Harlow and Chloe surfed with them, riding waves in tandem. Harlow had returned to the board as if she'd never been away.
They'd need the Otterfolk's goodwill, to get fish to feed the merchants.
Harlow simply poured one bagful of speckles into their speckles shaker can. "It's the obvious place for it. The way we run the inn, everyone'll think someone else got us more speckles." He stopped her from adding the second bag, but he had no excuse at all.
A day later he'd found one. "Taste this."
She sipped. "Smooth. Grapefruit and vodka and... salt?"
"Secret recipe," he said.
"Speckles. Sea salt and speckles?"
They called the drink a Salty Dog, and the last bag of fertile speckles stayed in the bar.
Rita Nogales phoned. She had answers. Fresh avocado reacting to speckles in the mayonnaise, in Karen's and Brenda's mixed seafood dish, produced a mild allergic reaction that disappeared without obtrusive symptoms. Only a patient already sick was threatened. Avocado picked two days earlier wouldn't react. Hardly surprising if nobody had noticed in two hundred years.
Nogales was crowing, sure that anyone she talked to must be just delighted. She could live with throwing away Hope Batch and Batch One, but all the superskin on Destiny? Jeremy was glad he'd answered the phone. Anyone else would have screamed at the woman.
Even he hung up in a black mood. Avocados... what a lousy, trivial...
With two days to spare, Johannes and Eileen Wheeler arrived with a wagonload of green and root vegetables pulled by two goats and a tug. "Hell of a lot of prep work for three days of pure madness," Johannes told Jeremy, grinning and slapping a goat's flank. "I expect you can use the help?"
"Yes. Do not introduce me to the goats." Johannes had once insisted on doing that before Jeremy put on his butcher's hat.
For a day, then, he and Harlow faced Karen's entire family. Then all
four men went off to hunt and left just the women and the gimp. Jeremy didn't see any fireworks. They were being civilized. Eileen tried once or twice to involve her father in some kind of property discussion.
As for the separate rooms, "There's no point," Harlow told him. "We came here together. They know where you were staying. They don't know how long you fought me off-"
"Hey."
"We probably even walk like we're rubbing up against each other."
"You do. I have this deceptive limp."
"Jeremy, we're not doing them a favor here. People like to file people in subroutines. It's easier for them if they think of us as a couple."
Matters of courtesy be damned, the room would be needed. A day ahead of the caravan, Harlow moved into Jeremy's room.
He liked it. He dreamed of Karen and woke guilty, but with a woman in his bed, he could sleep.
They came at noon, announced by a cloud of dust.
A wagon was the length and width of a bus, but taller, and two tugs were enough to pull it. They numbered a full twenty wagons: no yutzes yet, but eighty merchants and perhaps twenty-five suppliers. They rolled past Wave Rider and out of sight.
In Spiral Town the caravan's arrival had been very like this. Wave Rider had twenty-two rooms, and that had always been barely enough. Caravans carried tents, after all, and did not look for unnecessary expense. Wave Rider housed merchant families with elders and children. Merchants' relatives and businesses that dealt with the caravan were the caravan's supply line, and they would want rooms: they often doubled up. Romances and marriages had started that way.
Forty or so to be housed in twenty-two rooms. Over a hundred to be fed! Wave Rider geared up for business.
33
The Spring Caravan
The natives are irrelevant to humankind on the Crab. They're not as madly versatile as men.
-Wayne Parnelli, Marine Biology
There was no winter in Destiny's year. Removing winter allowed the other seasons to be almost the right length for the Earthtime clocks.
In order for the spring caravan to reach Destiny Town in spring, it must reach the Neck in autumn. Wave Rider hosted the spring caravan in early autumn, and the previous summer caravan carrying goods acquired along the Crab, three weeks later.
It was autumn now: the nights were cooling. Dionne, party of eight filed out onto the pier to watch the sunset.
Old Wayne Dionne traded in Terminus, selling carved and painted shells and similar goods collected along the Road by his family in Dionne wagon. Jeremy had known them for years. When they filed back toward the fire pit, Wayne called, 'Jeremy, meet Hester. She's old enough for the wagons now."
'Hello. Hester." Wayne's granddaughter had grown tall, and kept the quiet smile. "Will any of you be staying, then?"
"No, the tent's enough for us. Just meals tonight and tomorrow. We wouldn't miss your cooking."
"I have something for you." Jeremy showed Wayne what he'd found on the beach west of here: a flattish shell nearly a meter long. Rainbows played along its inner face where Jeremy had polished it.
Wayne looked dubious.
Jeremy persisted. "It doesn't look like a back shell, does it? More like a skullcap? This at the end would be where the beak extension broke off."
"The beast would be huge."
Jeremy set it aside.
Wayne said, "No, sell it to me. Somebody might be interested, back in Destiny Town. Forty?"
Money changed hands.
Jeremy asked, "Wayne, what would you think of my joining a caravan?"
And he watched Wayne's slow grin. "Unlikely. Why would you want to at your age?"
"I never saw a caravan pit barbecue. Everything I know is secondhand."
"You do fine."
"Would I do better if I'd been up and down the Road?"
"Maybe."
"Would you want me in the cooking crew if you had to eat the result?"
"Maybe. Hester, what do you think?"
The girl smiled. Jeremy grinned back. Hester hadn't tasted his cooking or the Road's. Wayne wasn't taking him seriously.
Wayne wasn't a merchant.
Chloe and Harlow came out with the large salad bowl. Harlow stopped for a lingering kiss before going back in.
More merchants were gathering around the fire pit, or watching the sunset fade and the Otterfolk play. Merchants and suppliers did business here. Not many would bother to talk to the chef. Jeremy wore his pit chef's persona like a vividly painted mask, and of course the light hid him too.
Jeremy had persuaded Harold Winslow that he could run a pit barbecue. So Harold had run a strip of lighting along the deck's edge, above where Jeremy dug the pit. "My guests eat late," he'd said. In that electric blaze Jeremy hadn't been able to tell whether food was raw or cooked.
In two weeks it had become much easier than trying to judge by sunset-light. And in this blue-tinged light no merchant from Tim Bednacourt's past had ever recognized him.
"This is one thing you almost never get on the Road," an older man said, not to Jeremy. "Lettuce." He looked around for inn personnel. "You grow this yourself?"
"Half our back garden is planted in lettuce," Jeremy said, and kept the neutral grin as he recognized Joker ibn-Rushd, aged and weathered and gone a bit soft. He babbled On: "After all, it'd be wilted mush before it got here from the Terminus farms."
Joker was frowning in the harsh, blue-tinged light. Better not give him time to think about where he'd seen this barbecue chef. "I'm Jeremy Winslow, part owner. You're new here?"
"Not quite new. I'm Dzhokhar Schilling. My wife Greta, my daughter Shireen."
Jeremy clasped his hand and said, "Dzhokhar Schilling," careful of his pronunciation, because Jeremy Winslow had never called this man 'Joker." "Hello, Greta. Hi, Shireen," more handclasps for the young woman and the ten-year-Old girl.