He went back to cutting weed. He perfected the jab-and-flip. He got another amtrak eel that way. He was ready when a flounder appeared- Earthlife!-and he got it aboard. He baited three hooks with what was left after he'd eaten. There were sockets in the deck to brace a fishing pole. He lowered the lines into the great open patch he'd cut in the weed around Carder's Boat.
Earthlife fish lived deep down. He ate himself stupid, and remembered to add speckles.
The skin on his neck and legs peeled off in flakes.
Later-it had to be later-he was wearing swim trunks and a windbreaker and a floatation vest fished from a locker. He slept through noon and worked at night. Quicksilver had become a white glare.
He kept chopping. Every day there was less weed around the boat. It was trying to grow back, but he stayed ahead of it. There was a ladder after all, under the thickest part of the weed. He cleared it.
A few people watched from shore, day after day. Then a great crowd came down from Warkan's Tavern, when Quicksilver was almost behind the sun, brilliant at sunset. They never waved, they just watched, day after day.
One day they were sparse; another day, gone.
He found the anchor cable by chopping devilhair from around it. He tracked it up from the water to a housing in the boat's nose.
There was a switch.
He flipped it.
The housing hummed to itself, gearing up. Then it pulled, and the boat's nose sank. He watched, fascinated. The boat was too light to sink, he thought, but could it pull itself underwater? right to the floor of the ocean? He never thought of turning the motor off.
Something in the sea bottom gave first. The boat surged savagely; the deck slapped him silly. The anchor lurched up while he was still too dizzy to care.
Later-Quicksilver was rising well before dawn-he saw that the weed that linked the boat to shore had stretched into a line. The current was pulling him southeast.
He chopped weed until all that was left was the little patch on the starboard side on which his board still rested. At some point the boat tore loose and he drifted free.
He had no way of rowing or steering Carder's Boat. Nonetheless his life had changed. Jemmy Bloocher was moving again.
Tim Hann had lived ten days. Tim Bednacourt, Loria's husband, had lasted half a year. Tim Bednacourt, the caravan's chef, was a hunted bandit.
He couldn't remember when Jemmy Bloocher came back. It just felt right.
The land slid northwest, then away.
The current along Haunted Bay ran southeast toward Spiral Town. Jemmy had thought the water would carry him around the point and down the Crab's barren shore. Those cliffs were unclimbable-he'd seen that-but he could wait, drift down along the Neck, see what the shore was like along the mainland.
The mainland. There was nothing left for Jemmy Bloocher on the Crab Peninsula, but the mainland... Cavorite had gone there, leaving Road for others to follow. The caravan's home was in the mainland.
He came to understand that he'd guessed wrong.
He was far out at sea. Mist hid the land but for the projecting peaks of the Crest. Those slid northwest, then away-north and east-then, very distant now, drifted southeast again. He was moving in a great curve.
The sea flowed like a wide bathtub whirlpool of which Haunted Bay was only the drain.
None of this bothered Jemmy Bloocher. His speckles and the ocean would feed him for a while. As the days passed, he watched a vast sea and a serrated edge of land, and a towering black storm far down the coast. In his mind he traced Cavorite's path.
He was noticed, of course. On all of Destiny there couldn't be two objects like Carder's Boat.
One morning a few Otterfolk had him in view.
The next morning there were more. He couldn't tell how many because they spent most of their time underwater, but he could see five or six at a time. At noon they drifted away, or drifted deep to fish. He came to believe that Otterfolk didn't like direct sunlight.
On another morning he came on deck into a flurry of Earthlife flatfish. He ducked two and another smacked him on the cheek. There must have been a whole school flopping on deck. He stood at the edge of the deck and raised his arms and shouted, "Stop!"
They stopped. He brushed flopping fish overboard, picking those who might live to swim away. He kept a dozen. Qtterfolk watched for half a day while he filleted and cooked the catch. He didn't have to fish for a while.
Another day, his line pulled a sub clam up to the surface. There were beaked faces all over the water, watching.
The thing was heavier than he was, too heavy to lift into the boat.
Did Otterfolk play practical jokes, or were they testing an alien intelligence? How was he to free his hook?
He pulled the sub clam onto the remaining patch of weed. It rested on its shell, its siphon/tentacle writhing as it fumbled at the slick fishing line, trying to tear it.
If he climbed down there, the weed would drown him.
Could he balance on the board while he worked? Weed surrounded the surfboard, but he could pull the clam into reach of it. But if he did find some way to get the sub clam up to the boat...
Otterfolk knew that humans ate sub clam meat. They might not know that it wouldn't keep him alive.
He used his four-meter weed cutter to chop at the meat around the hook until some of it came free. He pulled up twenty pounds of sub clam. Then he compromised. He sliced two pounds of it free and threw the rest back into the weed alongside the shell, where scavengers swarmed around it.
The Otterfolk got the idea, or else they didn't like waste. He was never offered another sub clam.
He could remember the sub clam shell in view beneath a blazing Quicksilver, long before dawn. An Earthlife duck was flapping in the shell with both its wings broken.
It took all of his will to cook it before he ate it.
Afterward he wondered if there was a way to teach mercy to Otterfolk using gestures alone. .
The Neck was where the peaks disappeared below the mist layer. Beyond they rose again, marching into the mainland toward a distant storm.
Storms formed and went away, didn't they? This one didn't. He was still drifting toward it after... he couldn't remember how many days. The clouds towered higher than the peaks of the Crest. At night he could see lightning playing within.
How old was that storm? He fantasized that it was a permanent feature of Destiny. Jupiter's Red Spot had lasted centuries. Destiny storms didn't normally do that, but if one had... then Cavorite would have gone to see.
He was passing the Neck, then, the morning he found that the picked clean shell of a sub clam held a neatly placed tuna still flopping. They couldn't have thrown such a mass, could they? They must have guided and chased it across the weed and precisely onto the shell.
Neat!
He was working out how to hook it when he saw sails.
He'd thought the mist would hide him. Maybe it only hid him from the Neck, while a fisher at sea could still see his mast. Maybe they hadn't told the merchant guards on the Neck. But Carder's Boat was conspicuous.
The fisher sails showed clearly now. They'd get here hours before sunset.
He raised the ladder.
From above, weed half-enclosed the surfboard. From a boat they'd never see it.
He'd left his mark in chopped-away weed, but a fisher might think it just grew this way.
He gaffed the tuna, pulled it up, took it into the cabin's shadow, and cleaned it. He threw the offal onto the weed to draw scavengers.
Lying on deck with only his eyes above the rim, he watched four sails come closer. He didn't know the men in the boats. None of them wore merchant's clothing.
Jemmy took his four meters of weed cutter to the cabin, and waited. He could hear them moving about. He heard their voices, querulous and awed. Otterfolk watched from afar.
The fishers were gone at sunset. They hadn't been able to find a way up.
More boats came the next day. Carder's Boat had drifted by then, but they'd come straight as arrows. They threw something over the side: a rope ladder with hooks on it. When one of them started to climb up, Jemmy cut the ropes and heard him splash.