Destiny's Road Read Free Page B

along with a hydroponics garden, stores of seeds and fertilized eggs, considerable medical facilities and lab equipment. The animals were thriving too, but none would be left on this first trip. They'd have nothing to eat. The plan called for Cavorite to return, and eventually to make a second journey, scattering animals and birds along the path.
    This trip, Cavorite would leave seeds and growing plants, and one thing more:
    A road.
    Sitting on the fusion drive alone, Cavorite would ride a meter in the air, with flame mushrooming out around the skirt, hot enough to melt rock. That was the idea. Cavorite would move off along the foothills of the Spine, the Crab's mountain ridge, leaving a snail's trail of cooling lava.
    Jemmy recognized what was onscreen: a view from space taken ages ago from the mother ship, before Columbiad and Cavorite landed.
    Water covered most of the planet. Destiny's core was deficient in radioactive elements. Its shell was thick. Ages ago it had cracked: an upwelling of magma had become a long, relatively narrow ridge of continent.
    Most of the continent, Wrinkle, lay north, under the broad ice cap. One end reached south of the equator, then curled over. A constriction nearly split the end off from the main body. A spinal ridge ran along Wrinkle, along the constriction now called the Neck, and down the length of the Crab Peninsula, splitting the Crab into broad and narrow halves. That was the land that the settlers settled.
    As he and Brenda watched, the computer drew the Road in neon pink. Down at the tip of the Crab, the Road curved out from Columbiad in a perfect little spiral. Where it got too big, where Bloocher Farm was now, it drew a tangent, a straight line that ran toward the mainland, parallel to the spinal ridge. As it approached the Neck it became a string of dots, then trailed off.
    "Are those dots all we get?" Brenda asked him.
    "They made the Road after everyone was down. There wasn't anyone in the sky to take pictures. Except Argos, and they don't talk."
    Now the computer was drawing in Spiral Town, filling in the curves of the spiral and spreading off down the straight section... and fuzzing out into terra incognita.
    Brenda complained, "Jemmy, it just trails off."
    "They never came back. They were going to, but they never did." Everyone knew the Cavorite story. Nobody knew how it ended.
    Brenda said, "The caravans must know where Cavorite went. The Road goes there and so do they. Why not just ask?"
    "Okay," Thonny said obligingly, mocking her.
    Jemmy tasted the idea. "Traders wouldn't tell anyone anything. But Brenda's right. They know."
    The Road was a spiral, and Radner Street was a radial path, not quite straight. The straggling line of children crossed the Road's next inward arc, and saw the last wagon receding. They crossed the next arc ahead of the wagons. Soon thereafter they walked between fruit orchards. The Road curved more tightly now. The intersection ahead was Guilda's Place.
    Guilda's Place sprawled like three or four buildings pushed together around an open space, a courtyard. Bird feeders stood in the corners, and the courtyard swarmed with little birds. The buildings were old, of poured stone, with every corner rounded by two hundred years of winds; but the roof of the biggest building was new Begley cloth sheeting, dark silver-gray. Walks led through the fruit orchards out back.
    The orchard wasn't enough to keep Guilda's going. The family had to buy fruit from farms farther out. The Bloochers supplied her with melons and grapes; their neighbors supplied other produce. And everybody stopped at Guilda's.
    It wasn't as if farmers couldn't make their own juice. But Guilda Smitt sold sherbet. Guilda had a working freezer, and a storage battery, and
    a roof covered with Begley cloth to soak up the sunlight and turn it into electric power.
    In the courtyard the boys and girls formed separate lines to get juice, then settled at four big round tables close enough for