Destiny's Road

by Larry Niven

  It was a heavy sonofabitch. Four handles on the bottom meant four men could lift it. Could one man drag it?

  He could if he was desperate. The boat moved in surges. He dragged it down the sand until it floated, then pushed it out hard and swam after it. Clambering in was harder than he'd expected, but he made it.

  He'd thought of swimming around Tail Town and then ashore. He'd still have to do that if he couldn't control the boat. The boat would be easier travel. Now he felt very conspicuous, one lone stolen boat on this great flat expanse. Get the sail up and get going!

  But he needed the tiller to aim the boat.

  So: mount the tiller in the dark, using the mountings he'd felt out so carefully, in the dark.

  The sail was bound against that horizontal beam. He hadn't spent enough time feeling the lines out, and it cost him. This line would raise it after he untied these. Then tie it down. Where?

  He got it up.

  The boat had turned under him to face the wind. The sail hung slack. He felt conspicuous as hell. He moved the tiller. It wasn't steering anything.

  He lowered himself off the stern and kicked until the bow came around, reached up and swung the tiller hard over.

  The sail billowed as sails did at Baytown, and he heaved himself into the boat as it flew back toward shore. He turned the boat into the wind, kept the tiller turned when the boat wanted to just stop and drift, and now he was flying back toward Loria and Twerdahl Town.

  Yes! But how on Earth did fishers do this?

  Okay, it took four men, one on the tiller while three raised the sails....

  Most of Tail Town was quite dark. Torches still burned in the larger buildings. Tim searched the water for Otterfolk, but there were none in sight. Did they sleep?

  As dawn showed above the Crest, boats were putting out from the beach beyond Tail Town. Tim had sailed past Tail Town in the night. He watched them, having little better to do.

  Sails came up. Five, six boats took to the water, raised sail, then foreshortened, turning toward his position. It looked choreographed.

  Merchants armed with guns might be aboard, but Tim didn't believe that. Fishers would be dangerous enough. He was a thief. If they caught him, the least he could expect was to be turned over to the caravan.

  The autumn caravan would know him by daylight: Jemmy Bloocher.

  A row of dark heads appeared ahead.

  Their eyes glittered black, facing forward at water level. As they neared he saw that their heads were as big as his own, capped with a shell that dropped to form the upper part of a beak, like a chug's head.

  Their beaks were cable-cutter traps, more like a lungshark's mouth than a chug's, but they were clearly related to both species.

  He watched for a bit. They did nothing. He waved; nothing.

  "I'm-" He hesitated, then shouted, "I'mJemmy Bloocher. That's one small step for a man-"

  They were waiting for something.

  He v~'as about to sail past.

  He couldn't see it, but he felt how the boat slid sideways across the water, losing forward momentum. Those fishers would catch him unless he could get the centerboard down.

  He was tired of banging his shins on it.

  He swung the boat into the wind and saw the sail go slack. The Otterfolk flicked into motion and were with him again. He picked up the centerboard and slid it into the water, hanging on to it until he felt hands take it from him.

  Then it was a matter of waiting. He watched more boats take sea room and turn toward him. The floor of the boat thumped and bumped.

  The boat began to turn by itself.

  The Otterfolk knew how this worked. Tim twisted the tiller to help them put the wind in the sails. The boat took off, but sluggishly. He looked down to see what he'd expected: four Otterfolk, their short, thick forearms wrapped around the handholds at water level.

  Damn, he could reach down and touch them.

  He didn't. But he leaned far over to look, his arm far back to hold the tiller in place.

  He'd half-expected to see smiles. Their beaked faces were immobile, yet it was clear they were having fun.

  They were smaller than he was, but he'd known grown men as big as the Otterfolk. Sixty kilograms, he judged, and very alike except for their shells.

  Left and aft was the one he was studying. Its legs were short, ending in big splayed fins. Its arms were short too. They pulled its body hard against the handhold. Its body hugged the hull. It twisted to look up at him. It seemed wonderfully agile where the shell didn't bind it.

  Its shell was smooth, streamlined-and painted! Painted in unreadable hieroglyphs, in brilliant scarlet and orange and green.

  The other riders were painted too. Tim couldn't read the patterns, though they looked more like simplified pictures than an alphabet. But he'd seen those colors before. Where?

  Forward left, that one had been injured. Tim could see a healed split along his shell, under paint that turned the crack into a coat of arms. The accident had bent the shell, and bent the Otterfolk's body too.

  Tim believed he had known they were sapient the instant he looked into their eyes; but the paints told a more emphatic tale. They were artists.

  A creature barred from using fire could never make such paints.

  Wait, now, that was the red of a speckles can!

  Settler magic. The walls of Civic Hall in Spiral Town had murals in those colors, and others too.

  The Otterfolk would have used more colors if they'd had them.

  Somewhere was a source of red and orange and green acrylic paint, and the Otterfolk had access.

  Twenty or more sails were chasing him now. Tim wasn't really concerned.

  Those other boats must be carrying Otterfolk too, to slow them. The handles on a boat weren't placed for fishers' convenience, after all.

  The day passed like a dream. This was sensory deprivation: lying in the bottom of a boat, holding the tiller in one position, sometimes finding the will to lift his head, look over the side, check his position. Once he looked just as the left-forward rider reached out, snatched a platyfish from the water, bit off two big bites, and dropped it to be caught by the rider behind him.

  Then one of the riders flipped a big Earthlife bass over into the boat. Around midday the rearmost pair dropped off. The boat picked up a little speed, and then he had another pair of riders. Later the front pair dropped away and were replaced.

  He was hungry. He was thirsty. He'd eaten and drunk as much as he could hold last night, and it wasn't enough. When Quicksilver blinked out his arms were racked by cramps. He tried steering with his feet and found he could make it work.

  That left his agonized hands free to fillet the bass into sashimi.

  The fleet came ever closer.

  The sun sank, the sky darkened.

  In an hour he couldn't tell the land from the sea. He could tell where the wind was. Once, staring into the dark, he perceived the land far too close. He steered hard about, and sensed that the wind was blowing straight at the land. He could keep himself aimed, if Destiny didn't change the rules on him.

  Sailing an unfamiliar boat was dangerous enough in daylight.

  Sailing at night was suicide. Would he even know if the shore was about to smite him? If he'd seen a way, Tim would have surrendered. But the fishers would smash their boats and his if they caught him in the dark.

  And in the morning, would they have him surrounded?

  Quicksilver peeked above the mountains, a brilliant point against a sky already showing yellow-white.

  Sails had come very near, but they hadn't surrounded him yet. With Quicksilver's added light, Tim angled closer to the beach. Closer yet, as the sun itself glared between peaks.

  Tim didn't intend to be caught. He'd beach the boat and run when they came close enough.

  The waves were tiny, twenty centimeters high, breaking only ten meters from shore. He was sailing only a few meters beyond that point, and that was very near the beach. He could see an endless
reach of sand without a shack or wall or footprint anywhere, nothing but sand and weed and painted shells.

  Otterfolk shells. A score in view to left and right, now that he thought to look.

  Tim edged the boat closer yet. That wasn't an Otterfolk graveyard, was it? Sharks had bones; chugs had bones; but there weren't any Otterfolk bones on that beach. Just shells painted in acrylic colors, all set on the beach beyond the tide line, like headstones maybe, until one shifted suddenly, and again.

  The boat rocked. Damn, he was too close, his centerboard was grinding against sand! He turned hard, and back a bit as the sail tried to go slack. The centerboard wasn't grinding anymore because his four riders had dropped off and the boat was riding higher. He angled for open sea before he thought of the other boats.

  They were all turning.

  He had some sea room now, and he looked back for the particular shell that had moved.

  It covered a hollow. Shapes too small to see crawled out from under the edge.

  Otterfolk were riding waves to shore. He saw them clearly for the first time, four limber shapes with short finned limbs and long bodies.

  He half-recognized the markings. Those had been the riders on his boat.

  He worked it out later, thus:

  Fishers were too skilled, and a fisher boat was too predictable.

  Boring. A thief in a boat he didn't know how to use, making mistakes and learning as he went, made for an exciting ride.

  Four riders piling on a thief's boat would slow it. Fisher boats chasing it, being less interesting, would carry fewer riders. Of course the thief would be caught.

  Otterfolk might choose to ride two at a time to give a thief a longer run; but Tim always believed that the Destiny natives had minds but no language. Negotiation had to be basic.

  Threatened, the thief sent a basic message. Tim had threatened to beach his boat on the birthground.

  The Otterfolk must respond. Perhaps they fouled the fishers'

  centerboards or tillers, or clung to the handholds in hordes, until the boats couldn't move.

  At the time, Tim couldn't guess why the fishers had abandoned their chase. But sailing near shore now seemed a very dangerous thing.

  Otterfolk shed their shells: that was clear. They made nests in sand, and left the shell to shade the emerging young: that was a likely guess. Otterfolk would kill any creature found on that shore: that seemed very likely.

  He stayed well out to sea until he was nearly to Baytown.

  The sky was red with after-sunset, and Quicksilver burned right at the water. Baytown fisher boats were at sea ahead of him. As he came nearer they all turned toward him.

  Tim aimed his boat inland, toward where a dish-shaped crater lay on the beach.

  The wind was blowing out to sea. He couldn't aim directly toward shore, but he could approach in a switchback pattern. When the centerboard grounded and heeled over, he went overboard. The lightened boat bobbed up and righted. He swam for shore with boats converging behind him. He crawled out winded, and ran for the crater on rubbery legs.

  He paused once, and stooped to lift the rim of a painted shell that would almost cover his chest. His vision grayed and he went to his knees.

  But the cavity under the shell was empty; the Otterfolk children gone. He heaved himself up and kept running, chest heaving, and halffell over the rim of the fused sand dish.

  Arcs of wooden bench lined the inland half of the dish. The wood was ancient and weathered. Soft sand lined the bottom on the sea side, and the slanted rim had been painted with hieroglyphs in yellow, orange, green, scarlet, indigo.

  The shell he was holding was very like those he'd found scattered over the mudflats that held towels and soggy clothes for the Baytown fishers. Would he have found paint, if he'd turned one over?

  It was too big for his pack. He shoved it up between his shirt and rain tunic, against his chest.

  He was burning priceless seconds. Fishers had gone overboard. They were in the water, trying to save his stolen boat by attaching lines: they meant to tow it. A few shouted at him, the words blurred, the tone unfriendly.

  The five-color cartoons along the rim of Meetplace were old but still vivid. If he studied them he'd see what those simplified figures represented.

  But Baytown women were wading the mudflat in his direction, and Tim thought it best to leave.

  14

  The Speckles Can

  Th~~k 0f us as priests 0f evolution.

  -Caravan proverb

  He climbed as far as the caravan trail before he looked back. They wouldn't follow him in the dark...?

  It was already too dark to tell.

  Thirst was near killing him.

  Well, he was new at this. He followed the caravan trail to the Spectre River. He watched from cover while the last of the light died, before he crept to the water and drank his fill.

  Then he kept climbing.

  He woke sheltered in bushes, just below the Road, on the wrong side of the Spectre River. He woke joyful. He was free! Anyone could outrun a caravan.

  He watched Baytown wake. He watched the boats put to sea. Any tiny fleck of white on the water might be Otterfolk. It was all a wonder, but the thing he wanted most was to go down.

  Did he do wrong to run? He was frantic to question them. All those discarded Otterfolk shells! Fishers must be in constant contact with Otterfolk.

  Why did the merchants let Baytowners inspect their wares the day before they bought? They didn't do that anywhere else along the Road, except in Tail Town itself. Did the Otterfolk tell the locals what they needed?

  How?

  All his traveling had only bought him more questions.

  He saw no way across the Spectre. The bridge lay too close to Baytown. Baytown knew that he had stolen a boat. They knew he had landed on the forbidden beach. The shadow of the mountains was withdrawing from Baytown, and sunlight would soon touch the mountains where he hid.

  The flat Road itself hid nothing and grew nothing.

  If he tried to hunt what lived in the brush, Baytown fishers would see brush moving on the mountain. He didn't dare even reach up into a fool cage.

  But the slopes above the Road bloomed with Earthlife crops that hadn't been harvested since Cavorite passed. He crept among them like a snake, and gorged on fruits and berries. He collected beans, several kinds of nuts, and a few root vegetables. The beans he set soaking in a bottle.

  He cooked after dark in a rock fire pit tall enough to hide the light.

  Then he climbed in the dark until he reached bare rock.

  In the morning the Spectre had become a thousand springs. Crossing was easy.

  Now there were none to spy on him at all. Nobody lived on this long stretch between Baytown and the distillery. Tim stayed high, at the interface between Earthlife growth and bare rock.

  Fruits and grains grew here, and the occasional fool cage with something trapped inside. Rotten bird meat would still make bait for catfish. He didn't hunt; someone might hear gunfire. He walked wide around the occasional wild pig. Once he speared an unwary rabbit with his weed cutter. He was never able to do that again.

  He'd traveled this way before.

  He watched the Road for signs of pursuit. Merchants must know about bicycles, and Tim couldn't outrun those. He'd be wary for a while.

  But nobody followed. In ten days he was halfway home.

  He'd been seeing birds as big as men. He hadn't seen one fly, but they ran like the wind. Ostriches. The land was flat up to an abrupt "frost line," where bare rock suddenly rose nearly straight for five or six hundred meters.

  He was halfway between the Neck and Spiral Town, he judged, high on the spine of the Crab. A klick's stretch of chaparral, of tiny Earthlife oranges and berry bushes and Destiny thorns, barred him from the Road.

  Far ahead he could see a vertical white thread of waterfall.

  The long stretch of lonely coast was ending. The Homes and Wilsons were friends of the caravans, and so was eve
ry community beyond. How would they treat a yutz found wandering loose? Tim would have crept past the distillery and dairy; but it seemed to him that he was becoming clumsy.

  Nothing serious. He'd left the Otterfolk shell behind, three mornings in a row. The shell was proof of some terrible truth that he hadn't yet fully understood. It served as a platter too: it kept food out of the dirt. He needed it.

  This morning he'd lost time doubling back to get the shell, again, and he'd found his fire pit sitting like a signature. He threw the rocks into the bushes, as usual, but this was getting scary. He didn't want to end like Jael Harness.

  There was no sure way to recognize speckles deficiency.

  He could keep track of the days, eleven now, and so what? He could move more carefully, look around himself more often, avoid some mistakes that way. More likely he'd just forget the question, and gradually all the patterns in his mind would go too.

  He was a couple of caravan-days downRoad from the distillery. For now he'd keep to the heights. He'd reach the falls tonight and go down in the morning-hide the gun first-approach the distillery by the Road, unless they found him first.

  Every child knew that planets glowed by reflected sunlight. Quicksilver was brilliant before it passed behind the sun. These last few days, with its shadowed side turned toward Destiny, Quicksilver had been nearly invisible; but now it was crossing the sun.

  Half an hour before sunset, Tim could just glance at the westering sun and glimpse a black dot on the solar disk before he snatched his gaze away.

  Children did that. Adults yelled at them for it. A child who tried such a thing with Earth's hotter, brighter sun would blind himself. Tim could blind himself if he blinked the sun too near noon. If he let the sun get too far down the sky, the dot would blur out.

  But he'd caught it.

  So he sat on a boulder and waited for his vision to come back, and wondered why he was wasting time. Loria waited ahead, a caravan was crawling up his tail, the falls he'd seen was still ahead, and Tim Bednacourt sat on a rock waiting for dark.

  Because he needed rocks to build his fire pit, and water to cook.

  He hadn't seen loose rocks earlier in the day. Here was a convenient spring near a convenient landslide, a raw cleft in the rock spilling stones