Larry Niven - Destiny's Road

The bus stopped in the middle of a block to let them off. Lloyd was chattering. “We thought we'd take you to Romanoff's for dinner tomorrow. After twenty-seven years eating your own cooking? But it's eight blocks from Medical.”

Jeremy's wife's father's second wife was Jeremy's age. She was dark with black kinky hair, white showing through now. Her beauty had refined itself. Why she'd married old Harold was something he had never asked. She was too good for him.

Twenty-seven years ago the vision of Harlow standing in the doorway of Wave Rider had gone straight to his glandular system. He'd held himself polite and diffident, a pit chef looking for a job; but what had she seen in his eyes? He'd never asked.

Had Harold been relieved when Jeremy married Karen? Today... she was not much changed, but he knew what she saw from the dismay in her eyes. A young man grown old, fatigued and in pain.

“What on-? I think you'd better have the downstairs,” she said. “Used to be an office.”

Harlow leased one quarter of a big two-story building of poured stone. The old office was big enough for a bureau and a big futon-big enough for Brenda and Lloyd, but they'd moved upstairs-and an old computer with a dark screen.

Anything he did to his left leg hurt. He crawled down the crutches, maneuvering around the leg's rigidity until his back was on the futon. He didn't move again until Brenda woke him for dinner. Getting up again...

Could be worse. He might have lived as a cripple, forever waiting for his knee to heal.

Lloyd's laughter chopped off when Jeremy entered.. He said, “Sorry. But they were going to look at your knee. You went away with a limp. Next thing, you're staggering in on crutches with your whole leg cased in concrete! It's everything I grew up knowing abput Medical. I shouldn't have laughed, Jer, but I hate that place.”

“I share your pain.”

Lloyd laughed wildly. “Well. You're here. Should we go home in the morning?”

This was the part-owner asking the pit chef: Is there anyone left to run the inn?Jeremy said, “We're empty. You could take another day or two.”

“How's Mommy?” Brenda asked.

Jeremy took his seat. “Hanging on. Brave. Brenda, I don't know anything about Destiny Town medicine. You tell me. How is she?”

“I could lie to you?”

Only one answer to that. “Sure.”

“Daddy, she got badly hurt. We're not wizards. Superskin is old settler magic, but it still has to grow on her.”

He'd known she could die.

He couldn't speak of that. So: “Brenda, dear, how did they 'find' my identity?”

“Ask Gran Harlow.”

Harlow said, “I wrote it in. That computer you're sleeping with, it died before I moved in here, but one of my friends got it going. Brenda told me what to say. Are we likely to be caught in an inconsistency, Jeremy?”

“That story held up for twenty-seven years,” he said.

They all seemed to be studying him: a sudden stranger. Harlow asked, “Was it supposed to?”

“What d'you... ?” Then he understood. “Harlow, I wasn't sure what I wanted. I needed refuge. I didn't know what was possible. Maybe I'd follow the Road the rest of the way to Destiny Town and see where Cavorite ended. Maybe I'd go home. Maybe there was a way to serve time in the Winds and come out as a citizen. I didn't know how to do any of that, but I thought I knew how to keep a restaurant and get some breathing space.”

“So now you've seen Cavorite.”

“Yes.” He looked at Harlow in wonder. He hadn't known it, here in his bones, until now. “I've seen Cavorite. I've seen the end of the Road. Harlow, thank you.”

“Is that a big thing?”

“Harlow, what we learn is all wrong. We're told that the Twerdahl contingent got bored. Cavorite went off with all the wealth of the colony and was never heard from again, just like Argos. I followed the Road all the way down to the Neck, and I found it again in the Winds. Cavorite's crew saved Spiral Town. They set up the Windfarm and worked it to grow speckles. They set up the caravans to keep the speckles coming.”

“They did more than that,” Brenda said. “Ah?”

“Daddy, do they have teaching machines in Spiral Town?”

“Sure.”

“There's a computer in Medical, in the library. Look up speckles, Daddy.”

Moving only her eyes, Karen watched Brenda help Jeremy into a chair. She said, “That limp's getting worse, isn't it? You should go to Medical.”

Lloyd laughed himself into tears. They told Karen what had been done to his knee. They talked about Wave Rider, then about his first return to Destiny Town in twenty-seven years. Had he been to see his old home?

Under Brenda's censorious eye he told Karen, “I haven't been anywhere. The bus this morning was a nightmare. Lloyd and Brenda had to get me on and off. I don't think I want to visit anyplace before I heal a little.”

“Not even Cavorite?”

Those first few years he'd talked of burning lights settling on the sea just out of sight; of space and Argos and Cavorite. Spaceport personnel ate at Wave Rider, but Harold didn't want the pit chef bothering them. In time he dropped the subject. But Karen remembered.

He said, “For Cavorite I'd walk on my hands. Would they let me in?”

“I don't know.”

“Can just anyone get in there?”

Lloyd said, “Brenda went.”

“Mustafa took me through,” Brenda said. “Pilots get in. Mustafa came to visit while he was in training and I was at Wide Wade's, Daddy. I used to wonder why you never came. If you ask-“ She caught herself.

Yes, he could ask his wife's son the shuttle pilot to guide his stepfather through the old lander. But it was a risk.

He gave Karen a hand massage, both hands, he and Brenda trading chairs. When he had put her to sleep, Brenda stood up. “When are you going to tell her?”

“When she isn't on drugs. When I figure out how to tell her about her sister Barda. When I think it won't kill her.”

“Look up speckles. We'll see you at dinner.”

He tracked down Dr. Nogales in a third floor office.

Rita Nogales

Surgery

Surgeon and Anesthesiologist

She was reading a computer screen. Jeremy told her, “Karen doesn't look good.”

“Karen Winslow?” She tapped at a virtual keyboard. The configuration jumped: a torso with highlighted internal organs, then with highlighted patches of skin; a requisition form; a block of text. Nogales hadn't looked around. “You wouldn't look good either if you'd scalded seventy centimeters of skin off your body. Your wife?”

“That's right.”

“We put superskin on. We wait. It's a life-form, you know. Human genes trimmed in some lab in Sol system to make it a universal donor. Wonderful stuff.” Now she looked up at him. “We wait. It attaches itself. Eventually the patient gets up and goes home. There are old guys walking around with superskin faces and hands. Women too. You can just barely tell.”

He knew her. Narrow head, narrow nose, yellow-brown skin, and Oriental eyes: handsome, but an impatient, angry woman.

He couldn't quite remember, and he couldn't just stare. “I know you've got her on drugs. Is she in a lot of pain?”

“Would be. She's taking Novabliss. With that in her she's happier than you are.” Her eyes widened in shock. “No birdfucking allowed!”