Destiny's Road

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 filleted 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....hought 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 hooks 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 Ha

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.

On another morning he came on deck into a flurry of Earthlife flatfish. He ducked two and another smacked him on the cheek. There must have been a whole school flopping on deck. He stood at the edge of the deck and raised his arms and shouted, "Stop!"

They stopped. He brushed flopping fish overboard, picking those who might live to swim away. He kept a dozen. Qtterfolk watched for half a day while he filleted and cooked the catch. He didn't have to fish for a while.

Another day, his line pulled a sub clam up to the surface. There were beaked faces all over the water, watching.

The thing was heavier than he was, too heavy to lift into the boat.

Did Otterfolk play practical jokes, or were they testing an alien intelligence? How was he to free his hook?

He pulled the sub clam onto the remaining patch of weed. It rested on its shell, its siphon/tentacle writhing as it fumbled at the slick fishing line, trying to tear it.

If he climbed down there, the weed would drown him.

Could he balance on the board while he worked? Weed surrounded the surfboard, but he could pull the clam into reach of it. But if he did find some way to get the sub clam up to the boat...

Otterfolk knew that humans ate sub clam meat. They might not know that it wouldn't keep him alive.

He used his four-meter weed cutter to chop at the meat around the hook until some of it came free. He pulled up twenty pounds of sub clam. Then he compromised. He sliced two pounds of it free and threw the rest back into the weed alongside the shell, where scavengers swarmed around it.

The Otterfolk got the idea, or else they didn't like waste. He was never offered another sub clam.

He could remember the sub clam shell in view beneath a blazing Quicksilver, long before dawn. An Earthlife duck was flapping in the shell with both its wings broken.

It took all of his will to cook it before he ate it.

Afterward he wondered if there was a way to teach mercy to Otterfolk using gestures alone. .