Destiny's Road

"Log on with your credit ident. Doctors get priority."

Up three floors. Lines of office doors along a corridor, all labeled, all closed. At the end of the hall, an open door.

LIBRARY

He found a dozen comfortable chairs and five screens. One wasn't working. Four were in use. One user looked wasted: his eyes had a glassy look. Patient. Three looked healthy and busy: doctors.

Jeremy sat down and waited placidly. He'd waited twenty-seven years.

The patient nodded off; rapped his forehead on the keyboard, jerked up to see gibberish. Staggered upright and went away.

Jeremy took his place. As his fingertips touched the keyboard, Jeremy's eyes stung with tears, abruptly, unexpectedly. The home he'd lost again and again was his at last. He was back in Spiral Town, eight years old again, and it was time for school.

All right. There were things he'd always wondered about. The teaching programs never had enough to satisfy him.

CRAB

There were hundreds of Earthlife varieties. Jeremy could pick one or two that resembled the Crab Peninsula.

OTTER

Earthlife: a mammal, streamlined, with bristly hair. It looked nothing at all like Otterfolk.

OTTERFOLK

Kismet tegumentum lutrahomines, the first intelligent species ever found off Earth.

Otterfolk were curious about humans.

Cavorite's crew loved that. They ran their Road well above Otterfolk beaches for fear that those who came after would meddle. Jeremy found references to species gone extinct because they attracted human attention. But they'd done some meddling themselves.

They'd taught the Otterfolk how to cultivate Earthlife fish and crustacea, and traded them simple tools for fish. That was a success.

They'd set up a cooperative exploring team.

Reference:

OTTERFOLK*EXPLORE*CLIFF SIDE

OTTERFOLK*EXPLORE*BEACHE S

The Otterfolk enjoy boat rides. We want to try a mixed crew. Arundez has designed a suitable boat, a catamaran with nets we can drop to block off the central well so that otterfolk can swim during a voyage...

They'd gone exploring together, along the coast and off the back side of the Crab, above and beneath the sea.

Destiny sunlight, reddened and deficient in ultraviolet, still caused skin cancers and blindness in Otterfolk.

Sea life outside Haunted Bay poisoned them. Or attacked them: there were predators worse than lungsharks.

In unfamiliar currents they followed the wrong smells and got lost.

Lower salinity hurt their skins and made them vulnerable to parasites.

To avoid bringing back a nasty skin parasite, the contact crew had euthanized ten Otterfolk and burned the boat.

EUTHANIZE

Kill.

It bothered Jeremy, but the Biology crew had been horrified. Not just the guilt, not just the deaths. An intelligent species that couldn't explore! To men and women who had conquered space- And seen space ripped from their grasp- That was obscene.

He flinched from the next entry- KAREN WINSLOW

Patient records are restricted. Access code?

-relaxed, and tried- ARGOS

Familiar stuff.

Half a thousand colonists had left Sol system in cold sleep, with twenty crew.

Cold-sleep techniques were two hundred years advanced beyond Avalon's time, but the major advances were diagnostic. Colonists damaged by cranial ice crystals would be, ah, euthanized. A crew member wakened during the voyage must remain thawed.

Far too many were damaged. Three hundred and sixty-six sleepers arrived, and seventy crew. Fifty sleepers chosen for skills learned in deep space had been revived to deal with an emergency.

Most of the fifty had lived their lives off Earth. They'd grown up using the resources of an entire solar system. They had flown Argos across light-years to a system yet untouched. Asteroid and gas-giant mining techniques were centuries old. Their faith was in Argos and their own skills.

They'd expected the colony on Destiny to fail. Destiny's ecology, after all, would have its own agenda.

On arrival, they mutinied.

ARGOS*MUTINY*TRIAL

The facts weren't in dispute. A trial hadn't struck him as silly when he was a boy. Base One's tribunal had found them guilty, and so what? By then the mutineers were elsewhere in the solar system. Their judges were marooned, owning two landers and whatever gear had been judged useless by an exoplanetary community. They were barely able to reach orbit.

ARGOS*DEBRIEF

He'd been through these too: memoirs by crew who chose to remain

with the Destiny colony. Wait, these files had more bulk than Base One's memoirs. It must include material written after Cavorite's departure. Try ARGOS*MEMOIRS*TWERDAHL

Restricted material. Access code? No birdfucking allowed.

ARGOS*SIGHTINGS

Ye gods! Destiny Town had an orbiting telescope!

The Cyclops telescope had gone up a hundred and ninety-one years ago. First sighting of Argos came ten years later; first verified sighting, eleven years. Argos's drive flame was not bright; Argos without it was invisible. But the Argos drive flame impacting an asteroid was brilliant and unmistakable... for whatever that was worth. Destiny Town could only watch. Cavorite could reach geosynchronous orbit, but not the moons, not the planets, not the stars.

Cyclops telescope watched Argos establishing a base on the dumbbell-shaped asteroid called Blake, and verified that Argos had kept faith by this much: they had seeded Quicksilver with a photocollector factory.

QUICKSILVER*SUNPOWER

In 2689, approaching two centuries after its emplacement, that first little self-reproducing factory had multiplied enough to be noticed. A bright patch was visible on the i

Power was also being directed toward Argos.

Today-2739-Quicksilver's sunward face was covered in silver. Along the Crab they never knew it had been different. But power flow toward Argos could no longer be detected.

Jeremy kept returning to the blueprints for the self-reproducing factory. Shape of a turtle, mass of a man, size of a small boy. There was a name for such things: what was it? A factory that could be directed to make more of itself.

Von Neuma

Argos's mutineers had no faith in the planetary colony. Time might have justified that to their descendants. The colony on Destiny had done little in a quarter of a mille

Yes. The last sighting of Argos in flight was in 2680, fifty-nine years ago. And the flow of power from Quicksilver had stopped.

Did Argos's crew still have descendants?

SPECKLES (FATUM VENTUSI HERBAAE)

The list of entries ran on and on. What on Earth was SPECKLES, see also Fatum mortem parnelli FATUM MORTEM PARNELLI

Destiny krill is a multicelled microscopic life-form that uses photosynthesis, but swims free.

Even on Earth there were organisms that crossed the line between plant and animal.

F. mortem parnelli lives in every part 0f the ocean thus far explored. It is clearly 0f the speckles family (Fatum ventusi herbaae), though speckles is entirely a plant.

May one speculate? Future archeologists will find the fossil record of a krill eater-one pictures a Destiny blue whale with shell and shellcap that plowed this world's seas until M. parnelli learned to secrete deadly metals. The krill poisoned them to extinction. Later a Mortem variation evolved on land.

The crucial point here is that Destiny lzrill secretes potassium. When it dies it sinks to the bottom 0f the sea. There the potassium remains. After billions 0f years 0f that, we find no potassium in Destiny sea salt, and that is ~ we will die.