Destiny's Road

17 Carder s Boat

He thought he was going to die.

He thought he didn't care.

There was nothing to drink. There was nothing chasing him anymore. There was nothing to do but paddle.

A thousand times lie turned his eyes toward shore. A wave would carry him in. He could live between Twerdahl Town and Spiral Town live like a hunted animal, until his mind turned animal too. When he could make his arms move, he paddled. When he rested, the shore still drifted past him by infinitesimal degrees. His shoulders were one long moan of pain. The sun burned into his neck and his arms and the backs of his calves.

He lay in salt water. The board floated two centimeters below the surface. If he let his head rest on the wood, he could drown. The offbalance weight of his pack drove him crazy, but never quite crazy enough to drop it overboard.

When he remembered this part of his life, he never knew how long anything took.

He was drifting in a stupor with his chin propped on his arms on the second night, or the third. He was flying Cavorite in his mind...

The long, slow drift from the landing site down to the Neck and beyond. Day and night shifts? Stop to rest, or to shed the heat from riding a fusion flame, or to look at anything interesting. Side jaunt to Haunted

Bay, because cameras in the sky found seabed geometries suggesting an undersea city...

Trying to see why they ran the Road so high.

Twerdahl Town filled the whole space between the Road and the beach. Cavorite had flown close to shore when it made the Road there. As it moved down the coast, the Road ran higher. Near the Neck it ran as high as it could get, right along the crest... as if Twerdahl and his crew had become afraid of the sea.

He toyed with an odd notion. When had Cavorite learned of the Otterfolk?

Teaching programs named thousands of extinct species of life on Earth. All species die or change over millions of years. A meteoroid impact had rendered all the dinosaurs extinct, barring those that sired the birds... but many species died because Man was good at changing his environment.

There was a shadow among shadows ahead of him...

Had Cavorite laid the Road to protect the Otterfolk?

He remembered, though, that the Hub in Spiral Town was far, far inland. Cavorite was hovering over burnt-out alien wilderness when it drew the lines of Spiral Town. The Twerdahls must have run their loops of Road to within a klick of shore, stayed near the water for forty klicks farther, then eased upslope toward the peaks again..

Avoiding the sea.

The landers had charred the land and boiled the lakes, but a flame couldn't reach below the sea. Future generations would follow the Road, spiraling outward until they gradually approached whatever came out of the sea. They'd have time to prepare.

Cavorite's crew feared the alien.

Ahead of him, then passing on the left. He moaned and tried to work his arms.

He could make them move, but he couldn't paddle.

He slid far back, half off the board, and kicked. Against the current, toward shore, gripping with dead arms and kicking with all his remaining strength, his breath a stuttering moan. A raft of Destiny devilhair with an angular shadow in the middle was trying to creep past him. He gained a centimeter at a time.

Then the current was pushing his board not past the vastness of black weed but into it, and he could rest.

Hours later the cramping in his arms faded. He found he could grip the board with his knees and pull handfuls of weed toward him, sliding the board across the weed, until floating devilhair lifted his board above the water. Now he could let his head rest on waxed wood for the first time in two days.

By morning light it looked tremendous. It loomed far above him, shaped like two slender fisher boats with a deck across iheir tops.

Carder's Boat, sure enough.

Sunlight's touch turned the heat in his neck and arms and calves into a flame. He pulled himself and the board across the black weed into the shadow of the boat. That pain eased, but what was hurting his hands?

Destiny devilhair had covered his palms with myriads of black needles barely big enough to see as specks.

Carder's Boat loomed vast. He could not imagine such a thing stowed in a starship's cargo hold. Settler magic was compact, never bigger than it had to be.

He used his shirt to shield his hands. He dragged his board across the devilhair, around the stern and into sunlight.

Children had used this as a raft before the weed grew too thick. They must have left a ladder somewhere! But the weed hid everything. On this sunlit, seaward side the weed had grown right up the side: a black shroud marked with yellow-green, and a boat half-visible beneath.

He climbed the weed with bare hands and feet.

It didn't quite reach the rim. It kept ripping loose. Somehow he got a hand on the rim and pulled himself over. The impact of his fall was so strange... but what mattered was the cabin, and the steps down.

The weird surface gave back no impact. He crawled like a ghost, down into the cabin, into shadow.

In shadow the burning went away and he could think about his thirst.

There was a sink.

Water ran. He twisted his head under the spigot and drank. He remembered to be afraid of it, old water in an old container, but it tasted like spring water: like life itself. He drank until the weight of his belly pulled him to the weird floor. He didn't want to die.

On a table he found what must have been lunch for six or eight, then a garden of Earthlife yeasts and bacteria, then this dead powdery residue.

There was nothing to eat aboard Carder's Boat.

Carder's Boat was not of this world. The floor and walls of the cabin ate his footfalls and gave back no sound and no recoil. Carder's Boat was nearly massless, an airy foam under a taut skin.

They hadn't stowed Carder's Boat aboard an interstellar spacecraft. They'd stowed a tank of something that foamed up and hardened, and maybe a boat-shaped membrane to foam it into, and a few compact settler-magic machines, like this sink that seemed able to make drinking water, and the lighted interior walls. The hull's silver-gray surface was Begley cloth sheeting from Mount Apollo, pressed into place after the boat was inflated.

His hunger had subsided to a dull ache. His fingers and toes were black with tiny needles; he could barely move them for the pain. Climbing the weed had cost him.

There was a bath. Water still ran. When the salt was off him some of the itching went away. He left his clothes soaking and moved naked about the cabin.

A small patch on a counter almost burned him. It glowed dull red with heat. He found a dial to turn it off.

A teapot and a frying pan were both chained to the wall above the counter. There were hooks for more cookware, but the cookware was gone.

He found boxes and chests of Spiral Town workmanship, here and on deck. One held a big stack of towels that shredded in his hands. One held fishing gear, sturdier lines and sturdier poles than the caravan used. He looked over the side and saw only black devilhair. How could he fish through that?

And one chest held clothing: floppy knee-length swimsuits and elbowlength windbreakers in a strange old style, tinted in shiny pastels. These had held up very well. Jemmy tried to pull one apart, hoping he'd fail; and the seams held, if there were seams. He couldn't find them.

Carder's Boat was a small frog on a wide lily pad.

Events came isolated. Afterward he was never able to order them properly.

He was still wandering naked about the boat when he found the fishing gear. He'd kept his weed cutter. He put that together with a jointed fishing pole four meters long and some translucent line, and had a four-meter weed cutter. He began to chop devilhair.

It hurt his healing hands. Flying mites lived in the weed, and the blade set black clouds rising.

Something leaped. He stabbed, and had a Destiny amtrak eel on the point. A moment later it wriggled free. When? The gap in the weed wasn't very big then.

The gap was bigger before anything leapt again, and he jabbed and flung-heavy!-and a little lungshark flopped on dry weed. He worked the blade under the shell and was able to flip it into the boat.

He killed it and fihleted it and cooked it with speckles. It fed and calmed the ravenous animal in his belly. He lay on deck to watch the fires of sunset and, briefly, Quicksilver.

It must have been next morning that he baited a hook with the shark's remains... thought it over, and threw the offal overboard. Destiny life would not keep a man alive. He didn't want to catch more.

He went back to cutting weed. He perfected the jab-and-flip. He got another amtrak eel that way. He was ready when a flounder appeared- Earthlife!-and he got it aboard. He baited three l~ooks with what was left after he'd eaten. There were sockets in the deck to brace a fishing pole. He lowered the lines into the great open patch he'd cut in the weed around Carder's Boat.

Earthlife fish lived deep down. He ate himself stupid, and remembered to add speckles.

The skin on his neck and legs peeled off in flakes.

Later-it had to be later-he was wearing swim trunks and a windbreaker and a floatation vest fished from a locker. He slept through noon and worked at night. Quicksilver had become a white glare.

He kept chopping. Every day there was less weed around the boat. It was trying to grow back, but he stayed ahead of it. There was a ladder after all, under the thickest part of the weed. He cleared it.

A few people watched from shore, day after day. Then a great crowd came down from Warkan's Tavern, when Quicksilver was almost behind the sun, brilliant at sunset. They never waved, they just watched, day after day.

One day they were sparse; another day, gone.

He found the anchor cable by chopping devilhair from around it. He tracked it up from the water to a housing in the boat's nose.

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 shore 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 shore. Those cliffs were unclimbable-he'd seen that-but he could wait, drift down along the Neck, see what the shore 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 passed, 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 shell, its siphon/tentacle writhing as it fumbled at the slick fishing 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 shell, 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 shell in view beneath a blazing Quicksilver, long before dawn. An Earthlife duck was flapping in the shell 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 passing the Neck, then, the morning he found that the pickedclean shell of a sub clam held a neatly placed tuna still flopping. They couldn't have thrown such a mass, could they? They must have guided and chased it across the weed and precisely onto the shell.

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 nobody 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 fishing 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 slashing 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 smashing 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 shore 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.