Destiny's Road

by Larry Niven

  Black touched with bronze and yellow-green; branches that divided, divided, divided, until every tip was a thousand needles too fine to see.

  One could rip up an encroachment of Destiny weeds with a few passes of a tractor. One day the Harnesses' neighbors would do that.

  But Destiny's animals were another matter. They lived among Destiny's encroaching plants, and some were dangerous. These were Killer's prey.

  Killer squatted in the wild corn, a silver bulge the size and shape of a chug pulled in on itself. The children watched and waited. Older children bullied the youngers onto Warkan Farm's long porch, where Destiny creatures weren't likely to be hiding.

  One would not want a child to come between Varmint Killer and its prey.

  They waited, waited...

  Ssizzz!

  Even looking, you might not see it. Jemmy just caught it: the line flicking out like a slender tongue, snapping back; a drop of blood drooling down beneath the little hatch cover.

  Junior's hand was on his arm. He obeyed, remained seated, but looked. Something thrashed in the weeds. Killer's tongue lashed out again.

  The caravan and the crowd were trickling away slowly but steadily, off down Twerdahl Street. The Bloocher family gathered itself. Junior called, "Sanity check. If we skip Guilda's now, we can get through school time and still beat the caravan to Guilda's. Vote!"

  Reality sometimes called for hard choices. They looked at each other.

  2

  Lessons

  The planets

  L(c)K.I- DUICKSILVER NORN DESTINY

  asteroids, a sparse and narrow ring

  VOLSTAAG

  HOGUN in Volstaag's trailing Trojan point

  HE LA, black giant or brown dwarf

  inner comets

  Missing school was not a p~blem for the Bloocher kids, nor for the Warkans either. Computers had infinite patience. A teacher wasn't usually needed. Kids who didn't make up lost lessons would get a reputation, but delays would have been more serious at harvest time.

  The Hann Farm was one loop inward from the Bloochers'. It was smaller than most. Maybe the first Hanns had been cheated. Maybe not. The land was fantastically fertile, and Hahn machines must have been among the best that had come from the sky.

  Or else the Hanns made things grow by using intensive care, treating each separate plant as an individual; and maybe their machines lived longer than others because they were kept clean inside and out.

  There were things Jemmy would never learn, things nobody knew. He was already beginning to resent that.

  Nine children trooped into the Hann front yard in late afternoon.

  The yard was a rich lawn with islands in it: round patches of dark soil three feet across marked with a big, strangely shaped rock and two or three Destiny plants, or driftwood and a cluster of multicolored irises, or. .

  Deborah Hann had a Julia set growing on a dwarf. redwood. The Destiny vine wound around the straight Earthlife tree, spraying out green spines that bifurcated in fractal fashion into a nearly invisible lacework. Mrs. Hann smiled at the children and starteçl to get up, but Junior had plenty of time to wave her back down. Deborah and Takumi were old. Their knees were going.

  They entered the Hann house via the airlock.

  Curdis Hann, at sixteen, fancied himself a teacher. "Hi, Sandy. Do you know why these double-door things are called airlocks?"

  Sandy Warkan, the oldest boy and nominally in charge of the boys, said, "Keeps the wind out."

  Curdis grinned. "In. Look it up."

  The kids separated inside the airlock. Junior went with Marion and Lisette Warkan downstairs to the cellar. Sandy and Hal Warkan went upstairs to join Toma and Curdis Hann. Jemmy had never been up there.

  That left Jemmy in charge of the younger ones, in the company room.

  Jemmy let Greegry log in. The kid was getting good at that. The rest read over his shoulder as he typed, find: airlock.

  Diagrams, etymology.. . Airlocks were for spacecraft. They held air in against the vacuum of space, as long as both doors couldn't open at the same time. The first settlers had built airlocks into their houses against the ferocious coastal winds. Curdis had scored a point.

  Jemmy asked, "Brenda, what've they got you studying? Path of the Cavorite, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  Greegry said, "Hey, I'm supposed to be doing algebra."

  Jemmy asked, "You like algebra?"

  Greegry grinned over his shoulder. "'Sorry, Dad, Jemmy wanted to know where the caravans came from.' Okay?"

  "If he asks. I just want something to catch Curdis. Brenda, see what you can get."

  Brenda reached past Greegry and typed, find: Cavorite*caravan*Road.

  Nothing.

  "I think these records are older than the caravans. Let me try."

  Thonny typed, find: Cavorite* Road*map.

  The screen lit with visuals, and Thonny got up to give Brenda his seat. Jemmy crossed to the smaller screen. "Greegry, let's get you going on algebra. Have you got a lesson on file?"

  Greegry worked. Jemmy watched because he could use the brushup. The program was a good one, and Greegry wasn't stumbling much. Jemmy's attention strayed.

  On Brenda's screen, Cavorite and Columbiad settled on pillars of flame: huge squat cylinders with flared skirts and bullet noses. Jemmy had seen this lesson before. It looked real, then and now, but Jemmy thought it must be a computer-generated cartoon. How could a camera have watched these first ships land?

  Probes had been leaving Earth since the 1950s. Over the centuries they ranged farther, past the gas-giant worlds, over the sun's poles, out among the comets, ultimately to the nearer stars.

  Humanity knew the local neighborhood well, long before they could build a starship.

  Tau Ceti was a yellow dwarf star not far from Sol. One of its planets showed the blue of an oxygen atmosphere. Only living things can maintain an oxygen atmosphere.

  Apollo was a star eight to ten billion years old, redder and smaller than Sol. There the probes found another blue world. They named it Norn. Norn, Apollo 4, held life. . . but Tau Ceti 3 was closer to Sol, and that world-Avalon-became the first interstellar colony.

  The colonists aboard Geographic had settled on a great island and called it Camelot. Whatever lethal surprises waited on an unknown world, they could be restricted by choosing an island. That decision must have saved the Avalon colony from destruction, for a time.

  Cryogenic sleep didn't quite work. Ice crystals formed in the brains of the first colonists. Some died of it. Some woke brain-damaged.

  Some lasted a few years, then died of strokes. Survivors faced local predators and weird weather cycles. Whether Avalon survived was in doubt: over the decades the broadcasts had slowed, then ceased.

  The launching of Geographic had nearly broken Sol system's economy.

  All things considered, it was no wonder that Sol system waited two hundred and twenty years to send forth another colony ship....

  "She's blowing smoke," Jemmy decided.

  Brenda tapped to pop up a window. The author of the teaching program was-"Allison Berkeley, Ph.D. . . . string of letters. You think she's lying?"

  "More like confused. It bothers her. She's looking for reasons herself." Brenda tapped, and the lesson's headings disappeared. She didn't need to say We'll never know. Allison Berkeley string-of-letters must have died centuries ago, light-years away.

  In 2490 AD. Argos arrived in Apollo system. The starfarers had already renamed the blue world. No longer Norn: Destiny was waiting.

  They chose a narrow-necked peninsula with a ridge of weathered mountains, like Malaya in size and shape. As on Avalon, so on Destiny: they would isolate the problems.

  Cavorite and Columbiad, the landers, were massive spacecraft designed to explore a solar system or a world. They sat low on groundeffect skirts. Riding the fusion drive alone, either ship could hover a meter high until the land beneath turned to lava; or above a lake, until the water boiled and rivers downst
ream ran steaming. It was thus that they cleared the Crab for farming and ranching.

  Argos had been long in the building. The Apollo Project had sixty years to breed plants and animals of Earth for life on Destiny. Probes had shown them a shorter year, redder sunlight, a circular orbit and a mere ten degrees of axial tilt, stable wind patterns and no ice caps, a small moon that moved too fast to pick up much of a tide. Weather would not be a persistent problem. They got that wrong! But the dimmer, reddened sunlight would. The Apollo Project planners tried to breed plants to survive that.

  Cavorite and Columbiad settled high on the wider, southwestern side of the Crab Mountains, fifteen miles inland. The settlers wanted easy access to the sea, but not too easy. There might be Bay of Fundy tides, despite the little moon, or amphibious sea monsters.

  They dredged the sea for Avalon seaweed and used it to fertilize Earthly crops.

  And Argos disappeared.

  "I can see why Argos's crew got bored," Brenda said, greatly daring.

  Heads turned, but nobody spoke. Argos had betrayed them all, marooned the settlers and their descendants to the end of time. The crew of Argos had been tried and convicted of mutiny, in absentia. Later the lander Cavorjte had abandoned Base One, Destiny Town. Lives that crossed between suns would drown in the mundane work of farming. Jemmy felt the same, some days.

  Here is the farm, there is the Road. Take off go.

  Thonny's screen showed something like an octopus made of clouds, curved arms, a body that bulged in the middle. An old view from orbit.

  Jemmy had seen that once and never found it again.

  Greegry wasn't having fun. Nobody does algebra for fun. He kept leahng back through the text. There was a block to keep him from seeking the Answers file, but Jemmy had cracked that block long ago, and maybe Greegry had too.

  The Hanns had once had a window like the one at Bloocher Farm.

  Eternal winds had finally cracked it. What they had now was brick set into the Roadside wall, and four panes cut from the old window and set in the brick. And nothing much was going on out there.

  This room was not where Jemmy Bloocher wanted to be.

  He wanted to be where Cavorite was, at the far end of the Road.

  Columbiad became the colony's power source. Cables ran into the base, with a tent to protect the join. (Jemmy and Brenda were amused. The tent by their time had become a thick-walled building.) Cavorite was kept ready for an emergency evacuation of the Crab.

  Inevitably, some of the half-a-thousand first settlers thought more like interstellar explorers than like farmers. Forty of them followed an alternative path-"the path less traveled by," in Groundcaptain Radner's words.

  They waited eight years before the rest of the colonists had enough faith in their growing crops, and enough surplus to make the trip worthwhile. In 2498 A.D. there was a glut.

  Cavorite had carried half the colony from orbit down to the Crab.

  Leaving Spiral Town, the same craft carried forty in roomy comfort along with a hydroponics garden, stores of seeds and fertilized eggs, considerable medical facilities and lab equipment. The animals were thriving too, but none would be left on this first trip. They'd have nothing to eat. The plan called for Cavorite to return, and eventually to make a second journey, scattering animals and birds along the path.

  This trip, Cavorite would leave seeds and growing plants, and one thing more:

  A road.

  Sitting on the fusion drive alone, Cavorite would ride a meter in the air, with flame mushrooming out around the skirt, hot enough to melt rock. That was the idea. Cavorite would move off along the foothills of the Spine, the Crab's mountain ridge, leaving a snail's trail of cooling lava.

  Jemmy recognized what was onscreen: a view from space taken ages ago from the mother ship, before Columbiad and Cavorite landed.

  Water covered most of the planet. Destiny's core was deficient in radioactive elements. Its shell was thick. Ages ago it had cracked: an upwelling of magma had become a long, relatively narrow ridge of continent.

  Most of the continent, Wrinkle, lay north, under the broad ice cap.

  One end reached south of the equator, then curled over. A constriction nearly split the end off from the main body. A spinal ridge ran along Wrinkle, along the constriction now called the Neck, and down the length of the Crab Peninsula, splitting the Crab into broad and narrow halves. That was the land that the settlers settled.

  As he and Brenda watched, the computer drew the Road in neon pink.

  Down at the tip of the Crab, the Road curved out from Columbiad in a perfect little spiral. Where it got too big, where Bloocher Farm was now, it drew a tangent, a straight line that ran toward the mainland, parallel to the spinal ridge. As it approached the Neck it became a string of dots, then trailed off.

  "Are those dots all we get?" Brenda asked him.

  "They made the Road after everyone was down. There wasn't anyone in the sky to take pictures. Except Argos, and they don't talk."

  Now the computer was drawing in Spiral Town, filling in the curves of the spiral and spreading off down the straight section. . . and fuzzing out into terra incognita.

  Brenda complained, "Jemmy, it just trails off."

  "They never came back. They were going to, but they never did."

  Everyone knew the Cavorite story. Nobody knew how it ended.

  Brenda said, "The caravans must know where Cavorite went. The Road goes there and so do they. Why not just ask?"

  "Okay," Thonny said obligingly, mocking her.

  Jemmy tasted the idea. "Traders wouldn't tell anyone anything. But Brenda's right. They know."

  The Road was a spiral, and Radner Street was a radial path, not quite straight. The straggling line of children crossed the Road's next inward arc, and saw the last wagon receding. They crossed the next arc ahead of the wagons. Soon thereafter they walked between fruit orchards. The Road curved more tightly now. The intersection ahead was Guilda's Place.

  Guilda's Place sprawled like three or four buildings pushed together around an open space, a courtyard. Bird feeders stood in the corners, and the courtyard swarmed with little birds. The buildings were old, of poured stone, with every corner rounded by two hundred years of winds; but the roof of the biggest building was new Begley cloth sheeting, dark silver-gray. Walks led through the fruit orchards out back.

  The orchard wasn't enough to keep Guilda's going. The family had to buy fruit from farms farther out. The Bloochers supplied her with melons and grapes; their neighbors supplied other produce. And everybody stopped at Guilda's.

  It wasn't as if farmers couldn't make their own juice. But Guilda Smitt sold sherbet. Guilda had a working freezer, and a storage battery, and

  a roof covered with Begley cloth to soak up the sunlight and turn it into electric power.

  In the courtyard the boys and girls formed separate lines to get juice, then settled at four big round tables close enough for eavesdropping. Jemmy would have liked to listen to Junior reporting her conversation with the man who drove the second cart. But then his siblings wanted to hear about his conversation.

  "She said, 'The Road's always been there.' And he laughed."

  Eight-year-old Thonny scoffed. "We know better than that."

  "They did too," Jemmy said.

  Guilda's four daughters were replacing the juice. Junior stepped up and spoke to them. They listened, then moved briskly inside. Adults were gathering; the courtyard was filling up.

  Other customers had gathered around Guilda's Place to hear Jemmy and Junior tell of the merchants. Turning heads and sudden quiet alerted Jemmy, and he saw what the rest had seen: a single chug pulling a small cart along the radial road, with a single merchant walking alongside.

  He was more than twenty and less than thirty: hard to tell, with those pointed features. He had long black hair and a black beard trimmed short. Where other merchants wore several layers, this one wore only a woven vest, loose pants, and an elaborate cummerbund with a wide poc
ket in it. His feet were bare, and his arms and shoulders.

  He seemed to speak to the chug, and the chug waited while he went inside. They saw him speak to a massive woman whose wealth of dark hair was piled into intricate curves: Guilda herself.

  When the trader came out he was carrying a massive drum of sherbet.

  His arm and shoulder muscles rolled like boulders, and Jemmy envied him that. He didn't acknowledge the regard of the girls.

  He set the big drum in the cart, all in one smooth motion, and drove back up along the Road.

  Conversation started again when he was gone. "He'll meet the rest of the caravan coming the long way," an old man said.

  Guilda herself came out. She clapped her hands for attention, then spoke rapidly. "Sherbet and coins for any of you who helps me this day!"

  Jemmy downed his juice and stood up. Sibs and friends were doing the same. A horde moved into the fruit orchards. Wagons were in motion too, bringing fruit from markets nearer the Hub. The Bloochers, sticking together, fetched chairs and tables from nearby houses.

  Guilda's contract was good, stated and implied. Guilda's neighbors knew. When the caravan was in town, chairs and tables were needed; the loan would be repaid. For the labor of the children and young adults now spilling out of the courtyard, money would be paid tonight. Sherbet might come during a slack moment, or days from now, when the merchants were gone.

  So chairs and tables were brought and stacked. The ancient freezer ran at its humming maximum, using power stored for months. Guilda's extended family occupied her huge kitchen, and there they turned fruit into juice and whipped it while it froze.

  In midafternoon the caravan flowed around the curve of the Road.

  The wagons were nearly hidden within the crowd of customers. Every level of Spiral Town society had something to buy or sell or trade. Around the shell of customers seethed an outer shell of Spiral Town children.

  Now Jemmy and his friends could deploy tables and chairs and silver umbrellas, competing for speed, competing for how many chairs a boy could stack and lift. In the wake of the wagons Guilda's sprawled across the square.

  And suddenly there was nothing more to do. The caravan stopped near Spiral Town's hub, and business was being done there. Sherbet was ready, but the merchants were not.