14
The Speckles Can
Think of us as priests of evolution.
-Caravan proverb
He climbed as far as the caravan trail before he looked back. They wouldn't follow him in the dark...?
It was already too dark to tell.
Thirst was near killing him.
Well, he was new at this. He followed the caravan trail to the Spectre River. He watched from cover while the last of the light died, before he crept to the water and drank his fill.
Then he kept climbing.
He woke sheltered in bushes, just below the Road, on the wrong side of the Spectre River. He woke joyful. He was free! Anyone could outrun a caravan.
He watched Baytown wake. He watched the boats put to sea. Any tiny fleck of white on the water might be Otterfolk. It was all a wonder, but the thing he wanted most was to go down.
Did he do wrong to run? He was frantic to question them. All those discarded Otterfolk shells! Fishers must be in constant contact with Otterfolk.
Why did the merchants let Baytowners inspect their wares the day before they bought? They didn't do that anywhere else along the Road, except in Tail Town itself. Did the Otterfolk tell the locals what they needed?
How?
All his traveling had only bought him more questions.
He saw no way across the Spectre. The bridge lay too close to Baytown. Baytown knew that he had stolen a boat. They knew he had landed on the forbidden beach. The shadow of the mountains was withdrawing from Baytown, and sunlight would soon touch the mountains where he hid.
The flat Road itself hid nothing and grew nothing.
If he tried to hunt what lived in the brush, Baytown fishers would see brush moving on the mountain. He didn't dare even reach up into a fool cage.
But the slopes above the Road bloomed with Earthlife crops that hadn't been harvested since Cavorite passed. He crept among them like a snake, and gorged on fruits and berries. He collected beans, several kinds of nuts, and a few root vegetables. The beans he set soaking in a bottle.
He cooked after dark in a rock fire pit tall enough to hide the light.
Then he climbed in the dark until he reached bare rock.
In the morning the Spectre had become a thousand springs. Crossing was easy.
Now there were none to spy on him at all. Nobody lived on this long stretch between Baytown and the distillery. Tim stayed high, at the interface between Earthlife growth and bare rock.
Fruits and grains grew here, and the occasional fool cage with something trapped inside. Rotten bird meat would still make bait for catfish. He didn't hunt; someone might hear gunfire. He walked wide around the occasional wild pig. Once he speared an unwary rabbit with his weed cutter. He was never able to do that again.
He'd traveled this way before.
He watched the Road for signs of pursuit. Merchants must know about bicycles, and Tim couldn't outrun those. He'd be wary for a while.
But nobody followed. In ten days he was halfway home.
He'd been seeing birds as big as men. He hadn't seen one fly, but they ran like the wind. Ostriches. The land was flat up to an abrupt 'frost line,' where bare rock suddenly rose nearly straight for five or six hundred meters.
He was halfway between the Neck and Spiral Town, he judged, high on the spine of the Crab. A klick's stretch of chaparral, of tiny Earthlife oranges and berry bushes and Destiny thorns, barred him from the Road. Far ahead he could see a vertical white thread of waterfall.
The long stretch of lonely coast was ending. The Homes and Wilsons were friends of the caravans, and so was every community beyond. How would they treat a yutz found wandering loose? Tim would have crept past the distillery and dairy; but it seemed to him that he was becoming clumsy.
Nothing serious. He'd left the Otterfolk shell behind, three mornings in a row. The shell was proof of some terrible truth that he hadn't yet fully understood. It served as a platter too: it kept food out of the dirt. He needed it.
This morning he'd lost time doubling back to get the shell, again, and he'd found his fire pit sitting like a signature. He threw the rocks into the bushes, as usual, but this was getting scary. He didn't want to end like Jael Harness.
There was no sure way to recognize speckles deficiency.
He could keep track of the days, eleven now, and so what? He could move more carefully, look around himself more often, avoid some mistakes that way. More likely he'd just forget the question, and gradually all the patterns in his mind would go too.
He was a couple of caravan-days down Road from the distillery. For now he'd keep to the heights. He'd reach the falls tonight and go down in the morning-hide the gun first-approach the distillery by the Road, unless they found him first.
Every child knew that planets glowed by reflected sunlight. Quicksilver was brilliant before it passed behind the sun. These last few days, with its shadowed side turned toward Destiny, Quicksilver had been nearly invisible; but now it was crossing the sun.
Half an hour before sunset, Tim could just glance at the westering sun and glimpse a black dot on the solar disk before he snatched his gaze away.
Children did that. Adults yelled at them for it. A child who tried such a thing with Earth's hotter, brighter sun would blind himself. Tim could blind himself if he blinked the sun too near noon. If he let the sun get too far down the sky, the dot would blur out.
But he'd caught it.
So he sat on a boulder and waited for his vision to come back, and wondered why he was wasting time. Loria waited ahead, a caravan was crawling up his tail, the falls he'd seen was still ahead, and Tim Bednacourt sat on a rock waiting for dark.
Because he needed rocks to build his fire pit, and water to cook.
He hadn't seen loose rocks earlier in the day. Here was a convenient spring near a convenient landslide, a raw cleft in the rock spilling stones just small enough to lift easily. This boulder would do for a backstop, and when he brushed the coals away it would stay warm for hours: he'd sleep with his back against it.
He'd stopped to gather berries and blink at the sun. He'd washed himself thoroughly, and his clothes too, to make himself presentable. Dawdling here rather than hoping to find more rocks ahead.
His vision was coming back. Tim looked down and saw char marks.
He slid off the boulder and into the brush to think it through.
Marks of a fire.
Of course he hadn't looked for char marks on the rocks he used. He made his fires in the dark!
Vulcanism and landslides made these stonefalls. But he'd found stones conveniently clustered these past ten days, spaced a scant daywalk apart for a man carrying a pack and stopping to hunt and gather and cook.
He'd been pulling his fire pits apart after use, and so had someone else, it seemed. Someone who built much bigger fire pits. Not just a wanderer. Several men together.
Now what?
Don't hunt. He'd gathered fruit and some barley. Did he dare cook the barley? Nobody had seen his fires....ad they?
He'd been more than careful. The mountain was bare above where he built his fires; no human lived there. Someone close might have whiffed smoke, but nobody had seen it rising in the dark. He built his stone circles tall. Nobody could have seen fire within Tim Hann's fire pits, not unless he were floating in the sky.
At dusk he built his stone circle and his tiny fire. There was the risk that he had been seen, that he was being
