He read on, while afternoon darkened to evening.
Base One had delayed Cavorite's departure, had afflicted them with a long list of projects, had repeatedly tried to cancel the expedition. The first settlers had not perceived any need for haste.
A nasty shock, as Jeremy had guessed, following the nasty shock of Argos's betrayal. Base One was in denial.
But, though sea salt would not sustain Base One, Earthlife animals made nerves too. They were good at secreting potassium. Ancient kings had learned to confiscate manure piles at the first sign of war, for nuggets of saltpeter to grind up for gunpowder. But saltpeter-potassium nitrate-could also be ground into food.
So Cavorite drifted down the coast at a snail's pace, leaving a snail's trail of molten rock. They would fulfill all of their mission: seed Earthlife wherever they went, pause to sample local life, look for places a village might thrive, investigate signs of what might be intelligence. Let the ungrateful bastards wait and wonder. Cavorite's crew could take their time.
In due time Cavorite returned to Base One emptied of Earthlife seeds and infant animals, and loaded with samples of rock and Destiny life, maps, refined potassium and speckles.
What had gone wrong at Base One?
They found plumbing redirected to sterilize sewage with heat, then vent it above croplands. That would have done the job, if the job had been more than ten percent finished! Maybe they were stopped by the stench.
Livestock implied manure. Manure had even been raked into heaps, but the heaps lay untouched. Nobody had picked through them for saltpeter. Then again, there wasn't much. Potassium must first be put into fertilizer to feed the grass! Grass didn't make nerves.
As their intelligence dropped, had they forgotten what was at stake? Cavorite's crew might speculate, but there was nobody to ask. There were nobody at Base One who could still talk coherently.
The records that followed were nearly incoherent with medical jargon. Here Jeremy sensed a rage shared but never expressed. Twerdahl's crew had fed and washed and dressed their former colleagues, dressed the sores and treated the illnesses caused by dirt and randomly deposited sewage, and cleaned up after them until they grew to detest them.
Jeremy found reference to discipline problems, and murky speculation as to what constitutes rape and consent, theft versus custody, murder versus euthanasia, for people who had ceased to be people.
This wasn't in the teaching tapes at Spiral Town! But Barda Winslow had tried to tell him.
Some of the sick ones recovered some of their intelligence, some of their memory. Not all. Central-nervous- system nerves, once dead, don't grow back.
Cavorite's crew came to realize that they had become the primary colony on Destiny.
They founded Terminus far enough outside the Winds to escape the continual howling- 'Move it,' someone said. Before he could react, someone was handing
Jeremy his crutches and lifting him to his feet. 'Set?'
'Ah-' Wait, I want to look up- The man sat down. A doctor. He erased Jeremy's file and called up something else.
-Caravans!
If Jeremy's sudden rage showed through, the doctor hadn't seen it. Jeremy was on crutches and still getting his balance, and that was as well. He had time to visit Karen before he saw Rita Nogales.
Karen was awake but a bit fuddled. He tried to tell her what he'd learned about speckles, Cavorite, Argos, the Windfarm, Destiny Town. She listened. She tried to comfort him, as if he'd suffered a personal injury. Presently she fell asleep.
'Looks good,' Nogales said, turning the luminous interior of a human knee before her eyes. 'A doctor like Itchy Wald does a neater job, but he spends too much time probing around in the joint. Trauma. Brendan is brisk. So, stay on crutches and don't do much walking for another day, then maybe we'll take the cast off.'
'Would you look in on Karen before you go?'
'Sure.'
He started to stand. 'I should catch a bus-'
She said, 'Wait, wait, wait. You owe me a story.'
He sat down. 'You owe me, I think. Andrew was going to use the prole gun on you all.'
'No birdfucking allowed' I knew that speckles-shy birdfucker-'
'It's the law-''
'Go on.'
'I was expecting it, Rita. He turned around and I yelled and jumped him. The rest piled on. Of course he tried to kill me later... .' He told her more than he'd told Brenda, but again he left out the speckles. I did it, I made them into a restaurant before I had to leave, and now I knew how!'
Running from the Swan, Jemmy Bloocher might have begged a ride from the inbound caravan. Go to Destiny Town, the end of the Road, Cavorite. In the instant that was possible, he'd remembered what the Windfarmers had called him.
Crab shy. A stranger in a place where he didn't understand the rules. He'd done that before. And generally messed it up.
He'd gone outbound instead.
From Barda's description he'd had no trouble finding Wave Rider. 'All I had to do was get Harold Winslow to give me a chance.'
'The daughter?'
'Karen? She was two months pregnant when I got there. She never told me who. Maybe I've served him dinner. Maybe not. Turnover's high in the caravans, or he might be from the spaceport. Rita, are you thinking I targeted the innkeeper's daughter?'
'Didn't you?''
'No no no. I only wanted to make myself a pit chef. I wasn't staying. And Barda didn't know Harlow. She worried me. Karen was just the little sister. Then we, I started noticing her, we started talking while she was pregnant with Mustafa.'
'Tell me about her. She's my patient too. I can tell by her skin, she gets a lot more sunlight than most human beings.'
'Karen was the one who talked to the Otterfolk before I came. She swims, and Wave Rider has a pier; she didn't have to bull her way through the waves. She gave birth in the water. Later I taught her to surf.'
'But Otterfolk don't talk, do they?'
'Karen taught me to read their dance. That's her word, dance.' He talked about Karen and himself. He was never boss at Wave Rider. He never owned any part of the restaurant. Any investment was emotional. Karen had never demanded that he show ambition.
'She has you by the balls.'
'They're still there.'
'Show me.'
He shied off. Rita laughed.
He'd stayed nearly faithful. Pressed, he admitted four affairs in those twenty-seven years. As for Karen, he was sure only of a wagonmaster who may have been Mustafa's father. He was an old man now, and Mustafa flew the orbital shuttles.
'Yeah, you weren't staying. Twenty-seven years?'
He didn't laugh.
She said, 'I'm a real doctor now, a surgeon. It's what Dolores wanted to be. When she, when that birdfucker-'
'Dolores had empathy.'
'She couldn't stand to cut a person open. For me that's the easy part. Wanting to fix something broken, that's easy too. Jeremy, if Medical knew I was in the Windfarm, they might ease me out. Might not.'
'I'd be in worse trouble than you.' They'd kill me, he didn't say. Reassure her, yes, but he didn't want Rita Nogales thinking in terms of extortion.
