Destiny's Road

All that vastness of stars staring down at us, and it's just us and the Otterfolk? But Argos might have heard more from Earth by now.

- Control experiment?

Base One, now Spiral Town, was to retain technology that was too heavy or fragile to transport. Visiting caravans would purchase the use of what they hadn't already stolen: paint and clocks and Begley cloth and, in later years, handcrafted work. .

A generation later they teased the paintmaker system into duplicating itself. On their next circuit they bought the duplicate from puzzled Spirals.

They didn't bother with the clock factory, but they tried it again with the Begley cloth weavers.

Jeremy read the results in bitter amusement. The little mechanical spiders in the walls and roof of the Apollo Caverns could be snatched by handfuls. Spirals never interfered. But they wouldn't dig anywhere else! Of course it was a safety measure, a part of their program. One wouldn't want mechanical vermin eating caverns into every hill and mountain on Destiny. But where was the damn code? Stored in the teaching tapes? Or lost with Argos?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY

A handful of listings.

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY* Shire restricted material. Access code?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Twerdahl T0~~ restricted material. Access code?

CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Tail Town restricted material. Access code?

Somebody somewhere was keeping genealogical records, and keeping them hidden.

He'd seen an ominous degree of continuity in the families that held the wagons. He remembered three generations in ibn-Rushd wagon. Outsiders not welcome? How could he learn?

AVALON

restricted material. Access code?

SPACE*SHUTTLE

Designs, vidtapes, test results, wow!

Six crashes in fifty-one years. No deaths mentioned. A vivid description of the tenth flight by the first humans to orbit. Say what? He'd read it and failed to believe it. He had to go back for it- The shuttle didn't have a pilot on board.

It was flown by onboard programs and a pilot on the ground. A box of varied design but rigidly exact size fit into the shuttle's rectangular cargo space. One such box was a cabin for two passengers and an array of tools.

Passengers had flown twice. That first pair of women went up to repair a satellite. The second pair... something political.

Jeremy felt massive disappointment. Had Mustafa ever said that he'd gone into space personally? He couldn't remember. But he'd daydreamed, from time to time, of persuading Mustafa to help him stow away aboard a shuttle. The space wasn't even there.

Harlow's words didn't make sense together. Maybe he'd remembered wrong. Try it anyway:

HYDRAULIC*EMPIRE

A political entity that controls its citizens has controlling the flow of water.

'Tuck my bird.'

"What?"

"Sorry."

It was no trivial thing. Thousands of years of Eastern despotisms had been of that nature. Water was life. Dig a canal system, guard the canals. If a town opposes the government, block the canals, dam or pollute the river, confiscate the wheat or rice.

Two towns in a drought? Strip one of food, send it all to the second. Gain the second town's support; make deadly enemies of the first, but it won't matter, they will die.

Hydraulic empires never died. No matter how far they slid into decadence, they lived on until destroyed by barbarians beyond the border.

Hydraulic empires grew with the rising level of communications and transport. On Earth a moment came at which one government could rule the world, forever. Afterward the United Nations controlled not just water, but communications via comsats, electric power from sunpower satellites, and every resource that could be labeled "limited." The United Nations in its last days had launched the Avalon expedition- Last days?

He skimmed, picking it up little by little.

Ah. They'd grown their own barbarians. They'd been brought down by a coalition of populations throughout the solar system, each as great or greater than the population of Destiny. There followed two hundred years of stagnation before one civilization stretched from Sol to the far comets, one empire with a stranglehold on... what?

Reading between the lines- Everything. The Web controlled everything that flowed. Water, hydrogen, information, diet supplements, placement of orbiting habitats, and kinetic energy. Especially kinetic energy. What moved through interplanetary space averaged twenty klicks per second. Fusion explosions were nothing compared to that. Every habitat in motion within Sol system was assigned its orbit. Keep to it or be treated as a meteor.

In a spasm of creativity the Web had launched Argos and a third expedition- restricted material. Access code?

The thrust of the lecture was that Sol system had become one vast resource-control empire, sluggish, but able to make long plans. There weren't any barbarians because there was no outside. A million years from now it would still he in place.

Outsiders and their barbaric ideas would not be welcome in Sol system.

There was no home to return to.

'Jeremy."

He looked up. "Rita! Karen's itching like crazy. Did you take her off Novabliss?'

"I cut the dose as per your suggestion."

'Right, and it's great to hear her making plans again, but now she's itching-"

"I'll go see her. Come along.'

Rita's tendency was to outrun him, and what the hell, he knew the way. But she glanced back and then waited. "How's the leg?"

"I did eight blocks last night."

"I guess we can take the cast off after we see Karen."

"I've been reading about hydraulic empires."

Silence: she was fishing through her head. "Sol system? That old tenthyear lecture? It's a reason why we can't go back, but that's just mind games, Jeremy. Anyone can think of reasons why we shouldn't do what we can't do anyway."

"Suppose a government didn't control water. Just speckles."

A disgusted look; then Rita Nogales walked away from him. She held the lift. They descended in silence. She walked away from him again, outside, in, another lift, and he reached Karen's room a good ten minutes behind her.

It was too active. Something was wrong. Four doctors crowded the room, and one left at a half-run. Jeremy backed against the corridor wall and, resting on his crutches, waited.

Rita Nogales noticed him and came out. "Jeremy, did Karen have trouble controlling her weight?"

"No."

"Damn."

"After all, we live at Wave Rider. She just eats a lot of Destiny sea life if she needs to lose a few kilos. So do I."

"Was she doing that a week ago?"

"I don't know.''

"All right. Right now Karen's getting all the attention she can stand, right? The whole damn hospital's worrying about her. They don't need a twitchy husband on crutches getting in their way," she said, and walked away fast. Over her shoulder she added, "Go eat. Go home. Go read, but don't block any doctors."

Now there were two doctors in there with Karen. One saw Jeremy still there, and came out. His label said Malcolm Evans. He was having trouble keeping his smile on.

"Don't let all this... activity worry you," he said. "Karen is rejecting superskin, that's all, but it's not supposed to happen. Maybe this batch threw off a sport. Clinics keep batches of superskin all over Destiny Town and on up the Road. Nogales is off to get a different batch for, uh, Karen, and Waither is phoning patients who got superskin from Batch One, so you can s-" Evans caught a gesture from the other doctor and turned away without finishing the sentence.

CONTROL*EXPERIMENT

Jeremy couldn't concentrate. He had to read it twice, though the idea wasn't complicated.