Destiny's Road

The Shire women enveloped themselves in shapeless robes. It was hard to see what they were like. One woman seemed bent and twisted, and too young for it. One or two who might be in their teens and twenties moved like they were in their thirties and forties. The way they moved and stood formed groups, with merchants and yutzes and Shire men outside. They closed themselves off from strangers, men and women alike, and only the Shire elders spoke to the elder merchants.

Joker's warning, Hal's warning, seemed superfluous.

The Shire had agriculture, at any rate. There were mushrooms big as a man's hand, corn and squashes and potatoes and unidentifiable flowery green stalks. It was all set steaming between blankets of Destiny ferns over a bed of coals.

The pig got the same treatment. An hour later, the fish did too.

The Shire men were settled in conversational circles, idle but for their busy hands. They ignored the men of the caravan, and Tim respected their wish. But Hal stood above one old man for a time, then called, "Tim? Bord'n? You've got to see this."

The old man was seated against the tilted wall of a house. His skin was dark and seamed, his curly hair gone nearly white. His legs were thin and knobby. There was something distorted about him. Maybe something about the line of his jaw? He'd been working on the pale i

"This's Geordy Bruns," Hal said.

The picks left dark scratches, or else Geordy Bruns had rubbed lampblack into them for shading. He'd carved a seascape: clouds and sea and dark bluffs, the same bluffs Tim could see to the northwest. A man in the middle distance, his back turned, looking up at a tinier human shape on the bluff. Tim turned the picture in his hands. A woman?

"It's amazing," he said, "how much you've shown with so few lines." Geordy Bruns nodded happily. Tim handed it back, carefully, and asked, "What is this?"

The Shireman's voice was rough, his accent twisted. "Scrimshaw. This's a lungshark's backplate."

Tim studied it. The polished surface had a pearly iridescence. Hal said, "They're littler, but elsewise they're not so different from a chug's. You can go to a caravan's campground and pick up a hundred."

Most of the Shire men were working scrimshaw carvings. Scenes differed; skills did too. Geordy Bruns showed a finished plate, a line of bas-relief skulls, all Destiny life, all clearly derived from some common ancestor. The middle one was certainly a chug. Another man had carved a crude view of Landing Day, as two featureless cylinders descended on inverted candle flames. A man Tim's age was instructing a younger one in technique, practicing on a chipped shell. They stopped uneasily until Tim stopped watching them.

The rest of the caravan arrived near sunset.

The men of the Shire distributed di

These women might know only one way to cook, but it worked. Fish, pig, potatoes and mushrooms and greens, they all tasted wonderful. Tim became certain that they'd used a different Destiny plant to flavor each coal bed. He should have watched more closely.

And finally it came to him to wonder-"Bord'n!"

"Tim?"

"Where on Earth are the chugs?"

"Well, they can't use the bluffs, can they? We turned them loose a couple of klicks up the Road, where they can get to a beach. It's still a good run for them."

"Sharks?"

"We stayed to shoot a few. That's why some of us are late."

Quicksilver was gone, and the sun was a last sliver of light on the sea. Against the dying red sky the silhouettes of human shapes showed their origin clearly. Tim saw it, the common thread. In their stance, in their walk, the Shire folk were distorted. Too many were sick, one way and another. Like Jemmy Bloocher's father: crippled, twisted.

He'd been seeing it half the afternoon: how they set wide privacy bubbles around traders and yutzes both. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, did they think outsiders were the twisted ones? And the traders were being meticulously polite- Tim watched Rian and Senka together. Senka's walk was always an invitation, and Rian's too. Not tonight! Senka's walk was clumpy, jarring. Rian tottered alongside, imitating her, two cripples keeping their balance with each other's help, with jaws set in anger against what the universe had done to them. Rian caught him looking, and winked.

The Shire elders and the merchants emerged from conference. Master Tucker and Damon ibn-Rushd accepted fish from two Shire men, then vegetables from another pair. Arms well extended with their plates. Keeping their distance. The senior yutzes knew the drill too.

Whatever was wrong with the Shire folk....as it contagious?

That was in the teaching programs too. Humankind had evolved alongside tens of thousands of parasites. The parasites kept pace easily:. they died faster so they evolved faster. In Africa and Asia the parasites ruled. Mankind had come later to Australia and the Americas and the polar ice caps; parasites that preyed on humans, were fewer there.

The Destiny expedition had brought no parasites at all.

But disease and parasites would evolve eventually, given enough prey. Ways to fight infections, diseases, and plagues were in the teaching programs.

He couldn't ask a merchant, of course. Tim Bednacourt had never seen those teaching programs. He could hardly ask the children. Boys and girls were moving among the yutzes and merchants, and Tim couldn't shy from them: they were friendly and curious, unlike their elders. But he couldn't quite make sense of their accents.

So Tim Bednacourt began to sing.

He picked a song the yutzes had taught him, a ballad of terror and courage, "Grendels. in the Mist." No sex in it, no gender references. A simple chorus shouted at the top of one's voice. It sounded splendid in the dusk. Other voices joined him one by one: yutzes, a few merchants, now a woman's voice, now another, now a girl.

The full moon had risen above the mountains. Quicksilver would have been brighter, but the moon cast as much light. Quicksilver was a point; the moon showed a clear disk. In its light you could walk around obstacles and make out human shapes, but not faces, not even body language. Communication wasn't easy.

But they could sing.

Now the Shire women were singing, and the men listened.

City Hall was crowded, and blazing daylight outlined the door. With the wagons six klicks uphill, the entire caravan had stayed for the night. The building was one huge room with alcoves at the corners. The sleepers all tended to gather at the center.

Tim wriggled his way out of a knot of women and men and made his way out. Children cheered as he emerged into the morning, and he waved back. And froze.

He was in the crater left by Cavorite.

It hadn't showed yesterday evening. It showed vividly in daylight.

City Hall had been built on a foundation of melted and recooled lava, a concave dish.

Cavorite must have come straight down.

Cavorite's crew had examined this site and found it good.

But why not bring the Road right down to the Shire?

He was on their track. One day he'd know.

The caravan cruised past the Shire the next morning. Of the Shire's alleged hundred people, nearly forty adults and fifteen children had climbed six klicks uphill to walk alongside the wagons, to haggle or just to watch.

Tim moved up and down the line, passing out bread. He'd wondered if Doheny wagon would be empty, but Bryne and Lucia Doheny were selling toothbrushes, dental floss, bandage cloth, and crudely blown bottles of clear fluid.