Destiny's Road Part 27

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 sh.o.r.e 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 Hann had lived ten days. Tim Bednacourt, Loria's husband, had lasted half a year. Tim Bednacourt, the caravan's chef, was a hunted bandit.

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 sh.o.r.e. Those cliffs were unclimbable-he'd seen that-but he could wait, drift down along the Neck, see what the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sed, 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 sh.e.l.l, its siphon/tentacle writhing as it fumbled at the slick fis.h.i.+ng 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l in view beneath a blazing Quicksilver, long before dawn. An Earthlife duck was flapping in the sh.e.l.l 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. .

The Neck was where the peaks disappeared below the mist layer. Beyond they rose again, marching into the mainland toward a distant storm.

Storms formed and went away, didn't they? This one didn't. He was still drifting toward it after. . . he couldn't remember how many days.

The clouds towered higher than the peaks of the Crest. At night he could see lightning playing within.

How old was that storm? He fantasized that it was a permanent feature of Destiny. Jupiter's Red Spot had lasted centuries. Destiny storms didn't normally do that, but if one had. . . then Cavorite would have gone to see.

He was pa.s.sing the Neck, then, the morning he found that the pickedclean sh.e.l.l of a sub clam held a neatly placed tuna still flopping.

They couldn't have thrown such a ma.s.s, could they? They must have guided and chased it across the weed and precisely onto the sh.e.l.l.

Neat!

He was working out how to hook it when he saw sails.

He'd thought the mist would hide him. Maybe it only hid him from the Neck, while a fisher at sea could still see his mast. Maybe they hadn't told the merchant guards on the Neck. But Carder's Boat was conspicuous.

The fisher sails showed clearly now. They'd get here hours before sunset.

He raised the ladder.

From above, weed half-enclosed the surfboard. From a boat they'd never see it.

He'd left his mark in chopped-away weed, but a fisher might think it just grew this way.

He gaffed the tuna, pulled it up, took it into the cabin's shadow, and cleaned it. He threw the offal onto the weed to draw scavengers.

Lying on deck with only his eyes above the rim, he watched four sails come closer. He didn't know the men in the boats. None of them wore merchant's clothing.

Jemmy took his four meters of weed cutter to the cabin, and waited.

He could hear them moving about. He heard their voices, querulous and awed. Otterfolk watched from afar.

The fishers were gone at sunset. They hadn't been able to find a way up.

More boats came the next day. Carder's Boat had drifted by then, but they'd come straight as arrows. They threw something over the side: a rope ladder with hooks on it. When one of them started to climb up, Jemmy cut the ropes and heard him splash.

They sailed off. The next day n.o.body came.

The land came near: an unfamiliar coast half-seen through mist. The storm came nearer too.

He'd eaten tuna until it went bad and he had to throw it overboard.

Now he'd grown hungry enough to want it back. The Otterfolk had gone away. He'd caught nothing using tuna for bait. Earthlife fish must be scarce around here. But the current would carry him back toward the Neck, where Tail Town fishers didn't seem to go hungry.

But he'd be giving the fishers and the merchants another shot at him. He could hardly hear himself think for the howling of the wind and, often, the pounding of the rain. He had to shelter in the cabin most of the time. But he thought about drifting back along the Neck, conspicuous as any fifteen-meter craft from another world, and he thought of Ca vo rite flying into a storm that wouldn't go away.

He couldn't remember making a decision. It was just there.

He took all the clothes he'd found aboard, though it was only shortsleeved windbreakers and trunks and a pair of work gloves. It all went into his pack along with fis.h.i.+ng line and hooks. He showered: no telling when he'd do that again. He drank all the water his belly would hold.

He knelt on the board in a pelting rain.

The devilhair hadn't actually eaten into the wood. He peeled it away in big patches, wearing the gloves he'd found aboard. Then gloves and shoes went into his pack and he began paddling with great overhand sweeps of his arms.

He had imagined the path of Cavorite, but it felt very real to him. Had he imagined the days aboard Carder's Boat? Events in his head were isolated; he had trouble connecting them. He'd been on this board forever.

Rain lashed at him and withdrew and fell again. It could not be much past noon, could it? But it was dark as night save for the slas.h.i.+ng of the lightning. Thunder and rain filled his hearing.

Now there was another sound, growing.

He couldn't see sign of a beach ahead, but he could hear, above the thunder and the rain, waves rising and smas.h.i.+ng down, throwing spume.

Storm waves. If this storm had been here long enough to draw Cavorite-But he had no reason to think that was true, did he? The storm might be only weeks old. But if he'd guessed right, then there had to be a beach.

Waves like this, pounding rock cliffs for centuries or millennia, would have smashed rock to sand.

The waves were lifting him and dropping him. He got to his knees.

This oncoming mountain of water looked like it, and he paddled hard, then stood up and walked the board forward, sliding down, down. The nothing ahead was taking shape.

Alien-looking black cliffs.

He veered the board. The wave was trying to break.

Twerdahl Town surfers had given him a name for what he was doing now, but he couldn't remember. He rode the board parallel to sh.o.r.e with a wave breaking behind him and curling over him. He was losing ground, always closer to black rock, but that was sand, it had to be sand at the foot of those black cliffs. He veered straight toward land and ran ahead of the wall of water, as far as he could, before the wave broke over him.

He crawled onto a narrow band of black sand. He lay for a time, just breathing.

Choking on seawater, he'd still had the wit to hurl his pack at the rocks. It was beyond the waves. But the waves were playing with a shattered board, rolling it in and back out, shredding it. His four-meter weed cutter must be under the sea.

The border of sand had narrowed. When the moons lined up you could get tides a meter high. If this beach disappeared, he could drown yet.

The black cliffs loomed alien and dangerous, a type of rock he'd never seen on Destiny.

He donned his pack. It was incredibly heavy, the clothes within soaked with seawater. Presently he found something like a way up.

18.

The Windfarm Something in the ocean is absorbing or precipitating pota.s.sium. What it is doesn't matter: we couldn't possibly counteract it in time. We'll have to 100k elsewhere.

-Cordelia Gerot, Xen.o.biology Ferocious winds and stinging rain held him crouched and crawling and nearly blind. Lightning sputtered continually, like settler magic gone bad. It was all black and gray rocks tilted at all angles, and it had gone on forever.

He slid on slippery smooth surfaces. In places he found a surface like foamy rock. Traction was good, but it lacerated his knees and would have torn bare hands and feet to ribbons. His shoes and gloves were worth his life here.

It was another world, as alien as pictures of Volstaag and Hogun taken by crawler probes.

Yet there was life all around him. The rocks were cracked everywhere; and wherever there were cracks, wherever mud could acc.u.mulate, dwarf forest clung to the cracks and the flats.

Jemmy found he could cling to the spiky plants and follow the cracks.

Shadows blew past him on the wind, like kites with broken strings.

He couldn't spare attention for what must be fragments torn from Destiny plants. But he had to keep ducking to protect his eyes, so he never got a good look. Now flurries of shadows dipped and darted about him as if a malevolent whirlwind sought his death.

He ducked a shadow and it slashed his pack.

He'd barely glimpsed its shape. It was not an Earthlife bird.

He could huddle close to the black-and-bronze plants. Birds had to veer from the plants, and Jemmy got a better look at them. What seemed to be feathers certainly weren't. They looked more like a chicken than an eagle: more compact, less likely to fly. He ducked slas.h.i.+ng claws, and peered after the bird as it wheeled and came for him again. How many legs did that thing have?

Furtive creatures were looking him over from within the brush.

Maybe his scent would keep them clear. . . but it wasn't stopping the birds.

A lovely, brilliant creature posed on a rock to watch him crawl toward it.

In the sputtering blue-white light it stood out like a bonfire, scarlet and yellow with bands of electric orange. When he came close it stood upright and spread short wings, and now there were threads of blue in the pattern. It looked too big to fly. It was patterned like a b.u.t.terfly, iridescent in this light. It turned its head sideways to look at him, and snapped a beak like needle-nosed pliers.

He stopped a few meters away, wondering what defense could give it such confidence. It never gave ground. Destiny birds veered clear of it, and so did Jemmy.