Starrigger s-1

by John Dechancie

  "You know damn well my dues are a year behind. But that's moot ― I own three rigs now. Pretty soon I won't have to drive at all."

  "Moving up to employer status, eh? Good for you." I let

  him puff and preen for a while, then said, "Jerry, this question may sound strange… but what have you heard about me recently?"

  Jerry laughed. "Who hasn't heard about the shoot-out at Sonny's? It's all over the skyband. What're you still doing here?"

  "That's not what I meant. What have you heard in the way of strange stories about me?"

  Apparently he knew what I meant. He settled back, lit a cigarette, looked at me, and said frankly, "Jake, I don't believe ninety percent of the road yams I hear. Who does? Someone claims to've sighted a Roadbuilder vehicle, you hear someone's stumbled onto a backtime route and winds up being his own grandfather, that sort of thing. I've also heard some things about you, just as wild."

  "Such as." He was skeptical. "Oh well, it seems you and Sam found a way out of the Expanded Confinement Maze and followed the Skyway all the way out to the end."

  It was crazy. You could go only so far on the Skyway before the known routes were exhausted. Of course, you could take a chance and go through one of the many unexplored portals… and end up anywhere in the universe. If the planet on the other side had a double-back portal ― like the one leading from here back to Tau Ceti ― you were in luck. If not, you'd "be stuck with the option of shooting the next aperture, which could lead anywhere. The reason why all of the above is fairly certain is that no one has ever made a convincing case for having come back from a "potluck portal."

  I popped a chunk of sour fruit into my mouth. "I can tell you for a fact that we've done no such thing."

  "Hell, I know that. But I've also heard that you're going to do it. I've heard the tale both ways."

  "Going to?" I mulled that over. "How are we supposed to accomplish this amazing feat?"

  I chanced to turn my head. Perez was looking into the room, and our eyes met. He quickly ducked back. A little too quickly.

  "With a roadmap."

  I turned back to Jerry. "Roadmap?"

  "Yeah. A genuine Roadbuilder artifact. How you managed to get hold of one is covered in the next episode, I guess."

  What was remarkable to me was how the Skyway breeds these tall tales. The Skyway is half legend, half reality itself. Nevertheless, evidence abounds that the Skyway extends to other regions of the galaxy. Alien vehicles are seen every day on the road, coming from parts unknown, going to ― only the occupants know where. Most don't stop. Every once in a while, one does, and we meet a new race: Zeta Reticulans, Beta Hydrans, Gliese 59ers; races like the Ryxx, the Kwaa'jheen, and the beings who call themselves The People of the Iron Sun, whose home stars can't be found on any Terran catalogues; many, many more. All in all, there are about sixty races whose Confinement Mazes, the routes that lead from their home system to nearby colonizable planets, are known and mapped. Put all these known areas together, and you get one big Confinement Maze, little sections of which are strewn out over a sizable portion of several spiral arms. But there certainly is more to discover. Every once in a while, a new race drops into this neck of the woods and stops to be sociable. More information is then acquired ― but the process is slow.

  'Tell me. Where does the Skyway end?" I asked.

  "At the beginning of the universe."

  I drained the last of my sickly sweet drink. "Is there a good motel there?"

  Jerry laughed. "Jake, you know how these whoppers get started. Alien booze in human stomachs. Accidental chemically induced insanity."

  We talked for a while longer, about five more minutes. Jerry told me what he knew about the jungle-clearing project. All the while something nagged at me from the back of my mind: the way Perez had eyeballed me.

  "Jerry, thanks a lot. Good luck in your new business."

  "Okay, Jake. Let me know what it's like at the Big Bang."

  "I'll write."

  I went out into the lobby.

  Perez was behind the desk, smiling at me strangely, and three sleek roadsters were pulling into the lot.

  I dashed for the elevator, and while waiting for the accursed sluggish thing, buzzed Sam.

  "Sam, old man, condition puce. Get ready to roll."

  "Where to, for God's sake?"

  "Look for two roads and a yellow wood that we can diverge into. Otherwise, it's all over."

  There was a house intercom by the elevator. I punched our cabin number.

  "Yes?"

  "Darla, pack up. Now. Drop that ladder and get down to Sam. Make it fast, and use Bess on the rope bridge. Bum it!"

  "Right!"

  Three men, one of Wilkes' gunsels and two unknowns, were approaching the transparent entrance doors. I looked around and saw double doors that probably led to a kitchen.

  I was right, and three cooks, one of them alien, a Thoth, looked up from their dirty work. I didn't stop, and banged out a rear door. It opened onto a hallway that led into the restaurant. A separate entrance provided access from the parking lot. The room was dark and empty. From behind a partition by the waiters' station came the clattering of dishes. I crossed the floor quietly, crouched against the front wall, and looked out a window.

  Five more men were running toward the restaurant door. I dived under the nearest table and froze just in time to hear the door thump open and feet pound across the floor. The heavy tablecloth prevented me from seeing. I waited until they left, then got up and risked another look. Three more men waited in the lot, standing by the side of one vehicle, hands thrust under their tropical shirts.

  Trapped like a rodentoid.

  I needed to get out the door and to the right, toward the end of the parking lot where the footpath came out of the woods; but as I watched, two men came out of the front entrance and ran past my vantage point, no doubt going to cover that very route. The alternative now was to somehow make it across the lot in the other direction and duck into the woods using Sam's swath as an entry point. The three lookouts were still there.

  Something was moving in the lot; by the sound, a rig. Then I saw it as it backed up between me and the gunsels. It was Jerry, clearing out in a hurry. Wherever I was, he didn't care to be.

  When the gunsels' view of the side door was completely blocked, I sprinted out, mounted the rig's running board, and knocked on the side port about three inches from Jerry's head. He jumped.

  He slid back the port. "Hey, Jake. Don't do that!"

  "Sorry, Jerry. Hello, Andromeda. Can you give me a lift to the far end of the lot?"

  "Jake, those guys there… Never mind."

  Resigned, Jerry eased the rig forward. I watched as we passed the main entrance. Nobody showed.

  "Far enough?" Jerry hoped.

  "Yeah. Stay here until I can get into the woods, okay?"

  "Sure."

  Sam was right. The undergrowth had rebounded to the point where I could barely distinguish Sam's trail. It was horrendous going. Bent grasses snared my feet, thorny tendrils leeched at my clothing. I stumbled into hidden holes, tripped over submerged rocks, doing it for about two minutes and getting nowhere.

  It got worse. I wasn't sure if I had lost the trace. It appeared as if I had.

  "Sam! Come in!"

  "Where the hell are you?"

  "I don't know. Somewhere behind you. Is Darla ―?"

  "Fine mess. Yes, she's here. I'm going to start the engine. Follow the sound."

  "Fine. No, wait!" I smelled smoke ― the rope bridge. Now, if I could only follow my nose. But I couldn't see a damn thing. "Forget it. Start up."

  Sam did so, and the muffled whine came from my right. I thrashed my way toward it.

  "Can you come back toward the lot?"

  "Trying to. For some reason, it's harder getting out than getting in."

  "Yeah, well see if you can―" Something was on my leg, something warm, wet, and rubbery. I looked down.

  A hairless, many-legged beasti
e with a central body about as big as a grapefruit was hugging my calf. I let out a yell, smashed the thing with a fist, grabbed it with both hands, and pulled. A sharp pain lanced through my leg. I yanked, managed to pull one slippery leg free, and it coiled about my hand, throbbing. I pulled. The tentacle stretched like taffy, then grew resilient and tugged back. I fell, tumbled in the springy brush, writhing, while the pain crescendoed. I beat and tore and cursed at the thing, but it wouldn't give me up. Great scarlet waves of pain coursed up my leg, pulsed in my side. For a frozen eternity there was only the pain and a separate universe to kick and scream in, little else.

  The next thing I knew I somehow had a stick in my hand and I was whacking the animal as hard as I could, oblivious to the damage. I was doing to my leg. Finally, the thing squealed ― the sound of chalk against a blackboard ― let go, and burrowed back into the grass.

  I lay there for a moment. Presently, I got to my feet. The leg was numb and loath to obey my commands, but I could walk. I paused to look around for the key, which I had dropped, but it was nowhere around.

  Movement behind me, the sound of thrashing. I regretted having yelled, but when it comes to creepy-crawlies I immediately lose my gonads, become all hoopskirts and fluster. Definitely phobic reaction.

  No time to search for the key.

  Sam sounded nearer, at least, but now I had no way of communicating. I groped through the eternal green miasma, flailing at my leafy tormentors, suddenly getting a wild, desperate notion to go back to the main building, ask Mr. Perez for his machete, and pay the rooted bastards back in kind. They did not relent. I hacked at them with what I had, stiffened forearms, my good leg, hate. Tiny insects hummed about me in a swirling cloud, lit on my face and swam on the surface of my cornea, and had pity enough not to bite.

  I heard the crackling of a gun. Someone was burning a path off to my left.

  Crashing came from directly ahead. Sam. I lurched forward and fell, squelched a curse, and struggled onward again. Sam was near, but I still couldn't see him. My ankle turned in a depression, and for an agonizing few seconds I sucked air and screamed inwardly as bolts of white heat shot through me. But soon I was plunging ahead, throwing my body against the foliage, ramming myself through toward what I took to be the rig's engine sounds. Progress came in bits of eternity.

  Finally, I gave up. The throbbing had returned in my leg, neatly phasing with pulses of fire from my ankle. I collapsed backward from the heat, the exertion, the pain. I dug out my squib and waited, letting wriggly wet things lave my face. I didn't care, just lay there, defocusing my eyes on an overarching canopy of dark green. Sam was getting nearer, nearer. I tried to sit up, found that I could, then looked around.

  Something whooshed out of the jungle directly behind me. I turned around and found myself sitting beside Sam's left front roller. It had stopped on the exact spot where my head had been. The engine whined again, the roller moved, and I pounded frantically against the ground-effect vane with all my strength.

  "Jake?" Sam's voice on the external speaker.

  "Yo!"

  The hatch popped open, and I painfully hauled myself up and in.

  I fell to the deck behind the shotgun seat.

  "Oh, my God," I heard Darla say.

  I rolled over and saw her face, one of the most deftly executed of God's pastel drawings. "Hello."

  "Where the hell you been, boy?" Sam chastised.

  "Out weeding the garden. Let me get… ahhhh!"

  "Careful," Darla said. "Oh, your leg…."

  With a little help, I got up and slumped into the seat. Sam was turning to the left, steamrollering through the green-capped swells.

  "There's a stream around here. Yeah, the ground's dipping. Should be―"

  We didn't see the man, one of our pursuers, until we were on top of him. He had time to turn his head and register the beginnings of alarm before we ran straight over him. He didn't have time to scream. Darla gave a tiny squeak and put her hand over her mouth.

  After an interlude, Sam said, "Here we go."

  We clunked over an embankment, slid, and splashed into a shallow running brook strewn with polished stones. Sam eased the back end down. I heard the forward accordian-joint between cab and trailer go scrunch as it bent to its limits. Sam turned hard left and trundled down the stream bed bumpingly, jarring our teeth and bones to jelly.

  "We'll make time this way," Sam said.

  "Where are we going?"

  "This stream parallels a dirt road farther down. The road should take us down to the clearing project, where we'll pick up another trail that'll get us to the Skyway. We hope."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "Just following Cheetah's directions. Ask her yourself."

  I looked around. In a pile of soft dark hair huddled in a comer of the rear seat, two big wet eyes awaited my approval.

  4

  The stream meandered through cathedrals of jungle, its banks overhung with weeping vinery. We strapped in and let the rig jostle us as Sam sent it banging over rocks and slamming down over half-meter-high cataracts. It was rough going, but not as difficult as barging through rain forest. The gradual downgrade soon leveled off and the stream got deeper. Then it got very deep.

  As the water level gurgled up to my viewport, I said, "I knew those optional snorkels on the vents would come in handy someday."

  "I think this is about as deep as it gets," Sam said.

  He was right. Ahead was white water. Sam stopped for a moment to decide on his approach, then gunned it for a place where the drop was lowest. We rolled over smooth rocks and splashed into the hydraulics below, like some great, lumbering water beast beached in the shallows.

  Anyway, the rig was getting a long-needed washing. The stream widened out farther down, and Sam stopped long enough for Darla to clean the triple-puncture wound on my leg and bandage it up. I suddenly felt very weird.

  "You're in luck," she said. "Cheetah says the weegah, which is what bit you, isn't poisonous to humans. Unfortunately, the chemical of the venom resembles chlorpromazine, a tranquilizer, if I remember correctly. You should be winking out soon. You probably got a good dose."

  "I feel very calm, but kind of strange. How did you know all that?"

  "Oh, passing interest in xenobiology, especially exotic zoology."

  "If I die, I want you to do something for me. Go to my flat and kill every houseplant in it."

  "Sounds so petty."

  But my ire grew abstract as a nirvanalike mood descended. The pain in my leg and ankle subsided to alternating twinges, and I sat back to enjoy the ride as Sam resumed driving.

  About half an hour later we picked up the dirt road, but we almost hung ourselves up getting out of the water. We scraped bottom with the sickening sound of abused metal, then gained the rutted road, which bore us away from the stream and slightly uphill.

  I grew terribly sleepy. I told Darla to fetch a stimtab from the medicine kit, but she advised against it, contending that the interaction of the drug and the venom was unpredictable, owing to the weegah's alien chemistry. I acquiesced. Now she was a doctor.

  Another hour went by, and we came to the clearing. It was a shock. Over at least a dozen square kilometers the jungle had been ripped away like so many weeds. In its place lay chewed earth, shards of pulp, and row after endless row of neatly wrapped bales, bundles of vegetation sorted into homogeneous groups ― bark, logs, leaves, chips, pods, fruit, and vegetable mash (these in big metal canisters), all products useful as-is or ready for further processing. The thing that had done the deed was off in the distance, a Landscraper. The machine was a metal platform almost a kilometer long, moving on gargantuan tracks, biting off great chunks of forest at its leading edge, sorting, processing, digesting masses of material in its guts, and dropping the fecal result off behind. Eventually, farms, houses, and factories would follow in its wake. Cleared land was a premium on Demeter (the proper name for the planet and one everybody ignored; most people called it Hothouse
).

  Cheetah eyed the scene dolefully, and I couldn't help feeling sorry. She looked upon the ruins of her only home.

  The road skirted the edge of the clearing for about a klick or so before it swung back into the jungle. At this point we were on the lookout for airborne vehicles, but none appeared.

  The new section of trail was heavily overgrown in spots, and wound its way around marsh and hollow until it dead-ended into another road.

  "That way!" Cheetah instructed.

  Sam turned left, and beneath the feeling of utter tranquility and well-being, I recognized the absurdity of having to be led by the nose out of danger by an individual supposedly without a measurable IQ. But we usually take all the help we can get.

  I fell asleep, kept popping awake when Cheetah yelled out a new direction, but eventually there were no more decisions to make and the road before us twined endlessly.

  Night fell, as it does very early on Hothouse, with its sixteen-hour rotation, and we ghosted down leafy corridors with the headbeams playing among the trees. Pairs of tiny eyes glowed in the shadows like sparks in a dying fire, watching. Now and again came sounds of rustling in the bushes, nocturnal cries echoing out in the blackness beyond. I dozed, awoke, drifted sleepward, awoke, and the vista before me was the same, dream and reality indistinguishable. I don't know how long we traveled. The trail turned into a green Moebius way, endlessly twisting back on itself, like the Skyway laid out in a galaxy of verdure….

  Skyway. Paradox. Causality reversed… living lives, loving loves, dying deaths out of natural sequence…. We are born, follow our useless paths to the grave, but the paths are two-way… cut and splice a lifeline and you get death before life, disappointment before expectation, fulfillment before desire, effect before cause….

  The road was long and I drove it, taking the Backtime Extension… back to Terra, a lost, blue-white speck against the blackness, an exhausted little planet of fifteen billion souls ― despite the constant exodus of surplus population out to the web of worlds linked by the Skyway… back to a boyhood in a dying rural town in Northeast Industry, nee Pennsylvania, Federated Democracies of North America… a little mining town called Braddock's Creek, whose pits had given up their last flakes of bituminous at around the end of the fourth decade of the century, shortly after I was born… a demi-ghost town of boarded-up tract houses long foreclosed upon and abandoned to house-strippers and weather, a depopulated community in this age of overcrowding, victim of Climate Shift… short hot summers, long face-numbing winters, with no growing season to speak of…. A toddler spending the warm months barefoot playing on shale piles near the mines, mounds of blue-black rubble forever smoking with spontaneous combustion, cooking themselves into mountains of "red dog," gravel good for laying on dirt roads… a boy swimming in strip-mine holes brimming with acid-spiked runoff water…. We never went hungry in those days, with Father working when he could, coaxing fruits and vegetables out of our chemical garden when he was laid off; and when neither activity paid the bills, doing mysterious things, staying out late at night while I waited for him, sleeping in the big double bed with Mother, lying awake, listening to dogs bark out in the windy night', waiting, wondering when he would get in, wondering what he was doing, and where; Mother never saying anything about it, never acknowledging the fact that her husband spent whole nights away; waiting, until I fell asleep, to wake up next morning in my sleeping bag on the old mattress in the front room, dimly remembering Father carrying me there, kissing me and tucking me in…. Dim years spent in boredom and restlessness and missed school because of fuel shortfalls and lack of funding, meatless days, wheatless days, proud happy days when the sun was out and things warmed up and I could run and raise hell and play and not think about or not care about a world where millions, no, billions starved and the incessant brushfire wars raged on, or appreciate the profound implications of the fact that men lived on the moon and in lazily turning metal wheels in space…. I remember my father telling me about his remembering when the first portal of the Skyway was discovered on Pluto by a robot probe, and I thought. Why did they put it so far away out there at the edge of the solar system?… Watching viddy programs about it and hearing the commentators say what a mystery it all was ― who had built it? when? why? ― years that melted away too soon, because for all the privation, it was a childhood no worse than most, better man some…. And one day Father telling us that we would move, that he had applied for emigration and that we had been accepted, and that somehow he had come up with the 500,000 New Dollar emigration fee charged to all North American residents because economically the region was still better off by far when compared with other parts of the world…. The trip by hydroskiff to India, the unbelievable masses of people there, bodies in the streets, dead bodies and some that were not quite dead, stacked like cordwood and sprinkled with white powdery chemicals making them look like woodpiles in a first snow…. The shuttle port near Kendrapara on the Bay of Bengal, surrounded by tent cities of stranded emigrees… The thundering shuttle ride and my first space-sickness and the view of a dazzling Terra wheeling below… Being aboard the Maxim Gorky, a Longboost ship that made Pluto in eighteen months, most of the time spent with its passengers in Semidoze, an electrically induced twilight of semiconsciousness which made the interminable trip bearable… Spending about an hour on Pluto before boarding the bus which took us by Skyway to Barnard's Star, thence to 61 Cygni-A II, thence to Strove 2398, thence to Sigma Draconis IV, called Vishnu, where I spent the remainder of my childhood on a farm in a valley made green with water cracked from rocks, working as I never worked before or since; where I grew, finally became a man ― too soon, when my mother died giving birth to my brother Donald, stillborn….