Destiny's Road

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....s 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 shore, 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 their 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.