Destiny's Road Read Free Page A

teaching program was-"Allison Berkeley, Ph.D... . string of letters. You think she's lying?"
    "More like confused. It bothers her. She's looking for reasons herself." Brenda tapped, and the lesson's headings disappeared. She didn't need to say We'll never know. Allison Berkeley string-of-letters must have died centuries ago, light-years away.
    In 2490 AD. Argos arrived in Apollo system. The starfarers had already renamed the blue world. No longer Norn: Destiny was waiting.
    They chose a narrow-necked peninsula with a ridge of weathered mountains, like Malaya in size and shape. As on Avalon, so on Destiny:
    they would isolate the problems.
    Cavorite and Columbiad, the landers, were massive spacecraft designed to explore a solar system or a world. They sat low on groundeffect skirts. Riding the fusion drive alone, either ship could hover a meter high until the land beneath turned to lava; or above a lake, until the water boiled and rivers downstream ran steaming. It was thus that they cleared the Crab for farming and ranching.
    Argos had been long in the building. The Apollo Project had sixty years to breed plants and animals of Earth for life on Destiny. Probes had shown them a shorter year, redder sunlight, a circular orbit and a mere ten degrees of axial tilt, stable wind patterns and no ice caps, a small moon that moved too fast to pick up much of a tide. Weather would not be a persistent problem. They got that wrong! But the dimmer, reddened sunlight would. The Apollo Project planners tried to breed plants to survive that.
    Cavorite and Columbiad settled high on the wider, southwestern side of the Crab Mountains, fifteen miles inland. The settlers wanted easy access to the sea, but not too easy. There might be Bay of Fundy tides, despite the little moon, or amphibious sea monsters.
    They dredged the sea for Avalon seaweed and used it to fertilize Earthly crops.
    And Argos disappeared.
    "I can see why Argos's crew got bored," Brenda said, greatly daring.
    Heads turned, but nobody spoke. Argos had betrayed them all, marooned the settlers and their descendants to the end of time. The crew of Argos had been tried and convicted of mutiny, in absentia. Later the lander Cavorite had abandoned Base One, Destiny Town. Lives that crossed between suns would drown in the mundane work of farming. Jemmy felt the same, some days.
    Here is the farm, there is the Road. Take off go.
    Thonny's screen showed something like an octopus made of clouds, curved arms, a body that bulged in the middle. An old view from orbit. Jemmy had seen that once and never found it again.
    Greegry wasn't having fun. Nobody does algebra for fun. He kept leahng back through the text. There was a block to keep him from seeking the Answers file, but Jemmy had cracked that block long ago, and maybe Greegry had too.
    The Hanns had once had a window like the one at Bloocher Farm. Eternal winds had finally cracked it. What they had now was brick set
    into the Roadside wall, and four panes cut from the old window and set in the brick. And nothing much was going on out there.
    This room was not where Jemmy Bloocher wanted to be.
    He wanted to be where Cavorite was, at the far end of the Road.
    Columbiad became the colony's power source. Cables ran into the base, with a tent to protect the join. (Jemmy and Brenda were amused. The tent by their time had become a thick-walled building.) Cavorite was kept ready for an emergency evacuation of the Crab.
    Inevitably, some of the half-a-thousand first settlers thought more like interstellar explorers than like farmers. Forty of them followed an alternative path-"the path less traveled by," in Groundcaptain Radner's words.
    They waited eight years before the rest of the colonists had enough faith in their growing crops, and enough surplus to make the trip worthwhile. In 2498 A.D. there was a glut.
    Cavorite had carried half the colony from orbit down to the Crab. Leaving Spiral Town, the same craft carried forty in roomy comfort