Destiny's Road

25 The Swan

Andrew hailed him from the crest. Jemmy stopped on the bridge and waited while Andrew bounded down.

“We tracked you,” he said. “Thought you might need help. And we watched a bus go past.”

The others were already climbing down. Three more in windbreakers, followed by four scrambling down in naked haste, exposed in brilliant sunlight. Become a restaurant? We're kidding ourselves- “How's it look?”

“Lot of work,” Jemmy said. “I don't see everything Barda says needs doing, but there's a lot.”

By morning the damage was easier to see.

The bridge might have been a century old. It was new enough that big trees had been cut to build it. On Earth there had certainly been lifeforms that ate wood, but here it would last forever. The wood was sound, and thick, and moored in poured stone: sturdy enough to support a caravan. It sagged in the middle. Water had poured over it in a spring storm, or several, and taken the handrail and some paint. Patches of paint lined the edges, still glare-bright.

“Needs propping,” Andrew said. “One big beam right in the middle.” A wide sheet of clear glass wrapped the front of the inn in a halfcylinder, framing the dining area. Several smaller windows were broken.

The bed left behind in the Captain's Suite would have been too big to move. They could clean up the Captain's Suite for display. The thick rug in Barda's room would be bed for them all.

“And of course the sign is out,” Andrew said.—

There were outhouse toilets. The one with a woman's silhouette stank. “These have to be dug out,” Barda said. “Daddy must have just let the fern's go.”

A much bigger outbuilding was barred from the inside. Barda showed them how to slide a sawblade through the crack and lift the bar. “Daddy thought this would keep us out, but my brother Barry figured it out. Daddy's hiding place, right?” She opened the door and yelped in delight.

Harold Winslow hadn't taken everything.

They wandered through the place as if entering an ancient Texas politician's treasure trove. There were tools: no little stuff and nothing powered, but...

They put Amnon into the big set of coveralls and gave his trunks and windbreaker to Rafik Doe. Rafik claimed a long, vicious weed cutter, then reluctantly traded it to Andrew for one of the shovels; Amnon took the other.

There was a roll of cloth! A tablecloth with the logo of the Swan, a fluffy white bird sailing a pond that reflected the blue sky. Blue and green and pure white. Andrew's weed cutter sliced it into broad strips: loincloths for the nudes. Clothing at last.

They looked at half a dozen fragile wands as tall as a man. Barda wondered, “Now, why didn't Daddy take these?”

Jemmy said, “I've never seen anything like them.” A breath would have broken them.

“Fishing rods,” Rafik said.

“Not for ocean fishing!” Jemmy told them. “Barda, you dealt with the Otterfolk? Your daddy wouldn't throw a hook into somebody's dining room.”

“Daddy might.”

Rafik and Arnnon dug a pit. Then six men picked up the old outhouse, hoarding their breath, and moved it to the new pit.

They were all wolfishly hungry by midafternoon, and Barda was trying to get them to dig out the other outhouse. Jemmy got her attention. “Pit. Fire. Hunt. Cook,” he said. “Now.”

“We can lose a meal, Jeremy.”

“That's not it.” Though he was getting hungry. “Willya, Henry, give me a sanity check here? The day anyone sees this restaurant going, we've been here for half a year. Yes?” Jemmy waved at a flat patch of ground. 'just look at our fire pit, sir! We cleaned it out last week and it's already full of ashes. We were so busy two days ago, it's no wonder we've run out ofafew things. “He saw a few grins, and persisted: “But we don't have a fire pit. What if someone comes by today?”

“No chairs either. No tables. No silverware,” Barda said.

“Start a list. We don't need silverware. No forks at a caravan stop, Barda. Everyone carries his own knife.”

Andrew asked, “What about the buses?”

Barda waved it off. “A bus ride costs money. People don't take them very often. So, there's a restaurant here. Last time anyone went past, he didn't notice.... Jemmy, two months we've been here.”

“Fine. But I've got to teach you people how to cook!”

The nudes had skirts and/or loincloths now, but that wasn't quite like being clothed. It seemed best to send them off to hunt and keep the others for digging.

They dug a fire pit long enough to feed ten. Extend it tomorrow. The men's ancient outhouse could imply an ancient restaurant, so that could wait. The fem's had been too rank.

Barda showed them where the truck garden had been, and sure enough, potatoes and carrots were growing in a maze of weeds that had been (and still were) spices. The patch was clean of Destiny life.

They watched Barda choosing spices for dinner. The rest got bored and wandered away, but Jemmy stayed and made her identify every spice for him. He waited until they were alone before he asked.

“Barda, isn't this a graveyard?”

“Sure. Three generations of Winslows.”

“It must have half-killed your father to move.”

She looked up. “One day I'll have to ask him. Heya, Jemmy, if I said, 'No birdfucking allowed,' do you think he'd answer?”

“He might know. Maybe the proles caught your brother. It's the law.” Barda stood and dusted herself off. “That should do it.” She left, carrying spices in her rolled-up windbreaker.

When she was gone, Jemmy reached into his pack.

The hunters returned at dusk with something piglike, still alive and struggling. They left it tied up and settled for root vegetables. Can't cook in the dark.

In the morning Jemmy and a few others built up the fire and killed and roasted the non-pig. They got a cheer from the late risers. Afterward they extended the fire pit into an arc seven meters long.

The men got tired of sharing their outhouse. They dug another pit and moved the men's outhouse to that. “We'll call this place the Pits,” Jemmy suggested. They jeered him.

He took men uphill to collect rocks. A Roadside caravan stop had to have an oven. He'd walk the Road and look for grain, and find a way to grind it. If that birdfucker Harold Winslow had only left some pots, they could have set a stew going! There were flowerpots in the toolhouse, but no passerby would accept those as cookware.

They cleaned the long hall, and the first pair of rooms leading off it, and the Captain's Suite. On Barda's insistence they cleaned the suite of rooms at the end too, because someone might want it. There were indoor toilets! and old signs on the doors that said:

OUT OF ORDER

“These have been down since I was a little girl. Daddy got tired of digging up the pipes, or else he ran out of money,” Barda said. “There's a Destiny plant that just loves to block pipes.”

In Barda's old room were chairs and a desk. They took the chairs down to the dining area. The desk was too big.

Looking up at the inn, you could see through the picture window, but you saw only ceiling. So it didn't matter that the place was an echoing emptiness. “Daddy took all the curtains,” Barda told them. “They should be there. If you don't close them the sun can fry the diners.”

Andrew shrugged. “We just don't let anyone in.”

“Might work. But the window's filthy.”

There was soap, but no rags. They cleaned the picture window with their swim shorts, amid considerable horseplay, then used more soap to get the shorts clean. The shorts came out of that amazingly well. Settler magic. Some machine in Spiral Town, some relic of Argos and Sol system, must have continued making clothing after Carder's Boat stopped moving.

Jemmy found a tree big enough to serve as a centerpost for the bridge. That could wait. They found endless useless junk accumulated in the dining hall and moved that out, and made brooms and swept the place out. But there were no tables and no chairs!

Barda's list was growing. “I really wish we had any kind of money. Nobody in his right mind would start an inn without funds.”

“As long as it doesn't rain,” Jemmy said.

“What?”

“We'll drag some logs down here for seats.”

It took them all the next day. They chopped down trees, split the logs, set them around the fire-pit arc and adzed them flat on top. It felt decidedly fancy, a sanitized wimpy mock-up of a Roadside caravan stop, when they dined around the coals that night.

“Napkins,” said Barda. “It doesn't work without napkins. Clean napkins.”

There was no light but the coals and, briefly, Quicksilver. They felt their way to their beds. But in the morning Jemmy got Barda to show him the list. poured stone,-S-lOtonnes1000 2000 glass panes700 silverware200-1000 paint400 chairsup to 2000 tablesup to 4000 line wire4000 soap100 curtains500-1000 advertising??? napkins, paper50/week

OR

napkins, clothlogo?200 + washer5000 cookware:

stew pots

teapot tea

“I'm guessing at the cost, most of the time. Even so, some of this doesn't cost much. Cloth napkins, we don't need to buy a washer if one of us will wash them out.”

Five days after their arrival, the Pits was starting to look more like the picture in Barda's mind.

The felons too were starting to look less gaunt. Less pale, too. A day of sporadic sunlight wouldn't give anyone a sunburn, but they no longer looked like they'd been living under an endless black thunderstorm.

Of course they were too many, and three were in kilts chopped from a tablecloth. And if Jemmy Bloocher had thought of robbing their first customers for their clothes, and never mind the friends and relatives and proles who might come looking for them... then nine people who had been imprisoned for violent crimes would all have thought of the same thing. Something had better be done about clotljes!

Buses passed twice a day.

On the fifth evening they sat around the fire pit and spoke their plans. “It's a wonder nobody's ever tried this before,” Barda caroled. “It could work. Unless it rains.”

Was she fooling herself? Nobody could see the flaws in the inn as well as Barda, not even Jemmy, who still saw only a mask over chaos. Andrew asked, “What else do we need to be a restaurant?”

Barda said, “Well, the sign, of course.”

Jemmy asked, “Paint?”

She laughed. “Paint? No. We have to turn the sign on... like the Windfarm barracks sign. We need lights too. Jemmy, there's a way out to the roof, but it's blocked. Can you climb up there?”

The roof was three stories up. Nobody but Jemmy wanted to climb it, but it wasn't difficult. He found a weathered and muddy elegance.

He called down. “Barda? Three tables, twelve chairs. You didn't say it was a dining area.”

“We never got crowded enough to use it. That's why Daddy closed it off.”

“I don't see how to get them down.”

“We'll get the door unblocked.”

“Barda, I can see the door. It's barred on this side.”

“What? Really?”

“Whoever did it must have climbed down afterward.”

“Brian! He would've! And then Daddy never got around to unblocking it!”

Jemmy lifted the bar away and tried to pull the door open. “Stuck.” There was no chimney. From this height you could see... well, you could see enough Road from here to prepare for visitors, get the nudes under cover, and put Amnon on display in his coveralls. From the roof's back edge, through a notch in the ridge, water gleamed through a fringe of slender, straight Earthlife trees. Swan Lake.

He called down. “Still there, Barda? I'm thinking. If a client never sees us except in swimsuits and windbreakers, we have to serve fish.”

“Daddy left because Swan Lake was fished out.”

“Worth a try. Barda? You've got electric power.” Beneath a surface of accumulated dirt, he was standing on a dark silver-gray surface.

“Did something light up?”

“No, I only mean half the roof is Begley cloth.”

“Of course. How's it look?”

“It's covered with goo; we'll have to clean it off. And there's...” A metal structure as high as his head was sited on the silver-gray surface, where the sharp corner of the restaurant pointed toward the Road. Like the prow of a boat, Jemmy thought. He put his hand on the stained metal casing and asked, “What is this?”

“What's it look like?”

“Casing out of a foundry. It looks like an open hand, round base, splayed fingers.”

“Antenna.”

“I can open it... the inside looks like settler magic. Is this your sign?”

“It's the sign and the lights and anything else that takes power. See if there's anything missing.”

“Oh, come on, Barda, I've never seen anything like this.... All right, here's a slot. Like it takes a great big three-pronged key.”

“Fuck my bird! I'm coming up.”

So Amnon pushed the door open and they all trouped out on the roof to see what everyone except Jemmy knew all about. They hovered around Barda while she opened the shell and looked in.

She said, “He took it with him!”

''It?''

“Birdfucker!”

Andrew said, “It isn't as if we could go off to town and open another account.”

“That birdfucking list is getting big,” Barda said. “Andrew, whose name would we use? Not mine!”

Andrew laughed. “We're all wanted felons except Jeremy. Jeremy doesn't have a name.”

“Well, without a guide spot we don't have a sign, and without a sign we don't have an inn.”

Guilda's Place in Spiral Town had never needed anything but paint. Jemmy asked, “Guide spot?”

He wasn't heard. “Maybe I can rig something,” Duncan Nick said.

Barda made way for him. The shell opened at the edge of the roof. Two could look inside; no more.

“I was up here before, but I did not want lights,” Duncan said. “Mmm.”

“Let me see.” But Winnie Maclean wasn't heard either, and she wasn't strong enough to push her way in.

SoJemmy asked her. “Guide spot?”

“It sends back a reflection,” Winnie said. “The power beam from Quicksilver goes to four orbiting relays. The relays flash a beam, and all the guide spots flash back. Then the beams focus on all the guide spots. It's a frequency Begley cloth can turn into power. But you buy your guide spot from City Hall and then you're in the records and City Hall keeps track of how much power you use.”

“So there's a record in a City computer, and it says this is the Swan,” said Denis. “But these things can be hacked.”

Barda edged away from the power collector so that others could look it over. Duncan's and Denis's heads and shoulders disappeared inside.

“The Winslows must have retired the account when they moved,” Winnie said.

Barda laughed suddenly. “Not Daddy. All the way to Destiny Town, when he's going the other way? I bet he just took the guide spot along and bought someone else's power collector.”

Most of this was beyond him, but Jemmy caught that datum as it went by. “You mean the City thinks he's still the Swan.”

“I'm guessing, you know.”

“So if you got it going again-”

“I worked for a power company,” Winnie said. “Let me try.”

“The City would just see the Swan using more power? Your daddy would pay a bigger fee. Would he notice?”

“Oh, sure, and complain. But... couldn't complain to the City, could he? They like things neat in the City.”

“If he didn't switch accounts.”

Duncan Nick moved out. “It's hopeless,” he said. “I could make it work if I had some number-four line wire.”

Winnie moved in beside Denis. They whispered crypticisms, their heads hidden. “Don't need number four... any gauge line wire... isn't that what they use to wire a kitchen? No, it's thinner...

Watching them wasn't very interesting. They weren't doing anything. The men picked up chairs and tables and wrestled them inside and downstairs and into the main dining room.

There were chickens in the woods. They were fast, hard to catch. But on the fifth day Winnie found four nests: scrambled eggs for all, cooked in the pottery pots.

On the seventh morning, Willametta saw the bus stop and let people off. Blind luck that she happened to be looking through the picture window. Andrew had set a guard, but he hadn't been taken seriously.

Two men, two women walked across the bridge carrying fishing poles.

Willametta moved about the house whispering the news. Nudes to the upstairs rooms. Amnon to work the garden.

The strangers were in their teens. They wore tiny swimsuits and skimpy vests with lots of pockets. What they saw was Amnon in coveralls, and four older folk in out-of-date short-sleeved windbreakers, carrying poles. Jemmy was one of those.

“Yes, we're reopening the restaurant. Just for dinner. We'd be happy if you'd pass the word.”

“What have you got for breakfast?”

“We don't have flour yet. Cold chicken? Tea?”

They turned that down. One man said, “You should open for breakfast too. They come to Swan Lake to fish, you know, and this is the only way in. Cook their fish for them in the evening.”

Amnon stayed. Jemmy took the rest to the lake. Behind him he sensed frantic action held leashed.

At the shore they separated. The inlet to Swan Lake was easy to wade. Jemmy tried to keep an eye on the little group on the far shore, but they weren't spending all their time fishing. They let a little tent inflate and spent some of their time in there. They went exploring through the trees.

Earthlife bushes and grass and trees. Earthlife fish. Before noon the felons had caught two dozen fish of three varieties, none of which Jemmy recognized. It made sense to go home then, and they did.

Jemmy dreaded that Andrew would see what he saw: four teens on foot who might have disappeared anywhere between here and the City, with clothes on their backs in current styles and money in their pockets. But he couldn't stay to protect them.

They returned to a great light.

Above the restaurant's roof a flame rose and fluttered in the shape of a Swan.

Jemmy was relieved to see Andrew grinning up into the lighted dininghall windows. He lofted a mess of fish and got a nod. He asked, “How did you do it?”

“I don't know. Winnie and Denis pulled a nest of line wire out of the ceiling in one of the rooms. You know what that is, a thread of superconductor in a rubber tube? They'd have been electrocuted if the roof was clean, I think. Nothing worked till they found some silver thing Barda hid in her room and pounded it into shape. But-“ He waved. “They got it going!”

“Shouldn't we turn it off? Or are we open?”

“We're open. Let's see, we'll keep that room locked, and clean up the roof so we get more power. All the lights are way too dim. But you, Jemmy, you get a pit fire going. When those kids come back we want to cook their fish for them. And show somebody how to clean fish! Henry!”

The visitors stayed for dinner.

Jemmy was a chef on display, with a Road accent, self-consciously not a Spiral Town accent, and, “My merchant father picked me up from the dairy when I was a little boy.

What the Swan lacked became much clearer. Bread, potatoes, lettuce. They'd have asked for a room until Barda told them there weren't any working toilets. Then they opted for their tent by the lake.

Then they tried to pay the chef.

“You pay Barda. She prefers to keep track.” Jemmy sneaked a peek at Destiny Town money before they turned away. It was a hologram imposed onto thin paper.

Barda took their money. They climbed uphill with Swanlight behind them. And Barda gave him an intensive course in how to identify, count, and change money before she let him go to bed.