Destiny's Road

"Yeah. It'd work better with a guy who wasn't so, mmm. Impressive.

Rafik? This could have gone on all night, you know. Cooking smells helped. Probes get hungry too."

"Redbeard found something in the men's," Jemmy said. "He hid it."

"Paper?"

"Not sure."

"Message from s.h.i.+mon. That's all right, Jemmy. I found it and took out the part about you."

"What now?"

Barda took her bowl to the sink. She hadn't actually eaten much.

Nerves, maybe. "We wait for Andrew," she said. "Then maybe we run. I want to talk to Rafik, but let's get our showers first."

22.

Plans Destiny's ecology, after all, will have its own agenda.

-Dutton, #2 Hydroponics He couldn't remember hitting the bed. Now something was pus.h.i.+ng his toes down and the barracks was buzzing like a hive, and through his eyelids he felt the heat of a stare.

They were both watching him, the Nogales twins. They were on his bed, their weight pulling the sheet down on his feet. When his eyes opened one said severely, "Men don't turn us down. Most men like rubbing up against two women just alike."

Jemmy said, "You may be the best opportunity I never had. Who told you I needed distracting?"

"Wibbya. You weren't supposed to notice the pack or count heads-"

"-Just us," and a hand in his chest hair.

Jemmy felt damp and grungy. He'd been too tired to shower. He asked, "Am I getting another chance? Should I shower first?"

"Andrew's here. They want you."

"What time is it? Did I get any sleep?"

"They don't give us clocks."

They were down at the tables: Andrew, Barda, Rafik, and Willametta. The rest were staying clear. A few were asleep.

Andrew Dowd was wet and triumphant. "Jeremy Bboocher," he said- "Do I get to be Jemmy Bboocher now?"

"The rest of your life," Half-beard said expansively, "and I get to be Andrew Dowd. Jeremy, we need to know what the proles know. Did they get s.h.i.+mon's note in the men's?"

"He, the one with the red beard, he didn't look at it. Barda, you said it mentioned me?" Because if that note didn't, then some other would.

"Yeah, it did. I copied it with that part missing."

Jemmy was still getting his brain up to speed. "They thought I was hiding something because there were two cabinets I didn't open, but they searched those. They'll look for bird blood on s.h.i.+mon's poncho, but maybe the rain washed-" He saw the look that pa.s.sed among them. "Barda?

s.h.i.+mon's poncho?"

The big woman shuddered. "No. I sucked the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d dry and kept him distracted. I set him to keeping you out of trouble so he couldn't talk to proles. I did not put a b.l.o.o.d.y poncho on him. But," she whispered, "I would have."

Andrew said, "Couldn't. Rain would wash off bird blood. Rafik?"

Rafik grinned. "We soaked the inside of a pack in bird blood. We gave that to s.h.i.+mon. He had to open the pack to gather speckles, and that let out the smell. The birds were in place-"

"Sh.e.l.ls," Andrew said suddenly. "Rafik, tell me you didn't leave a mock-turtle sh.e.l.l for proles to find!"

Rafik shrugged. "What of it? Trusty, they know there were spectre birds in the field. They have to guess the birds went after something they could eat. How a mock turtle got there, that's the part they'll never know."

Andrew Dowd was nodding reluctantly.

Rafik said, "When we got back I took s.h.i.+mon's pack, took out the speckles, turned it inside out, and let the rain wash it clean. They'll be looking at the wrong pack anyway."

"You switched the speckles?"

"Sure. Then Wiliya and the yutz, they got me back in."

"See, Jeremy, there's bird blood soaked all through the speckles in s.h.i.+rnon's pack. We can't bet the Parole Board have that, so those speckles went in the stash and Rafik put speckles from the stash in his pack. Rafik, you didn't scant that, I devotely hope-"

"No, Trusty. Generous."

Andrew saw the heat in Willametta's cheeks and the glare in her eyes. "w.i.l.l.ya, I didn't want you to know exactly what you were hiding. Be too much of a pointer." He waved it off. "So. The spy is dead, we changed the only message he left, the probes don't know we've got clothes and they don't know someone was loose today. Are we clear on that? Have I left anything out?"

Jemmy asked, "Who wears seven windbreakers and six shorts and a merchant's pack?"

"Barda. Me. Amnon. Shar Willoughby. Henry. You. We had to throw away the one you were wearing on top. It was torn to shreds."

They were grinning at him. Rafik said, "You don't

Aghast, Jemmy booked about him. Of course. And we'll still look like- "Well, it only works if there's only one," Jemmy said. "Andrew, what happens to the rest of us?"

"We take all but eight," Andrew said. "It's nine now, I guess. The baby."

"You're leaving them-"

"Jeremy, we'd never get past the Parole Board, not by Road. We're going over the mountains. We'll pick up the Road on the other side. Eight of us don't want to try it."

"Winnie Maclean?" Too frail- "She wants to come. The Nogabes sisters don't." "I'll miss the twins," Rafik said soberly.

fe-re-my, not Jemmy. Have to practice. Later-"You're leaving eight people to describe how we did it?"

"The ones who aren't coming, I didn't tell them everything, and that's okay with them. They know there was a spy. Jeremy, we never could have taken Miledy Waithe and her baby, so what's the point? Too many of us are looking at a five-year hitch and four years gone already. If I tried to make them come along, they'd drop out somewhere in the rain and I'd never find them."

"That probe said something about a free ride-?"

Willametta said, "If you give birth in here, the baby goes back out and you go with her. Only twice, though. Then they char your tubes."

"But men don't get pregnant." Rafik laughed. "We're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g for nothing."

"Fourteen of us."

"We're the maxers," Andrew said. "Destroy life support, it's seven years, and they're generous with that term, aren't they, Wibbya? Kill, it's seven years. I killed two, never mind why, the Board won't listen.

Now, I scouted the mountain today. That place you found, Rafik? It doesn't work. I had to go farther. Six klicks toward the fields, then up.

There's a channel up to a ridge that runs another two klicks back. Must be an old flow. Then another channel up, and that'lb take us over."

"And down to the Road!" Barda didn't see Andrew's shrug, or ignored it. "On the Road we can pa.s.s. If anyone comes, the rest hide, we do the talking. But Jeremy's right, Andrew. Two of us together still look...

gaunt?"

Jemmy said, "Like so many liches risen untimely from our graves.

One of us at a time is only skinny, but two or three together- You can't see it? You've been together too long. Andrew, can we all climb?" He could. No thirteen felons could outclimb Jemmy Bloocher.

"Don't know," Andrew said. "I need as many as I can get. We're going to take over a caravan."

Jemmy sighed. They were crazy after all.

Barda said, "We need you to tell us what they're like. How they're armed."

Well, it had to be dealt with. He asked, "Where were you going to jump them? This side of the Neck? That way you're only fighting fifty or sixty merchants. Other way, you'd be fighting yutzes too."

"This side, sure. ~ce'll be lucky to get that far. But we'll only be facing bird guns."

"That's yutz guns, Andrew. They're the same as bird guns but with a solid bullet for putting holes in lungsharks and bandits. When bandits jumped us we shot them with yutz guns. But when the merchants went off alone to kill all the bandits, they took stuff from Spadoni wagon that they wouldn't let us look at. I saw just enough. Prole guns, Andrew!"

Silence.

"The toolhouse is locked till morning. You've got no guns at all."

Andrew stood, turned, opened one of the bins with a key. He lifted it just into sight: a prole gun.

A shudder ran through him. Jemmy said, "We looked in there." His hand reached out without consulting his forebrain.

Andrew pulled it away. "I came in after the proles left."

"Bullets?''

"Two chains." Andrew lifted those too, and Jemmy stood to look. He had never seen chains of bullets meant to feed into a prole gun; but, standing, he could see that both loops were part empty.

It was suicide, and, more than that, it was murder. They'd end up killing as many merchants as they could before the merchants killed all of them.

He could rave against spilling blood all over the Road, but would it persuade these already-murderers? Or would they only kill Jemmy Bloocher? Try something else. He asked, "Do you know how to make a caravan move?"

Andrew said, "You do."

"I know how to tend chugs," Jemmy said. "I'm a chef. I did a little mending. I never drove a wagon. I can't do it all." Jemmy wondered if they'd believe that. "What time of year is it? The date tells us if we'll get a caravan on its way to the Crab, or coming back, or nothing at all.

w.i.l.l.ya, what's the date? Rafik? I've lost track myself."

"We can't wait," Willametta said.

Rafik said, "We'll find someone on the Road. Ask."

"Uh-huh. Then we'll know if we're between caravans. That could take months."

Murderous silence.

"Of course we might outrun a caravan. They can't move faster than a chug. But you didn't even know that much, did you? What you don't know, doesn't it scare you?

"Now, if there's a caravan, and if fourteen of us could take it, you'd lose some wagons just by shooting them up. Bullets kill chugs too.

That gives you a short wagon train, and maybe eight or ten left alive to run it, and nothing to sell-"

Andrew released a bit of his fury. "Hold it, you son of a dirty bird! Why nothing to sell?"

"Andrew, a caravan full of trade goods is on its way to meet the other caravan! They stop on the Neck, nose to nose. They transfer all the yutzes and throw a big party. They see we're fakes and shoot us all dead.

"So you can't stop the outbound caravan. You could stop the caravan that's coming back and turn it around, but it'll be full of stuff they bought on the Road, and every little town along the Road is going to notice one caravan following another. With not enough people to defend it. And that, Andrew, is when your pitiful few survivors of that last fight get to die at the hands of bandits. By the way, there's no point in negotiating with bandits. They're speckles-shy. By then, I guess we'll be too."

Barda Winslow stood. She said, "Go away."

Jemmy went.

Hot water flooded over him. He stopped trying to think. Just let it happen. Ancient luxury. The water never had run like this at Bloocher Farm.

A voice shouted "Hey!" and a hand touched his arm. Then the twins were under the shower with him. He laughed and shouted into an ear, "What if someone wants the men's room?"

"Amnon's guarding."

"We asked w.i.l.l.ya. She said you could use a distraction."

"If anyone else comes in, we break this up."

"Rita's mostly here to take care of me. Some men, they'd get rough."

They connected, he and Dolores, sitting in a thundering flood of hot water. Rita was ma.s.saging his back and shoulders, and that felt good.