Destiny's Road by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

banyans, redwoods.
    Majestic trees hadn't always survived well, and variety had come into fashion. For a long lifetime the lifegivers bore nut trees and fruit trees. Then someone had decided that the practice was disrespectful or something.
    But an extensive grove still bore fruit and nuts. Jemmy picked a handful of cherries, a few plums, an orange. He stuffed his pockets, then settled in the shadows of the gnarled old trees to eat.
    The markers around him were all above eye level. Jemmy tried to read them, but they were only a glitter in the dark. Holograms need light.
    When the holomarker gun failed it would be a major tragedy. It was settler magic, irreplaceable.
    On an ordinary night Jemmy would have been asleep by now. Though he felt that he might never sleep again, he was weary. His life had lost all direction in one deafening blast. Now the bark against his back was too comfortable. It would be easy to stay where he was.
    Thonny's hat was a bit small, a bit tight. He took it off and waved it at the flies buzzing his ears. The buzzing went away, then came back, sounding like sleep.
    Had he been dozing?
    He surged to his feet, swung his pack onto his back, and was in motion. If he sat down again, they'd find him asleep in the graveyard come morning!
    The slopes above Spiral Town resembled chaparral, the dwarf forest of California. It was Earthlife laced with surviving Destiny life, too thick and too hostile to hike through. The bare rock above would not hide a fleeing murderer.
    But plants only covered the slopes up to fifteen hundred feet above the Road, and stopped quite suddenly. Frost line, the teaching programs would have called it, but Destiny never got that cold. The Destiny plants ran out of something else: air pressure, water, soil nutrients, something. Earthlife grew higher up, but sparsely.
    Jemmy was at the frost line when lights came on above him.
    He'd ducked back into the chaparral before his mind quite caught up.
    Lights glared and men moved around a great ragged hole in the side of Mount Apollo. The lights within the cavern showed great dark silvergray sheets peeling away like the pages of a thousand books, everywhere along the walls and roof. A man moved to the back of the cavern and pulled. Then, nearly hidden under layers of Begley cloth sheeting, he staggered toward a cart.
    It was Jemmy's first sight of the Apollo Caverns. Children weren't allowed here, even older children.
    Argos had carried several experimental von Neumann devices... a phrase every child learned and few could define.
    Begley cloth was one. A handful of self-reproducing machines just big enough to be dots had been dropped into a hole in a hillside. For two and a half centuries they had been eating into Mount Apollo, carving out a fairyland underground as they followed veins of... silicon and some small set of metals; he'd seen the list in one of the teaching programs... and made it into sheets that would turn sunlight into power, fringed with wires to carry the power to machines.
    Also, the dots made more of themselves.
    The sheeting was Spiral Town's most dependable trade good, and the caravan was in town. He should have avoided Mount Apollo at all costs. But he damned well didn't dare wait for daylight!
    He scuttled along the border between the chaparral and the bare rock above, hunching like a chug until he was out of sight of the Apollo Caverns, and far beyond.
    By night the New Hann Holding was just another patch of wilderness, and Jemmy couldn't tell where he crossed it. It might have made a nice resting place. Merchants might see it that way too. Jemmy kept moving.
    He walked through the night. Rarely did the Road come in view. At daylight he crawled into a manzanita grove and let his mattress inflate.
    On tilted ground, in a glare of sunlight sieved through red manzanita trunks and the branches and lace of some tall Destiny tree, sleep was hard to find. He slept with evil memories. Eyes and mouth wide in horror: Fedrick felt