Destiny's Road Part 43

The wave was breaking, and she skimmed away under the falling water. Otterfolk got lost, or let the wave roll over them just for the h.e.l.l of it. A few were almost keeping up.

She looked good, his sister-in-law. He'd taught her to ride these waves. He'd be riding again after his knee healed. At forty-seven years of age, he couldn't expect that to happen fast.

Behind him, not loud, Jeremy heard a metallic thump and a highpitched yzp.

A moment to realize how queer that sound was. Another to wait for the yell of rea.s.surance that didn't come. Then he was hop-running uphill, cane stabbing sand, right arm windmilling for balance.

He saw Karen, and he bellowed, "Barry! Brenda! Help!"

Karen had set the cauldron in a frame above the pit, in the sand below Wave Rider. The cauldron was on its side. He could see where chowder had spilled down Karen's right side, shoulder to hip and elbow.

"Barrbarrbarreee! Brenbrenbrendaaa!"

Her face was twisted in terror. Why wasn't she screaming? He s.h.i.+ed from the answer: the nerves must have been seared lifeless. He got under Karen's shoulder, her left shoulder, just as she started to collapse. His own scream rose to incoherent agony as his knee buckled under her weight.

Brenda came running.

Jeremy was down on his knee, still supporting Karen. "Don't touch her where she's burned! Get under her here, here where I am, okay?" He transferred his burden. Karen was moaning. She'd started to realize how bad it was. She wasn't able to stand.

"Get her up to the inn!" Jeremy limped uphill, up sixty meters of old wooden stairs, shouting every few steps. "Barrbarrbarreee!"

"What?I was stowing meat and veggies." Lloyd was back.

Good! "Get ice! All the ice! Karen's been burned! Barrbarrbarreee!"

Lloyd disappeared.

Jeremy continued his hop-jump progress up the stairs from the beach, through Reception and into the kitchen. Lloyd had poured several pounds of ice over a towel in the sink. He rolled the towel up and rushed past Jeremy.

Brenda and Karen had reached the landing outside Reception. Karen was whimpering; her eyes rolled. A patch of skin on her upper arm had slipped. Lloyd and Brenda eased her down to the wood floor and settled the ice-filled towel across her. Jeremy slid a pillow under her knees.

Brenda asked, "Did you call anyone?"

Call? "Lloyd-" Phone?"No."

Brenda ran inside.

Karen wanted to hold his hand. He told her, "Don't worry. Brenda must be calling the City. What happened?"

"It was tipping over. I tried to stop it."

"Should have called me."

"No time. Your knee."

"Someone."

"I know." Her eyes closed, her hand went slack.

He found Brenda in Reception talking to the settler-magic box in her hand. "Karen Winslow. Wave Rider Inn. Got it?" The little projector behind the desk flashed white-on-blue print into the air and she said, "Yes. I'm her daughter, Brenda Winslow, but she'll probably come in with Daddy, Jeremy Winslow. That's right-" The air blinked ruby script at her, and she frowned. "Daddy? When were you born?"

"Twenty-seven eleven." The truth. He didn't know a better answer.

"Where?"

"Skip it.''

"Haven on the Crab, Iremember. Daddy, they're having trouble finding your credit references."

Jeremy Winslow didn't answer. Brenda said, "You came here, so you took Mom's name. Would they have your name from before?"

"I hope not."

"Jeremy Hearst. Dad?"

"They won't find me."

His daughter gave him a long, hard stare. Then she told the phone, "Try Barry Winslow. Uncle Barry, Karen Winslow's brother." The screen flashed. "Yes, that's right. Daddy, see if you can find Uncle Barry!"

Jeremy hop-jumped away. He heard Brenda's voice continue behind him. "Yes, I'll have him phone and give you a reference, but send an ambulance now. She's burned over half her body! When can we expect.. . ?"

Barry was up two flights of stairs, making dust. Jeremy had to go up after him. Wave Rider had a high noise level. You got to where you barely heard the cras.h.i.+ng waves, but you couldn't hear someone shouting either, Barry moved fast for his age. Jeremy followed him down slowly, favoring the knee that hadn't worked right since the surfing accident.

When he was alone, he let his face have its way.

His face wanted a twitching, teeth-clenching rictus sardonicus. His hands wanted to tear the banister apart. What was he going to tell Brenda? Or, when he must, Karen?

Whatever he told his daughter, he'd have to tell them all. Barry and Chloe would demand to know what was up, and they weren't just his in-laws, they owned part of the restaurant. He didn't see his other children much.

Harlow? Earth, he would have liked to talk to her! His stepmother-inlaw hadn't quite got along with Harold's children. After Harold's death she'd sold them what she owned of Wave Rider, not quite of her own choice. She ran a candle shop in Destiny Town itself, out of Jeremy's reach.

When Karen had survived this horror, she would have to know.

So he'd better build a story, Jeremy thought, gripping the railing as he limped down the stairs.

He'd had a story. It had bought him twenty-seven good years.

They were cl.u.s.tered around Karen when he got down, trying to explain the matter to Chloe and six hotel guests. Asham Barenblatt offered to use his credit reference, but Barry was already on the phone giving his. Karen had been given pills. The way she looked frightened him.

Brenda looked at him and said, "Daddy, the ambulance will be hours getting here. I have to pack. You should pack for Mother."

"I told Medical the same as you used to tell us," Brenda said. She moved briskly about Karen's bedroom, stuffing clothing into the case with unnecessary force, not looking at her father. "Born at Haven on the Crab, little place with six families. Your mother, my grandmother, died. You were three. Your father came by with the spring caravan and took you.

Randall Hearst of Hearst wagon. But Medical's got no record of any of that!"

''It's fiction.''

"Didn't you tell Mother there was no doc.u.mentation? Father dead, stepmother never got to it?"

"It's fiction. Randall Hearst, he's a merchant I barely met when we traded off at the Neck. He wouldn't know me. . . well, he might. Haven's real. Carnot wagon's real too. I'm from Spiral Town."

Brenda hugged a double armful of blouses to her, and stared. "You mean literally Spiral Town?"

"Literally."

"n.o.body leaves Spiral Town."

"I had to. I shot a man. It was an accident " He told her the tale. Marriage in Twerdahl Town. The caravan's long, leisurely trek down the Road. The quick, terrible trip back. Adrift aboard Carder's Boat....

There were tears running down Brenda's face, but she'd finished packing. They left the cases in the hall and crossed to her own bedroom.

He spoke little of the Windfarm, but she knew more. Every child of the mainland studied speckles biology and the biology of the Winds.

When he told of birds killing s.h.i.+mon, she held her breath. When he came to the fight with Andrew, she was looking at her father with horror and fascination.

"You killed him?"

"Yes."

''How?"

"I threw rocks."

He wasn't proud of giving away Duncan's twice-stolen loot. He skipped that, and he skipped over what he'd done with the speckles, though he'd already told Brenda enough to put him back in the Winds. He said only, "I kept out a handful for the Road and gave the pouch to Willametta. Then I walked out. Four days later I was looking down from the ridge at the autumn caravan. It was down to six wagons pulled by tugs. I bit my tongue trying to look nonchalant. They'd have arrested me anyway, scruffy as I was, if I hadn't had the fis.h.i.+ng pole and fish to share around.

"I bought some clothes and a haircut and a bar of soap, enough to make me look civilized. I went on up the Road to the Wave Rider and asked for a job. Your grandfather turned me down."

"I thought-"

"No, he turned me down. I knew a lot about Harold from listening to Barda. I thought I could push his b.u.t.tons. But your grandmother had died and Harold was married again. Harlow met me at the door. I thought she must be Barda's sister Karen. Maybe Harold Winslow didn't like how I looked at his wife.

"So I camped on the beach a little down from Wave Rider. I set up a pit barbecue. Ate a couple of meals at Wave Rider while the money held out. I swam with Otterfolk-"

"Weren't you afraid they'd remember you?"

"Otterfolk don't travel. I'm not even sure this bunch could breed with Otterfolk around the curve of the bay." But he'd learned that much later, and he added, "Sure I was nervous. But they didn't know me and they liked playing with me. Harold's family, they never got time. It's part of the bargain, Brenda. They like us. They're interested. They want to play with us.

"I think Harold's poor overworked family nagged him into hiring someone, and I was there. Temporary, he said. He kept boards for guests.

I taught Harlow how to ride a board, then some of the others tried it-"

"And you told them a story."

"Yeah, I told my tale of a caravan trader and his Roadside son, and I stuck to it. Brenda, I know what happens to anyone crossing the Neck.

They shoot him. I do not know what they do to an island shy who lives among them for twenty-seven years."

There was noise outside the windows, from the Road. They looked out. A tug pulled up towing a boxy vehicle marked with a red cross.

Jeremy hop-limped down the stairs in Brenda's wake.

They were carrying Karen out. She was quiet. . . she looked dead.

The medics stopped so that he could see she was breathing: raggedly, but breathing.

"No, Daddy's not going, I'm going with her," Brenda told them. She put the cases in the ambulance alongside Karen's stretcher, and Lloyd added his. Lloyd was going with his wife.

Brenda asked, "Can't you visit us?"

"No." There were others listening, so he said, "I've got to take care of the inn."

Chloe and Barry began to a.s.sure him that they could handle that, it was slack season, they didn't depend on the cookpit.. . but Brenda and Lloyd climbed into the ambulance, Jeremy waved it away, and it moved off.

Asham Barenblatt and his family boarded the outbound bus the next day.

Jeremy wondered where they'd stay. Outbound was the s.p.a.ceport itself, and beyond that, the caravans. Barbara Barenblatt worked at the s.p.a.ceport that was somewhere up the Road. She couldn't leave during the fine weather season.

There must be facilities for rebuilding the wagons. Maybe they'd stay there.

Now the inn was empty of tenants. They closed all the upstairs windows pending the next caravan's arrival in fourteen days. Chloe and Barry took up the slack. n.o.body expected very much of the pit chef, but he could cook for the rest.

For years Jeremy had watched shuttles streak overhead like slow and vivid meteors, until one day Karen told him that the s.p.a.ceport was just around the bluff to the east. All he had to do was paddle out on a board, and watch.

The shuttles always came out of the west, always came down tens of klicks short of the Neck. Jeremy remembered seeing a takeoff when he was nearing the Neck; but yutzes who thought they'd seen s.p.a.cecraft reentering above them on the Crab had seen only meteors.

The shuttles came down on inverted, nearly invisible flames that flared yellow when they touched the water. Then a boat went out with a line, and the craft, bobbing like a top, was winched to the beach where tracks and a pair of big bulbous structures waited.

Jeremy couldn't get any closer because people in boats would come out to yell at him.

Barbara Barenblatt wouldn't talk about what she did there. Asham wouldn't talk about it. But Jeremy had mentioned his pilot stepson to the Barenblatt children, and maybe they knew something. . . and now they'd gone.

Guild secrets. The s.p.a.ceport stretched from the Road to the beach, Jeremy believed; but a high wall hid all of that from the Road, and boats guarded the beach. They didn't like gawkers from Wave Rider risking cremation under a shuttle flame. The far side of the s.p.a.ceport was a long white line of beach, just visible some days, and then, invisibly far, the Neck. Caravan country, and they didn't want company either.

He knelt at the edge of the pier, water lapping just below his knees, and reached out with a slice of sweet potato. Three flattish heads popped up.

"Winston," he said, and one of the Otterfolk took the sweet potato.

Short arms, wide hands with four thick, short fingers.

Jeremy curled and uncurled four fingers, thumb withheld. Four fish.

He concealed all but the tips of a finger and wiggled those. Shrimp.

Winston disappeared without acknowledgment.

He couldn't ride the waves, or even ease off the dock and swim, because they'd swarm around him and b.u.mp his leg. When the Otterfolk were happy with him, they'd try to surprise or delight him. Today they'd bring whatever fish were nearest.

He couldn't surf out to watch the shuttles land. Time he gave that up anyway. But what was there to do here but worry about Karen?