by Larry Niven
The houses were two deep, with truck gardens between. The mudflat beyond grew black Destiny sandweed that thinned out near the ocean.
Fifty or sixty people were milling around braziers set on the bare mud.
Others were down by the water.
Jemmy felt the blood freezing in his arteries. They were all St rangers. He'd never seen so many strangers together. He hadn't guessed what that would do to him.
But the girls were urging him forward.
A few were examining Thonny's bike while Loria turned the pedals and the handlebars. Brenda- There! He'd found his sister.
Half a dozen men were out on the water, riding floating slabs. “Glind, what are those?”
“Boards.”
Brenda was with other girls at the shore, and a couple of men too, watching them. Some of those had boards, and two of the men on the water were women. It was confusing, an optical illusion. He'd seen them as all men because they were together, all wearing sleeveless shirts.
Curdis was in a group around one of the braziers. He waved enthusiastically and called, “Timtimtimmy!”
Thanks for the reminder. “Curdis! There's a thousand kinds of trees and a thousand kinds of snakes, and Destiny vines you could build a city on.” And that gives Timtimtimmy a reason for going in there.
“Typical. You dive into a jungle and ignore the people. Drew, you really surprised us. We had no idea you were here. Tim, this is Drew Bednacourt.”
“Pleased,” Drew Bednacourt said, smiling. He was white-haired and muscular, Dad's age, and a white scar ran down his dark chest into his short pants. “You surprised us too.” His handshake was hard, horny.
Curdis said, “You're not that surprised.”
Jemmy saw what he meant. Most of the locals weren't talking to the Spirals. They were fishing or cooking or floating on boards in the water.
Drew said, “We've seen merchants all our lives. The caravan went through two weeks ago. They'll be back in a week with whatever Haven and the Spirals leave.”
Tarzana looked Jemmy over. “He's already wet, Dad. Tim, want to go for a swim? Do you know how to ride?”
Jemmy asked, “Ride?” Then he saw two men stand up on their boards while a wave hurled them forward.
He had to try that.
They sat in a circle on the sand, eating in near darkness. The red of sunset had faded. The only light was Quicksilver, a brilliant spark at the ocean's rim.
Jemmy was exhausted. The long day might have worn him out, but the surfing lesson was the finishing stroke. In the morning he was going to hurt.
He listened, half-dozing, while Curdis and Brenda talked to the Bednacourt girls and Cloochi boys. The girls were sisters born a year apart, Tarzana nineteen, Loria eighteen, Glind seventeen. Drew, their father, was cooking over the brazier with their mother, Wend, who had been surfing. Harl and Susie Cloochi were older, Wend Bednacourt's parents.
The girls began passing out food. Jemmy didn't guess how hungry he was until he bit into a chicken leg. Then he ate like a starving wolf, whatever the girls brought him, chicken and corn and Earthlife fruit, Destiny crab and Destiny seaweed.
Quicksilver disappeared in a blink. Now the only light was stars, and a funny blue glow in the rolling waves.
Harl Cloochi said, “I'm an old man, Curdis. Is Quicksilver brighter than it used to be? I can never he sure. It's like Quicksilver disappears in a blink, and then the night's as black as inside my stomach.”
“I'm only twenty-two,” Curdis said.
“You're Spiral. You've still got machines that t~ach, they say.”
'They're wearing out. Tim? Brenda? Remember anything about Quicksilver? From the schooling disks?”
Brenda did. “Quicksilver's closest to the sun, that must he why it's so bright. It's not very big. Quicksilver, Destiny, Volstaag, Hogun, Hela.”
There was something else about Quicksilver. Something Jemmy had read and forgotten, and now it wouldn't come.
'How did you come here?” Curdis asked.
Susie Cloochi answered. “My father told me his family got in a fight with the Spirals. Mother was carrying me already. They took some seeds and stuff and came down the Road and found Twerdahi already here.”
Jemmy exclaimed, “Twerdahl?”
Laughter. Susie said, “This place, we name it Twerdahl Town. After the Founders. the ones who took Cavorite and disappeared.”
Jemmy laughed at himself. “I thought you meant the Twerdahls themselves.”
“Your turn. You're the first Spirals we've seen in ages. What are you doing here?”
The silence stretched. Brenda or Curdis might have answers ready, but Jemmy couldn't know that, and in the dark he couldn't see their faces. He took the chance and said, “Following the path of the Cavorite. I want to know where they went.”
Tarzana breathed, “Cavorite!”
“But you've got the teaching machines,” old Susie Cloochi said. “Don't they tell you?”
All fatigue fled, Jemmy said, “Some. Cavorite left with forty crew. I know some of the names. Twerdahi, Tucker, Granger, Lyons, Doheny
Spiral Town was founded in 2490, but they called it Base One then. Cavorite left in 2498. You know they left a spiral of Road behind them? They never came home. Maybe they never planned to. Maybe something killed them.”
Susie Cloochi said, “My family never went home. A good many families here never did. Folk do leave Spiral Town from time to time. Might it be that the Cavorite crew just wanted to get away?”
“Snakes,” Jemmy said.
They looked at him. “Snakes, Tim?”
His mind had wandered, then closed its teeth on-“Snakes in the Swamp. It just came to me, Miz Cloochi. Cavorite must have left those. Someone aboard Cavorite must have liked snakes.”
“And swamps,” said Brenda.
Jemmy looked back toward the swamp. “Can't you see it? They're drifting along. Flame mushing out violet under the skirt.” He couldn't really picture that; he'd never seen a flame that hot; nobody had. “They could go faster if they were just trying to get away, but they're just drifting along, leaving a trail of melted rock behind them. Suddenly they're looking at a swamp.
“What can they do? They can boil the water, kill the Destiny weeds, but that won't make it into Road. They could go around it, uphill, but that wouldn't leave a Road for anything with wheels.”
“Rocks,” Brenda said. “They'd have to roll a line of rocks down across the water.”
Curdis said, “We had tractors in Spiral Town, big machines for pulling a plow or pushing down a tree. They don't go anymore. Cavorite might have taken one.”
Jemmy nodded, putting it into the picture. “Push a row of rocks across. Like stepping-stones. Then hover till the rock melts and the water boils. Wait till the swamp cools down, then seed-”
“No, T-Tim, that's a humongous thermal mass. You don't throw seeds in boiling water.”
He nodded. “Right. They go on, making Road. Week or two later they come back and seed some trees-“
“Maybe a year.”
“-and leave the snakes and anything else I didn't see. Damn.”
Curdis said, “All right, what damn?”
“They weren't just runaways, the Cavorite crew. I always knew forty crew was too tidy. When you're running away, you don't wait for your numbers to come out neat like that. The Road was the point. If Cavorite came back this far to seed a swamp, why not come all the way back to Spiral Town?”
The Bednacourt sisters led them to a structure that was all one big room. “A lot of us slept here after the storm washed away some houses two years ago,” Loria said. “Elsewise it's the House of Healing.”
There was nothing like a bed. The Bloocher clan slept on the wide expanse of floor, covered in their own clothes.
In a moment when Brenda was surely asleep, Curdis spoke in the dark. “I had to turn down an offer from Loria.”
Offer? Ah. “What did you say?”
“I said I'm married and B
renda's too young, but Timmy's not.”
Jemmy's ears burned in the dark.
The sun hadn't risen over the mountains yet. The morning was cold. The water was colder for the first moments; then Jemmy's body stopped noticing. He and Tarzana fought their boards through the waves and paddled out to where others were sitting six in a row.
They waited, talking little. Sound carried very well over the water.
Jemmy asked, “Don't you get sharks around here?”
The pause lasted long enough that Jemmy thought nobody had heard him. Then one boy said, “I don't think they like the taste of the river. Sometimes one comes around. We get a lot of sharks when a caravan stops and three hundred chugs get their attention.”
“Wave,” Tarzana said.
The idea was to be moving as fast as the wave when it arrived. Paddle without falling off. When the board catches the wave, stand up. Jemmy had tried standing up yesterday. Today he didn't. Kneeling on a board as a wave hurled it toward the beach was tough enough.
Curdis asked the Twerdahl folk for work, and work was found. He and Brenda and Jemmy (make that Tim, start thinking Tim) knew how to garden, knew how to pull Destiny weeds.
“If we leave about now,” Curdis said in midafternoon, “we'll get to the guarded bridge about sunset.”
“I think they like us here,” Brenda said doubtfully. “Uh-huh. I don't guess Margeiy's worried about us yet, but, Brenda, I told the merchants we'd be coming back today.”
Jemmy held up a hand. Hold it. “Sunset?”
“They saw Thonny around noon. Let's let them see you around sunset.”
At noon and sunset, two views of “Tim Hann” could look quite different. Curdis continued, “Sunset, not dawn. They'd never believe we marched in the dark.”
“Did the merchants tell you about Twerdahi Town?”
“Not a word,” Curdis said in some irritation.
“Nothing about people living down the Road? Big surprise?”
“Big joke.”
“So,” said Jemmy, “we found a surprise and stayed an extra day. That's what they'll expect. Give them another day to forget what Tim Hann looks like.”
Curdis grinned. “I like it here too. I didn't have the nerve to try those boards, Tim. How is it?”
Jemmy shook his head. “It's like, I can't tell a Twerdahl how to ride a bicycle. I can't tell you what surfing is like. Want us to show you? Brenda?”
“Yeah.”
Brenda showed an aptitude for surfing. Curdis gave up early. He didn't like falling off in front of strange males.
The Bednacourt girls returned to the House of Healing with them that night. When the Bloocher clan curled into their blankets, the girls didn't leave.
Voices in the dark, men and women talking together. That was Loria:
“You're good people. You have things to teach us. Some of what comes off the Road are parasites.”
“We all do farm work,” Curdis said. “We learn to look for what needs doing.”
Glind: “We don't let anyone stay a minute if he's alone. Any man alone must be running from something.”
“A woman?” Curdis.
“A woman alone might be running from, well, a man.” Tarzana's voice.
Loria: “The only women we've ever seen on the Road were merchants. But there was a man called himself Haines-” And he was a murderer who hid in the swamp. He stole from the truck gardens when he could, until Destiny food and no speckles turned him into a skeletal zombie, and then they flushed him out.
“Sounds like Mattoo Haine,” Curdis said. “He killed his wife and oldest son when I was little.”
Nobody wanted to tell Twerdahls that if criminals could get past where the Road straightened, Spiral Town let them go. There was a silence Jemmy savored. Then he spoke into the dark. “It must have started this way.”
“Tim?''
“Tarzana, grown men and women don't talk to each other in Spiral Town. When your grandparents came, maybe they didn't bring lights. They could talk together in the dark where they could be just voices.”
“Mmmm.”
He must have fallen asleep soon after.
Jemmy taught bicycle riding all morning.
Cooking over a grill fascinated him. He helped some, but watched more.
In midafternoon they retrieved their bikes from Twerdahl riders. Again Curdis said, “Time to leave.”
Jemmy said, “I'm not going.”
“What?”
“Tell the merchants Tim wants to know where Cavorite went. Tim Hann is on the Road.”
He saw Curdis studying him and guessed his thoughts. Is Jemmy crazy? How crazy? He didn't know Jemmy like a brother, and the Jemmy Bloocher he thought he knew wouldn't have killed a merchant. ~
Curdis said, “They'll take a harder look at Tim Hann if Tim comes back alone.”
“I don't think I'm coming back, Curdis. I can't run Bloocher Farm. I can't talk down a merchant's price while I'm hiding my face! And if Spiral Town gets in another face-off with the caravans- You see?”
Curdis did. “They'd have to stand without the Bloochers. You'd stand for the Bloochers, but you'd be hiding.”
“Curdis, it's unacceptable. Give Thonny two years, he'll be fine running Bloocher Farm. Thonny doesn't have to hide anything.”
“That's two years before Margery and I can get our own farm.”
“Forgive me.”
“Uh-huh.” Curdis's eyes were unfocused: still thinking. “Okay, the caravan'll be starting back this way tomorrow or so. I figured we'd meet them just when they were getting organized, and we'd get you through that way. If you stay, they'll be here in, oh, four days. Tim, are you staying here or pushing on?”
“I don't know.''
“You could keep ahead of a caravan. Even on foot.”
“Sure.”
“Or let them catch you in a few weeks, but now you're a Twerdahl with itchy feet.”
“Mmm.”
“Is this really your choice?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too,” Brenda said.
Curdis blew his top. Brenda shouted back, then cried.
Jemmy watched them dwindle, pedaling hard, up the Road.
When he returned to the House of Healing that night, Loria came with him.
6
Oven Maker
The northwest coast is mountainous. The southeast coast is wider, and rich in beaches. We'll set clown at the far end of the peninsula and explore.
-Anthony Lyons, Geology
Twerdahl Town didn't seem to know about bread.
There was grain growing along the Road. There were rocks about. Children of all ages found Tim Hann strange and interesting, and some would do what he suggested.
He showed the younger children how to gather grain. The older helped him carry rocks. Upthrusting banyan knees had flaked a great flat shelf of lava from the Road. Four were able to move that. It became the base of Tim Hann's oven.
His first experiments came out scorched, but two days after his sibs left him, Tim Hann served bread at dinner.
The morning of the third day- The first of the board riders took their boards from where they were propped against the long wall of the House of Healing. Tim Hann trailed the others, watching them, trying to balance the board on his shoulder as they did.
The board was a few inches shorter than Tim himself, carved from wood that grew in the swamp. It was heavy and awkward. Playful gusts of wind kept swinging it about.
Far up the Road toward Spiral Town, there was dust.
Jemmy stopped and squinted. A plume of dust, far off. He thought he knew what it meant.
Wend Bednacourt carried her board like a wand. She wasn't stronger than he was, but she had the balance. The other riders were running, but Wend trailed back a little. She said, “My daughters have taken an interest in you, Tim.”
“I know. But all the others-” It had taken Jemmy two days to notice that the Bednacourt women were the only womeh who would talk to him.
In Spiral Town that was normal, but here? “Is it something I'm doing?”
“Tim, do they say marry in Spiral Town?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Wend shied back a bit to avoid the wild swinging of his board. “How's it done?”
“There's a ceremony. You invite-”
“Tim, how do you decide?”
This was no casual conversation. Jemmy set his board down and sat on it, thinking it through.
“We kids all pretty much know each other, time the girls stop talking to us. If I'm interested in a girl-” He decided not to mention Tunia Judda. ”-why, maybe I've got a friend who dated her, or knows her, or a friend of a friend.” He'd learned quite a lot about Tunia and the Judda family. “Or my sister or maybe a cousin probably knows her, can tell me-“
“You don't talk to her?”
“Her. No, not until we're dating. That's-“ He'd never thought of it this way. “-like a contract, like you're buying seed corn or a rooster. Like we buy each other on spec.”
The older woman also sat on her board. “So, two nights ago, Loria spoke to you-“
He could feel himself blushing. “She did.”
“What did she say?”
“She told you?”
“We talked,” said Wend.
He couldn't lie. He wouldn't know what to hide. He said, “Loria came with me back to the House of Healing. She brought a blanket. I rolled up in mine. I was tired. There wasn't any light, of course, so I couldn't see her face and she couldn't see mine. Talking's easier that way somehow. I just thought we'd talk until I fell asleep.
“She said, 'Do you want to make babies with me?'”
“What did you take that to mean?”
He looked at Loria's mother. “It means rub up against. F-fuck. How could it mean anything else?”
“Yes. Tim, we say that when we want to talk about marrying. Raising children. How to take care of them, how many you can afford-”
“No, look, she touched me. I would have, but I was a little slow, maybe. She was a little distance away and I couldn't see her face. I didn't see it coming. 'Do you want to make babies with me?' and then a hand came out of the dark and had my knee. I pulled, and she came to me, and we did it.”
