Larry Niven - Destiny's Road

Jeremy kept returning to the blueprints for the self-reproducing factory. Shape of a turtle, mass of a man, size of a small boy. There was a name for such things: what was it? A factory that could be directed to make more of itself.

Von Neumann device.

Argos's mutineers had no faith in the planetary colony. Time might have justified that to their descendants. The colony on Destiny had done little in a quarter of a millennium. Wait, hadn't he seen a file- ARGOS*SIGHTINGS

Yes. The last sighting of Argos in flight was in 2680, fifty-nine years ago. And the flow of power from Quicksilver had stopped.

Did Argos's crew still have descendants?

SPECKLES (FATUM VENTUSI HERBAAE)

The list of entries ran on and on. What on Earth was

SPECKLES, see also Fatum mortem parnelli FATUM MORTEM PARNELLI

Destiny krill is a multicelled microscopic life-form that uses photosynthesis, but swims free.

E~en on Earth there were organisms that crossed the line between plant and animal.

F. mortem parnelli lives in every part 0f the ocean thus far explored. It is clearly 0f the speckles family (Fatum ventusi herbaae), though speckles is entirely a plant.

May one speculate? Future archeologists will find the f055~l record of a krill eater-one pictures a Destiny blue whale with shell and shellcap- that plowed th~5 world's seas until M. parnelli learned to secrete deadly metals. The krill poisoned them to extinction. Later a Mortem variation evolved on land.

The crucial point here is that Destiny lzrill secretes potassium. When it dies it sinks to the bottom 0f the sea. There the potassium remains. After billions 0f years 0f that, we find no potassium in Destiny sea salt, and that is ~ we will die.

-Wayne Parnelli, Marine Biology

Fatum mortem, he'd called it. Destiny's death. Scared the hell of out him, did it?

Jeremy had wondered... every child wondered... why A rgos came to Destiny without the means to keep settlers alive. How could the ancient wizards of Sol system have been so stupid? But if oceans on Earth had all the potassium they needed...

Jeremy almost laughed. That must have been a nasty shock.

Look up speckles, but there were so many files. Be selective. Search:

SPECKLE S*FARM

A line of sporadic volcanoes four hundred klicks long. Tornadoes. Metals... potassium refining... speckles... thorn trees and thorn weeds, ground-hugging animals and windbirds, a varied and intricate ecology evolved within the Winds, each new species needing classification and further study.

And:If speckles can be farmed elsewhere, we must ~t~l1 extract potassium to feed it. Why bother? We'll grow it here.

Cavorite's course matched his guesses, but what had Brenda meant? They did more than that. More than refine potassium, then discover and cultivate speckles, in an endless howling storm full of thorn birds? Then race home...

SPECKLES*TWERDAHL*BASE ONE

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, rnurder versus euthanasia, for people who had ceased to be people.

This wasn 'tin 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 Windfarrn, 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 hermore 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.