Red Limit Freeway s-2

by John Dechancie

  By the time we got back, Susan was out of the fitting booth.

  "My survival suit'll be ready in an hour or two," Susan said. "I even got to design it myself. Custom tailored-how about that!"

  "Good. Now let's―"

  "Oh, look over here," Susan said, walking off.

  We followed her over to a stall offering a wide variety of weaponry.

  "Guns." Susan curled her lip in distaste. "I'm going to buy one."

  "Whatever for?" I asked.

  "Everybody else is armed to the teeth. Even John's carrying a gun now. Hell, with all the trouble we've been running into, I'd be foolish not to be packing some kind of shooting iron."

  "I think we have enough to go around, Suzie."

  "No, I want something that doesn't kill."

  "Oh."

  "Something that'll stop an enemy but not hurt him. I don't believe in killing."

  "That might be a tall order, but let's see."

  The merchant was a Nogon, and we found that the extent to which the alien had engaged in ritualizing and dickering had been a mere nod to local custom. Done properly, complete with nuances and byplay, the real thing could take hours. By being brusque almost to the point of insult, Tivi cut it down to twenty minutes. Meantime, Ragna went off to buy Susan a torch and some other camping gear. By the time he returned, the merchant had sold Susan a box containing three components which supposedly fit together. The sale of completely functional weapons inside the faln was illegal.

  "They are scanning all the time for operative armaments," Ragna told me.

  The sale complete, our merchant growled something and stepped behind a curtain. He didn't come out again.

  "What was that all about?" I asked Tivi.

  "He is saying that such a show of crass materialism and greed has been making him sick, at which point he will be expelling the contents of his gastric sac."

  "Oh." I turned and yelled, "Sorry!"

  "I wonder if this thing works," Susan said, examining the contents of the box.

  "I wonder what it does," I said. "Wouldn't look like a gun, no matter how you'd put the parts together. What did the salesman say?"

  "Who knows. Tivi?"

  "He was saying that this particular weapon would not be killing one's opponent. However, he was not saying in exactitude what in matter of fact it would be doing."

  "That's what came out of all that conversation?" I wanted to know.

  "Much was being spoken," Tivi said, "but little was being said."

  "Is it that these articles are to your satisfaction?" Ragna asked, displaying the various oddments he had bought for Susan―torch, mess kit, toilet articles, some sort of bedroll, other stuff, all of which were Nogon-made but eminently adaptable to human use.

  "Oh, they're fine. Thank you so much, Ragna. Here, let me pay you."

  "We may be settling monetary business dealings later, you are welcome."

  I said, "We can't thank you enough for exchanging our gold for currency."

  Hokar had let slip that gold prices had taken a dive recently. Apparently, the economy of the Nogon maze was booming.

  "You are to think nothing of it, Jake, friend of mine. These things are not spoken of, not much."

  "Here, Jake," Susan said, dumping a load of parcels on me. "Now, let me check back at the dressmaker's and we'll―"

  "Look," I said, "I'm going to take Tivi and get those parts. You go get your outfit and we'll meet you here in an hour."

  "Okay. Let's divvy up these things. You take that and that, I'll take this thing… don't they give out shopping bags in this place?"

  "You may be needing this?" Tivi was unfolding a gray cloth sack which she had brought out from under her cape.

  Susan shook her head. "And we didn't even think to bring a bag or something." She stuffed the small sack, but the gun box wouldn't fit. "This bulky thing. Maybe if we took the stuff out of the box. Ragna?"

  "No, let me take it," I said. "Maybe I can find out what kind of weapon it is."

  "But you'll have the parts to carry."

  "I have two of these," Tivi said, producing another sack.

  "Tivi, darling, you're indispensable."

  "I am thanking you for not dispensing with me."

  We finally split up.

  Tivi led me across the mall and up a ramp to a mezzanine. From there we took a connecting corridor and came out onto a curving balcony at least fifteen stories above a vast central floor alive with commerce and every- other sort of activity. We walked along the balcony until it swung out over the floor and became a ramp leading down to platform. There were bunches of transparent tubes shooting up from the floor, and inside the tubes were platforms moving up and down. These were elevators, certainly, but I couldn't figure out how they worked. We ran into a crush of shoppers well before we reached the boarding platform.

  "Too much crowd," Tivi said. "We should be going back this way."

  We walked back up the ramp and onto the balcony, then through another connecting corridor, coming out into a smaller open area that was a disconcerting architectural jumble. Nogon ideas of interior design were perceptually disorienting. Walkways made odd angles as they shot overhead without visible support. Ramps spiraled dizzily, walls bulged and sucked in, staircases obtruded into overhead spaces. Control, I thought. Control is what arcologies are all about-but what's all this madness? Maybe arcologies were just about containment.

  Tivi led me into a side corridor. We stopped by a pair of doors set into the wall.

  "These freight-lifting mechanisms are not being in so much use," she maintained.

  It looked like a conventional elevator, but when we got it going, it went up diagonally for a while, stopped for a moment, then continued vertically. In all, we went up about twenty stories.

  These upper levels seemed devoted to non-consumer items and were a little quieter, but not much. "Auctions" were being held here, too, complete with the pushing and shoving I had observed below. There were stores here, of a sort, though you couldn't tell where one ended and one began. We found an area stacked with crates of what Tivi said were electronics parts. The store was full of shoppers, but there wasn't the crush there was below.

  "I will be going to fetch a sales individual. Be waiting here, please."

  "Right."

  Tivi left and I examined some of the stuff. I could see now that my coming along had been unnecessary. I had thought that my experience with alien technologies back in the known mazes would have helped. No chance. This junk looked like dried fruit to me. Boxes and boxes of dried fruit. Looked good, too; handy for long trips when you can't stop to eat.

  Damn, I was tired. I sat on a box of delicious-looking Nogon technology and took a deep breath. Mall fatigue? Hell. Getting old.

  I spent the next few minutes thinking about nothing in particular. Memories of the last four weeks were a jumble. Running and hiding, capture and escape, over and over again. Nothing made sense. The universe was a senseless machine, grinding away to no purpose. I was caught in its gears.

  I digested that for a while. A faint feeling of nausea was the result.

  Where was Tivi?

  I got up and walked around the store looking for her. She was nowhere in sight. I went back out into the mall, walked one way, then turned around and walked back. I searched the store again, checked out the neighboring store areas. No Tivi.

  I waited another minute, then jogged as far as I could down the mall without getting lost. I huffed back, threading through the crowds, then ran in the other direction, searched, came back. She was gone.

  In desperation, I searched the store once again, sat down, waited, got up and paced, sat back down, waited.

  The next ten minutes were miserable. If I went looking for her, I'd surely get lost. I couldn't ask anybody. I knew only a few words of Ahgirr, nothing of the mainstream Nogon languages. I could only wait. And wait.

  Ten minutes more. Fifteen.

  Helpless. Helpless.

  It was one of
the few times in my life when the notion of panicking didn't seem unattractive. Panic, at least, was action and maybe a release, while sitting there was unbearable torture.

  The sheer immensity of the distance between here and home struck like a hammer blow. I was lost-doubly, triply lost. I had blundered through not one, but two potluck portals, and now, inside that maze-within-a-maze, I had found yet another labyrinth to contain me.

  I stood up. All right, enough of that crap.

  This place was big, but not infinitely so. I would walls and walk and walk and sooner or later Susan and Ragna would find me. They'd send out word, alert the security forces. I was easy enough to spot.

  But if something had happened to Tivi, could Susan and Ragna be safe?

  I was sure I could find that freight elevator. I did.

  There were no buttons to press. Tivi had fiddled with a single knob until the desired level designation had shown on the readout screen: No help to me. I tried remembering what symbol had been on the screen when we entered. Couldn't. Okay. Then it was a matter of fiddling with the damn knob, going along for the ride until this contraption went down at least twenty stories. I fiddled, and the thing went.

  Sideways.

  Then it stopped and the doors slid open. A few Nogon waiting nearby made motions to enter, saw me, and backed off. The doors closed. Nothing happened.

  I spun the knob. The elevator went straight up. I spun the knob the other way. The elevator stopped, groaned, went down diagonally to the right. I kept worrying the control and the thing kept changing direction, going nowhere. Exasperated, I twisted the knob until a likely set of runes showed on the readout. I left it there.

  The contraption dropped like a rock. Which was fine, except that I couldn't stop it. I must have given it some priority command. Okay, the hell with it, I'd just go along for the ride.

  It was a long ride, straight down. And down. And farther down still. The bargain basement-sale items, hardware, carpet remnants-the Seventh Circle of Hell.

  Finally the elevator slowed, sighed softly, and stopped. The doors opened. I peered out.

  Compared to the ceaseless roar of the mall, there was silence here. Out of the semidarkness, the quietly efficient whir and hum of machinery came to my ears. It was a world all to its own. Pipes gurgled, motors thrummed and throbbed, fans whined. The strangled scream of a turbine came from my right. But quietly, quietly.

  The place was a jungle of pipes and ducts. Here and there, faint trails of steam arose from joints and junctures. Dripping water puddled on the floor in front of the elevator. Dim yellow light came obliquely from a source to the left. Through the riot of pipes I could see branching corridors leading off at odd angles.

  This wasn't my floor. I wrenched the oversized, dull-white control knob around until vaguely familiar markings showed on the readout screen. The elevator stayed put. I fiddled with it some more, to no avail. The thing would go up again, if at all, in its own good time. I squatted, leaning my back against the metal wall of the car.

  Lost again. Loster and loster.

  To kill the agonizing wait I examined Susan's strange weapon. Taking the pieces out of the box, I tried to figure a way to put them together. The largest component of the three looked like a handle-end, and I proceeded on that assumption. The smaller of the remaining two pieces appeared to be a power pack, which fit into the third, a long rod with an adjustable clamp on the end of it. Click, snap, and it was together.

  Fine. Now, what the hell was it, and how did it work? Second question first. You held it by the handle and pointed. You crooked your middle finger around this little ring here, and…? Nothing. There were various circular switches on the handle, and I pressed some of them. Nothing. I broke it apart, examined the cylindrical power pack, decided it looked to be in backward, and turned it around. Putting the contraption back together, I pointed it out the door at the floor and squeezed the ring.

  A tiny, bright blue discharge sputtered from the end of the rod. That was it. I fiddled with the switches and tried again. The discharge was brighter and more elongated. Further fiddling produced a weaker, shorter discharge.

  And that was absolutely it.

  The floor was in great shape.

  This was obviously not a weapon but a tool, probably a pipe cutter or scoring tool of some kind. Apparently our salesman had been extremely pissed off at us. Why hadn't Tivi known it wasn't a weapon? Possibly because the thing was alien manufactured and designed for non-Nogon use. It didn't look like a typical Nogon tool; I had seen plenty of those.

  I pressed switches until it didn't discharge when I pullet on the ring. On safety. I slipped into my back pocket and stood up. I played with the control knob some more. Nothing. I paced inside the car, then tried the control again. No response. I banged on it in annoyance. Hell, don't break it, I told myself, I paced in a circle, giving the knob a good twist every circuit,

  Some ten minutes later I decided it was never going to go up again, at least not very soon. I picked up Tivi's cloth sack. Inside was Susan's new torch and another thing that looked like a sewing kit.

  I took the torch, dropped the sack and walked out into the pipe jungle, taking a corridor leading to the right. Just as I got far away enough not to be able to run back in time, the goddamn elevator shut its doors and took off. Maybe it had been waiting for me to leave.

  I wandered for an hour, looking for a way up. No stairwell, no ladders, no more elevators. Endless passageways through thickets of pipes, ducts, cables, and conduits. The life of the faln throbbed in the darkness all around me. The Nogon had never really left their caves. Vents of steam hissed at me. Strange markings on the walls gave no clue as to where I should go, how to get out. Lost and more lost. The urge to panic was returning.

  I stopped and sat on a metal canister left in the passageway, leaned back and rested my head against a warm pipe. I couldn't see a way to the other side of this. I would wander endlessly through an eternal humming night-no one would find.me, ever.

  Hey, you'd better stop that, another voice told me.

  Right. But I had been worn down. Every man has his breaking point. I was tired of this. Tired of it. I wanted to sleep, get into another dream. I didn't like this one. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep, something sounded behind me. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep. I was lost in a forest of sounds again. Lost in a cave again. The same cycles were repeating incessantly. Over and over, over and over. Run, chase, run, chase… lost, lost, lost…

  … The road is never-ending. I run along it into the night, footsteps echoing from the vast nothingness that slowly envelopes me, that slowly closes me within its dark maw. I run into the throat of the night. Eternal night. Even the stars are gone, winked out, choked out by the miasmal nonbeing that clouds the universe ahead. All that remains is the road, my feet slapping against it. Hard metal, it drains the strength from my legs, but I must go on, I must run. That is the only thing left, the only thing I have. I keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep throwing one leg out, then the other, jogging on, loping on. The things behind will never catch me if only I can keep running. I must. The light behind fades, my own shadow on the road ahead blends with the darkness. I am alone. Running, running… I can't feel my legs. My body is gone. I am pure movement, forward movement without cause, without purpose, but with an inevitable destination. I am in a dark tunnel, rushing forward, my speed increasing, momentum — building. I accelerate into the starless dark trailing slipstreams of blackness. Time winds down and stops while I gain speed. I plunge headlong through eternity, aiming for a nodal point where all lines of force, all threads of being converge. I fall. I gravitate toward the center, toward the knot in the middle of space, the beginning of time. I slide along a web woven of the stuff of night, all lines leading to its heart. I plummet. But as I approach, as I am about to reach my resting point… Sudden tight! Blinding explosion of light! The wavefront overtakes me, I dissolve into purest energy, I am swept away by overwhelming force…

  I j
erked awake and fell off the barrel to the hard, warm floor.

  Sitting up, I waited until my heartbeat slowed, then stood. I had dozed off-or maybe I had had a recurrence of my hallucinating. I was bone tired. Sure, I had only fallen asleep. Time to get moving. Sit here and they'll never find you. Okay.

  I walked forward again a few steps and stopped abruptly.

  Something tall was standing in the shadows farther down the passageway.

  I slowly took Susan's torch from my back pocket. My nonBoojum again, I thought. Will I never be rid of the thing of will it follow me for the rest of my life?

  I played the beam of the torch on it and my heart dropped into my stomach.

  "Grrreetings, Jake-frrriend. We have found you at last."

  A nightmare in gray-green chitin, fully two and a half meters tall, the Reticulan took a step forward. I assumed it was Twrrrll, the one who had always spoken to me. His zoom-lens eyes rotated slightly to get me in better focus. The complex apparatus of his mouth worked in and out, up and down in a rapid and silent sewing-machine motion. His body was thin, his seven-digited hands and feet huge. Jutting out from a long narrow face, the eyes were dead, containing nothing, no emotion, no palpable presence. A thin spike of a genital organ hung from his lower abdomen. He wore no clothing except for a harness of leatherlike material wrapping his torso. He carried a large pouch hung by a strap from his shoulder. Something was in it.

  Twrrrll and his hunting companions had followed me all the way from Terran Maze. They had been teamed with Corey Wilkes. Ostensibly, Wilkes had been paying them off in return for safe passage through Reticulan Maze, the only way back to Terran Maze from the Outworlds. But I suspected that the Reticulans had wanted the Roadmap, too. It would open up new hunting grounds to them, provide fresh honorable game. Their home world and Skyway planets had been hunted out long ago. I also suspected that they had just about given up hope of getting the map. Too many hounds after one fox. The only thing that drove them now was the hunt. For members of a Reticulan Snatchgang, bagging the quarry and dispatching it in a horrific ceremony of vivisection was the overriding concern.

  I took a deep breath. At least the danger, the thing to be feared, had taken on a physical form. I had been chased and now I was caught. And now I would deal with the situation.