Destiny's Road h-3

by Larry Niven

  “Barrbarrbarreee! Brenbrenbrendaaa!”

  Her face was twisted in terror. Why wasn't she screaming? He shied from the answer: the nerves must have been seared lifeless. He got under Karen's shoulder, her left shoulder, just as she started to collapse. His own scream rose to incoherent agony as his knee buckled under her weight.

  Brenda came running.

  Jeremy was down on his knee, still supporting Karen. “Don't touch her where she's burned! Get under her here, here where I am, okay?” He transferred his burden. Karen was moaning. She'd started to realize how bad it was. She wasn't able to stand.

  “Get her up to the inn!” Jeremy limped uphill, up sixty meters of old wooden stairs, shouting every few steps. “Barrbarrbarreee!”

  “What?I was stowing meat and veggies.” Lloyd was back.

  Good! “Get ice! All the ice! Karen's been burned! Barrbarrbarreee!”

  Lloyd disappeared.

  Jeremy continued his hop-jump progress up the stairs from the beach, through Reception and into the kitchen. Lloyd had poured several pounds of ice over a towel in the sink. He rolled the towel up and rushed past Jeremy.

  Brenda and Karen had reached the landing outside Reception. Karen was whimpering; her eyes rolled. A patch of skin on her upper arm had slipped. Lloyd and Brenda eased her down to the wood floor and settled the ice-filled towel across her. Jeremy slid a pillow under her knees.

  Brenda asked, “Did you call anyone?”

  Call? “Lloyd-” Phone?"No.”

  Brenda ran inside.

  Karen wanted to hold his hand. He told her, “Don't worry. Brenda must be calling the City. What happened?”

  “It was tipping over. I tried to stop it.”

  “Should have called me.”

  “No time. Your knee.”

  “Someone.”

  “I know.” Her eyes closed, her hand went slack.

  He found Brenda in Reception talking to the settler-magic box in her hand. “Karen Winslow. Wave Rider Inn. Got it?” The little projector behind the desk flashed white-on-blue print into the air and she said, “Yes. I'm her daughter, Brenda Winslow, but she'll probably come in with Daddy, Jeremy Winslow. That's right-“ The air blinked ruby script at her, and she frowned. “Daddy? When were you born?”

  “Twenty-seven eleven.” The truth. He didn't know a better answer.

  “Where?”

  “Skip it.''

  “Haven on the Crab, Iremember. Daddy, they're having trouble finding your credit references.”

  Jeremy Winslow didn't answer. Brenda said, “You came here, so you took Mom's name. Would they have your name from before?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Jeremy Hearst. Dad?”

  “They won't find me.”

  His daughter gave him a long, hard stare. Then she told the phone, “Try Barry Winslow. Uncle Barry, Karen Winslow's brother.” The screen flashed. “Yes, that's right. Daddy, see if you can find Uncle Barry!”

  Jeremy hop-jumped away. He heard Brenda's voice continue behind him. “Yes, I'll have him phone and give you a reference, but send an ambulance now. She's burned over half her body! When can we expect... ?”

  Barry was up two flights of stairs, making dust. Jeremy had to go up after him. Wave Rider had a high noise level. You got to where you barely heard the crashing waves, but you couldn't hear someone shouting either,

  Barry moved fast for his age. Jeremy followed him down slowly, favoring the knee that hadn't worked right since the surfing accident. When he was alone, he let his face have its way.

  His face wanted a twitching, teeth-clenching rictus sardonicus. His hands wanted to tear the banister apart. What was he going to tell Brenda? Or, when he must, Karen?

  Whatever he told his daughter, he'd have to tell them all. Barry and Chloe would demand to know what was up, and they weren't just his in-laws, they owned part of the restaurant. He didn't see his other children much.

  Harlow? Earth, he would have liked to talk to her! His stepmother-inlaw hadn't quite got along with Harold's children. After Harold's death she'd sold them what she owned of Wave Rider, not quite of her own choice. She ran a candle shop in Destiny Town itself, out of Jeremy's reach.

  When Karen had survived this horror, she would have to know.

  So he'd better build a story, Jeremy thought, gripping the railing as he limped down the stairs.

  He'd had a story. It had bought him twenty-seven good years.

  They were clustered around Karen when he got down, trying to explain the matter to Chloe and six hotel guests. Asham Barenblatt offered to use his credit reference, but Barry was already on the phone giving his. Karen had been given pills. The way she looked frightened him.

  Brenda looked at him and said, “Daddy, the ambulance will be hours getting here. I have to pack. You should pack for Mother.”

  “I told Medical the same as you used to tell us,” Brenda said. She moved briskly about Karen's bedroom, stuffing clothing into the case with unnecessary force, not looking at her father. “Born at Haven on the Crab, little place with six families. Your mother, my grandmother, died. You were three. Your father came by with the spring caravan and took you. Randall Hearst of Hearst wagon. But Medical's got no record of any of that!”

  ''It's fiction.''

  “Didn't you tell Mother there was no documentation? Father dead, stepmother never got to it?”

  “It's fiction. Randall Hearst, he's a merchant I barely met when we traded off at the Neck. He wouldn't know me... well, he might. Haven's real. Carnot wagon's real too. I'm from Spiral Town.”

  Brenda hugged a double armful of blouses to her, and stared. “You mean literally Spiral Town?”

  “Literally.”

  “Nobody leaves Spiral Town.”

  “I had to. I shot a man. It was an accident “ He told her the tale. Marriage in Twerdahl Town. The caravan's long, leisurely trek down the Road. The quick, terrible trip back. Adrift aboard Carder's Boat...

  There were tears running down Brenda's face, but she'd finished packing. They left the cases in the hall and crossed to her own bedroom.

  He spoke little of the Windfarm, but she knew more. Every child of the mainland studied speckles biology and the biology of the Winds.

  When he told of birds killing Shimon, she held her breath. When he came to the fight with Andrew, she was looking at her father with horror and fascination.

  “You killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  ''How?”

  “I threw rocks.”

  He wasn't proud of giving away Duncan's twice-stolen loot. He skipped that, and he skipped over what he'd done with the speckles, though he'd already told Brenda enough to put him back in the Winds. He said only, “I kept out a handful for the Road and gave the pouch to Willametta. Then I walked out. Four days later I was looking down from the ridge at the autumn caravan. It was down to six wagons pulled by tugs. I bit my tongue trying to look nonchalant. They'd have arrested me anyway, scruffy as I was, if I hadn't had the fishing pole and fish to share around.

  “I bought some clothes and a haircut and a bar of soap, enough to make me look civilized. I went on up the Road to the Wave Rider and asked for a job. Your grandfather turned me down.”

  “I thought-“

  “No, he turned me down. I knew a lot about Harold from listening to Barda. I thought I could push his buttons. But your grandmother had died and Harold was married again. Harlow met me at the door. I thought she must be Barda's sister Karen. Maybe Harold Winslow didn't like how I looked at his wife.

  “So I camped on the beach a little down from Wave Rider. I set up a pit barbecue. Ate a couple of meals at Wave Rider while the money held out. I swam with Otterfolk-“

  “Weren't you afraid they'd remember you?”

  “Otterfolk don't travel. I'm not even sure this bunch could breed with Otterfolk around the curve of the bay.” But he'd learned that much later, and he added, “Sure I was nervous. But they didn't know me and they liked playing
with me. Harold's family, they never got time. It's part of the bargain, Brenda. They like us. They're interested. They want to play with us.

  “I think Harold's poor overworked family nagged him into hiring someone, and I was there. Temporary, he said. He kept boards for guests. I taught Harlow how to ride a board, then some of the others tried it-”

  “And you told them a story.”

  “Yeah, I told my tale of a caravan trader and his Roadside son, and I stuck to it. Brenda, I know what happens to anyone crossing the Neck.

  They shoot him. I do not know what they do to an island shy who lives among them for twenty-seven years.”

  There was noise outside the windows, from the Road. They looked out. A tug pulled up towing a boxy vehicle marked with a red cross.

  Jeremy hop-limped down the stairs in Brenda's wake.

  They were carrying Karen out. She was quiet... she looked dead. The medics stopped so that he could see she was breathing: raggedly, but breathing.

  “No, Daddy's not going, I'm going with her,” Brenda told them. She put the cases in the ambulance alongside Karen's stretcher, and Lloyd added his. Lloyd was going with his wife.

  Brenda asked, “Can't you visit us?”

  “No.” There were others listening, so he said, “I've got to take care of the inn.”

  Chloe and Barry began to assure him that they could handle that, it was slack season, they didn't depend on the cookpit... but Brenda and Lloyd climbed into the ambulance, Jeremy waved it away, and it moved off.

  Asham Barenblatt and his family boarded the outbound bus the next day.

  Jeremy wondered where they'd stay. Outbound was the spaceport itself, and beyond that, the caravans. Barbara Barenblatt worked at the spaceport that was somewhere up the Road. She couldn't leave during the fine weather season.

  There must be facilities for rebuilding the wagons. Maybe they'd stay there.

  Now the inn was empty of tenants. They closed all the upstairs windows pending the next caravan's arrival in fourteen days. Chloe and Barry took up the slack. Nobody expected very much of the pit chef, but he could cook for the rest.

  For years Jeremy had watched shuttles streak overhead like slow and vivid meteors, until one day Karen told him that the spaceport was just around the bluff to the east. All he had to do was paddle out on a board, and watch.

  The shuttles always came out of the west, always came down tens of klicks short of the Neck. Jeremy remembered seeing a takeoff when he was nearing the Neck; but yutzes who thought they'd seen spacecraft reentering above them on the Crab had seen only meteors.

  The shuttles came down on inverted, nearly invisible flames that flared yellow when they touched the water. Then a boat went out with a line, and the craft, bobbing like a top, was winched to the beach where tracks and a pair of big bulbous structures waited.

  Jeremy couldn't get any closer because people in boats would come out to yell at him.

  Barbara Barenblatt wouldn't talk about what she did there. Asham wouldn't talk about it. But Jeremy had mentioned his pilot stepson to the Barenblatt children, and maybe they knew something... and now they'd gone.

  Guild secrets. The spaceport stretched from the Road to the beach, Jeremy believed; but a high wall hid all of that from the Road, and boats guarded the beach. They didn't like gawkers from Wave Rider risking cremation under a shuttle flame. The far side of the spaceport was a long white line of beach, just visible some days, and then, invisibly far, the Neck. Caravan country, and they didn't want company either.

  He knelt at the edge of the pier, water lapping just below his knees, and reached out with a slice of sweet potato. Three flattish heads popped up.

  “Winston,” he said, and one of the Otterfolk took the sweet potato. Short arms, wide hands with four thick, short fingers.

  Jeremy curled and uncurled four fingers, thumb withheld. Four fish. He concealed all but the tips of a finger and wiggled those. Shrimp.

  Winston disappeared without acknowledgment.

  He couldn't ride the waves, or even ease off the dock and swim, because they'd swarm around him and bump his leg. When the Otterfolk were happy with him, they'd try to surprise or delight him. Today they'd bring whatever fish were nearest.

  He couldn't surf out to watch the shuttles land. Time he gave that up anyway. But what was there to do here but worry about Karen?

  He went back inside to a ringing phone.

  Jeremy had never gotten used to the phone. He almost never answered its flash and bell. He was only the pit chef, after all; he owned no part of Wave Rider. Barry and Chloe had bought out part of Harlow's share- Never mind. In the absence of Karen and Brenda, they expected him to answer. “Wave Rider Inn, speak to me.”

  A young man's head and shoulders, half familiar. Man's voice. “Who've I got?”

  “Pit chef Jeremy.”

  “Karen's man? Brenda talked to Eileen. Yesterday. Dreadful thing. Anything new?”

  Jeremy knew him now. Johannes Wheeler had married his eldest daughter Eileen.

  Jeremy tried to think: not easy since Karen's accident had shattered his world. “Let's see, they took her to the hospital day before yesterday, and Brenda called this morning. They're treating her as a burn patient, I guess. I don't know medical terms. Cultured skin transplant?”

  The cameo bust of Johannes stared at him. “Means she's lost huge amounts of skin!”

  Jeremy settled to a squat so that he wouldn't faint. Johannes must have noticed. “Hey, hey. They mean superskin. They're putting skin back from the cultures in Medical. She'll grow it back, Jeremy!”

  “Grow it back.”

  “Why aren't you with her?”

  “Somebody had to take care of the inn.” Jeremy remembered that these two had bought out part of Harlow's piece of Wave Rider. “Then again, the Barenblatts are gone. Now it's just us.”

  “Can you handle it?”

  “Just barely, with three of us missing.” Tell Eileen I can't come to Destiny Town.

  “Well, I can't get away, but we wondered if Eileen should come early. No? Well, you've got our number. And Brenda says her mother is calling for you, and she says they've found your records.”

  “My records?” Earth, he felt stupid. Karen was half his brain. But what could she have meant?

  “You were having trouble with your credit record, I guess, but Brenda says it's all straightened out. Look, if you can get to the hospital, I think you should, and soon. Karen's been asking for you, and Brenda sounded scared.”

  After he hung up, he stood staring through the empty space above the phone projector. They found his records?

  Did he dare call Brenda and ask? Brenda was staying with Harlow. They'd given him the number.

  Better not. But he knew how to summon a credit check! He typed in

  Jeremy W~05l0~@99.200@

  -a reasonable price for a meal for eight.

  Green.

  Somehow he was in the computer.

  He used the phone once more, to get a schedule for the next bus to Destiny Town.

  28

  Destiny T0~11

  Most species on Barth aren't adventurous. They occupy one habitat, and if it fails, they go extinct. The Otterfolk shouldn't have surprised us...

  Maybe most intelligent species can't travel.

  -Wayne Parnelli, Marine Biology

  A big square bus and the tug pulling it came the next morning. A swing of his arm flagged it down, a gesture Jeremy had seen a thousand times, and never used himself. He climbed up into a box full of indifferent strangers, stowed his backpack, chose a seat.

  As soon as Jeremy was settled, it took off at a scary fifty klicks an hour down the Road, straight into the horizon.

  When the caravan was in, Wave Rider seethed with strangers. They didn't press this close, though, because too often he was holding something sharp or something hot. At the pit, his word was law, and any strangers about him were in his charge. Here... The bus was no more than half-full. They weren't staring,
they weren't hostile, yet he couldn't meet their eyes.

  He looked out the windows. He got used to the speed and the shaking, and even dozed for a time.

  He woke afraid that he'd missed the Swan. But when the bus stopped an hour later, he recognized the bridge. It had a new handrail and new paint. It still sagged almost to the water under a big painted sign: CORSO'S CAMP WAIKIKI.

  Six older children crossed the old bridge to the bus. They chattered as the bus moved on. The passengers paid not the slightest attention to a landslide slope not much farther on, site of an old climbing accident never discovered or long forgotten.

  Terminus was bigger than Twerdahl Town. The buildings were old and blocky and oppressively massive, like nothing he'd seen short of the Windfarm. Still, the town wasn't dying. A street fair was buzzing along the Road. The bus stopped to let a .dozen people get off, and near as many got on.

  Another hour passed. Here were more houses, then a line of stores. Side streets multiplied. The bus stopped frequently, and now it was easing through foot and bicycle traffic.

  You're supposed to have seen it all before.

  Nothing he saw stood above three stories. Newer structures had a lighter feel, but as the bus moved deeper into town he saw massive blocky buildings like those in Terminus. It was as if Cavorite's crew built to withstand some terror left behind on old Earth. Coriolis-driven storms spun off from the Winds. Earthshakes.

  Guessing, he was guessing. But he was close enough to taste the answers. All the answers! Ticking in the back of his mind was the certainty that he was nearing the end of the Road. How could he have lived so close for so long?

  Stop staring!

  He'd grown up with as much variety, if not quite the same styles. When traffic slowed, he looked for the oldest buildings to encroach on the Road as they did in Spiral Town.

  The shops along this part of the Road were marked by signs; few had holograms, and those were faint in daylight. The glowing ghost of a man-high fur hat caught his attention. The hologram letters were too dim to read, but there was a painted sign too. ROMANOFF.