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 angel hair 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
