Destiny's Road

4 Leavetaking

Warkan farmland trailed off toward the sea. The land was barren rock and sand. It would barely support Destiny life and it barely hid Jemmy Bloocher.

The old fence was another ancients' miracle. Corrosion had not touched it in more than two centuries. It ran for over a mile between Bloocher and Warkan land, all the way into the shallow waves. The fence was three grades of mesh laid over each other, filters to stop anything from seeds to sharks to chugs.

Spiral children learned early: those fine strands would cut flesh.

The first settlers must have been anal-retentive about property rights. Or was this another attempt to confine Destiny?

The fence would cut a chug's mouth. Merchants never released chugs close to the fence.

But the fence didn't stop Destiny seaweed.

Here at the shoreline a grove of black and yellow-green devilhair ran into the sea and out as far as Carder's Boat. Weed had nearly swallowed the boat; had entirely swallowed the fence. By using the fence as a frame, the weed gained access to sunlight and the sea's nutrients too.

Jemmy reached the beach at a run. He swarmed over the humped weed onto Bloocher turf and kept running. Adrenaline raged in his blood. He wanted to run until the breath seared his lungs... but every Spiral knew where he must come. Any of them might tell a merchant.

He spared a moment's glance for the settler's miracle offshore. They'd never find him there! and for good reason. A swimmer would never reach Carder's Boat. He'd be tangled in the weed and drowned.

He stopped, his chest heaving. Then he made himself crawl through the rows of wheat, uphill toward the house.

It seemed quiet. Merchants would have flooded the house with light and noise.

Jemmy went in through the root cellar, then up into the kitchen, softly, softly.

Loaves of bread were still in the oven. He left them for the moment.

More stairs, well lighted. There was light under his parents' door, and under Junior's. Margery's. Margery and Curdis. He eeled into his room and stood in the dark, thinking.

The Warkans had their reasons to let the fence go like that, but the Bloochers had no excuse for such slovenliness.

Not his business, now. Jemmy Bloocher wasn't going to be running Bloocher Farm after all. What could he take? Just the backpack and the hiking gear in it. Real shoes. A flash, a canteen, blankets; thick hiker's gloves, because much of Destiny life was armed with thorns or poison. He added underwear and socks and shirts, going by feel in the dark. He was already wearing a jacket. What else? Anything he left behind now was gone forever. Pen and a pad of paper- He heard the front door slam. Only minutes now, he thought-and his own door slammed back against the wall and light blazed in his eyes.

Jemmy was standing with his hands spread wide and showing empty when the ceiling lamp came on. Curdis lowered the flash. “Jemmy,” he said. “Thought it might be some thieving merchant.”

Jemmy said, “I've killed a merchant.”

Curdis's eyes only narrowed, but Jemmy heard Junior's gasp. She wedged herself around Curdis and squeaked, “Jemmy!,” swallowing the scream because they'd wake their parents.

Curdis turned out the lamp. “We're too close to the Warkan place,” he said.

Why would you-even-” Junior caught herself and was silent.

The dark was welcome. Jemmy said, “I have to run.”

Thonny's voice spoke from the hall. “He was trying to save me. Even SO, Jemmy, that was crazy.”

“I know-”

“Crazy, Jemmy!” Brenda.

Curdis said briskly, “Just hide for a while. Get your camp gear and- you've got it already? Hide in the hills. Wait for the caravan to go away. We don't know anything, didn't see anything, can't guess-“

“They come three times every two years. Everyone knows where Bloocher Farm is. Everyone knows who I am!”

“Three times every two years, you just aren't here. Caravans come, you go. Bloocher F-Farm-” Curdis stopped.

That was the sticking point, all right. Margery was Bloocher Farm for now, but in half a year she and Curdis Hann would be farming the New Hann Holding. The head of Bloocher Farm had to deal with merchants, if only for speckles.

Jemmy said, “Curdis, I want to take the speckles bread that's in the oven. Okay? Thonny, you'll have Bloocher Farm when Curdis and Margery move Out.” They'd have to postpone moving, he thought, until Thonny was older. Curdis must see that already. “If merchants want to search the farm for a fugitive, go them one better. Lead them down to where the fence goes into the sea. It's covered with enough weed to feed a caravan, the chugs would have a head start on the sharks, and we'll get the shore cleaned off to boot.”

Thonny nodded, eyes glassy, mouth open.

Curdis said, “Hold it. Jemmy, caravans use the Road.”

Jemmy hadn't thought quite that far.

“The merchants only just got here. They'll stay awhile,” Thonny said. “Jemmy, if you can get around them they can't catch you. Chugs don't move fast.”

“They'll send someone to block the Road,” Curdis said.

Thonny and Brenda and Margery came into Jemmy's room and found seats on the bed, the bureau, the footlocker, This was going to take some thought.

“One step at a time,” Curdis said. “The merchants will search Spiral Town. They'll demand that, and nobody will stop them. You can't hide in town.”

“I've got to leave.”

“Have you thought of just hiding in the hills?”

Jemmy said, “We hike the hills, but merchants must know that whole range end to end. And if they found me-Curdis, they wouldn't have to take me to trial. Bang and plant a tree. Who'd know?”

“You'd be pretty conspicuous on the Road, too. How do you think you'll get around them?”

“It's our Road too,” Thonny said tentatively.

Brenda said, “Yeah. Let's go for a walk.”

In the dark one could just see Thonny's disgusted look. But Curdis tasted the notion. “Go for a nice long walk down the Road? Me and Thonny? Jemmy, you go over the hills. You can stay hidden in the brush for a few days, can't you? Meet us-”

“I'm coming too,” Brenda announced.

Curdis ignored her. “Meet us somewhere down the Road, Jemmy.

Then I'll trade packs with you. From then on, you're Curdis Hann: me.

You come back by Road, with Thonny. I'll come back through the hills.

If I'm caught, hey, I'm just off camping. I'll-”

“Come back by way of the New Hann,” Margery said. “You're tending our own land.”

Curdis nodded. It would give him legitimacy if he were caught.

“I'm coming too,” Brenda repeated. Margery said, “All right, Brenda.”

“Margely-“

“Darling, you'll need her to talk to merchant women!”

Thonny suggested, “Bicycles?”

“Good,” said Curdis. “We can let things settle for a day or two and still beat Jemmy to... where shall we meet?”

“There aren't that many bicycles on the Road. I'll find you, “Jemmy said. Curdis sat in the dark, moving his lips, while they watched him. Presently he said, “The merchants search Spiral Town and don't find you. Your camping gear is gone. So's our store of speckles, so you buy some more, Margeiy-”

Jemmy said, “I wouldn't take your speckles-”

“You would if you were going forever. Instead, we can bring you home after the merchants have searched the farm and Spiral Town. You take my place here. They're searching the hills by then, but at worst they find just me, camping on my own land. After they're gone you can grow a beard or something. Lie about your age, marry someone, move to another farm. We'll have time to work that out.”

“I like it,” Junior (Margery!) said. “I wish I could come-”

“You're in charge here,” Curdis said gently.

They were deciding his future.

Margeiy said, “Okay. Thonny and Brenda and Curdis on bikes. Don't look at me like that, Thonny, you're brother and sister! Not betrothed. Oh, hell!”

“What?”

“Curdis, you can't pass for Jemmy.”

Curdis had straight black hair, yellow-dark skin, eyes with an epicanthic fold. Hmmm?Jemmy said, “I only have to pass for Curdis coming back. Going out is when they'll be looking to be sure he's not me. Me, escaping. Going out, you're innocent. Let them look.”

They closed the curtains and turned on the lights. Margery posed Jemmy next to Curdis, examined them and said, “No.”

And Brenda was a girl.

But Thonny moved up next to Jemmy, shorter by three inches, and Margery said, “Maybe on a bicycle.”

They took all of Jemmy's clothes out of the bureaus and carried them in armloads into Thonny's room. They began putting together matching outfits.

“You can switch scarves and hats,” Margery said, and they tried it. “Right. Thonny, you stay on the bike. When you're not on the bike, you don't lean on the bike, don't lean on a wall, don't lean. Stand up like a man. Be careful coming back. Camp out on the New Hann land until someone comes for you.

“Jemmy, coming back, you're Thonny. You always lean on the bike, or a wall. Don't be seen standing straight up. Curdis, you wear those dancers going out, but you put those high-heel shyster-stomper boots in your bike bag. You're taller than Thonny going out, you'd better be taller than Jemmy coming back.”

Curdis nodded in the semidark.

“Now, how did it happen, the killing? Hush, Jemmy. Brenda?”

Junior wanted Brenda's version, then Thonny's, and never bothered with Jemmy's. Then she told them all, “Take your time going and coming. Stop and talk to everyone. Thonny, Brenda, if a merchant asks you about the killing, you tell him. 'I was there, I saw it all.' Babble! But you haven't seen Jemmy since then, and you don't think you ever will. Jemmy, you heard everything Thonny said? You tell it that way coming back

Once again Jemmy moved along the shore. Two more fences to cross. He went back up through rows of lettuce, the Wayne Holding. Where he crossed the Road it was deep into its first curve.

Gasoline Alley, then the next inward loop of Road, then Baker Street. The graveyard had been well beyond the town for two good centuries, but Spiral Town had reached it at last. Jemmy stepped from the empty shops of Harrow Street into a grove of willows.

Destiny life wouldn't grow among the graves. The Spiral Town graveyard covered more than a square mile with nothing but Earthlife: long, lank grass, clover, and trees up to 240 years old.

Jemmy drifted like smoke among the trees. There was cover to hide him. The eyes he expected might be imaginary after all.

A lifegiver of Spiral Town would be buried with a handful of seeds. His will might name the Variety of tree. If several sprouted, tenders would transplant all but one, and a marker would be fired into the bark for the lifegiver within its roots.

The oldest trees were huge, chosen for majesty: oaks, banyans, redwoods.

Majestic trees hadn't always survived well, and variety had come into fashion. For a long lifetime the lifegivers bore nut trees and fruit trees. Then someone had decided that the practice was disrespectful or something.

But an extensive grove still bore fruit and nuts. Jemmy picked a handful of cherries, a few plums, an orange. He stuffed his pockets, then settled in the shadows of the gnarled old trees to eat.

The markers around him were all above eye level. Jemmy tried to read them, but they were only a glitter in the dark. Holograms need light.

When the holomarker gun failed it would be a major tragedy. It was settler magic, irreplaceable.

On an ordinary night Jemmy would have been asleep by now. Though he felt that he might never sleep again, he was weary. His life had lost all direction in one deafening blast. Now the bark against his back was too comfortable. It would be easy to stay where he was.

Thonny's hat was a bit small, a bit tight. He took it off and waved it at the flies buzzing his ears. The buzzing went away, then came back, sounding like sleep.

Had he been dozing?

He surged to his feet, swung his pack onto his back, and was in motion. If he sat down again, they'd find him asleep in the graveyard come morning!

The slopes above Spiral Town resembled chaparral, the dwarf forest of California. It was Earthlife laced with surviving Destiny life, too thick and too hostile to hike through. The bare rock above would not hide a fleeing murderer.

But plants only covered the slopes up to fifteen hundred feet above the Road, and stopped quite suddenly. Frost line, the teaching programs would have called it, but Destiny never got that cold. The Destiny plants ran out of something else: air pressure, water, soil nutrients, something. Earthlife grew higher up, but sparsely.

Jemmy was at the frost line when lights came on above him.

He'd ducked back into the chaparral before his mind quite caught up.

Lights glared and men moved around a great ragged hole in the side of Mount Apollo. The lights within the cavern showed great dark silvergray sheets peeling away like the pages of a thousand books, everywhere along the walls and roof. A man moved to the back of the cavern and pulled. Then, nearly hidden under layers of Begley cloth sheeting, he staggered toward a cart.

It was Jemmy's first sight of the Apollo Caverns. Children weren't allowed here, even older children.

Argos had carried several experimental von Neumann devices... a phrase every child learned and few could define.

Begley cloth was one. A handful of self-reproducing machines just big enough to be dots had been dropped into a hole in a hillside. For two and a half centuries they had been eating into Mount Apollo, carving out a fairyland underground as they followed veins of... silicon and some small set of metals; he'd seen the list in one of the teaching programs... and made it into sheets that would turn sunlight into power, fringed with wires to carry the power to machines.

Also, the dots made more of themselves.

The sheeting was Spiral Town's most dependable trade good, and the caravan was in town. He should have avoided Mount Apollo at all costs. But he damned well didn't dare wait for daylight!

He scuttled along the border between the chaparral and the bare rock above, hunching like a chug until he was out of sight of the Apollo Caverns, and far beyond.

By night the New Hann Holding was just another patch of wilderness, and Jemmy couldn't tell where he crossed it. It might have made a nice resting place. Merchants might see it that way too. Jemmy kept moving.

He walked through the night. Rarely did the Road come in view. At daylight he crawled into a manzanita grove and let his mattress inflate.

On tilted ground, in a glare of sunlight sieved through red manzanita trunks and the branches and lace of some tall Destiny tree, sleep was hard to find. He slept with evil memories. Eyes and mouth wide in horror: Fedrick felt what Jemmy Bloocher had done to him. Blood flooded his vest. The fist-sized hole in his back- From time to time he woke and, with his eyes closed against the filtered light, thought how much he had lost.

Somewhere around noon he ate half the speckle bread. It was his last speckles for the foreseeable future.

What would satisfy the merchants? Just how badly did they want his blood? Would a face-saving gesture satisfy them? Or his exile? Or would they take reprisals against Bloocher Farm?

Grow a beard or something. Lie about your age, many someone and move to another farm.

They'd been pressed for time, trying to decide what to do now. Even so, Jemmy hadn't liked hearing that. Even if it worked, even if the merchants let it work... how was it better than just moving on down the Road? Either way, the man who had been Jemmy Bloocher was gone.

Better, maybe, if he died here in the hills.

Many forms of Destiny life were poisons. Hadn't that been trolihair, the last time he'd stopped at a stream? It was hair-fine silver stuff, softlooking threads with very sharp tips. He'd given those clumps a lot of room. Being scratched by trollhair was an easy death, a long slide into sleep.

His family need never know. Jemmy never came to meet us.

What had sent his thoughts straying toward suicide?

Jemmy realized with a start that he was sleeping in the shade of a fool cage.

There were fool cages growing among the manzanita, all around him. Four feet of trunk flared into a thorny oval cage of black wicker decorated with bronze and scarlet lace, and a few tiny bones in the cage.

A Destiny bird could perch on any of a number of Destiny plants and find lace to eat. Some plants grew gaudy lace displays so that birds would transport their seeds. But the lace within a fool cage was a lure and a trap. A bird could perch on the upper branches of a fool cage, but any breeze that rattled the branches would cause them to trap a bird's feet, pull it in.

Most Destiny birds had learned to stay away. These bones belonged to Earthlife.

Curdis and Thonny and Brenda would expect to find him on the Road. Jemmy rolled his mattress, got his pack on, and crawled until the plants were thick enough to hide him walking upright.

The water table was lower now: the plants reached no more than three hundred meters above the flatland and the Road. Jemmy traveled by night. By day there were plants to hide him. He slept away from water. A stream might make him a target.

At night the star fields were gaudy, gorgeous. Quicksilver was brilliant but tiny and only showed for a few minutes after sunset. Kismet, Destiny's massive little moon, cast no more light even at the full. Any meteor might be Cavorite in reentry, or Argos among the asteroids, making a few seconds' burn. The land at night was black; a man could hurt himself thinking he saw more detail than was there.

He could only glimpse the Road in patches, and the sea far beyond. Once he saw a boat moving parallel to shore. Once, a house or shed that looked abandoned. He hadn't yet seen a human being. Then again, he didn't intend to.

There were Earthlife birds everywhere, a hundred varieties of song at morning and evening, hawks hovering on updrafts by day, owls hunting by night. He'd seen the shells and bones the predators had made of Destiny birds. And he'd seen fool cages everywhere, with Earthlife bones and beaks in them. The coming of Columbiad and Cavorite had been good for the fool cages.

They were good for Jemmy. Any bird still flapping inside a fool cage must be fresh and edible. He found a smallish turkey on the second night, and he pulled on his thick gloves and reached in through the thorns and strangled it. After dawn he felt safe building a tiny fire in a circle of rocks. The perpetual wind was enough to whip the smoke away.

On the third night he collected three little birds, pigeons maybe.

At the fourth dawn he crossed above a waterfall, then crawled downhill into brush. The stream had cut a gorge that ran down to the Road and through it. Someone had built a little bridge over the water.

Three men and a woman had set up camp near the bridge. The chugs were gone-in the water, likely-but the wagon nearly blocked the bridge.

Jemmy slept away from the water. From time to time he crawled back to the waterfall to spy on the merchant guards. Their eyes would see only the falling water; a tiny, distant moving man would be lost in all that motion. Right?

They weren't cheerful as merchants usually were. The woman was middle-aged and snappish; the younger men obeyed her with little grace.

He was moving back to the stream in midafternoon, careful as ever, when he heard a familiar shout.

“Brenbrenbrendaa!”

He crawled to the edge of the falls and looked down.

The falls drowned out speech. Thonny and Curdis were talking to the guards, to the men. The woman was talking to Brenda. The merchants' manner had grown cordial.

He crawled closer, staying in the thicket of fool cages. He got down to where the water wasn't so loud. Then sage and tumbleweed were growing too close together and he feared merchant guards would see them wiggle.

He heard Thonny shout, “Curdcurdcurdis! That's the last coin we've got!” And the sound of merchant laughter, and Brenda's laugh too.

Three bicycles moved on, across the bridge and down the Road. Now all Jemmy had to do was catch them.

They would have gained from better planning. How on Earth was he going to catch bicycles?

Jemmy was seething with impatience, but he'd have to be crazy to move now, in daylight, with merchants just below him. He crawled back among the fool cages and tried to sleep.

They must know they'd have to wait.

The next stream. They were past the merchant guards; why not stop? They'd wait at the next stream, and he'd see them and know it was safe to come down. And if he didn't see them?

No way could he sleep. He crawled up to where plants thinned out to bare rock, and he kept crawling.

Where water next crossed the Road, they weren't waiting. Jemmy made sure of that, then moved on.

What stopped him next was more than a stream.

The plant interface dipped, an arrowhead shape pointing at the Road. Jemmy's gaze followed the tree line down along rock that had run like wax. Frozen lava ran up to the ridge a thousand feet above him, and down almost to the Road itself, ending in a broad patch of green Earthlife trees and water gleaming between.

Interesting.

Jemmy could picture the giant landers Cavorite and Columbiad hovering on either side of the crest, moving parallel on pillars of violet flame bright enough to blind any witness, burning off the life of Destiny. Then return to seed the slopes with Earthlife. One of the ships must have paused here... yes, and he could see why. Above him the ridgeline bent by forty degrees.

Cavorite on the broad side had waited for Columbiad on the narrow side (or vice versa) to round the curve.

Water at the point of the lava triangle, then a thick stand of Earthlife trees, then the Road. The far side of the Road was a thriving village. There were shops along the Road, and a setback wide enough and long enough for a whole caravan, and a wide stream running to the sea, spreading into a delta at the end.

Who were these people? It had never occurred to Jemmy that there was this much of civilization beyond Spiral Town. Somewhere the merchants went for their goods, and to trade what they got from the Spirals. And in between...?

And how could he cross bare and slippery rock?

He couldn't. He was going to have to go down.