Red Limit Freeway s-2

by John Dechancie

  I just wanted to draw a curtain over my mind and forget. But the stickum all over me and the image of quivering mandibles wouldn't go away. And the sight of intestines that looked like children's plastic building blocks spilling from the body of a creature whose passing glance would stop a child's heart. And the smell of turpentine and almonds.

  At some point Susan showed up.

  She ran her hand gently over my forehead. She was crying.

  "Oh, Jake," she said.

  "Are you all right?" I asked calmly. Then I came out of it. "Susan," 'I said, and it all seemed like a dream. "Suzie. My God, Suzie."

  I stood up. Susan buried her face into my filthy jacket and sobbed.

  Her voice muffled, she wailed something.

  "… my fault, it's all my fault…" was all I could hear.

  "No, no," I Said.

  She cried some more then lifted her face up. She looked as if she'd been crying for hours. Had it been hours since I came up from the depths?

  "Poor Tivi," she said, her lower lip quivering. "How can I ever…"

  She hid her face again and trembled against me.

  "There, there."

  I actually said, There, there.

  There was more moving around. Ragna came out of what was apparently some official's office, into the anteroom where Susan and I were sitting.

  "The distinguished individual to whom I have just been speaking," he informed us solemnly, "is wishing to be gazing upon you in person as we are discussing this matter."

  We went into a lavish office that looked more like a bedroom. The Nogon individual was dressed in cerise robes of a crepe material and reclined on a divan like some improbable satrap. His manner was perfunctory, if not downright insulting. He and Ragna exchanged words. We stood by.

  In all, five minutes' worth of words were exchanged, and at the end of it the official spat out a phrase that was surely an insult, got up, and flounced out through another door.

  "Why are we being blamed?" I asked Ragna. "And what did he say to you?"

  "He is calling me what most of our race are calling us, in so many words, that we are people who are fornicating with creatures that have no eyes―which is to be saying animals who are living in caves. And we are not being blamed, so much, anyway. They are caring nothing for Tivi. A fire, though, to them is frightening stuff, which is understandable―which is serving them right for living in these dumps, by gosh, the bastardly rats. It is all strictly in the nature of being bullshit." I still didn't understand, but didn't ask for further elaboration. It was all, I was sure, very difficult to be explaining.

  We went home.

  The Ahgirr medics fixed me up fine, and while I was recuperating, the techs fixed the trailer for us. No one breathed a word about Tivi's death. The Ahgirr, it seemed, didn't have funerals. What was done with the remains was left unspoken as well.

  Nothing was said or done which in any way would have led us to believe that we were being held to blame. Tivi's husband Ugar came to us and said that Tivi had died in the performance of her duty as a scientist. That was all he said.

  There was a ceremony, however, which we humans all attended. The entire community gathered in a huge central chamber and sat on the cool stone floor in silence for a full hour or more. Then they all got up and left to go about their daily tasks.

  I spent two days languishing in Ragna and his wife's suite, staring at the polished granite wall of a bedchamber, seeing strange things swarming in the grainy surface. Tivi's face, Susan's, Darla's, my father's. Scenes from my life, too, darkly and through a glass smudged with forgetfulness.

  Gradually, I came out of whatever state I was in and in a week I was more or less back to normal.

  Three very busy days passed before we said good-bye to the Ahgirr. I supervised the final touches on the repair job. Ariadne got a facelift and a clean bill of health after extensive repairs. She was still magenta, but now she wore it well.

  In the middle of all this, I drew Sean aside. I had avoided doing this for as long as I could. I asked him about what I had seen in the caves.

  "Ah, yes," he said, stroking his explosion of facial foliage. "Now, what exactly does your Snark look like?"

  "What do you mean, my Snark? Are there different varieties?"

  "As many as there are people who see them."

  "I don't understand. Was what I saw in the woods back on Talltree real or not?"

  "Hard to say. There are a number of theories. Not a shred of solid research has been. done, but it's thought that some types of vegetation on the planet produce hallucinogenic pollen."

  "I see. So what I thought I saw was just brain static. Right?"

  "Hard to say. Did you look for tracks?"

  "No. I got conked right after I saw the thing."

  "Well, it might have been real. That is to say, you could very well have seen something. Almost nothing's known about Talltree, zoologically speaking."

  "How do you account for its being here?"

  He shrugged his mountainous shoulders. "I don't. But you could have seen a real creature back home, then had a delayed reaction here. It's been known to happen."

  "Yeah, hallucinogens are like that. D‚j… vu experiences are pretty common."

  "I've known some people who claim to be revisited by their Snarks every odd month or so. It's like an imprinting process. An id‚e fixe, if you'll forgive another Gallicism."

  I scratched my face, shaking my head. "But it seemed so real."

  "It can be that, m'lad."

  "Yeah. One thing, though."

  "Hm?"

  "You said the thing I saw wasn't a Boojum."

  "Sounded like a Snark to me."

  "What would've happened if I had seen a Boojum?"

  "You wouldn't be here to talk about it."

  "Ah," I said.

  Sam was lonely, parked as he was at the mouth of the cave-city, so in and around other activities, I had made sure to go up and visit him. To pass the time, we ran a systems check on him, just to make sure that everything was working smoothly.

  We would do this now and then, debug and add a few new subroutines, erase useless files, that sort of thing. All seemed fine until I discovered that Sam's absolute-timing circuit was two hours slow. No doubt about it. Sam was two hours behind all the other clocks in the rig: the one on the dash, the one on the microwave oven in the kitchenette, even my wristwatch, which I never wear. There were only two explanations. Either the timer had inexplicably shut down for two hours and started up again, or Sam had been shut down for the same amount of time.

  There is no direct way to turn Sam off, but if I wanted to, I would cut the power to his CPU and he'd be out like a light, just like any other computer. Of course, Sam would never permit anyone else but me to do it, but somebody working on him, on the rig, rather…

  Sam said, "So you figure if it happened, it happened at the repair garage back on Talltree."

  "Can't think of any other time when the opportunity would have arisen, except when Stinky worked on you back on Goliath."

  "Well, surely Stinky's above suspicion."

  "Maybe." I thought a moment. "Okay. Stinky worked all day on you, right? And that night, the Militia tried to break into the garage to search you."

  "I don't know who it was. I just got the hell out of there, fast."

  "Yeah, which is kind of hard to figure, now that I think about it."

  "How so?"

  "You say you crashed out of Stinky's garage. Did you run into anyone?"

  "Nope. I rolled through a vacant lot, flattened a little shed, then found a side street, and rolled out of town. No one followed."

  "If it was the Militia, I wonder why they didn't," I said.

  "Maybe it was that Petrovsky fellow, and an assistant or two,"

  I nodded. "Makes sense. I didn't see Petrovsky at the Teelies' ranch when the Militia raided it. He could have been leading the mission to search you."

  "Could "

  Sitting in the shotgun s
eat in front of Sam's diagnostic display, I tugged at my lower lip, pinching it between thumb and finger. "Though Petrovsky could have been in one of those flitterjets. Only two landed, as I remember. I can't imagine him not personally commanding a major operation like that.

  So, he may have left the break-in attempt to his subordinates."

  "Maybe."

  "Yeah," I said, mulling it over. Presently I said, "Answer me this. Is there a chance you were shut down that night?"

  "How would they have done it?"

  "An electromagnetic pulse gun could have knocked you out that way."

  "That would have knocked out everything, including the other clocks."

  "Maybe some other way? Maybe you didn't notice anything until the last second before they yanked the plug."

  "Well, hell, I guess it's possible," Sam acquiesced, "but doesn't it make more sense to suspect that something happened back on Talltree? There, they had all the opportunity in the world. You told them to go right into the main power junction to check for sand."

  "I was trying like hell," I said, "to avoid drawing the conclusion. Don't like the implications of that. If they got to you back there and tampered with you, it was for a reason."

  "To get control of me? I can assure you that I'm just as ornery as ever."

  "No. Those backwoods bumblers wouldn't know how to handle a major artificial intelligence. But they could have punked around with your auxiliary system software, maybe added a mole program."

  "To what end?"

  "To get you to do something you wouldn't be aware of doing."

  "Like what?"

  "Like leaving some kind of trace."

  "Okay, I see what you're driving at. Well, it's easy enough to find out. Let me just read out how much main memory we're currently using for system software and… Jesus Christ."

  The readout was on the screen before Sam's reaction. The figure was almost twice what it should be.

  "No wonder I was having trouble crunching numbers during that shoot-out," Sam said. "What is all that junk? Can't be just supervisor programming."

  "Doubt it," I said.

  "Lemme try to get a listout, see what the hell it is. Dammit. Why ain't I surprised that it won't list out?"

  "You've lived too long. Switch the buffer to the dash terminal and let me try."

  Sam did, and I punched up the Main Menu. I tried various ploys to get a listout of the mass of bytes taking up space in main memory, but couldn't, though I did get an address for it, and a program ID.

  "At least it has a name," Sam commented.

  "WPA0001. Mean anything to you?"

  "'WPA' rings a bell somewhere. Otherwise, no, it's meaningless."

  "Not surprising. Lessee, what else can we do? What about this…?"

  Half an hour later, we had an empty trick-bag and still had a main memory clogged with what was undeniably a mole program of puzzlingly major proportions that stubbornly refused to show itself or give some clue as to its nature. It was everywhere. As well as claiming squatter's rights in the CPU,

  it had nestled itself in Auxiliary Storage, but we couldn't pinpoint exactly where. It was as if it had checked into a motel and left a suitcase in every room. The thing was intractable. When we erased it from main memory, it would load rightback in when we IPLed the system again. And we couldn't erase it from AuxStorage without the risk of wiping out something we wanted to keep. I grew frustrated. In a last-ditch effort, I spent two hours coding a diagnostic program which, while it would not tell me directly what the phantom program was, would by a process of elimination tell me what it wasn't. It wasn't a conventional supervisor program. It would not relinquish control to any other program once it started operating. What it did when it operated was a mystery. With the engine off, it seemed to do absolutely nothing. When we fired up the rig, something happened in the radioactive waste management system, but whatever was going on was too subtle to detect.

  After two hours of test runs, I finally got an inkling of what the thing could be.

  "I'd say it was an artificial intelligence. Generation Ten, possibly higher."

  "That's what I make it out to be," Sam said. "Which means…"

  "We have a stowaway."

  Chapter 14

  "Entity X," as we came to call it, proved a tough nut to crack. When we'd completed all other repairs and still had no success, we threw in the nutcracker and left.

  The phantom program obstinately resisted analysis, no matter how cleverly we devised the probe. We couldn't get too tricky, though, for fear the thing was booby trapped. I didn't want to risk damaging the CPU or maybe even the rig itself. No telling what the thing could or would do if provoked. So we gave up. Whatever Entity X was, it wasn't inhibiting business as usual. Sam's Vlathusian Entelechy Matrix was firmly in control of 99 percent of the computer's functioning, and the mysterious program's claim on the rest seemed harmless, though we strongly suspected it wasn't. We still didn't know exactly what it was up to in the waste management system, but we could guess.

  "So you think it's dropping off a trail of waste products, is that it?" Sam asked.

  "Maybe," I said.

  "Put most vehicles leak a little stuff now and then. How could the trackers find the trace?"

  "By spiking our fuel with something. They filled you up on Talltree, right?"

  "Right. You may be on to something here."

  "Best guess I can come up with," I said.

  "And we can't do anything about it, either. Beautiful."

  "Not unless we want to fiddle with the waste system, and we're certainly not equipped for that."

  "No, we're not. One thing, though. Why would they need major artificial intelligence to do the job? A dumb little Trojan horse program would've sufficed."

  "Maybe not," I countered. "We could deal with one of those.

  A program that's a computer in itself can keep itself hidden and resist attempts to ferret it out."

  "Set a computer to avoid getting caught by a computer, so to speak."

  I nodded. "So to speak."

  We said good-bye to the Ahgirr, with no little regret and sadness. I still felt Tivi's loss, and many others had come to be friends. Darla was especially loath to leave a fascinating alien species that was so much like us. No race in the known mazes approached them in their similarity to humans. The Reticulans ran a distant second, which is to say they weren't close at all. It made sense that we had found them here, in a noncontiguous maze. The Roadbuilders had probably wanted to separate species who might compete for colonizable worlds.

  In the shade of the cave-mouth, Ragna's eyes brimmed with tears.

  "We shall invariably be missing each of you as individuals," he said, clutching the hand of Oni, his wife―the term seemed applicable here, even though Ragna and Oni were lifecompanions in the truest sense. The Ahgirr were given to life-long monogamous relationships. There was no word for "divorce" in their language, though separations were not unheard of.

  Hokar wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his plain gray tunic. "Yes," he said, "we shall be missing you much."

  "And we you," John said, enveloping Hokar's hand in both of his.

  About thirty cave dwellers had come up to the entrance to bid us farewell. We had come to know most of them. In the shadows toward the rear, glowing eyes of shy children peeked out at us from behind stacks of crates and cylindrical containers. I waved, and the eyes disappeared. Susan saw me smiling as the children dared another peek.

  "They're adorable, aren't they?" she said, coming up to me.

  "Cute as buttons," I said.

  "Always makes me wonder…" she began, then gave me a wan smile.

  "About having children? Or not having them?"

  "I made that decision long ago, but it's not irrevocable. So I have second thoughts when I see a bunch of darling little things like that―and these are nonhuman kids, so you can imagine."

  Taking her arm I said, "I usually ask long before this, but… uh, do we have anything to be
concerned about in that area? You said it wasn't irrevocable."

  "Hm? Oh, no way. I went in for old-fashioned surgery. My tubes are tied. Those three-year pills are so damned expensive, and with my brain I'd forget when the next one was due. The other nonsurgical options aren't very attractive either. They're irrevocable, and who the hell wants to go into premature menopause? But undoing a tubal ligation is easy, so I'm always safe, and I always have the option of changing my mind." She grinned and put her arms around my neck. "And…"

  "And?"

  "If I ever do change my mind about having children―"

  "Whoa there," I said, undraping her arms from around me. "I'd have to think about that for a good long while."

  She was annoyed. "Why, you big egomaniac. Do you think I necessarily want to sign a lifecompanionship contract with you simply because I might want to bear your child? I say might." She put her fists on her hips and tossed her head defiantly. "Think I want to be a truckdriver's wife, stuck at home with half a dozen screaming brats while you go highballing around the universe picking up skyhookers?"

  "I never indulge, my dear. Don't like diseases in the groinal area.

  "Don't make me laugh." She poked me in the ribs with two stiffened fingers. "You're good stock, is all. Prime genetic material." She kept poking till I flinched. "Healthy as a horse, good teeth, no inheritable defects―"

  I reached and bobbled her right breast. "You're not so bad yourself, kid."

  She squealed. "You creep! Groinal, huh?"

  I tried to stop her hand as it shot out and under, but missed. I jumped half a meter.

  "Susan, really," I groaned. "What will our friends think?"

  Our friends were regarding us bemusedly, and I caught a particularly curious stare from Ragna as Susan ceased her attack upon my privates and jumped up, locking her legs around my hips, hugging me, laughing, kissing me.

  Ah, this is being some strange courtship ritual, perhaps, invariably?

  Well―actually, yes.

  * * *

  The road, the road. Always the road, the endless black ribbon, like the one that'll be around my casket probably, tying off my life in a tangle topped by an enigmatic floral bow, Moebius-looped and infinite.