Spiral Town was founded in 2490, but they called it Base One then. Cavorite left in 2498. You know they left a spiral of Road behind them? They never came home. Maybe they never planned to. Maybe something killed them."
Susie Cloochi said, "My family never went home. A good many families here never did. Folk do leave Spiral Town from time to time. Might it be that the Cavorite crew just wanted to get away?"
"Snakes," Jemmy said.
They looked at him. "Snakes, Tim?"
His mind had wandered, then closed its teeth on-"Snakes in the Swamp. It just came to me, Miz Cloochi. Cavorite must have left those. Someone aboard Cavorite must have liked snakes."
"And swamps," said Brenda.
Jemmy looked back toward the swamp. "Can't you see it? They're drifting along. Flame rushing out violet under the skirt." He couldn't really picture that; he'd never seen a flame that hot; nobody had. "They could go faster if they were just trying to get away, but they're just drifting along, leaving a trail of melted rock behind them. Suddenly they're looking at a swamp.
"What can they do? They can boil the water, kill the Destiny weeds, but that won't make it into Road. They could go around it, uphill, but that wouldn't leave a Road for anything with wheels."
"Rocks," Brenda said. "They'd have to roll a line of rocks down across the water."
Curdis said, "We had tractors in Spiral Town, big machines for pulling a plow or pushing down a tree. They don't go anymore. Cavorite might have taken one."
Jemmy nodded, putting it into the picture. "Push a row of rocks across. Like stepping-stones. Then hover till the rock melts and the water boils. Wait till the swamp cools down, then seed-"
"No, T-Tim, that's a humongous thermal mass. You don't throw seeds in boiling water."
He nodded. "Right. They go on, making Road. Week or two later they come back and seed some trees-"
"Maybe a year."
"-and leave the snakes and anything else I didn't see. Damn."
Curdis said, "All right, what damn?"
"They weren't just runaways, the Cavorite crew. I always knew forty crew was too tidy. When you're running away, you don't wait for your numbers to come out neat like that. The Road was the point. If Cavorite came back this far to seed a swamp, why not come all the way back to Spiral Town?"
The Bednacourt sisters led them to a structure that was all one big room. "A lot of us slept here after the storm washed away some houses two years ago," Loria said. "Elsewise it's the House of Healing."
There was nothing like a bed. The Bloocher clan slept on the wide expanse of floor, covered in their own clothes.
In a moment when Brenda was surely asleep, Curdis spoke in the dark. "I had to turn down an offer from Loria."
Offer? Ah. "What did you say?"
"I said I'm married and Brenda's too young, but Timmy's not."
Jemmy's ears burned in the dark.
The sun hadn't risen over the mountains yet. The morning was cold. The water was colder for the first moments; then Jemmy's body stopped noticing. He and Tarzana fought their boards through the waves and paddled out to where others were sitting six in a row.
They waited, talking little. Sound carried very well over the water.
Jemmy asked, "Don't you get sharks around here?"
The pause lasted long enough that Jemmy thought nobody had heard him. Then one boy said, "I don't think they like the taste of the river. Sometimes one comes around. We get a lot of sharks when a caravan stops and three hundred chugs get their attention."
"Wave," Tarzana said.
The idea was to be moving as fast as the wave when it arrived. Paddle without falling off. When the board catches the wave, stand up. Jemmy had tried standing up yesterday. Today he didn't. Kneeling on a board as a wave hurled it toward the beach was tough enough.
Curdis asked the Twerdahl folk for work, and work was found. He and Brenda and Jemmy (make that Tim, start thinking Tim) knew how to garden, knew how to pull Destiny weeds.
"If we leave about now," Curdis said in midafternoon, "we'll get to the guarded bridge about sunset."
"I think they like us here," Brenda said doubtfully. "Uh-huh. I don't guess Margery's worried about us yet, but, Brenda, I told the merchants we'd be coming back today."
Jemmy held up a hand. Hold it. "Sunset?"
"They saw Thonny around noon. Let's let them see you around sunset."
At noon and sunset, two views of "Tim Hann" could look quite different. Curdis continued, "Sunset, not dawn. They'd never believe we marched in the dark."
"Did the merchants tell you about Twerdahi Town?"
"Not a word," Curdis said in some irritation.
"Nothing about people living down the Road? Big surprise?"
"Big joke."
"So," said Jemmy, "we found a surprise and stayed an extra day. That's what they'll expect. Give them another day to forget what Tim Hann looks like."
Curdis grinned. "I like it here too. I didn't have the nerve to try those boards, Tim. How is it?"
Jemmy shook his head. "It's like, I can't tell a Twerdahl how to ride
a bicycle. I can't tell you what surfing is like. Want us to show you? Brenda?"
"Yeah."
Brenda showed an aptitude for surfing. Curdis gave up early. He didn't like falling off in front of strange males.
The Bednacourt girls returned to the House of Healing with them that night. When the Bloocher clan curled into their blankets, the girls didn't leave.
Voices in the dark, men and women talking together. That was Loria:
"You're good people. You have things to teach us. Some of what comes off the Road are parasites."
"We all do farm work," Curdis said. "We learn to look for what needs doing."
Glind: "We don't let anyone stay a minute if he's alone. Any man alone must be running from something."
"A woman?" Curdis.
"A woman alone might be running from, well, a man." Tarzana's voice.
Loria: "The only women we've ever seen on the Road were merchants. But there was a man called himself Haines-" And he was a murderer who hid in the swamp. He stole from the truck gardens when he could, until Destiny food and no speckles turned him into a skeletal zombie, and then they flushed him out.
"Sounds like Mattoo Haine," Curdis said. "He killed his wife and oldest son when I was little."
Nobody wanted to tell Twerdahls that if criminals could get past where the Road straightened, Spiral Town let them go. There was a silence Jemmy savored. Then he spoke into the dark. "It must have started this way."
"Tim?''
"Tarzana, grown men and women don't talk to each other in Spiral Town. When your grandparents came, maybe they didn't bring lights. They could talk together in the dark where they could be just voices."
"Mmmm."
He must have fallen asleep soon after.
Jemmy taught bicycle riding all morning.
Cooking over a grill fascinated him. He helped some, but watched more.
In midafternoon they retrieved their bikes from Twerdahl riders. Again Curdis said, "Time to leave."
Jemmy said, "I'm not going."
"What?"
"Tell the merchants Tim wants to know where Cavorite went. Tim Hann is on the Road."
He saw Curdis studying him and guessed his thoughts. Is Jemmy crazy? How crazy? He didn't know Jemmy like a brother, and the Jemmy Bloocher he thought he knew wouldn't have killed a merchant. ~
Curdis said, "They'll take a harder look at Tim Hann if Tim comes back alone."
"I don't think I'm coming back, Curdis. I can't run Bloocher Farm. I can't talk down a merchant's price while I'm hiding my face! And if Spiral Town gets in another face-off with the caravans- You see?"