by Larry Niven
Tim Bednacourt had no warning. Come dawn of a bright morning in early spring, Tarzana and Glind were pulling him and Lonia out of bed.
The house they'd built had no locks and the sisters had no sense of~ privacy. Lonia had Tim's arm and Tarzana had the other and Glind was talking too, and there was no resisting. Lonia explained, breathless, as the laughing girls pulled Tim into a run.
There were near three hundred Twerdahls. There were fifty-two weed cutters. Once there had been sixty. Twerdahis were more careful counting knives than each other, Tim noticed, but the point was that there weren't enough knives. So they ran, knowing that their elders would wake later and follow at their leisure to take the knives away.
It looked like all the teens and twenties of Twerdahl Town were swarming toward the toolhouse. They raced to be first through the big doors; they pushed past each other clutching weed cutters.
One elder, at least, was up: Julya Franken was standing benevolent guard over blades heaped on a table. Early arrivals had picked them over. No seven were alike, though there was a set of six and there were several sets of five that had been six. Some were just big enough to use for cooking or eating. A few were big enough to swing twohanded.
Tim and the girls snatched up blades and ran for the swamp.
The youth of Twerdahi Town left their clothes in neat piles and scrambled down into the water. They slashed exuberantly at thick green hawsers fringed with lacy spines: the Destiny Julia sets and python vines that were killing Earthlife trees.
Tim could hear shouted warnings from elsewhere in the swamp. Not everyone had learned to stay clear of slashing blades. Tim disengaged himself even from Loria, who made joyful howling noises as she swung a quarter-meter serrated kitchen knife at the biggest vines.
Tim slashed, slashed with a midsized broad-bladed knife, moving straight inland through the hip-high water. Snakes avoided him, but there were too many for his comfort. He slashed loose a branch to prod them away. Now orange daylight glowed through the trees ahead, until he faced a rising lava slope.
He was alone.
If Thonny and Jemmy Bloocher had left evidence of themselves, a third of a year ago, it was best that Tim Bednacourt find it first.
Nothing?
Nothing of Jemmy Bloocher showed here.
He turned back toward the voices. Glind was gathering head-sized spongy clumps of fiber and stuffing them in a net bag. “Fairy loofa,” she told him.
“Got enough?”
''I think so.''
Cutting vine was exhausting work. When they got tired they worked nearer the Road, so that an elder could claim the knife. Twerdahls in their thirties and forties were arriving in clumps, and they took their time taking up knives.
It was a game of showing off strength, and Tim couldn't quit until Loria did. But the Road came nearer and nearer. They saw Tarzana pass her blade to her father.
Two older women who tended the bean gardens, Sharlot and Emjay Clellan, watched them for several minutes, then jumped down and claimed their knives. Tim and Loria crawled up onto the Road and joined Tarzana and Glind and a host of bodies lying and drying on the sunwarmed surface of the Road.
The vines would recover, of course. Twerdahl Town made no serious attempt to exterminate them.
Everybody quit around noon, gathered and stacked the blades, jumped back into the water, and bathed and scraped each others' backs with fairy loofas. It was fun, the first break they'd had from work in some time. And it got theni clean before the spring caravan arrived.
At last night's sunset they'd heard distant gunfire.
The wagons cruised past while Twerdahl Town did business at their windows, trading harvest fruits for speckles and tools, chatting to learn what the others had. Prices would be cheaper coming back from Spiral Town.
Tim stayed in the house while Loria dealt with merchants.
The summer caravan was long gone. Who would know him here? But Loria took it for granted that Tim would not confront the spring caravan.
Windows were scarce in Twerdahl Town. This house had only two. Tim watched through the dining-room window as the wagons drifted off up the Road.
Loria was back. “I got speckles for fresh corn. I didn't want to wait. We were nearly out.”
“It feels like I'm hiding.”
She looked at him. “You are hiding.”
The sun was low, and Quicksilver had already blinked out, when a rattle of gunfire drifted down the Road.
An hour later the merchants were back among them.
Tim was stir-frying vegetables in a wok big enough to bathe a twoyear-old, using a spoon as long as his forearm. An elderly merchant woman tried to strike up conversation, but gave up quickly. Who could possibly expect him to pay attention to anything but cooking?
Loria was unhappy.
Why? He was hidden in plain sight. In the house he would be missing dinner, in hiding, in the dark. It wasn't her they were hunting, if they were hunting anyone at all.
The vegetables were done. The nearest man wasn't as strong as Berda Farrow, a middle-aged mother of four with long limbs and stringy muscles, so it was Berda who helped him move the wok aside. Tim pulled the big omelet pan onto the fire.
He poured eggs in, a quart or so. Berda stayed a moment to watch him work, then smiled and went off to chase children.
Berda had taught him this. Under her eyes Tim had made two-egg omelets all one morning, until there was no feeling in his arm. The eggs stuck at first, or burned. He used too much oil or too little. Under Berda's supervision he began adding fillings. She watched him perfect his technique, then graduated him to a wok with a double handle, ten eggs at a time.
All the territory around Twerdahl Town was infested with chickens. They nested out of range of sharks. Nothing else seemed to hunt them. Wherever you went there were nests. Twerdahi Town ate a lot of omelets.
He tilted the pan, then lifted the omelet's edge to let eggs run underneath. He tipped cooked vegetables across the omelet. The corner of his eye caught a grinning merchant woman holding a shaker. He took it, sprinkled the omelet with speckles, then handed the shaker hack with a nod and smile.
Twerdahls put speckles in almost anything made with eggs; but Twerdahls wouldn't trade for speckles and then give them back. Merchants would get none in their dinner if they didn't bring their own.
Tim flipped the omelet over itself.
'-Cavorite-“
He finished the maneuver before he looked around. Who had spoken?
Two merchants didn't notice him. “The Otterfolk saw it come past. They remember. I got one of them to draw it for me.”
“It's not easy to tell,” the older man said. “When you don't know how it works you don't know what to draw either. Anyway, they were just drawing in sand-”
“I copied it.”
“Sure you did, Joker, but they drew what they thought you wanted and you copied what you thought you saw-“
“Skip it. Yutz, isn't that omelet ready yet?”
Right. Tim briskly turned the omelet onto a plate. “Should be perfect. Jean, cut this up for us, will you?”
A half-grown girl began cutting the huge omelet and serving it onto plates.
Loria came out of nowhere, set a slice of broiled meat beside Tim, and took a stack of empty plates. She brushed sensuously past Tim and breathed into his ear, “I am so sick of hearing about Cavorite,” and was gone.
Tim poured oil and more eggs into the pan.
In the morning the wagons went on to Spiral Town, and Twerdahl Town returned to the work of harvest.
Two weeks passed.
Loria was at work on a tossed salad. She brushed past him, back to back, slowly, a suggestive caress. Yum. The Bednacourt kitchen was bigger than the Hanns', but two at work still had to touch. Two could make a virtue of that.
Tim drained the rice, Brown rice with flecks of color in it, bell peppers and onion and bits of bacon. No speckles today: they'd all had enough last night.
Lunch
for four including Wend, who was somewhere about, or five, if Tarzana showed up.
The Bednacourts were a close family. Loria was closer to her mother and sisters than to her husband. It didn't bother him. Spiral men were cliquish too. That was Tim's problem: he was a clique of one. He didn't have quite the same concerns, didn't speak quite the same language, as Twerdahl Town.
Had he chosen Loria? Or had the Bednacourt women played some complex game with Tim Bednacourt as the prize? Loria had taught him surfing as he'd taught her the bicycle, while Tarzana drifted with other men. Glind had never been alone with him at all. Loria had become the default option.
“Caravan's in sight,” Glind said.
Tim felt Loria stiffen. “We've already got our speckles,” she said.
“You didn't wait?”
No answer. Glind turned from the Road and said for Tim's benefit, “They like to travel at harvest time. The feasts are wonderful.”
“Where's Tarzana?”
“Met a merchant man, I think.”
He asked, “Not a labor yutz?,” to see if she knew the term.
“Merchant.”
“How will Gerrel feel about that?”
Loria looked at him queerly. Glind, serving out salad, didn't notice. “Feel? Tim, anyone can mix it up with the merchants. Hey-“ She looked up. “They tell us about something called hybrid vigor. We get better babies if we don't make babies with just each other. Did they teach you about that in Spiral Town?”
“Sure, hybrid vigor and gene drift.” Tim grinned at Loria. “Was that it? Was that what you saw in me?”
She blushed. Glind, grinning, said, “We wonder. It's such a good story, maybe it's just-”
“No, I read about hybrid vigor and gene drift in the teaching programs. I could go off with a merchant woman? And nobody will care? And I wasn't supposed to know that?” He was watching his wife's face. She was irritated and unamused. “Loria, you know why I can't get close to merchants.”
She nodded.
“Even so, I'm glad we lock up the knives,” he teased her. His mind ran on. When did Twerdahis start doing that? Why? Was there a time of knives and blood? And now they pass them out to cooks every evening, and count them- Better not ask.
Abruptly, Loria asked, “Where did you hear that? 'Labor yutz.'” “Last summer.”
“Have you ever talked with Haron Welsh?”
“What, the old surfer? The one who does stunts?”
“He was a labor yutz. Twice. Once before I was born. Talk to him.”
Haron Welsh wasn't cliquish. Tim hadn't seen him at the vine-slash. He lived alone; he worked his own patch of garden; he surfed alone.
In late morning he was a small dark silhouette in a cold drizzle, alone on the water Tim waited on the beach. The old surfer let several good Waves pass. He must be watching the endless passage of the caravan.
Haron caught a wave. Finally! As the old man stood up in the shallows
Tim shouted and waved: a towel in one hand, a fat mug of silver fern tea in the other.
The old man thought it over, then pulled his board to land. He used the towel and dropped it, then took the mug.
“You were a labor yutz,” Tim said.
Haron drank the hot tea down straight and handed back the cup. Only then did he speak. “Who're you?”
“Tim Bednacourt.”
“You don't know anything.” Haron picked up his board and turned toward the water. Stopped. “Spiral?”
“Yes.”
“They got teaching things in Spiral? You learn?”
“That's right.”
“Huh. What do you know that I don't?”
''Well-''
“I've been as far as the Neck!”
“Tell me about it.”
The old man started to turn away. Tim said, “Ever seen Columbia?”
The rest of Twerdahl Town had no interest in Columbia or Cavorite.
“...No. Tell me about Columbia.”
Tim spoke to the back of Haron's head.
Columbia was a huge squat tower in a nest of cables, with a brick building against its side to protect the join. The original cables were as thin as angeihair pasta. Replacement cables were as thick as a man's fingers, made of copper or silver bought from merchants. Clusters of black conical pits each the size of a boy were attitude jets. Once they had spit fire. The hatch ten meters up, and the old stairway built to reach it, were made of poured rock, wonderfully precise.
Power had flowed from Columbia for two and a half centuries. Tim spoke of Spiral Town's machines all wearing down, getting less and less power as Columbia's energy grew more sluggish.
The old man listened and gave nothing back, and Tim spoke more than he intended. He spoke of boyhood dreams: studying engineering and plasma physics, running the power system as apprentice and journeyman, until they would let him enter Columbia's interior. To turn on the old ship's motors. And rise in a blaze of light and a tearing away of the ship's prison of cables, rise into the sky and fly.
The eldest Bloocher boy, the one who would inherit, could never do any of that.
The old man's attention was wandering. From some attic storage in his memory Tim pulled something random.
“Did you know that Earth's sun was hotter than ours?”
Haron's eyebrows arced. “Why didn't they fry?”
“Earth was farther away, of course. The sun probably looked smaller, and brighter, so it'd dazzle you quicker, and the light would have been more blue. Maybe the sky had more blue in it.'~' Tim was guessing at some of this. “But Destiny's sun is a little smaller than Sol, and maybe two billion years older.”
“Huh. And why would any of this crap make a fingernail's difference ~ to anyone?”
Jemmy Bloocher had asked that too. There were answers. “Earth took almost twice as long to go around Sol. We have eight months in a year, they had twelve, but theirs were longer. The clocks still measure Earth days and Earth years.”
“Yeah, the Spiral Town clocks. Can't anyone make a clock for Destiny time?”
“Nobody I know. Hey, have you ever been sunburned?”
Haron considered. “Few times, I've stayed out all day surfing. Next day I'm bright red and everything hurts. Can't wear clothes. Can't go outside. Next day, itch. Two days after that I'm peeling like a snake in spring.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“On Earth you could do that in a hour,” Tim said. “They had to wear hats and spread goo on their skins to thin the sunlight or they'd get cancer. Too much-” He'd never quite got this straight. “Too much of the light that's too blue to see.”
Haron seemed to find that funny. “Too blue to see.” He set down the board. Nearly naked to the wind, he didn't shiver. “All right. You know something. Not like these yutzes. What do you want?”
“Did you ever see Cavo rite?”
“No,”
“Did you ever find out where Cavorite went? Do the traders know?” Haron's eyes went distant. His lips moved, but nothing came out.
“The Neck,” Tim prodded.
“We got to the Neck. The Road goes right across.”
“Is that where the Otterfolk are?”
“Them. They're all along the shore of the big bay. They don't talk. They can't go anywhere.”
“You went twice? You must like it.”
“Not so much that.”
Tim waited.
“They don't know anything here. Surf in summer, gather and eat in fall, huddle hungry in winter. Time of year tells them what they're doing, everything they're doing. It feels so cramped.” Haron's voice was rising, but he caught himself. “Doesn't matter anyway. The merchants asked, I had to go.”
“Why?”
“First time, they gave us two knives.” Haron grinned. “Second time, I was trained already. Four knives.”
Ah, he'd been bought.
“The Otterfolk, they can't go anywhere,” Haron said. “There's only the bay. Anywhere else, they die. That's one
reason. I'd go again, because the Otterfolk can't.”
“What are they like?”
“We're not supposed to talk to them, but you can sneak away. They draw pictures in the sand. You try to tell them things that way, but it's-“ Haron frowned. “It's not enough.”
“For what?”
Haron shook his head. He picked up his board and ran into the water.
Merchants and Twerdahls mingled on the sand. Tim Bednacourt worked anonymous in their midst.
For a long moment Quicksilver burned at the edge of the sea, just below the cloud deck. Then it winked out. An hour of sunlight left.
Merchants watched Tim Bednacourt cutting onions, carrots, bell peppers, mushrooms picked in the cypress swamp. “That looks good,” the older woman said. Tim smiled.
Four merchants came, all a few inches shorter than Tim, all exotic and elegant, dressed in many colors, many layers. I-fe noticed the younger man first. Dark, with a thin mustache: Tim had seen him before. An older man with brown hair and a forked beard turning gray. A blackhaired woman his own age; another very like her but no older than Tim. Skins browner than Tim's, all four. Their eyes were dark and a bit tilted. Parents, son, daughter?
He could be wrong about that, or their ages, or almost anything. Any fool might pretend to know all about merchants. Nobody really knew.
The young man said, “I remember you. We were talking about Otterfolk. I noticed you trying to listen and cook-“
“I remember. You're Joker?”
He nodded. The older woman asked, “Would you like to see them for yourself?”
Caught by surprise, Tim laughed. “Sure. It's not likely, is it?”
“I'm Senka,” she said. “These are Damon and Rian, my husband and daughter.”
“I'm Tim Bednacourt.”
She was examining him. It made him uncomfortable. “How long have you lived in this place?”
“Twenty years. Born here,” making himself a year older than Jemmy Bloocher.
The man asked, “Do you ever wonder what the rest of the world looks like?”
“Well, sure, sometimes I look off down the Road and-”
“Tim.”
He jumped. Loria! She said, “You can't cook in the dark. You need help?”
