21
Suspicions
If speckles can be farmed elsewhere, we must ~ttll extract potassium to feed it.Why bother? We'll grow it here.
Of course the strongest men should have been carrying Shimon; but the ones who did were the ~first names Jemmy could remember. Dennis and Denis, Henry and Amnon.
Jemmy draped Shimon's nearly empty pack to keep some of the rain off Shimon's torn torso. The Parole Board might want a coroner to examine those wounds.
He walked alongside while four men carried the fifth. He'd told off two more to carry one of the spectre birds, for dinner and a chance to examine the wounds. And so the funeral procession straggled up the Road.
“Willametta?”
“Trusty.”
“There was a joke 'Andrew' wouldn't have missed. 'It's the law'?” Willametta guffawed. “Well, Iwasn't here yet, but you can picture it. Nobody gets a bird gun except the probe. But there hadn't been any birds so they'd been eating nothing but rice and veggies for weeks. One day a crooner popped up in the field. It's as big as an ostrich. Well, the probes and the trusty were a little slow for Gordon Weiss. He didn't wait. He ran the bird down and jumped on it and tried to crush it in a scissor lock.”
Jemmy thought it over. “Ouch.”
“Of course those aren't really feathers. There's a reason the windbird predators all have needle beaks. They've got to stab through the Destiny feathers to get at the meat. Because the feathers are nothing but needles.
“So picture it,” she said. “Gordon's legs and arms are full of needles, and he rolls away screaming, and the bird is crooning and the trusty has finally started shooting, and somebody shouts,” \i(Tillametta drew breath and bellowed, “'No birdfucking allowed!' And someone else yells-“
Her timing was perfect. Six people behind them shouted, “'It's the law!'”
“And ever since then-“
Light grew behind them, like a sudden dawn.
Drenched, exhausted, frightened: Jemmy could only wonder at the glare behind him that threw blurred shadows along the Road. He turned, expecting to see sunglare through split clouds. That would not be such a strange thing- Whirling storm was still there, but the clouds flared too bright to book at. Lightning was only a faint sputter against that. Jemmy shouted, “Willya! What is that?”
“They're lighting the field. Looking for more birds.”
“Lighting it with what?”
The other pallbearers laughed. Willametta said, “Quicksilver.”
“Quicksilver how?”
“The power comes from Quicksilver.”
And the long Road stretched away, and after a time the light behind went out.
It seemed to take forever. A white flicker became an intermittent white glow, and the rain blew it away, and there it was again... until a blazing yellow-white banner bed them on, and on... At the end Jemmy stood in the rain before the massive door and its massive lock, and couldn't remember what to do next.
Like the barracks, the toolhouse was built for giants. Generations of gatherers labored to move masses of rock, their lives as nothing to their Parole Board masters... Nah.
Jemmy had come to understand Cavorite's intent.
Find potassium! Get it back to the landing site before everyone on Destiny dies!
They must have come prepared to refine the ore, here or at Spiral Town. Speckles must have been a surprise: a plant that poisoned herbivores by secreting potassium and other trace elements that Earthlife needed.
So Cavorite brought the Road here, and Cavorite's crew farmed speck- les. They came with interstellar technology and desperate intent, and they built massive forts of fused rock.
If the first settlers tried to stop them from leaving, and later remembered Cavorite as a ship of deserters, perhaps it was because they were already speckles-shy.
Today's gatherers lived in housing that settler wizards had built for themselves. Prisoners swaddled in luxury! Twerdahl's crew hadn't barred this door against themselves; the bock must have been added years later, or centuries.
And he didn't have a key. Oh, that was it. Jemmy couldn't get in, so four men were standing behind him still hoisting the dead weight of Shimon. Jemmy turned toward the barracks.
Wibbametta blocked his way.
“You've got to give over the packs and gloves first,” she said urgently, “and your gun. They'll shoot you! Have some sense!”
“We can't just Two hours' walk through rain with lightningblasted vision and thunder-shattered hearing and that damned ghostly banner ahead must have turned off his mind. Of course they could wait out in the storm for the probes' convenience. Yes, but they couldn't set Shimon down in the mud. Jemmy booked around him.
Two gatherers were half-reclined on an exposed ridge of bare white rock. Jemmy told them, “Move.”
They stood, not hurrying: Rita and Dolores Nogabes.
“Here,” he beckoned the pallbearers, and they set the body down. Shimon was still dripping wet, and his pack no longer covered him. Jemmy looked around and found packs piled on another bare tufa ridge, and the dead spectre bird next to them.
He felt queasy, looking at the spectre. Its torso was chopped half through, raggedly, as if a big dull ripsaw had been used on it while it wiggled.
Warm breath in both ears: he jumped. Voices whispered:
“Trusty?”
“Could be a long wait.”
The twins had him bracketed. Jemmy said, “Sorry. If I had a key we could wait in the toolhouse, but then I'd be a probe, so maybe I wouldn't give a shit.”
“What we sometimes do-”
“-We go around the other side of the barracks.”
“The corner? For shelter?”
The women brushed gently against him on both sides. Even through the poncho that felt nice, and practiced. One said, “Not everyone, just us. The rest, they know not to bother us because you're a trusty. And it's a corner-”
“Of course it's still wet, but it's not so cold.”
“You could think of it as slz~pery.” That twin had to be Dolores.
It was tempting. Jemmy's arms had reflexively moved around their waists; at worst they warded off some rain. Dolores meant it, he thought, but anger still smoldered in Rita's eyes. So what was going on?
He said, “You know they'll do a count.”
He felt Rita go rigid. Dolores said quickly, “They'll want to know what spectres were doing there in the fields where there's no prey. So they won't be right behind us.”
“But we might want to hurry, or just fool around now and then stay in tomorrow.” Rita.
Dolores:"Have you seen the big baths?”
“There's the packs and there's us,” Jemmy said firmly. “Three of us in the barracks, that hasn't changed. Andrew's gone but I'm here. I count eighteen of us out here including Shimon. But that should be nineteen.”
Rita snapped, “He'll be back!”
Who?Jemmy asked, “And the pack? Piling them up is good, but he took a pack. I counted those too.”
Rita touched Dolores's hand and they both faded back. Amnon Kaczinski asked, “You got a problem, Trusty?”
Willametta was standing beside the looming giant, and Jemmy spoke to both. “You tell me. A missing man, a missing pack, and a pair of probes coming closer every second. Those guns are like hoses. Then again, I don't have a problem, Amnon. 'Sure I know we're one gatherer short, man, and he stole a pack of speckles too, but I can't chase him because there's just me to watch all of these other gatherers, including that big dangerous-looking one-'”
Willametta spoke. “Yes~ all right, Rafik took Shimon's pack and he'll take a handful of speckles for the stash!”
Amnon said, “Willametta-”