Guilda's daughters moved among them, serving minuscule cups of sherbet. Sheeko Radner, Guilda's eldest and as tall as most men, wove a contorted path, pushing a tub on rollers, doling out refill scoops.
The merchants were gathering out front. Yatsen's Far East would be gearing up to serve them dinner. The square must have filled with amazing speed, because merchants were already moving here to the grass slopes.
Four merchants. One was the brawny man who bought the drum of sherbet. Jemmy and the others made haste to make room, and the four traders sat in a circle.
Thonny, eight, was whispering to Ronny, seven. Jemmy couldn't hear. He kept his dignity for a long moment, then glared at them. "What?"
"They've all got guns," Thonny said, louder than he intended, his eyes invading the merchants' privacy. "See, the fat one has his in that loose
jacket, and him and him have those holders in their pocket belts, and the guy with the muscles-"
"That's you, Fedrick," the fat one laughed at the guy with the muscles. A wagon was pulling up in the radial street. More produce for Guilda's sherbet. Sheeko Radner waved prettily at a tableful of farmers. The six obliged: they followed her to the wagon and began lifting watermelons.
Fedrick grinned at Thonny. He pulled an L-shaped object from his belt. Jemmy too had been half-sure it was a gun. The brawny merchant made as if to hand it to Thonny, but he was pulling it back even as the fat one's hand blocked him. "I can't let you handle this, boy," he said, or something like that; his words were twisted almost beyond recognition. "I can show you, maybe."
Six farmers carrying six watermelons were trooping toward the kitchen door. The merchant named Fedrick fired at the sixth.
The watermelon in Davish Scrivner's hands exploded. It splashed in all directions, a sudden scarlet flower.
Scrivner stared at his arms, his clothes, hardly believing that it wasn't blood. For that moment he was too flabbergasted even to be afraid. Then, amid a sea of laughter, he turned.
He studied the tableful of merchants, and the roar in his throat didn't emerge. If it had been the fat one... well. But the grinning man now pushing a gun into his armpit looked like he could lift a wagonful of watermelons.
And he was coming forward with helpless laughter on his face and money in his hand. "It was for the children," he told the farmer. "Think, they'll never see a sight like that again! Friend, this should be the price to clean your clothes and a steam bath too. Really, I did look to see there was nothing behind you but hill. Forgive me! Come, share sherbet with us."
Thonny said, "Damn! Did you see that?"
In truth, Jemmy would never forget it. What the gun had done to a watermelon, it could do to a man. Davish Scrivner could have exploded like that. Would the merchant still have been laughing?
It never faded, never lost a trace of color: the watermelon exploding in Scrivner's arms, the pulp splashing every part of him like blood, the horror in his face as he gave up his hope of life. It was there in his mind eight years later, on Jemmy Bloocher's last night in Spiral Town.
3
Warkan s Tavern
"Dr. Maners, do you represent the crew of Argos?"
''I do.''
"How do the defendants plead?"
"On the charge 0f mutiny, not guilty. On the charge 0f sabotage, not guilty. On the charge 0f treason, not guilty. On the charge 0f grand larceny, not guilty
-Eric Maners, advocate for the crew of Argos
2730 A.D.
The Bloocher clan gathered in wilderness for the third time in three days. Mountains stood above them, the spinal ridge of the Crab. A stream ran foaming over rocks. The water had cut a shallow channel across the Road below, and somebody-merchants-had built a bridge across that.
The New Hann Holding would be here, four kilometers down the Road from the Bloocher Farm on the inland side.
Two hundred and forty years ago, Earthlife had been seeded over the entire peninsula in a random mix. You could make bread out of these waist-high grasses, corn and rye and wheat and a sprinkling of sesame. Apple and orange and pomegranate groves grew randomly. The tallest trees, twenty and thirty feet high, were both redwoods.
An early-morning fog had burned off. The Bloocher clan rested beneath a handful of oaks, the girls around Junior, the boys around Curdis Hann. Jemmy tended a cage that held Destiny tree lace and a pophopper. The pop-hopper was a Destiny burrowing creature, and nobody knew how to take care of it. After two days it looked to be dying. Here and there were patches of darker vegetation, black trunks and branches and lacy extrusions touched with green and yellow-green and bronze. That was local life, Destiny life. Three patches below the clump of oaks had merged.
Varmint Killer rested within that patch.
Killer's surface was very like poured stone, Jemmy thought, pocked with small apertures for light-threads, tiny glass-bead eyes, whips and pellets, all retractable into an ovoid shell. It sat like a statue or a rock, but it had moved in the night.
Killer had siblings.
A myriad tiny machines, specks just bigger than speckles, turned rock and ore into Begley cloth within a cave in Mount Apollo. Similar machines made Earthtime watches in Mount Chronos. Jemmy had looked at both kinds under a microscope. In the places where tools branched out, and in the ovoid shell itself, Jemmy saw an artistic relationship to Varmint Killer. Then again, he'd known in advance: these machines had come from Sol system aboard Argos.
The Bloocher clan watched for a time. Then Greegry got bored and tried to climb a redwood, and Thonny began taking bets on when Killer would move again.
Junior had married Curdis Hann.
She was twenty then and twenty-two now. It was time and past time, and Curdis was a good man and a boyhood friend to all of them. Still, it made things awkward.
Two years had passed since the communal tractor failed. Most of Spiral Town thought of it that way, and blamed the driver and his ill luck. But the terrible machine had sent its lightning like an ancient stored flame through William Bloocher's nervous system. Dad was a helpless cripple now, his mind damaged too. And Jemmy, his oldest boy, was only nineteen.
So Junior had charge of the Bloocher farm, and Junior's husband must live with the Bloochers for now. They must call Junior Margery. Now the Margery, Margery Junior's mother, was Mom to everyone, even Dad, even Curdis. Curdis Hann became another brother, at twenty-one an older brother who didn't have property yet.
In a year Jemmy would be twenty. Curdis and Junior-Margery- would have their land, the New Hann. Then Bloocher land would be Jemmy's to farm.
They'd picked a plot not far beyond the last reach of Spiral Town's farms, where a stream ran down from the mountains. It was infested with Destiny weeds, of course. In the lazy days of midsummer they'd leased Varmint Killer from the Council.
Killer didn't require much supervision. It didn't take orders anymore. Jemmy had led it here by offering it Destiny prey wiggling in a patch of Destiny weeds. Now it just sat in the weeds and waited.
It would not harm life of Earth. It sensed Destiny life, somehow; Jemmy had never heard an explanation that made sense. It wasn't smart enough to see what a human being would: that Destiny life didn't have proper leaves. Photosynthesis went on in lacy extrusions from the branches, and on the branches and trunks themselves.
If a creature of Destiny moved, Killer killed it. When no prey surfaced for a time, it would kill some weeds, then move on.