you'd like to tell me?'
'We're married.'
'Now, I'm still new among you,' Tim said, 'so I have to ask-' Loria burst out laughing. It didn't seem she could stop. Ander said, 'No, Loria can't have two husbands.'
'But you both, you all knew I'd be back.'
'But not now, damn it, Tim! We'd-Loria would have had time to decide.'
'Is this what happened to Haron Welsh?'
Loria's laughter had trailed, off. She wouldn't meet his eyes, now, but she nodded.
'Went off with a caravan. Came back. Found out he wasn't married? And you thought he'd tell me?'
Nod.
Ander put the baby in her arms, and stepped in front of her. 'So, you're here. What happened to you, Tim?'
'At the Neck they trade yutzes. The autumn caravan was every trader who ever-' He was so tired and so miserable. Tim felt he was about to faint. He didn't dare. '-ever watched me shoot a man. I had to run. I took enough speckles to get me here.'
At the corner of his eye, motion. Three or four older people at the door to the toolhouse. He recognized Julya Franken by her long white still-lovely hair, and remembered when he had last seen her.
She'd been handing out blades on the day of the weed cutting.
The four went into the toolhouse.
'You're not speckles-shy,' Susie Cloochi decided. 'You took enough speckles-'
Tim stooped and picked up his open pack. And ran straight at Tedned Grant.
'-from who? Tedned!'
Tedned was a skinny boy/man who flinched from big waves, or wrestling, or quarrels or confrontations. Still he was no runt. With all eyes on him, he tried to get his fists up. Tim knocked him aside and dodged between houses.
He emerged between high rows of corn, with nobody in sight. Paths ran between the garden plots. He pelted upRoad, counting.
Tedned was behind him, not catching up.
Tedned had run his bike between houses rather than meet Tim in the Road. There ahead, those houses. When Tim had next seen him, the bike was gone. Tedned must have dropped his bike and kept running, yelling into every house he passed. And here were the houses, and one was the Younger Grants' house, and the bike was leaning against a wall.
Tim was too late to board the bicycle as Tedned came running up. It wasn't as if Tim had choices. He couldn't make for the water, not yet. He left the bike and ran at Tedned. Tedned got his arms up and Tim punched between his elbows, a quick one to the solar plexus, the heel of his hand to the nose.
Now the bike. They had let grit get into the gears. It started slow. He pedaled past Tedned, who was curled up and trying to find his breath.
Twerdahl Town's defenders were pouring between the houses now, and others would be running along the mud, but Tim was ahead and moving considerably faster than a running man. He could see the toolhouse, the last building upRoad.
Well short of the toolhouse, he turned again. Between the houses. Out onto the mud. Off the bicycle before it got mired, because Tim Bednacourt was no thief.
DownRoad, a horde was running toward him, though they seemed out of breath. UpRoad, only four, and they all looked as old as Julya Franken. But they bristled with weed cutters.
He might have escaped them, he thought, if he'd turned toward the Road. But then what? He'd stopped alongside the surfboards lined up along the wall of the Elder Bednacourts' house. Tim snatched up the biggest and held it over his head as he ran for the water.
They tried to follow him, of course. A few were better surfers than he was, and they were hot on his tail, but he wasn't surfing now. Once beyond the waves he need only paddle.
Paddle for his life, slipping over the water, on and on. The ache in his shoulders grew until it swallowed everything else, while the current carried him southeast.
Ultimately his pursuers were too far from Twerdahl Town for their comfort, too close to Spiral Town, and they turned back one by one.
17
Carder s Boat
Black for photosynthesis. Sagan and Schklovskii were right.
-Gerot, Xenobiology
He thought he was going to die.
He thought he didn't care.
There was nothing to drink. There was nothing chasing him anymore. There was nothing to do but paddle.
A thousand times lie turned his eyes toward shore. A wave would carry him in. He could live between Twerdahl Town and Spiral Town; live like a hunted animal, until his mind turned animal too. When he could make his arms move, he paddled. When he rested, the shore still drifted past him by infinitesimal degrees. His shoulders were one long moan of pain. The sun burned into his neck and his arms and the backs of his calves.
He lay in salt water. The board floated two centimeters below the surface. If he let his head rest on the wood, he could drown. The offbalance weight of his pack drove him crazy, but never quite crazy enough to drop it overboard.
When he remembered this part of his life, he never knew how long anything took.
He was drifting in a stupor with his chin propped on his arms on the second night, or the third. He was flying Cavorite in his mind....
The long, slow drift from the landing site down to the Neck and beyond. Day and night shifts? Stop to rest, or to shed the heat from riding a fusion flame, or to look at anything interesting. Side jaunt to Haunted
Bay, because cameras in the sky found seabed geometries suggesting an undersea city. .
Trying to see why they ran the Road so high.
Twerdahl Town filled the whole space between the Road and the beach. Cavorite had flown close to shore when it made the Road there. As it moved down the coast, the Road ran higher. Near the Neck it ran as high as it could get, right along the crest....s if Twerdahl and his crew had become afraid of the sea.
He toyed with an odd notion. When had Cavorite learned of the Otterfolk?
Teaching programs named thousands of extinct species of life on Earth. All species die or change over millions of years. A meteoroid impact had rendered all the dinosaurs extinct, barring those that sired the birds... but many species died because Man was good at changing his environment.
There was a shadow among shadows ahead of him. .
Had Cavorite laid the Road to protect the Otterfolk?
He remembered, though, that the Hub in Spiral Town was far, far inland. Cavorite was hovering over burnt-out alien wilderness when it drew the lines of Spiral Town. The Twerdahls must have run their loops of Road to within a klick of shore, stayed near the water for forty klicks farther, then eased upslope toward the peaks again..
Avoiding the sea.
The landers had charred the land and boiled the lakes, but a flame couldn't reach below the sea. Future generations would follow the Road, spiraling outward until they gradually approached whatever came out of the sea. They'd have time to prepare.
Cavorite's crew feared the alien.
