Destiny's Road

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 Neuma

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 Ha

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 trollhair, the last time he'd stopped at a stream? It was hair-fine silver stuff, soft looking 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 Tho

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. Tho

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