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"Long time."
Karen said, "It means I can't help you with the pit."
Her hands were still bound but her shoulders moved restlessly. Karen still looked patchy. Better
along her ribs and hip, but her shoulder and breast were worst. One big grayish patch of skin had
sloughed off her shoulder onto the sheet. Jeremy wondered if he should remove it, or put it back. What
was underneath was puffy and red touched with purple.
He said, "You can't talk to the Otterfolk either, and that's the fun part. I should have my knee back
before the next caravan. I want to try some things in the kitchen. If any of it works out, we'll be working
there instead of the pit-"
"Ah-hah! Brenda got you to Romanoff's!"
"Lucky guess."
"Yeah?"
"Brenda and Lloyd and Harlow took me last night. We're all staying at Harlow's-" except that Lloyd
and Brenda went back this morning, and he chose not to tell his wife that.
"We had a good life, didn't we?"
What? Where did that comefrom?"So far so good," he said cautiously. And every bit of it stolen. He
could put off telling her that for a little while yet.
"I used to wonder. Did you and Harlow?"
He didn't ask, Did we what? He spoke the truth while he had the chance. "Yes, while you were
carrying Mustafa. We were careful. Your father never caught us."
"Mmm."
"But never after we were married, Karen."
"Good." She shifted a little. "It itches." She shifted again. "Burns. What did you call it? Novabliss? If
you run across Dr. Nogales, I need some."
He found someone with a label and told him that Karen needed a doctor. That might get something
done, but Rita Nogales should see her.
He looked into some rooms. He stopped at Reception and spoke with Lisa Schiavo. Then he went
to the library, the obvious place to wait for a doctor.
CARAVAN
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Again, a multitude of entries.
CAP~AVAN*MAP
Three klicks of the Neck and a twelve-klick stretch of land between the Road and the ocean were all
shaded in tan. Call it twenty square klicks: all property of the caravans. A scatter of rectangles and a
sprinkling of square dots just the far side of the spaceport (yellow), and another scattering just short of
the Neck, and no other buildings in between.
To the west the Road ran off the map, and Jeremy wondered- WINDFARM*IVIAP
restricted material. Access code?
WIND FARM
restricted material. Access code?
DESTINY TOWN
That was well mapped, with a zoom feature. He could sketch the details of Jeremy Hearst's life onto
this. He should! But it felt too much like work, and there was something he wanted more.
CARAVAN *CARGO
Nothing. Wrong word?
CARAVAN*EXPORT
Nope.
If he knew exactly what wagons carried and what they needed, he'd know how to deal for it. Try:
CARAVAN*2739*REPLACEMENTS
Bandages. Whiskey considered as medicine. Paint from Spiral Town, oil from Twerdahi Town, silver
fern tea from the Shire. Did the caravans carry high-tech medicine? It wasn't listed, and he'd never seen
such. Not for yutzes, at least.
Ammunition, guns, gun oil and cloth, the cylinder on the little reboring thing in Tucker wagon. . . shark
guns and tools to maintain them. Nothing about Spadoni or. . . he didn't know a proper name for "prole
guns."
Better not try CARAVAN*SPADONI*SUPPLIES. A computer might be told to alert somebody.
Try
CARAVAN*2739*SALE S
This year's outgoing. Speckles and spices. Basic farming and clothmaking tools, and some half
familiar terms that were also tools. Cookware: not the magical stuff nothing sticks to. Toys and shells and
other luxury goods. Preserved meat, root vegetables, spices, some of which had been sold to Wave
Rider. Nothing much to learn.
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CARAVAN*2739*PURCHAS E
This year returning: clocks and paint and Begley cloth. Spices again, and salt. Shire tea. Smoked fish
from Haven. Whiskey, liqueurs, and cheeses. Wave Rider kept some of these in stock.
For twenty-seven years he'd watched and eavesdropped on caravan merchants, merchants from
Terminus and Destiny Town, and the Winslow clan. He had a very good idea what passed along the
Road, and Wave Rider was involved in all of this. Except- Prole guns. Replacement, purchase,
maintenance: nothing at all. And speckles. If the route involved middlemen, he'd have seen something.
The sterilized seeds must go straight from the Windfarm to wherever along the Road they did their
loading.
He went back to CARAVAN and opened
ORIGIN*CARAVAN
In Will Coffey's vision, now more than two centuries old, caravans
were not for commerce, not for making wealth. They were a way to deliver speckles to Spiral Town.
The impression would be that Spiral Town was the peak of civilization on Destiny; that sophistication
dwindled with distance down the Road.
We've been swindled. The greed of merchants, is that a lie too? or a game the merchants play to
entertain themselves?
A later entry: The caravans are worleing! They serve as recreation for some, for some a way 0f life, a
forum for courtship for some, but for all a hedge against the danger 0f inbreeding. They allow us to learn
more about the only other sapient species ever found. They maintain the stability 0f our control
experiment.
All that vastness of stars staring down at us, and it's just us and the Otterfolk? But Argos might have
heard more from Earth by now.
- Control experiment?
Base One, now Spiral Town, was to retain technology that was too heavy or fragile to transport.
Visiting caravans would purchase the use of what they hadn't already stolen: paint and clocks and Begley
cloth and, in later years, handcrafted work. .
A generation later they teased the paintmaker system into duplicating itself. On their next circuit they
bought the duplicate from puzzled Spirals.
They didn't bother with the clock factory, but they tried it again with the Begley cloth weavers.
Jeremy read the results in bitter amusement. The little mechanical spiders in the walls and roof of the
Apollo Caverns could be snatched by handfuls. Spirals never interfered. But they wouldn't dig anywhere
else! Of course it was a safety measure, a part of their program. One wouldn't want mechanical vermin
eating caverns into every hill and mountain on Destiny. But where was the damn code? Stored in the
teaching tapes? Or lost with Argos?
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CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY
A handful of listings.
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY* Shire restricted material. Access code?
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Twerdahl T0~~ restricted material. Access code?
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Tail Town restricted material. Access code?
Somebody somewhere was keeping genealogical records, and keeping them hidden.
He'd seen an ominous degree of continuity in the families that held the wagons. He remembered three
generations in ibn-Rushd wagon. Outsiders not welcome? How could he learn?
* * *
AVALON
restricted material. Access code?
SPACE*SHUTTLE
Designs, vidtapes, test results, wow!
Six crashes in fifty-one years. No deaths mentioned. A vivid description of the tenth flight by the first
humans to orbit. Say what?
He'd read it and failed to believe it. He had to go back for it- The shuttle didn't have a pilot on board.
It was flown by onboard programs and a pilot on the ground. A box of varied design but rigidly exact
size fit into the shuttle's rectangular cargo space. One such box was a cabin for two passengers and an
array of tools.
Passengers had flown twice. That first pair of women went up to repair a satellite. The second pair. .
. something political.
Jeremy felt massive disappointment. Had Mustafa ever said that he'd gone into space personally? He
couldn't remember. But he'd daydreamed, from time to time, of persuading Mustafa to help him stow
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