Starrigger s-1

by John Dechancie

  "Urn… spooky. Yes."

  The others were waiting for us on me other side of the road. It had been a long trek, and we still had a piece to go until we made the harbor, or so we'd been told.

  "Trouble, ja?" one elderly woman with a German accent had asked us. "Vehicle break down?"

  "Uh, yes. Tell me, is it true mat there's no way back to the Terran Maze from here?"

  She laughed, showing a gold incisor. The sight of it threw me until I figured out what it was. When had dentists given up that peculiar technique? A century ago? Two?

  "Oh, nein, nein, new, kamrada, no, no, no." Apparently it was a damn silly question. "Gott, no," she said, still laughing. "Impossible. You take wrong portal, ja? Make mistake."

  "Yeah, I guess we did. Thanks."

  "You go down zere," she said, pointing south. "Zey vill haf boat comink, ja? Ferryboat."

  "Thanks. Are you taking the ferry also?"

  "Ja, ve alzo." She anticipated my next question. "Ve stay up here till boat is comink," she went on, waving with disdain toward the lower end of the island. 'Too much people. Aliens."

  Her lifecompanion smiled at me. He was a little older, bald, and wore eye-lenses… glasses, spectacles. We left them chuckling to each other, as if they'd now heard everything. Walking away, I reflected on the fact that there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged and older types around. Antigeronics hard to get here? Gold teeth, spectacles ― okay, things were primitive, but what about the vehicles?

  "Jake!" It was John, calling to me across the road. "The women want a privy call. Must find some cover, you know."

  "Right."

  "Someone's coming," Roland said, pointing to the western causeway.

  "Sam!"

  "No, a roadster… two."

  I shaded my eyes and looked. Two green dots were heading toward us. Reticulans, right on schedule.

  I practically threw Roland across the road. We needed cover fast, but there was nothing in sight but a slight rise a good minute's run down the sand. I yelled for everyone to run like hell, and they did with no questions asked. They were learning.

  Flattened in the sand just over the top of the rise, I watched two insect-green roadsters cruise across the island and come to a stop at the edge of the eastern beach. The lead vehicle was the one with the trailer, and the backup was more like a limo, bigger, with an extra rear seat, plus plenty of aft storage. The shadowy figures behind the tinted ports in the rear didn't look like Reticulans, but I couldn't tell if they were humans or not. Both vehicles pulled off the road, probably to talk things over. After a minute or so, they crossed the Skyway and headed north, perhaps following our distinctive tire tracks. Were they? No, that trail skirting the beach was well-traveled. Our trace should have been obscured by then. When they saw the submerged roadway, it was fifty-fifty that they'd head north. Still…

  When they were out of sight, I got up and brushed the sand from my chest. I was now shiftless and jackedess, having left my brown leather second skin in the Chevy, along with Pe-trovsky's pistol. Force of habit had saved Sam's key for me, since I don't usually leave it lying around. I had whatever gods who were on my side to thank for the presence of mind to have put it in my pants pocket.

  I walked down the other side of the hill and had a mild temper tantrum. Darla watched me kick sand, pick up a stick, and beat a poor patch of land-weed into pulp, then fling the stick away.

  She walked over to me. "Finally getting to you?"

  "Merte!" I said. "Shit! Piss!" I kicked more sand. "Hell and goddamn," I finished, done with it.

  She thought it was very amusing. I did too, after a moment. I looked at her. She was in briefs and halter, wearing her knee-high boots, carrying the jumpsuit in a roll under her arm. Roland was carrying her backpack. If my mind had been less occupied, I would have had trouble not staring at her. Roland was staring, not that I blamed him. The briefs were very sheer. Susan was topless and was by any standard an eyeful as well, but she wasn't drawing a glance from him. But then, Susan was a known quantity, so to speak.

  "Darla, how are those damn bugs following us?"

  "I don't know. It's very strange, but they are a Snatchgang, aren't they?"

  The others pricked up their ears. I wished Darla hadn't said it, but now they knew, if they hadn't before. Snatchgangs go after one quarry, and one only, so the Teelies weren't in danger, unless the Rikkis had a mind to use them to get to me ― which, when I thought about it, was indeed a possibility.

  "Okay, they're a Gang, but how did they trail us through a potluck… and why?"

  "Could they have scanned us?"

  "They were behind Sam, and even he might have lost us. And Sam didn't shoot the portal, so they didn't follow him through. No, they're using some exotic tracking technique, known only to Gangers. But what is it?"

  Darla considered it. "Chemical trace? Pheromones?"

  "Possibly. But can they detect minute quantities of the stuff over hundreds of kilometers of airless void?"

  "Some Terran insects can be sensitive to a few molecules in a cubic klick of air, so maybe―"

  "Yeah, but Rikkis aren't insects; they're highly evolved life forms. Even bear their young live, like us."

  "I was going to say that with the aid of technology, maybe they could do the same through vacuum."

  I stroked her shoulder. "Sorry, love. I'm being testy, I know. Your point's well-taken. But…" I looked up at the sky and massaged the back of my neck. "God, am I tired." I yawned and got hung up in the middle of it, couldn't stop. "Excuse me," I said, finally recovering. "One thing, though. When did they tag me?"

  "At the restaurant? Sonny's?"

  I'd been thinking about that for quite a while. "Yeah, the restaurant. But I never got near the Rikki. If they were spraying the stuff at me, it would have landed on other people too. Muddled the trace."

  Darla bit her lip, shook her head. "I dunno, but they must've done it somehow, Jake. We know it wasn't Sam they tagged. It was you, your person, somehow."

  "What were they doing at the farm, retagging me because the first one didn't take, or wore off?"

  "Sounds plausible. Maybe they were just looking for the map. You asked why they followed us through a potluck. It could only be because now they're sure you have the map, or know where you can get it."

  "Yeah, everyone must be absolutely convinced of that now. I guess it did look like we deliberately ducked through that portal, with Petrovsky literally trying to drag us back. Okay, so maybe nobody saw that part of it, but we sure didn't hesitate any."

  "No, we didn't. And now the Roadmap myth is reality."

  I nodded. It was, and I had made it so by trying to debunk it. I sighed. "Let's get moving."

  "Good. I'm going to wet my pants if we don't."

  Roland came down from the crest of the knoll, where he'd been watching the road. "Another vehicle went by," he reported.

  "Ryxx?" I asked.

  "No, a human driving, a man. Strange, the buggy looked familiar. I think I saw it back on Goliath, but I don't know where." He scratched his head. "Oh, I remember. It was in the dealership lot. An old piece of merte. The dealer tried to dump it on us, cash sale, instead of a rental."

  "One man, you say?" Now who the blazes could that be?

  "Oh, the hell with it," Darla said suddenly, and squatted in the weeds. "I can't wait. Gentlemen, please…?"

  I said, "Huh? Oh." I turned to John and Roland. "Okay, troops, eyes front."

  "God, men are so lucky," Susan said, taking her station near Darla.

  Lucky? Okay, so we can write our names in the sand. It's not exactly an art form.

  As we neared the harbor we found more aliens, most of them sealed up inside their vehicles, unable to step out on this planet without technological aid. Through the viewports we saw squidlike things swimming in a^ watery medium, blobs of gelatin sitting comfortably in a fog of yellow gas, many more forms mat we couldn't make out at all. Some beings motioned enigmatically to us as we passed, raising te
ntacles, claws. Others followed us with conical eyestalks, observing. From most there was no reaction.

  The island was a trade-fair of vehicle design. There were objects lying about that didn't look like vehicles at all, odd geometrical shapes and flowing, melted things giving no clue as to how they moved. There were humans here too, waiting patiently like everyone else. And rigs as well, strangely enough. I asked one starrigger when the ferry was due in.

  "She'll be in," was all he said, and spat in the sand.

  "Thanks." I walked away.

  The harbor was large but did not look deep, though the water's clearness may have been distorting. I was puzzled by the fact that there wasn't a dock or pier or anything in sight. Instead, at the apex of the deep indentation that formed the harbor, a graded section of beach angled steeply into the water. The sand looked packed and hard mere.

  "What do you make of it?" I asked Roland.

  "A hydroskiff?"

  I rubbed the scratchy stubble of my beard. "Funny, when I heard 'ferryboat' I thought of just 'that, a water-displacing vessel of some kind. Besides, you'd want flat beach to pull up on."

  "Right. Things seem primitive enough here, at least as far as humans are concerned. Maybe it is a boat."

  "Well," I yawned, "we'll see eventually." I plopped myself down on the sand.

  Winnie was drawing again, and this time I watched her. She made one big spiral figure, smaller ones nearby, and linked them with lines. I was intrigued, and asked Darla if Winnie had explained.

  "Something to do with her tribal mythology," Darla told me. "Haven't figured out what it's all about." Her answer gave me the ever-so-slight feeling that she was being evasive in some way. But no, she was just tired and didn't want to be bothered. Still, I wondered. Winnie now was drawing lines within the big spiral. I went over to her, knelt in the sand, and asked her as clearly as I could what she was doing.

  "Twee, many twee," she said, indicating the large figure. "But not like twee… like light! Many big twee like light." She pointed to the smaller spirals. "Many light, many light, many light…" I couldn't follow the rest of it, but if she was talking about galaxies and the Skyway linking them, it'd be a remarkable mythology indeed, if it weren't for the fact that it could have been learned by osmosis from contact with humans. That was the most likely explanation. A more sensational interpretation was an old pitfall some anthropologists in the past had spent time at the bottom of. Many light, many light… Winnie had passed through the Great Trees at the Edge of the Sky and was now in the realm of the gods, plying the paths through a forest of stars. Or whatever. As I watched her I again felt some share of guilt for what humans had done to her natural habitat, and wondered if there could have been any way to avoid it. Surely there was more jungle on Hothouse than Cheetah homeland. I couldn't imagine the species' total population planet-wide as being anything over a few hundred thousand, if that, but I wasn't sure. Hothouse wasn't all jungle, of course. True, there were millions of square kilometers of rain forest, but the planet had more ocean surface man Terra, plus the usual assortment of climates. It boasted icy polar continents, though small ones, deserts, plains, everything. The problem was that a lot of the tropic regions were parched and uninhabitable, and temperate areas were scarce due to the fact that Hothouse's land masses were bunched up around the equator. Mulling it over, I soon had it figured out: Winnie's people had naturally settled in rich food-gathering areas. These same areas of jungle produced high yields of organic raw materials used for a wide range of products, including antigeronic drugs ― definitely the most lucrative cash crop ever. Hothouse was one of the few sources for them.

  I looked at the web of lines within the big spiral. She'd executed them meticulously. The lines crisscrossed the entire figure, and I was curious as to how she could be so definite about them if they were mostly imaginary. Well, she'd learned the pattern from somebody, who'd learned it from somebody else, who'd learned it from…? Did the Cheetah who started the tradition have an active imagination… or could the pattern be based on fact? More to the point, was it possible that Winnie's people could have had contact with alien cultures long before humans invaded their planet? Yes, not only possible, but probable. And could they have picked up hints of where major Skyway routes led throughout the galaxy? Yes, it was ' possible all right, and I should have thought of it immediately.

  Something dawned on me, and the'very thought of it made me laugh out loud. Absurd, no? Winnie's sand drawings… the Roadmap? Couldn't be. This was no map, merely a stylized rendering. Fascinating cultural phenomenon, yes ― but an accurate map of the most labyrinthine road system in the universe? Not even close. First, you'd want to know what portals to take, and you'd need supplementary planetary maps for that. Make the first right, go x number of kilometers, etc. And you'd want to know what stars were on the routes, what part of the galaxy you were in, and all that. There was a limit to how detailed you could get in the medium of sand and stick. No, it seemed to me that a proper Skyway map would be not only three-dimensional, but hyperdimensional as well. Graphically impossible perhaps, but you'd need some sort of mathematical understanding of how the time element worked into the picture. Over long distances you'd want to keep an eye on the curve of the geodesic, since every jump involved some time displacement. Simple relativity. And somewhere along the line, according to legend, the geodesies took weird shortcuts and closed up "timelike loops," causing you to double back on yourself, or do something even more outrageous.

  But the more I thought about it, the more the idea grew on me. No, I could never convince my self that this was the vaunted Roadmap, but what if everybody thought it was? I tried that on for size. Maybe the Reticulans wanted Winnie ― maybe they came to the farm to kidnap her. But how could they have found out about her mapping abilities when I had just learned myself? If they knew about it before me, they could have grabbed Winnie at the motel anytime. Unless… unless ― ridiculous! It was all nonsense. Well, what else? Let's see, how about this ― maybe they're figuring this way. They see me shoot a potluck portal. They know I didn't have the Roadmap on my person, since the Militia didn't get it… and they're thinking, wait a minute, what's this guy doing? He must have the map. Sam doesn't have it, because Sam didn't shoot the portal. Hell, maybe they disabled Sam and searched him. So Sam's out, and they think ― well, what the hell does he have, since he barely got out of the station with his skin? The Cheetah! It must be her, because why the hell did he bother bringing her along? Yeah, that's it. The Cheetah. Sic 'im, Fido. Get that map.

  Oh hell, Sam back there disabled and helpless, and me here on the other side of nowhere. No, think a minute. Wouldn't they have let Sam shoot the portal and then search him? Because if they saw Sam turn around and go back, or hesitate, then they wouldn't bother with him. In that case I'd have to have the map, otherwise I'd be expecting Sam to shoot through. But if all that were true, why didn't Sam shoot the portal? What happened to him?

  I gave up, slumped back into the sand, and threw my arm across my face.

  "Darla?"

  "Yes, Jake?"

  "Are you keeping a lookout?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Good girl. G'night."

  "Sleep tight."

  13

  It was a ferryboat.

  Rather, that's what it looked like when it first appeared above the horizon. Then it started looking strange. There was a boat there all right, or at least the superstructure of one, but close to the waterline something else was going on. Far out, it looked like a ship run aground on a shoal, but as we watched, the shoal moved with the boat ― it looked like it was carrying the boat. Other objects appeared, globular translucent things in the water, and as the whole improbable apparition neared shore, they looked like inflated bags bobbing in the water at the edges of the dark line of land. The overall impression I got was one of a shipwrecked vessel plunked down on top of an island. There was even some vegetation growing here and there.

  The boat-structure was big enough, and
the island was fair-size as islands go, but for something moving in the water it was huge, filling the mouth of the harbor until there was barely room to float a dinghy to either side. The superstructure was just that; there was no hull. There were three huge decks up on pilings smack in the middle of the island, and the design was out of the last century, possibly earlier, all the way back to the late 1900's. It looked new, gleaming white with red and gold trim, proudly thrusting flying bridges to port and starboard, and sporting three, count 'em, three smokestacks, two of which belched puffs of white smoke. Why they were doing that was anybody's guess. Crewmen were scurrying all over the decks. Humans mostly, but there were a few aliens. The island proper was also busy, but here there were no humans. Animals ― beings ― slithered across the ground toward the leading shore, converging on a point that would be closest to the beach. They were seallike creatures, from what we could see, with sleek wet bodies, three sets of flippers, with the front pair looking larger and very prehensile, fingerlike. Their bodies were a dull orange color.

  What was very strange was the surface of the island. It was not land. Between clumps of seaweed and barnaclelike growths there lay a base of brownish-gray blubbery material, mottled with whitish scars and creases. There was more to see. Dotting the island were clusters of domed structures made of piled sea vegetation, cemented with mud or congealed sand. The seal-beings lived in these; some were still wriggling out of roof-holes and rushing to join the others.

  The shape of the island was more apparent now; it was roughly oblate, a squeezed circle, with six air-bag structures positioned at even intervals around it. The bags were multi-compartmented and looked like gigantic floral arrays of balloons bunched in the water. Whether they contained just air or a lighter gas wasn't apparent, of course, but obviously they supplied flotation. At the leading edge of the island was a high bulge.

  The shore slowly came alive. Humans stretched and yawned, mashed out cigarettes, knocked out pipes. Hatches slammed and engines started. Lines began to form starting at the top of the wide, inclined section of beach.