Destiny's Road

18 The Windfarm

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 accumulate, 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 slashing 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 butterfly, 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.

He was crawling blind along a curve like a huge snake. He forced his eyes open and found he'd run up against a smoothly curved surface, a tube of rock.

He crawled into it, out of the rain.

It ran for meters before it became too narrow. As soon as he stopped moving, he was asleep.

Thunder shaped nightmares. He'd wake with a scream he couldn't hear, and remember where he was, and sleep again.

Later, slept out and hungry in a black coffin of rock, he wondered what built tubes. Human engineers built pipes, aquaducts... but here? He pictured huge worms that ate rock.

He crawled out into a world much like the one he'd left, and kept moving. Water had drained from his pack. It was lighter, briefly.

Starvation and battered senses left him light-headed. It was only a day since he had eaten, but many days since he'd eaten anything but fish. Fruit and vegetables were a fading memory. There were potholes in the rock everywhere he went, and he drank rainwater to fill his belly.

He had no idea what he was crawling toward.

An orange glow... gone now, as he crawled along the edge of a patch of forest... there again, orange to his left and a touch of heat on his cheek. He crawled toward that.

The warm rain wasn't warm enough. It was draining the heat out of him, easing him into death. He was shuddering with fatigue and hunger. Lightning sputtered continually: the world was dark and blue-white, and it wasn't much better than being blind. He couldn't recognize a single plant or tree in the Destiny forest. The air stank. BuJ orange flashed and drew him.

Until warmth bathed him, and he turned himself like a roasting boar carcass to soak it in. The wind went up, carrying the rain away from him.

For a while, then, he could stop.

Curiosity brought him closer to the heat. Crawling over naked slippery rock, he looked down into a sea of red-orange light. It made him back up. He'd found what was only found in teaching programs. Lava- molten rock-volcano.

Destiny's crust had ripped here. That happened often on Earth, but nowhere else on Destiny.

An alien place indeed, where no food grew for Earthlife such as himself. He should go while he still had strength.

Wind howled in his ears beneath the crackle of lightning. It wasn't easy to walk; but he just couldn't crawl any more. His whole body screamed if he tried.

He walked directly into the wind, peeking between his fingers. He didn't remember why. He'd figured something out... he couldn't exactly remember, but this was right. Keep the wind in his face.

Plants drew him, color against the dark.

They covered the shallow slopes ahead of him. They stood out like settler-magic paint: green, orange, black. Black stalks split and split again to become orange thorns whose tips divided down to tiny green needles. Bristly plants hugged the ground, knee high and twice as wide as they were tall. Nothing grew around or between them.

There were paths between the rows. The slope was gentle, and the rain had eased. Suddenly everything was easier.

Jemmy was too far gone even to be thankful.

The plants tore at his legs when he wobbled off the path. He bore it twice or thrice, then bellowed in rage and tried to pull one up. The plant's roots clung like a demon. He tried another, and a third, then quit.

And now he'd found a wider path, rock not too slippery to walk on. The broad band of smooth rock continued level, maintaining a constant width alongside the hip-high forest. Even blinded by rain, he couldn't lose his way.

Plants all in one variety, like something tended. If there were Otterfolk on the sea, could there be sapient natives on land? Farmers? A world older than Earth might have had time to father more than one sapient species.

He walked, his mind dreaming, disconnected.

He'd done this before.

It didn't dawn on him; it seeped up into his mind. From magma spilled from a ripped planet, he had wandered onto rock melted by fusion flame and refrozen. He was on the Road again.

Above the wind and thunder he heard his own wild laughter.

A pulsing yellow-white light began to intrude on the lightning, growing bright as he followed the Road. He couldn't even feel surprise when he found the door.

Someone fed him broth.

Later, a bowl of rice with vegetables in it.

In between he must have slept.

The stone walls felt thick as mountains. They blocked the thunder down to a suggestion, a background. It was one big room. Bunks ran away from him in an infinite rectangular array. The occupants slept, or talked quietly; he heard nothing of that. One moaned and protested in her sleep, just audible above the whisper of thunder, and Jemmy knew that he could hear again.

He kept falling in and out of sleep.

He half-woke when the lights brightened. He was too tired to move, but he watched as men and women rolled out of their beds. They all wore shorts, scarlet and yellow with a narrow orange stripe, and nothing above the waist. Most of them pulled voluminous slick-skinned blouseand-hood garments over their heads, all in the same scarlet-yelloworange pattern, with strings dangling everywhere.

They went out in little clumps. Storm sounds rose, then fell as the door shut, rose again and fell.

Two doors. Airlock.

“Who are you?”

He blinked up at a half-bearded, half-naked man. Had he slept? The man shook him. “Who are you?”

“Jemmy Bloocher.”

“From now on you're Andrew Dowd. Remember that.”

“Andrew Dowd.”

“No, no, Andrew Dowd. Have you been getting enough speckles?”

“Andrew Dowd.” He tried to imitate the man's pronunciation. It wasn't quite Tail Town speech, but closer to that than anything else. Dowd was not quite Dawd, not quite Dode. Andrew, not Ander.

The man was hairy everywhere, a pelt of tightly curled black hair over chest and arms and face and head. His beard was half a finger joint long, too short to be a real beard. His hair was the same length. His ribs and muscles stood out like an anatomy diagram: wiry strength and no fat at all.

He listened carefully to Jemmy's pronunciation, then said, “Better.”

“Why? Why am I Andrew Dowd? Why do you want to know I was Jemmy Bloocher?”

“Tell you later. When you were out there, did you see anything like pools of water glowing blue?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Good!”

“Why?”

“There are pools where the water acts as neutron traps for uranium. We call 'em 0kb pools. They're radioactive as hell. We'd have to put you outside if-Willametta?” Half-beard stood up. He too wore shorts in screaming colors, and a stick shoved through a loop at the small of his back.

Willametta wore shorts just like Half-beard's, and the same brush haircut in blond, as he saw when he managed to pull his gaze away from her fits. She'd be Senka ibn-Rushd's age: late thirties. But Senka ruled a merchant wagon. Willametta was master of nothing, as lean as Halfbeard, and worn out. He could see a sharp-faced patrician loveliness beneath the fatigue.

She lifted Jemmy's head and slid her knee underneath. In that position she fed him spoonfuls of vegetable stew. It was nice.

It might have been erotic too, but Jemmy was just too tired. His attempt to impress her by feeding himself got as far as trying to free his hands from under a sheet. Too weak. Too hungry to bother. He hadn't eaten much when his protesting belly made him stop.

He asked, “Where am I?”

“You're serious?” Smiling, Willametta curled over to see his eyes. “Yeah. This is the Windfarm.”

“Who found me?”

“Henry saw you first,” Willametta said. “I thought Andrew would be angry. He's a trusty. He keeps track of us. But then-” She stopped. “Maybe tomorrow you can feed yourself, Andrew.”

Questions yammered in his head. Two Andrews? Trusty? Where are the toilets? “Where are my things?”

“Andrew, you were carrying speckles. Speckles means you're ready to run! The probes kill you if they catch you!”

He looked up at her.

“We stashed the speckles. Clothes too. The trusty will give you a poncho when you can work.” She handed him an oddly shaped pan. “This you piss in until you can get up.”

The room faded. When his strength came back he looked under the sheet and found that he was wearing scarlet-yellow-orange shorts, way too big, with a drawstring.

He woke when everyone came in glistening wet. They left their ponchos at the far end where the airlock was. The kitchen and tables were there too, and they ate without much talk, though Jemmy could sense eyes on him.

Willametta fed him again.

They dimmed the lights. jemmy snapped awake. The brightening of the lights was like dawn flashing through a curtain suddenly swept back. He'd never seen artificial lights this bright. The others were all tumbling out of their beds. A sudden whiff of bread: they were tearing a loaf apart. They ate fast while they dressed.

Voices:"I'd kill a probe for a jar of strawberry jam.”

“What size?” and a trickle of laughter.

They pulled ponchos out of a box at the far end of the big room, a machine that had throbbed all night, just audible through the muted roar of the storm. There were glare-orange ovals on the backs of the ponchos, a blue thread along the sleeves. They weren't all alike, not quite. Half-beard's had a broader orange curve down the front, a bigger oval patch in back.

They flowed out through the massive airlock. Jemmy counted as they cycled through: five women and fourteen men including Half-beard. Three stayed behind. There was the woman who couldn't get out of bed and complained a lot. There was a small muscular man with straight black hair and a bristly-black angry jaw, and an older woman whose tunic markings matched Half-beard's.

The woman loomed over him for a time, studying him. She was tall and dark, broad across shoulders and hips. She must weigh more than Jemmy did, despite being just short of gaunt, her big breasts slack and empty. By her size and her air of command, she reminded him oddly of Marilyn Lyons and Willow Hearst of the spring and fall caravans. She was of their kind, but starved to the bone.

Jemmy found himself avoiding her eyes. He was just as glad when she and the angry man disappeared through a door.

He lost interest, and dozed. Later he remembered sounds like quarreling or lovemaking... or storm sounds mingled in his dreams.

The smells of cooking woke him.

The man fed the bedridden woman, who appeared to be pregnant, not sick. At the big woman's orders he fed Jemmy and took Jemmy's bedpan.

There was no day or night out there. Jemmy (Andrew. Why Andrew? They could have picked a name closer to his own, and they had another Andrew.) “Andrew” could hear thunder. It never quite stopped. But there was day and night in here.

He'd lost his sense of time aboard Carder's Boat. Maybe he could rebuild his memory of the voyage from the phases of Quicksilver.

He'd guessed right about the storm. Heated air rises from a sea of molten rock, a rip in the world's crust. Air at ground level flows in to replace it. Air moving inward on a spinning ball, must spin... a hurricane pattern that must have been running for centuries if Cavorite's crew had come to see.

Oh, that was it. Air flows in, so face the wind to get out. Take the easy way out and you'll end on the easiest path to run a Road... assuming that Cavorite's crew meant to lead the Road right into a storm!

Why would they do that?

He'd found plants arrayed in rows; then the Road; then a plantation house. What would be grown here? He could feel the answer tapping at his mind. It was right on the tip of his tongue...