killing, you tell him. 'I was there, I saw it all.' Babble! But you haven't seen Jemmy since then, and you don't think you ever will. Jemmy, you heard everything Thonny said? You tell it that way coming back
Once again Jemmy moved along the shore. Two more fences to cross. He went back up through rows of lettuce, the Wayne Holding. Where he crossed the Road it was deep into its first curve.
Gasoline Alley, then the next inward loop of Road, then Baker Street. The graveyard had been well beyond the town for two good centuries, but Spiral Town had reached it at last. Jemmy stepped from the empty shops of Harrow Street into a grove of willows.
Destiny life wouldn't grow among the graves. The Spiral Town graveyard covered more than a square mile with nothing but Earthlife: long, lank grass, clover, and trees up to 240 years old.
Jemmy drifted like smoke among the trees. There was cover to hide him. The eyes he expected might be imaginary after all.
A lifegiver of Spiral Town would be buried with a handful of seeds. His will might name the Variety of tree. If several sprouted, tenders would transplant all but one, and a marker would be fired into the bark for the lifegiver within its roots.
The oldest trees were huge, chosen for majesty: oaks, banyans, redwoods.
Majestic trees hadn't always survived well, and variety had come into fashion. For a long lifetime the lifegivers bore nut trees and fruit trees. Then someone had decided that the practice was disrespectful or something.
But an extensive grove still bore fruit and nuts. Jemmy picked a handful of cherries, a few plums, an orange. He stuffed his pockets, then settled in the shadows of the gnarled old trees to eat.
The markers around him were all above eye level. Jemmy tried to read them, but they were only a glitter in the dark. Holograms need light.
When the holomarker gun failed it would be a major tragedy. It was settler magic, irreplaceable.
On an ordinary night Jemmy would have been asleep by now. Though he felt that he might never sleep again, he was weary. His life had lost all direction in one deafening blast. Now the bark against his back was too comfortable. It would be easy to stay where he was.
Thonny's hat was a bit small, a bit tight. He took it off and waved it at the flies buzzing his ears. The buzzing went away, then came back, sounding like sleep.
Had he been dozing?
He surged to his feet, swung his pack onto his back, and was in motion. If he sat down again, they'd find him asleep in the graveyard come morning!
The slopes above Spiral Town resembled chaparral, the dwarf forest of California. It was Earthlife laced with surviving Destiny life, too thick and too hostile to hike through. The bare rock above would not hide a fleeing murderer.
But plants only covered the slopes up to fifteen hundred feet above the Road, and stopped quite suddenly. Frost line, the teaching programs would have called it, but Destiny never got that cold. The Destiny plants ran out of something else: air pressure, water, soil nutrients, something. Earthlife grew higher up, but sparsely.
Jemmy was at the frost line when lights came on above him.
He'd ducked back into the chaparral before his mind quite caught up.
Lights glared and men moved around a great ragged hole in the side of Mount Apollo. The lights within the cavern showed great dark silvergray sheets peeling away like the pages of a thousand books, everywhere along the walls and roof. A man moved to the back of the cavern and pulled. Then, nearly hidden under layers of Begley cloth sheeting, he staggered toward a cart.
It was Jemmy's first sight of the Apollo Caverns. Children weren't allowed here, even older children.
Argos had carried several experimental von Neumann devices... a phrase every child learned and few could define.
Begley cloth was one. A handful of self-reproducing machines just big enough to be dots had been dropped into a hole in a hillside. For two and a half centuries they had been eating into Mount Apollo, carving out a fairyland underground as they followed veins of... silicon and some small set of metals; he'd seen the list in one of the teaching programs... and made it into sheets that would turn sunlight into power, fringed with wires to carry the power to machines.
Also, the dots made more of themselves.
The sheeting was Spiral Town's most dependable trade good, and the caravan was in town. He should have avoided Mount Apollo at all costs. But he damned well didn't dare wait for daylight!
He scuttled along the border between the chaparral and the bare rock above, hunching like a chug until he was out of sight of the Apollo Caverns, and far beyond.
By night the New Hann Holding was just another patch of wilderness, and Jemmy couldn't tell where he crossed it. It might have made a nice resting place. Merchants might see it that way too. Jemmy kept moving.
He walked through the night. Rarely did the Road come in view. At daylight he crawled into a manzanita grove and let his mattress inflate.
On tilted ground, in a glare of sunlight sieved through red manzanita trunks and the branches and lace of some tall Destiny tree, sleep was hard to find. He slept with evil memories. Eyes and mouth wide in horror: Fedrick felt what Jemmy Bloocher had done to him. Blood flooded his vest. The fist-sized hole in his back- From time to time he woke and, with his eyes closed against the filtered light, thought how much he had lost.
Somewhere around noon he ate half the speckle bread. It was his last speckles for the foreseeable future.
What would satisfy the merchants? Just how badly did they want his
blood? Would a face-saving gesture satisfy them? Or his exile? Or would they take reprisals against Bloocher Farm?
Grow a beard or something. Lie about your age, many someone and move to another farm.
They'd been pressed for time, trying to decide what to do now. Even so, Jemmy hadn't liked hearing that. Even if it worked, even if the merchants let it work... how was it better than just moving on down the Road? Either way, the man who had been Jemmy Bloocher was gone.
Better, maybe, if he died here in the hills.
Many forms of Destiny life were poisons. Hadn't that been trollhair, the last time he'd stopped at a stream? It was hair-fine silver stuff, soft looking threads with very sharp tips. He'd given those clumps a lot of room. Being scratched by trollhair was an easy death, a long slide into sleep.
His family need never know. Jemmy never came to meet us.
What had sent his thoughts straying toward suicide?
Jemmy realized with a start that he was sleeping in the shade of a fool cage.
There were fool cages growing among the manzanita, all around him. Four feet of trunk flared into a thorny oval cage of black wicker decorated with bronze and scarlet lace, and a few tiny bones in the cage.
A Destiny bird could perch on any of a number of Destiny plants and find lace to eat. Some plants grew gaudy lace displays so that birds would transport their seeds. But the lace within a fool cage was a lure and a trap. A bird could perch on the upper branches of a fool cage, but any breeze that rattled the branches would cause them to trap a bird's feet, pull it in.
Most Destiny birds had learned to stay away. These bones belonged to Earthlife.
Curdis and Thonny and Brenda would expect to find him on the Road. Jemmy rolled his mattress, got his pack on, and crawled until the plants were thick enough to hide him walking upright.
The water table was lower now: the plants reached no more than three hundred meters above the flatland and the Road. Jemmy traveled by night. By day there were plants to hide him. He slept away from water. A stream might make him a target.
At night the star fields were gaudy, gorgeous. Quicksilver was brilliant but tiny and only showed for a few minutes after sunset. Kismet, Destiny's massive little moon, cast no more light even at the full. Any meteor might be Cavorite in reentry, or Argos among the asteroids, making a few seconds' burn. The land at night was black; a man could hurt himself thinking he saw more detail than was there.
He could only glimpse the Road in patches, and the sea far beyond. Once he saw a boat moving parallel to shore. Once, a house or shed that looked abandoned. He hadn't yet seen a human being. Then again, he didn't intend to.
There were Earthlife birds everywhere, a hundred varieties of song at morning and evening, hawks hovering
