Destiny's Road

19 Prison Cuisine

Morning. The big woman and her paramour stayed behind again. The man gave Jemmy a fist-sized chunk of bread, then water. They both sat on Jemmy's bed and watched him eat.

“Get up,” she said.

Jemmy rolled out of bed, landed on his hands and knees. Mostly he'd stopped hurting, but he was weak. She watched him pull himself to his feet. He asked, “Where's the toilet?”

“Shimon, go with him.”

There were doors at this end of the room, marked with silhouettes of a man and a woman. Yesterday afternoon, these two had disappeared into the women's room for an hour or two.

The men's room was bigger than he'd guessed, with urinals, toilets, basins, towel racks, showers, and a tub. Partitions around showers, tub, and toilets had been ripped out and the marks painted over, badly. The walls were smooth stone like the rest of the barracks.

He turned a spigot. Burning hot water roared into the tub. Shimon was amused. He helped Jemmy climb in. He even got a towel for him; and then he watched as Jemmy got himself clean.

“How'd you get that scar on your hand?” he asked.

Jemmy tried to explain. His voice was rusty. He'd almost forgotten how to form words. He'd burned himself holding a gun wrong when he fired at an advancing line of sharks, and now there was a ridge of pink between thumb and wrist... and Shimon nodded and gave every sign of being fascinated.

When Jemmy tottered back to bed Shimon was supporting him with a hand on his elbow, under the woman's critical eye. Lying down was bliss.

The woman said, “I'm Barda. You do what I say. You do what anyone says if he wears the orange.”

“I call you Barda?”

“You call me Barda. I call you Andrew. Gatherers like Shimon, here, call me Trusty unless we're alone. They call you Trusty. You use their given names. It's good if you can learn their family names too. Barda Winslow,” she thumped her chest. “Shimon Cartaya,” she thumped Shimon's. “Willametta Haines. Amnon Kaczinski, the big guy. Duncan Nicholls, you call him Duncan Nick. Denis Bouvoire if you need some machine unjammed. There's a Dennis Levoy too, don't get them mixed up. Rita and Dolores Nogales, the twins. You noticed them.”

“The huge pale guy, yes. Amnon? Twins, no.”

“Most men notice Rita and Dolores.”

“There's a dark guy who looks young and old... crippled, maybe, but quick-”

“Rafik Doe. Came here at fourteen, near ten years ago. He won't give his real last name to anyone. Records say he killed a whole trader family with a yutz gun. You notice anyone else?”

“No.”

“What've you guessed?”

“The other trusty, he's Andrew Dowd.” Barda slurred her speech like Half-beard, and he tried to imitate that. It might buy his life. Prison workers who asked a stranger to lie would want to be sure he could!

“You wear the orange too. You're both bosses, trustees. I'm supposed to be him. Is he supposed to be sick?”

“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, running on automatic, and her emotions went straight to her knife hand.

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 pnisoned 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 inn and restaurant in Destiny Town, he says.”

“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 inn work before I was twelve. I saw the top of

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 dinner. It went fast. They set up a pot to boil rice, then a wok big enough to bathe in. He wouldn't be able to lift that for a while! Barda shook and tilted it to stir-fry the vegetables. Fans sucked the smoke and smells up into the ceiling: settler magic, whereas the stove was a wood-fired iron box.

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-”

“Shimon, stick to the point.”

“Yesss, Trusty. Trusty, there's a little branch off the Road, here. It spirals around this bluff to the top. They flew Cavorite to orbit from Terminus a lot of times, then from Mount Canaveral just once. They gave it up thirty years ago. They only started flying again... Trusty?”

“Fifteen years ago. Those new ships have to land on the ocean. The port had to be moved, and that's what did it for Daddy.” Barda reached past him. “The Swan is here, foot of Mount Canaveral. And now they launch the ships from somewhere this way. Clean it up now, Shimon.”

“Shimon, wait,” Jemmy said. “Barda, where were you thinking of moving to?”

“Moving? Oh, Daddy. Daddy wanted to build another inn here.” Her finger left an imprint on the other side of the Road's first branching, where the Road dipped to nearly touch the sea. “A day short of the Neck. We'd get all the caravan custom, and people who wanted to study the Otterfolk could stay there too. It wasn't just a whim. Daddy sent us to build the damn thing, Barry and Bill and me.”

Shimon said, “There now. Is that everything you need to know?”

“Let's hope,” Jemmy said, and Shimon began to clean the flour off the table:

Barda said, “It better be, Shimon. Tomorrow you keep him straight. Right at his elbow every second. If he starts to make a mistake, you cover for him. I can't. I've got to be watching the whole troop.”

“Excuse me,” Jemmy said, and he managed to reach his bed without falling over.

When the lights came on, Jemmy crawled out of bed with the rest. They eased out of his way so he could get to the bread before it was gone. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him.

Half-beard watched him. He said, “Take another day.”

Barda said, “I wanted Shimon watching him.”

“Oh, we can fix that. But look at him, if he tries to hold the pose... You taught him the pose?”

“No.”

“I'll do it.''

Barda and Shimon went out with the rest. Half-beard waited until they were gone. Willametta was tending Miledy, the pregnant woman, but listening too.

“The pose,” Jemmy reminded him.

“It looks like this.” Half-beard stood with his arms held high to the sides. “Do it.”

Jemmy stood, feet apart, and raised his arms. Any speckles-shy could have done it.

“Hold it till I tell you to quit. Barda says you're smart.”

“Good.”

“You need to fool the probes into thinking you're me. Can you do that?”

“Not yet. Tell me about proles.”

Half-beard studied him.

Jemmy said, “We're the, Barda said gatherers? You're trusties? Some-one is trusting you. Your bosses. That would be the probes?”

“Proles.”

“Proles. Keep talking, I need to hear you.”

“Ten men and women. They rotate. We don't know their names. We don't ever have to.”

“When you talk to them-“

“You say Yes man. If it's a woman, Yes mam. They sound alike, so if you're outside it doesn't matter if you can't tell. You know them 'cause-“

“They've got more orange. They wear the orange.”

“Right.”

His arms were beginning to ache.

“Where do they live?”

“Down the Road through the cleft, not far. If you go there you don't come back. Andrew, Barda says you've fired yutz guns? What the probes have is worse. Don't ever go up against the probes. And when you talk to them you say the Parole Board. Like their main job is to let us go.”

Jemmy bobbed his chin. His arms and shoulders were hurting now. He held his breathing deep, and reached.

“I'm going out tomorrow to farm in the rain,” he said. “I'm a trusty. Probes come to check on us? But they can't see anything about me but a big jacket with a hood and an orange stripe, unless there's something funny about your legs-“

Half-beard laughed, a full-throated bellow.

Jemmy said, “Right. But you have to tell me what they think you'll be doing-“

“Sit down. Lie down.”

Jemmy lowered his arms, then sat. “I don't know how to get speckles off a plant. Do I have a sack?”

“Backpack. You get your gear after you leave the stormbock. Gatherers get a pack and a scoop glove, this time of year. You get a bird gun. They strip the speckles with the scoop gloves. Come spring they'd be planting. Weeding takes a weed cutter. Probes don't give gatherers weed cutters, so you have to cut the weeds. But you still get the bird gun, and a pack too, but there's rescue gear in yours. You get your gun in the toobhouse and hang it back when you come home, and the probes replace the ammo while you're gone. They take the packs.

“Now, as far as the Parole Board is concerned, nothing, nothing stops us from gathering speckles, and that's how they pick trusties, so you better not show them anything else. Otherwise you don't have to know anything except to count gatherers and see they do the work.”

“Count?”

Half-beard grinned. He said, “You met Shimon. He'll help you. You watch Shimon, don't make it too obvious, and he'll point the way if you get confused-”

“And what will you be doing while Andrew Dowd is leading a work party?”

“Leading a shift.” Half-beard grinned. “And that's my problem.”

Twenty-two prisoners, Jemmy thought. The trusties are prisoners too. Firebird shorts and ponchos would mark them anywhere outside the Winds. Go out without them and you're naked in a storm, and birds tear you apart.

But now the storm gives up a stranger. The Parole Board doesn't know about a twenty-third gatherer carrying shorts and windbreakers that aren't red and yellow with an orange stripe.

Now the probes can count twenty-two while the other Andrew Dowd is off... where? Gathering whatever might be needed when six prisoners disappear wearing clothes they shouldn't own.

Barda Winslow and Andrew Dowd and four others. Not Jemmy Bloocher, unless he can talk his way in.

Do the rest know?

Half-beard was watching his face. “Do you think you can be me?”

“There's no telling what I might have to know. I got Barda talking yesterday. Tell me how you got here.”

Half-beard scowled and turned away.

Jemmy said, “The Parole Board knows how you got here, Andrew. When they ask me, I'd better know.”

Half-beard spoke without turning. “Murder twice. They don't want to know any more. If they do, you killed them when they tried to rob you, okay? The damn tribunal didn't believe you.”

“Transport?”

“Trans-? They walk us in. Felony tape around our wrists, crossed like this in front of us. There's a wagon sealed bike a safe, with gun slits, and tugs to pull it. We stick close to that. We're already wearing firebird colors. If we run, serve us right. Andrew, I got to start dinner sometime. Come along.”

“I was a caravan chef.”

“Barda said.”

He noticed more today. Food was stored in bins near the stove: grains, fresh and dried fruit, potatoes and carrots and other vegetables, a big bottle of cooking oil, some spices. Half-beard opened the bins with a key. Cookware was in there too, including heavy pans and cooking knives. The ovens and burners seemed to run continually, keeping the place warm.

Cooking was wonderfully relaxing. Jemmy helped where he could, peeling and cutting vegetables and feeding the fire, until he got tired. Then he watched. Wibbametta and Half-beard set up the wok.

Indoor cooking was most unlike the fire-pit cooking he'd learned on the Road. Suddenly, powerfully and painfully, Jemmy missed the kitchen in Bboocher Farm.

The gatherers brought a dead bird in with them and gave it to Halfbeard, who passed it to Jemmy and Willametta. Jemmy was startled to find himself holding two raptor-clawed legs while Willametta took the other pair. Big wings drooped between. Eight kilos of Destiny bird!

Half-beard shouted, “We don't stare at it, Andrew, we cut it up and cook it!” Willametta smiled and showed him how to slice under the feathers. The bird didn't seem to have a distinct skin. The feathers were narrow fractal spikes based in muscle tissue. The blood was rich, dark red. This was no relative of the shelled varieties Jemmy had encountered along the Crab.

“I was expecting Earthlife,” Jemmy said. He was surprised, now he thought about it, to find himself holding a l~cnife. Twerdahi Town wouldn't trust a stranger so. “Where are the speckles?”

“You're gonna love this, Andrew. Barda showed me how to stir-fry Destiny bird with potatoes and onions. Speckles? We don't need speckles. The birds and turtles around here concentrate the elements in the meat.”

“But is it all-“

“Sure. The wagons bring in Earthlife food, and we kill windbirds for the meat.” He waved the cooking oil. “This is the only fat we get, and they don't give us enough.

“We were real glad to see you, Andrew. Just anyone wouldn't pass for one of us. It had to be someone who's been starved.” Half-beard smiled. “I'd kill a probe for a rasher of bacon.”

Willametta's lips twitched: a token of a smile. “Fletch. Say fletch of bacon. People will think you're easy.”

The gatherers were piling their ponchos into the dryer, taking firebirdcolored towels and trooping back to the showers.

Before the lights went out, Dennis Levoy cut his hair to match Halfbeard's.