Destiny's Road

"If he gets sick they make someone else trusty. If someone finds you now, you're just someone we pulled out of the storm. Naked. Can you walk?"

He felt fifty feet high and made of glass, but Jemmy walked down as far as the box (which was bigger than Barda, and chugging again) and back. He set his hand unobtrusively on a bedpost to hold himself up, and asked, "Pulled naked out of the storm, right. Where are my clothes supposed to have gone?"

"What d'you think?"

"Torn off by the wind?" Better-"Shredded by the plants."

"Good."

"What really happened to them?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I saw a big bird the same color as your clothes-"

"Firebird," she said.

"The biology lessons say that when something is colored like that, to stand out, it's a signal. Could be a horny bird making himself easy to find, or a flower calling a bee. Could be it's poison and it's warning all the bird eaters away. Stop, Jam inedible! You wear the firebird's colors so the Destiny predators won't bother you."

She nodded. "Now, 'Andrew,' I want to know all about you. Come on down to the kitchen." She took his elbow and they walked.

Everything that wasn't beds or washrooms was down at the airlock end. There was considerable space here: the huge stove, a line of hanging cookware, locked bins, the dining table and benches, an enormous heap of black twisted logs drying for firewood, and the chugging box.

The box was bigger than a coffin. It was settler magic, but it bore signs of later crude repairs. Below a glass hatch was a churning storm of brilliant colors. It was a dryer for wet clothes.

Barda gestured, and he sat at the table. Shimon set out a heap of vegetables from a bin. Barda sat across from Jemmy and began to chop and peel.

"I can help," Jemmy said. "I was a caravan chef."

"You just watch. I don't want you fainting."

She listened while she worked. Her expression didn't give away much. He could watch her muscles tense and relax, and watch the knife move. She was very fast, ru

He couldn't watch Shimon, who busied himself tending the stove, feeding the pregnant woman, and watching Jemmy suspiciously.

When Jemmy told of killing Fednick, the knife didn't pause.

She knew of the caravans, but she listened sharply to what he had to say of towns along the Road, and cooking. At one point she said, "What you know about pit cooking isn't worth a fart in the wind, in the Winds." And she chuckled for a long time.

The pile of vegetables grew, and he asked, "Barda, are we vegetarians?"

"They'll bring a bird in tonight if they can. Everything else gets carted in. They don't give us red meat. I think it spoils too quick. When we take in enough kilos of seeds, sometimes they give us a radiated sausage. Keep talking."

The battle with bandits excited her. When he spoke of the Otterfolk, she was rapt, her knife hand slow and forgotten. She loved the theft of the speckles can. She looked queasy when he described sunburn.

She smiled (knife speed increased) when he spoke of swimsuits aboard Carder's Boat. "The boat must have been rifled for anything anyone could use on land. Even cookware. And somebody left a burner going. The towels had all rotted, but the older stuff must be settler magic."

"We wondered. Six baggy shorts and seven old windbreakers and no hat, no jacket. You were wearing three windbreakers on over each other!"

He drifted with the current aboard Carder's Boat, fed by Otterfolk. Barda looked wistful. He took his surfboard into the Winds and her knife action turned angry. "You must be some kind of crazy and some kind of lucky. We lose gatherers in the Winds every year."

"When I found the Road I knew I'd be all right."

"Not the plants? You didn't know the plants? Black core, orange branches, green tips?"

"Never saw them before."

"Yeah, why would you?" Barda stood and stretched elaborately. "They're speckles. We grow speckles."

"And you're prisoned here."

She didn't answer.

"Barda, you're faster than lightning with that knife. Can you cook as well as you carve?"

She shrugged. A silence grew, and then she said, "Daddy owns the Swan. It's the best i

"There's a Destiny Town?"

Shimon laughed incredulously. Barda started to laugh, then changed her mind. "If you don't know Destiny Town, you're a big bright target, 'Andrew.' Just don't ever mention Destiny Town, okay? I can't tell you enough to fake it."

"Just tell me if the Road ends there."

"Yes, of course-"

"Have you seen Cavorite?"

His intensity startled her; then she laughed. Jemmy said, "I've followed Cavorite all this way from Spiral Town. Have you seen it?"

"Not up close. They take children through for tours, but Daddy-" She didn't say anything while she shaved a potato naked. Then, "Me and my four brothers, we were free labor. Daddy never took us anywhere unless it was for the Swan, or for cooking, or for customers. I did every part of making an i

Cavorite once because we went to Romanoff's. Cavorite is right down the Road from Romanoff's. The top is round and there's a glitter from the windows. If you need to know more-"

Jemmy waved it off. "I've been through Columbia. That's the other lander in Spiral Town. Unless Cavorite was damaged or painted... ?" She didn't know. "Better not talk about that either. So tell me about Romanoff's?"

"That is the best restaurant in Destiny Town. When Daddy was a boy the Swan was outside town, just beside... I won't tell you where the Swan is."

Jemmy smiled. "What if I get hungry?"

"I don't want this... scum thinking they can hide out at the Swan. Anyway, Daddy thought he was going to move the Swan. The town was growing up around us, and we had to buy more and more of our food-"

"You used to hunt it?"

She sighed in exasperation. He said, "Tell it your way."

"Tell what? You can't pass for a citizen just because you somehow crossed the Neck! I should be telling you how to talk like a trusty."

"I'm tired, Barda."

"Get yourself a nap. Tomorrow you work."

The melee around the stormbock woke him. He walked down to watch Barda and Shimon cook di

Barda served herself, then Shimon, then Jemmy. They sat while Halfbeard and the gatherers, fresh out of hot showers, converged.

"I never saw anything like that," Jemmy said. "Is that how they cook at the Swan?"

"It's how we cook vegetables. We served fish and waterfowl grilled and baked. I know other ways to cook, but I couldn't feed twenty people that way."

"You can feed two hundred with a fire pit."

"Not when it rains one day out of four, and that's how it is around Destiny Town. The settlers must have liked things wet. The spaceport's on a plateau, top of Mount Canaveral, and that's dry. Old Igor didn't want the noise-my granddaddy's granddaddy-so he built down below Swan Lake."

"How does the Road go? Spaceport, then Destiny Town, then here?"

Shimon's sullen silence cracked. He said, "Trusty,. may I?" And he spilled some flour across the wooden table and began to draw in the flour. "The Road runs straight from the Neck along the coast to the Winds-"

"How high?"

"High?"

"Along most of the Crab, the Road acts like it's afraid of water."

"Oh. Yeah. High enough that nobody bothers the Otterfolk, except here." Shimon's fingertip grazed the line of ocean and veered away. "Then you have to go right past unless you get permission from the Overview Bureau. Then the Road branches here, about halfway, and the other branch runs inland. Cavorite stopped for a few years where this little town is now, Terminus, and that's where I was born. We grow up wanting to leave," he said. "Destiny Town is where it all happens, but they don't want you in Destiny unless you already got work there, and how can you do that? The damn Admiralty-"