Destiny's Road

When Karen had survived this horror, she would have to know.

So he'd better build a story, Jeremy thought, gripping the railing as he limped down the stairs.

He'd had a story. It had bought him twenty-seven good years.

They were clustered around Karen when he got down, trying to explain the matter to Chloe and six hotel guests. Asham Barenblatt offered to use his credit reference, but Barry was already on the phone giving his. Karen had been given pills. The way she looked frightened him.

Brenda looked at him and said, "Daddy, the ambulance will be hours getting here. I have to pack. You should pack for Mother."

"I told Medical the same as you used to tell us," Brenda said. She moved briskly about Karen's bedroom, stuffing clothing into the case with u

"It's fiction. "

"Didn't you tell Mother there was no documentation? Father dead, stepmother never got to it?"

"It's fiction. Randall Hearst, he's a merchant I barely met when we traded off at the Neck. He wouldn't know me... well, he might. Haven's real. Carnot wagon's real too. I'm from Spiral Town."

Brenda hugged a double armful of blouses to her, and stared. "You mean literally Spiral Town?"

"Literally."

"Nobody leaves Spiral Town."

"I had to. I shot a man. It was an accident " He told her the tale. Marriage in Twerdahl Town. The caravan's long, leisurely trek down the Road. The quick, terrible trip back. Adrift aboard Carder's Boat....

There were tears ru

He spoke little of the Windfarm, but she knew more. Every child of the mainland studied speckles biology and the biology of the Winds.

When he told of birds killing Shimon, she held her breath. When he came to the fight with Andrew, she was looking at her father with horror and fascination.

"You killed him?"

"Yes."

''How?"

"I threw rocks."

He wasn't proud of giving away Duncan's twice-stolen loot. He skipped that, and he skipped over what he'd done with the speckles, though he'd already told Brenda enough to put him back in the Winds. He said only, "I kept out a handful for the Road and gave the pouch to Willametta. Then I walked out. Four days later I was looking down from the ridge at the autumn caravan. It was down to six wagons pulled by tugs. I bit my tongue trying to look nonchalant. They'd have arrested me anyway, scruffy as I was, if I hadn't had the fishing pole and fish to share around.

"I bought some clothes and a haircut and a bar of soap, enough to make me look civilized. I went on up the Road to the Wave Rider and asked for a job. Your grandfather turned me down."

"I thought-"

"No, he turned me down. I knew a lot about Harold from listening to Barda. I thought I could push his buttons. But your grandmother had died and Harold was married again. Harlow met me at the door. I thought she must be Barda's sister Karen. Maybe Harold Winslow didn't like how I looked at his wife.

"So I camped on the beach a little down from Wave Rider. I set up a pit barbecue. Ate a couple of meals at Wave Rider while the money held out. I swam with Otterfolk-"

"Weren't you afraid they'd remember you?"

"Otterfolk don't travel. I'm not even sure this bunch could breed with Otterfolk around the curve of the bay." But he'd learned that much later, and he added, "Sure I was nervous. But they didn't know me and they liked playing with me. Harold's family, they never got time. It's part of the bargain, Brenda. They like us. They're interested. They want to play with us.

"I think Harold's poor overworked family nagged him into hiring someone, and I was there. Temporary, he said. He kept boards for guests. I taught Harlow how to ride a board, then some of the others tried it-"

"And you told them a story."

"Yeah, I told my tale of a caravan trader and his Roadside son, and I stuck to it. Brenda, I know what happens to anyone crossing the Neck.

They shoot him. I do not know what they do to an island shy who lives among them for twenty-seven years."

There was noise outside the windows, from the Road. They looked out. A tug pulled up towing a boxy vehicle marked with a red cross.

Jeremy hop-limped down the stairs in Brenda's wake.

They were carrying Karen out. She was quiet... she looked dead. The medics stopped so that he could see she was breathing: raggedly, but breathing.

"No, Daddy's not going, I'm going with her," Brenda told them. She put the cases in the ambulance alongside Karen's stretcher, and Lloyd added his. Lloyd was going with his wife.

Brenda asked, "Can't you visit us?"

"No." There were others listening, so he said, "I've got to take care of the i

Chloe and Barry began to assure him that they could handle that, it was slack season, they didn't depend on the cookpit....ut Brenda and Lloyd climbed into the ambulance, Jeremy waved it away, and it moved off.

Asham Barenblatt and his family boarded the outbound bus the next day.

Jeremy wondered where they'd stay. Outbound was the spaceport itself, and beyond that, the caravans. Barbara Barenblatt worked at the spaceport that was somewhere up the Road. She couldn't leave during the fine weather season.

There must be facilities for rebuilding the wagons. Maybe they'd stay there.

Now the i

For years Jeremy had watched shuttles streak overhead like slow and vivid meteors, until one day Karen told him that the spaceport was just around the bluff to the east. All he had to do was paddle out on a board, and watch.

The shuttles always came out of the west, always came down tens of klicks short of the Neck. Jeremy remembered seeing a takeoff when he was nearing the Neck; but yutzes who thought they'd seen spacecraft reentering above them on the Crab had seen only meteors.

The shuttles came down on inverted, nearly invisible flames that flared yellow when they touched the water. Then a boat went out with a line, and the craft, bobbing like a top, was winched to the beach where tracks and a pair of big bulbous structures waited.

Jeremy couldn't get any closer because people in boats would come out to yell at him.

Barbara Barenblatt wouldn't talk about what she did there. Asham wouldn't talk about it. But Jeremy had mentioned his pilot stepson to the Barenblatt children, and maybe they knew something... and now they'd gone.

Guild secrets. The spaceport stretched from the Road to the beach, Jeremy believed; but a high wall hid all of that from the Road, and boats guarded the beach. They didn't like gawkers from Wave Rider risking cremation under a shuttle flame. The far side of the spaceport was a long white line of beach, just visible some days, and then, invisibly far, the Neck. Caravan country, and they didn't want company either.

He knelt at the edge of the pier, water lapping just below his knees, and reached out with a slice of sweet potato. Three flattish heads popped up.

"Winston," he said, and one of the Otterfolk took the sweet potato. Short arms, wide hands with four thick, short fingers.

Jeremy curled and uncurled four fingers, thumb withheld. Four fish. He concealed all but the tips of a finger and wiggled those. Shrimp.

Winston disappeared without acknowledgment.

He couldn't ride the waves, or even ease off the dock and swim, because they'd swarm around him and bump his leg. When the Otterfolk were happy with him, they'd try to surprise or delight him. Today they'd bring whatever fish were nearest.