by Larry Niven
“Long story. But I-look.” He dropped his pack and was about to open it when everyone took one step forward.
“It's a shell,” he babbled. “Scrimshaw.”
Ander motioned him to go ahead.
Tim untied the pack, one-handed, and dumped it. He didn't need to conceal anything in the pack. He fished out the shell and pointed Out the pictures. “Chug. Shark. This is done on a lungshark shell. That's an Otterfolk. I had an Otterfolk shell too, but I gave it away. What happened to me? Everything you can imagine, Susie, and then some. I've sailed a boat. I can cook in styles you never imagined. I've seen the blind side of the Crab.”
“You don't seem to be speckles-shy,” Susie Cloochi said.
And suddenly he knew what he looked like.
He was wearing a trader yutz's glare-bright clothing, though it hung in rags and dirt. He'd traveled on the far side of the ridge for a long, hungry time. He was gaunt. Worst of all, he was here, with the caravan twenty days away. A wanderer not following a caravan was a bandit.
And a thief; but they couldn't know about the stolen speckles can. In a way that made it worse. A speckles-shy bandit might do anything.
The corner of his eye caught motion, way upRoad around the toolhouse. He couldn't spare the attention. “Test my mind,” he said. “Test my memory. I gave you the bicycle Tedned Grant was riding. Ander,
Gerrel, you helped me build that oven. I taught you bread! I remember getting married, Loria. Ander Cloochi, is there something you'd like to tell me?”
“We're married.”
“Now, I'm still new among you,” Tim said, “so I have to ask-“ Loria burst out laughing. It didn't seem she could stop. Ander said, “No, Loria can't have two husbands.”
“But you both, you all knew I'd be back.”
“But not now, damn it, Tim! We'd-Loria would have had time to decide.”
“Is this what happened to Haron Welsh?”
Loria's laughter had trailed, off. She wouldn't meet his eyes, now, but she nodded.
“Went off with a caravan. Came back. Found out he wasn't married? And you thought he'd tell me?”
Nod.
Ander put the baby in her arms, and stepped in front of her. “So, you're here. What happened to you, Tim?”
“At the Neck they trade yutzes. The autumn caravan was every trader who ever-” He was so tired and so miserable. Tim felt he was about to faint. He didn't dare. “-ever watched me shoot a man. I had to run. I took enough speckles to get me here.”
At the corner of his eye, motion. Three or four older people at the door to the toolhouse. He recognized Julya Franken by her long white still-lovely hair, and remembered when he had last seen her.
She'd been handing out blades on the day of the weed cutting.
The four went into the toolhouse.
“You're not speckles-shy,” Susie Cloochi decided. “You took enough speckles-”
Tim stooped and picked up his open pack. And ran straight at Tedned Grant.
“-from who? Tedned!”
Tedned was a skinny boy/man who flinched from big waves, or wrestling, or quarrels or confrontations. Still he was no runt. With all eyes on him, he tried to get his fists up. Tim knocked him aside and dodged between houses.
He emerged between high rows of corn, with nobody in sight. Paths ran between the garden plots. He pelted upRoad, counting.
Tedned was behind him, not catching up.
Tedned had run his bike between houses rather than meet Tim in the Road. There ahead, those houses. When Tim had next seen him, the bike was gone. Tedned must have dropped his bike and kept running, yelling into every house he passed. And here were the houses, and one was the Younger Grants' house, and the bike was leaning against a wall.
Tim was too late to board the bicycle as Tedned came running up. It wasn't as if Tim had choices. He couldn't make for the water, not yet. He left the bike and ran at Tedned. Tedned got his arms up and Tim punched between his elbows, a quick one to the solar plexus, the heel of his hand to the nose.
Now the bike. They had let grit get into the gears. It started slow. He pedaled past Tedned, who was curled up and trying to find his breath.
Twerdahl Town's defenders were pouring between the houses now, and others would be running along the mud, but Tim was ahead and moving considerably faster than a running man. He could see the toolhouse, the last building upRoad.
Well short of the toolhouse, he turned again. Between the houses. Out onto the mud. Off the bicycle before it got mired, because Tim Bednacourt was no thief.
DownRoad, a horde was running toward him, though they seemed out of breath. UpRoad, only four, and they all looked as old as Julya Franken. But they bristled with weed cutters.
He might have escaped them, he thought, if he'd turned toward the Road. But then what? He'd stopped alongside the surfboards lined up along the wall of the Elder Bednacourts' house. Tim snatched up the biggest and held it over his head as he ran for the water.
They tried to follow him, of course. A few were better surfers than he was, and they were hot on his tail, but he wasn't surfing now. Once beyond the waves he need only paddle.
Paddle for his life, slipping over the water, on and on. The ache in his shoulders grew until it swallowed everything else, while the current carried him southeast.
Ultimately his pursuers were too far from Twerdahl Town for their comfort, too close to Spiral Town, and they turned back one by one.
17
Carder s Boat
Black for photosynthesis. Sagan and Schklovskii were right.
-Gerot, Xenobiology
He thought he was going to die.
He thought he didn't care.
There was nothing to drink. There was nothing chasing him anymore. There was nothing to do but paddle.
A thousand times lie turned his eyes toward shore. A wave would carry him in. He could live between Twerdahl Town and Spiral Town live like a hunted animal, until his mind turned animal too. When he could make his arms move, he paddled. When he rested, the shore still drifted past him by infinitesimal degrees. His shoulders were one long moan of pain. The sun burned into his neck and his arms and the backs of his calves.
He lay in salt water. The board floated two centimeters below the surface. If he let his head rest on the wood, he could drown. The offbalance weight of his pack drove him crazy, but never quite crazy enough to drop it overboard.
When he remembered this part of his life, he never knew how long anything took.
He was drifting in a stupor with his chin propped on his arms on the second night, or the third. He was flying Cavorite in his mind...
The long, slow drift from the landing site down to the Neck and beyond. Day and night shifts? Stop to rest, or to shed the heat from riding a fusion flame, or to look at anything interesting. Side jaunt to Haunted
Bay, because cameras in the sky found seabed geometries suggesting an undersea city...
Trying to see why they ran the Road so high.
Twerdahl Town filled the whole space between the Road and the beach. Cavorite had flown close to shore when it made the Road there. As it moved down the coast, the Road ran higher. Near the Neck it ran as high as it could get, right along the crest... as if Twerdahl and his crew had become afraid of the sea.
He toyed with an odd notion. When had Cavorite learned of the Otterfolk?
Teaching programs named thousands of extinct species of life on Earth. All species die or change over millions of years. A meteoroid impact had rendered all the dinosaurs extinct, barring those that sired the birds... but many species died because Man was good at changing his environment.
There was a shadow among shadows ahead of him...
Had Cavorite laid the Road to protect the Otterfolk?
He remembered, though, that the Hub in Spiral Town was far, far inland. Cavorite was hovering over burnt-out alien wilderness when it drew the lines of Spiral Town. The Twerdahls must have run their loops of Road to within a klick of s
hore, stayed near the water for forty klicks farther, then eased upslope toward the peaks again..
Avoiding the sea.
The landers had charred the land and boiled the lakes, but a flame couldn't reach below the sea. Future generations would follow the Road, spiraling outward until they gradually approached whatever came out of the sea. They'd have time to prepare.
Cavorite's crew feared the alien.
Ahead of him, then passing on the left. He moaned and tried to work his arms.
He could make them move, but he couldn't paddle.
He slid far back, half off the board, and kicked. Against the current, toward shore, gripping with dead arms and kicking with all his remaining strength, his breath a stuttering moan. A raft of Destiny devilhair with an angular shadow in the middle was trying to creep past him. He gained a centimeter at a time.
Then the current was pushing his board not past the vastness of black weed but into it, and he could rest.
Hours later the cramping in his arms faded. He found he could grip the board with his knees and pull handfuls of weed toward him, sliding the board across the weed, until floating devilhair lifted his board above the water. Now he could let his head rest on waxed wood for the first time in two days.
By morning light it looked tremendous. It loomed far above him, shaped like two slender fisher boats with a deck across iheir tops.
Carder's Boat, sure enough.
Sunlight's touch turned the heat in his neck and arms and calves into a flame. He pulled himself and the board across the black weed into the shadow of the boat. That pain eased, but what was hurting his hands?
Destiny devilhair had covered his palms with myriads of black needles barely big enough to see as specks.
Carder's Boat loomed vast. He could not imagine such a thing stowed in a starship's cargo hold. Settler magic was compact, never bigger than it had to be.
He used his shirt to shield his hands. He dragged his board across the devilhair, around the stern and into sunlight.
Children had used this as a raft before the weed grew too thick. They must have left a ladder somewhere! But the weed hid everything. On this sunlit, seaward side the weed had grown right up the side: a black shroud marked with yellow-green, and a boat half-visible beneath.
He climbed the weed with bare hands and feet.
It didn't quite reach the rim. It kept ripping loose. Somehow he got a hand on the rim and pulled himself over. The impact of his fall was so strange... but what mattered was the cabin, and the steps down.
The weird surface gave back no impact. He crawled like a ghost, down into the cabin, into shadow.
In shadow the burning went away and he could think about his thirst.
There was a sink.
Water ran. He twisted his head under the spigot and drank. He remembered to be afraid of it, old water in an old container, but it tasted like spring water: like life itself. He drank until the weight of his belly pulled him to the weird floor. He didn't want to die.
On a table he found what must have been lunch for six or eight, then a garden of Earthlife yeasts and bacteria, then this dead powdery residue.
There was nothing to eat aboard Carder's Boat.
Carder's Boat was not of this world. The floor and walls of the cabin ate his footfalls and gave back no sound and no recoil. Carder's Boat was nearly massless, an airy foam under a taut skin.
They hadn't stowed Carder's Boat aboard an interstellar spacecraft. They'd stowed a tank of something that foamed up and hardened, and maybe a boat-shaped membrane to foam it into, and a few compact settler-magic machines, like this sink that seemed able to make drinking water, and the lighted interior walls. The hull's silver-gray surface was Begley cloth sheeting from Mount Apollo, pressed into place after the boat was inflated.
His hunger had subsided to a dull ache. His fingers and toes were black with tiny needles; he could barely move them for the pain. Climbing the weed had cost him.
There was a bath. Water still ran. When the salt was off him some of the itching went away. He left his clothes soaking and moved naked about the cabin.
A small patch on a counter almost burned him. It glowed dull red with heat. He found a dial to turn it off.
A teapot and a frying pan were both chained to the wall above the counter. There were hooks for more cookware, but the cookware was gone.
He found boxes and chests of Spiral Town workmanship, here and on deck. One held a big stack of towels that shredded in his hands. One held fishing gear, sturdier lines and sturdier poles than the caravan used. He looked over the side and saw only black devilhair. How could he fish through that?
And one chest held clothing: floppy knee-length swimsuits and elbowlength windbreakers in a strange old style, tinted in shiny pastels. These had held up very well. Jemmy tried to pull one apart, hoping he'd fail; and the seams held, if there were seams. He couldn't find them.
Carder's Boat was a small frog on a wide lily pad.
Events came isolated. Afterward he was never able to order them properly.
He was still wandering naked about the boat when he found the fishing gear. He'd kept his weed cutter. He put that together with a jointed fishing pole four meters long and some translucent line, and had a four-meter weed cutter. He began to chop devilhair.
It hurt his healing hands. Flying mites lived in the weed, and the blade set black clouds rising.
Something leaped. He stabbed, and had a Destiny amtrak eel on the point. A moment later it wriggled free. When? The gap in the weed wasn't very big then.
The gap was bigger before anything leapt again, and he jabbed and flung-heavy!-and a little lungshark flopped on dry weed. He worked the blade under the shell and was able to flip it into the boat.
He killed it and fihleted it and cooked it with speckles. It fed and calmed the ravenous animal in his belly. He lay on deck to watch the fires of sunset and, briefly, Quicksilver.
It must have been next morning that he baited a hook with the shark's remains... thought it over, and threw the offal overboard. Destiny life would not keep a man alive. He didn't want to catch more.
He went back to cutting weed. He perfected the jab-and-flip. He got another amtrak eel that way. He was ready when a flounder appeared- Earthlife!-and he got it aboard. He baited three l~ooks with what was left after he'd eaten. There were sockets in the deck to brace a fishing pole. He lowered the lines into the great open patch he'd cut in the weed around Carder's Boat.
Earthlife fish lived deep down. He ate himself stupid, and remembered to add speckles.
The skin on his neck and legs peeled off in flakes.
Later-it had to be later-he was wearing swim trunks and a windbreaker and a floatation vest fished from a locker. He slept through noon and worked at night. Quicksilver had become a white glare.
He kept chopping. Every day there was less weed around the boat. It was trying to grow back, but he stayed ahead of it. There was a ladder after all, under the thickest part of the weed. He cleared it.
A few people watched from shore, day after day. Then a great crowd came down from Warkan's Tavern, when Quicksilver was almost behind the sun, brilliant at sunset. They never waved, they just watched, day after day.
One day they were sparse; another day, gone.
He found the anchor cable by chopping devilhair from around it. He tracked it up from the water to a housing in the boat's nose.
There was a switch.
He flipped it.
The housing hummed to itself, gearing up. Then it pulled, and the boat's nose sank. He watched, fascinated. The boat was too light to sink, he thought, but could it pull itself underwater? right to the floor of the ocean? He never thought of turning the motor off.
Something in the sea bottom gave first. The boat surged savagely; the deck slapped him silly. The anchor lurched up while he was still too dizzy to care.
Later-Quicksilver was rising well before dawn-he saw that the weed that linked the boat to shore had stretched
into a line. The current was pulling him southeast.
He chopped weed until all that was left was the little patch on the starboard side on which his board still rested. At some point the boat tore loose and he drifted free.
He had no way of rowing or steering Carder's Boat. Nonetheless his life had changed. Jemmy Bloocher was moving again.
Tim Hann had lived ten days. Tim Bednacourt, Loria's husband, had lasted half a year. Tim Bednacourt, the caravan's chef, was a hunted bandit.
He couldn't remember when Jemmy Bloocher came back. It just felt right.
The land slid northwest, then away.
The current along Haunted Bay ran southeast toward Spiral Town. Jemmy had thought the water would carry him around the point and down the Crab's barren shore. Those cliffs were unclimbable-he'd seen that-but he could wait, drift down along the Neck, see what the shore was like along the mainland.
The mainland. There was nothing left for Jemmy Bloocher on the Crab Peninsula, but the mainland... Cavorite had gone there, leaving Road for others to follow. The caravan's home was in the mainland.
He came to understand that he'd guessed wrong.
He was far out at sea. Mist hid the land but for the projecting peaks of the Crest. Those slid northwest, then away-north and east-then, very distant now, drifted southeast again. He was moving in a great curve.
The sea flowed like a wide bathtub whirlpool of which Haunted Bay was only the drain.
None of this bothered Jemmy Bloocher. His speckles and the ocean would feed him for a while. As the days passed, he watched a vast sea and a serrated edge of land, and a towering black storm far down the coast. In his mind he traced Cavorite's path.
He was noticed, of course. On all of Destiny there couldn't be two objects like Carder's Boat.
One morning a few Otterfolk had him in view.
The next morning there were more. He couldn't tell how many because they spent most of their time underwater, but he could see five or six at a time. At noon they drifted away, or drifted deep to fish. He came to believe that Otterfolk didn't like direct sunlight.