange in the shadowed green-black around the trunks.

"You think Barda got away," Harlow said.

"She could have. I can... could've.

Harlow hugged him from behind, chin on his shoulder. He plunged on: "Could've told it to Karen that way. Still can. Karen had... Barda has brothers." Suddenly he knew what to do. "We've got four hours. Shall I show you how to fish?"

Alexandre Chorin stored their backpacks behind the desk for them, and rented them fishing gear all assembled for instant use. "Do you use flies?"

Harlow stared. Jeremy knew just enough to say, "Harlow, it's a lure you float. Mr. Chorin, have you got actual bait?"

"No. Try digging in the orchard."

"Okay."

The graveyard-turned-spice-garden had turned fruit orchard. Speckles grew all through it, sparsely, as if a gardener had failed to weed them out. Jeremy studiously ignored them while he dug for earthworms.

There were children all along the near shore, fishing, throwing frisbees, batting at a ball tethered to a pole. A worn, transparent tent sprawled loosely along the south side of the lake, with room for twenty or thirty underneath. Six growing Earthlife trees had become the tent poles. Destiny trees had been chopped down to make room.

Harlow said, "The way the buses run-"

"Yeah." Kids would have to stay overnight; hence the tent.

By silent agreement they walked around the north shore until most of the activity was out of sight and hearing. They took off their shoes. Harlow didn't flinch from putting worms on a hook. "You can use anything organic, but we didn't bring anything," he told her. They flung the lines a fair distance out, and waited, drowsy in the sun.

Reasonable time passed, and nothing struck.

Bare white rock stretched far into the lake, coming to a point a meter above deep water. Jeremy walked out onto it, set his cane down, and, carefully balanced, flung out his line.

Waited.

A fish struck. He pulled it in.

Harlow came to join him. She maneuvered to put them nearly back to back.

Moving to make more room, he stumbled, started to fall, arms windmilling. She reached and had him, and pulled. He backed into her hip, hard. She lost her balance and splashed into the lake. He barely saved himself from going after her.

The rock fell off steeply. Jeremy went down on his belly and reached for her hand. She could swim, of course. She swam over and, with his arms to anchor her, walked up the rock.

Her clothing clung to her like paint: The sight of her froze him like a rabbit in torchlight. The words he'd planned to say evaporated.

She was furious. She started to say so. Instead she looked into the heat of his stare, and then began to pull his shirt open.

He pulled them together. No other response ever crossed his mind until much later.

He felt so incredibly good.

She curled against him and said, "Tell me you didn't throw me in the lake just to rub up against me."

He laughed like a maniac. Then he said, "I swear to you by everything I own, I did not.''

"Right. Good."

There were children just out of sight; they deemed it better to ignore them. They sorted through their clothes, looked them over critically, put them on anyway. Jeremy asked, "Did you bring a change?"

"Sure. You?"

"Course."

He used his pole to fish her pole off the bottom. They walked back down to the lodge, dripping. She'd got his clothes almost as wet and muddy as hers.

Alexandre Chorin's chuckle kept bubbling through his self-restraint. He had towels for rent. They retrieved their packs and went upstairs.

MEN WOMEN

Change together in one room? Harlow's suggestion was a wiggle of her eyebrow; his answer a quick headshake. They went in separate doors.

Jeremy spilled his pack, snatched up a shirt and shorts, stripped and put them on, rubbed a towel past his hair, stuffed his wet clothes into the pack, closed it, and was out. To hell with showering. Down the stair fast, but limp past Chorin and, "I think I want to see that oak."

'Just don't overdo it with that leg, Mr. Winslow."

He climbed the hill fast, digging his stick in and pulling himself up. He'd seen speckles growing around Duncan Nick's oak, but the oak was a bit conspicuous; and the graveyard grove, but that must get visitors.

His fragile plan had gone all to hell. Fall in the lake, go back to the

lodge to change, anything for a moment alone with the speckles crop. Anything, but he hadn't expected- He certainly hadn't expected- Hadn't fought her off, either.

Couldn't. She'd wonder at his motives! Harlow was doing quite enough of that already.

Yeah, right. Karen, I'm sorry. I have to do this.

Here: the ancient privy, the men's. Ground-hugging bristly plants, with black stalks that split and split again to become orange thorns whose tips divided down to tiny, tinier, microscopic green needles.

These plants couldn't be ignored, even if nobody here knew what they were. Children must have tasted the buds. A cook who found speckles in the spice patch might try it on food. Did it taste like sterile speckles?

He'd brought two bags. He'd forgotten to bring a glove. He wrapped his hand in a silk scarf and took a pinch of tiny seeds and put them in his mouth, and chewed as he stripped the speckles plants.

Fresh speckles was a bit different. Try mixing it with... salt?

He filled the first bag and pushed it deep in his pack, and heard a rustle and knew it was Harlow.

He didn't look around. Had she seen more than one bag? He began stuffing the second bag. She wouldn't find the other unless she dug deep in his pack.

She was nearly breathing in his ear now. He said, "We will never have to buy speckles again."

"Is that what this is?"

"Don't you know speckles plants? Does anyone outside the Windfarm know what speckles looks like when it's growing?"

"There must be pictures in the teaching programs."

"'Restricted material. Access code?' But prisoners do get released from the Windfarm."

"You're evading."

"We came out of the Windfarm with fertile speckles. We used them for cooking, so the chef got to carry them. I scattered them where I thought they'd grow. Now it's twenty-seven years later and I own a piece of a restaurant. Harlow, I never had to worry about how to keep a restaurant solvent, and now I know we lost a piece of the inn to people I never heard of-"

"They were there at the right time, Jeremy."

"Next time might be worse. So I thought I'd fall in the lake and collect a bag of speckles on the way down to get myself changed."

"Wasn't I supposed to get wet?"

"That would have worked too. If we both get wet, that doesn't work. If you get wet and then we rub all the water and mud into each other's clothes, that sends us both back together."

She smiled now. He said, "Look, I only suspect it's illegal-"

"You speckles-shy idiot, of course it's illegal! We can't stop buying speckles and still run a restaurant!"

"Of course we'll have to buy speckles. We'll get them from the caravans, just like always. But if hard times come, there's a bag of speckles-"

"How many did you bring?"

She'd seen. 'Just the two."

"One would have done. Any bus can get us back here for more."

"Okay. Stashed where only you and I can find it. We don't tell anyone else."

"You didn't think you'd tell me!"

"It's a crime, Harlow. I thought I'd tell Barry, but as long as you know, that's enough."

That ought to get her.

And he saw that it had. Wave Rider had a secret, and none knew it save Jeremy and Harlow: the inner circle.

They arrived in time to scavenge the last of dinner. Three caravan suppliers had come early and were sharing a room. Otherwise the inn held most of Karen's siblings and children and in-laws. Everyone stayed polite, and presently carried Jeremy's and Harlow's backpacks up to separate rooms.

They'd discussed that on the bus.

Jeremy got to Lloyd before they gathered for breakfast. "What have you and Brenda told them about me?"

"About the Windfarm? Brenda and I won't tell them anything, Jeremy. We talked it over. It just wouldn't be good." Lloyd laughed suddenly. "And then you show up with Harlow!"

"She can help when the caravan-"

"Sure."

At least the timing was sweet. Whatever the Winslow clan remembered of their stepmother... however much they mourned Karen, now a lifegiver... whatever they thought of the pit chef who was probably rubbing up against his stepmother-in-law... they were shorthanded. It was late autumn. The outbound spring caravan was due in five days.

Over the next few days Harlow and the Winslow clan found some sort of adjustment. Jeremy didn't have to watch dominance and accommodation games. The trick was to stay outside. He tended the pit, and tried out some of what he thought he'd learned in Romanoff's, and upgraded his tools for the onslaught to come.

He tested his leg by swimming with the Otterfolk, reacquainting himself with them. If they noticed his game leg, that was all to the good: they'd guess why he wouldn't surf.

Harlow and Chloe surfed with them, riding waves in tandem. Harlow had returned to the board as if she'd never been away.

They'd need the Otterfolk's goodwill, to get fish to feed the merchants.

Harlow simply poured one bagful of speckles into their speckles shaker can. "It's the obvious place for it. The way we run the inn, everyone'll think someone else got us more speckles." He stopped her from adding the second bag, but he had no excuse at all.

A day later he'd found one. "Taste this."

She sipped. "Smooth. Grapefruit and vodka and... salt?"

"Secret recipe," he said.

"Speckles. Sea salt and speckles?"

They called the drink a Salty Dog, and the last bag of fertile speckles stayed in the bar.

Rita Nogales phoned. She had answers. Fresh avocado reacting to speckles in the mayonnaise, in Karen's and Brenda's mixed seafood dish, produced a mild allergic reaction that disappeared without obtrusive symptoms. Only a patient already sick was threatened. Avocado picked two days earlier wouldn't react. Hardly surprising if nobody had noticed in two hundred years.

Nogales was crowing, sure that anyone she talked to must be just delighted. She could live with throwing away Hope Batch and Batch One, but all the superskin on Destiny? Jeremy was glad he'd answered the phone. Anyone else would have screamed at the woman.

Even he hung up in a black mood. Avocados... what a lousy, trivial...

With two days to spare, Johannes and Eileen Wheeler arrived with a wagonload of green and root vegetables pulled by two goats and a tug. "Hell of a lot of prep work for three days of pure madness," Johannes told Jeremy, grinning and slapping a goat's flank. "I expect you can use the help?"

"Yes. Do not introduce me to the goats." Johannes had once insisted on doing that before Jeremy put on his butcher's hat.

For a day, then, he and Harlow faced Karen's entire family. Then all

four men went off to hunt and left just the women and the gimp. Jeremy didn't see any fireworks. They were being civilized. Eileen tried once or twice to involve her father in some kind of property discussion.

As for the separate rooms, "There's no point," Harlow told him. "We came here together. They know where you were staying. They don't know how long you fought me off-"

"Hey."

"We probably even walk like we're rubbing up against each other."

"You do. I have this deceptive limp."

"Jeremy, we're not doing them a favor here. People like to file people in subroutines. It's easier for them if they think of us as a couple."

Matters of courtesy be damned, the room would be needed. A day ahead of the caravan, Harlow moved into Jeremy's room.

He liked it. He dreamed of Karen and woke guilty, but with a woman in his bed, he could sleep.

They came at noon, announced by a cloud of dust.

A wagon was the length and width of a bus, but taller, and two tugs were enough to pull it. They numbered a full twenty wagons: no yutzes yet, but eighty merchants and perhaps twenty-five suppliers. They rolled past Wave Rider and out of sight.

In Spiral Town the caravan's arrival had been very like this. Wave Rider had twenty-two rooms, and that had always been barely enough. Caravans carried tents, after all, and did not look for unnecessary expense. Wave Rider housed merchant families with elders and children. Merchants' relatives and businesses that dealt with the caravan were the caravan's supply line, and they would want rooms: they often doubled up. Romances and marriages had started that way.

Forty or so to be housed in twenty-two rooms. Over a hundred to be fed! Wave Rider geared up for business.

The Spring Caravan

The natives are irrelevant to humankind on the Crab. They're not as madly versatile as men.

-Wayne Parnelli, Marine Biology

There was no winter in Destiny's year. Removing winter allowed the other seasons to be almost the right length for the Earthtime clocks.