Red Limit Freeway
The Skyway
Book II
John DeChancie
Content
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1
There they were, up ahead—the Trees at the Edge of the Sky. That’s what Winnie called them. Other people called them different things: Kerr-Tippler objects, tollbooths, noncatastrophic singularities, portal arrays…
I called them cylinders. That’s what they were, big ones, some as high as five kilometers. They were lined up on both sides of the roadway like impossibly huge fenceposts, their color impossibly black, blacker than the interstellar space they bent and twisted and warped to their creators’ ends, and to our benefit. Everything about them was incredible. They were said to be spinning at unimaginable speeds, though their featureless surfaces gave no perceivable confirmation of this. A few experiments had been done on them, measuring Doppler shifts of infalling particles and Hawking radiation flying out. But the Colonial Authority had a long-standing ban on the publication of data and even theoretical studies concerning the portals. One only had rumors to go by. And the rumors were: The results were impossible.
Their rotational speeds worked out to be faster than light. It couldn’t be, but that’s what the numbers said.
“What’s our speed, Sam?”
“Oh, we’re moseying along nicely. If you’d care to move your eyeballs a few millimeters to the right, you’d see for yourself.”
“You know I can’t read instruments and drive at the same time.”
“Good Lord, and I was just about to offer you some chewing gum.”
“Oh, cut the merte, Sam.”
“Is that any way to speak to your father?” Then Sam guffawed, in that scratchy/liquid synthesized voice of his—if the oxymoron can be forgiven, it’s the only way I can express what the sound is like. In no way does it resemble my deceased father’s voice, except in emotional tone and inflection. I didn’t have a recording of Sam to pattern the waveforms after when I ordered the voice-output software for the rig’s computer.
Sam went on, “We’re right in the groove. Forget the numbers, I’ve got her on speed lock.”
I glanced at the digital telltales, the array of numbers suspended in the air at eye level and at about thirty degrees to either side of my line-of-sight straight ahead. Positioned so as to hide in the retinal blind spot, they were unobtrusive until looked at directly. I usually had them turned off; if you moved your head a lot they seemed like pesky fireflies flitting about. “Okay, fine. Everybody strapped in?”
Roland Yee was in the shotgun seat. “Check,” he said.
“I think we’re all secure back here,” John Sukuma-Tayler reported.
I chanced a look back. John, Susan D’Archangelo, and Darla Petrovsky née Vance were in harnesses in the back seats. The cab accommodated five comfortably. I heard squabbling in the aft-cabin—a little living space useful for long hauls.
“Hey, Carl!” I yelled. “Is Lori strapped down back there?”
“Like trying to hog-tie a—give me your damn arm!—like trying to wrassle a she-cat!”
“Lori!” I shouted. “Be a good girl!”
“I’m okay, for God’s sake. Let me—”
“Gotcha!”
“I’m okay, I’m telling you!”
“Look, you had a concussion,” Carl told her. “Now, behave, or we wrap you in confetti and ship you with the rest of the load.”
“Oh, get folded.”
“Think I don’t know what that means? Should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Punk you!”
“Such language! And from a mere slip of a girl, too.”
I had insisted that Lori be strapped to my bunk during portal transitions. She’d taken a nasty whack on the head back on Splash, during our escape from the ship-seamonster Laputa.—I wanted to take no chances; shooting an aperture can be rough sometimes, and it wasn’t at all clear whether Lori was completely all right. She had been complaining of headaches. Normal enough, but I wanted to be sure. She needed to be looked over. However, we had to leave Splash in a hurry, and the next planet up, Snowball, lived up to its name. No one and practically no thing lived there. We were now on what Winnie’s Itinerary Poem called “The Land of Nothing to See” (per Darla’s translation). You called it, Winnie. The planet—or this part of it—looked like the old photographs of Mars I used to pore over as a kid, a place of vast rock-strewn plains with sand sifted in between the rubble, kilometer after endless kilometer of it. Except the sand was a crappy gray-green instead of an alluring, alien red. But there were beings here. Probably humans, if the occasional mail-order pop-up domes far off the road were any indication.
These were the Consolidated Outworlds, a maze of planets linked by the Skyway, but with no way back to Terran Maze. No way home.
But I wasn’t thinking of that just then. One of my pesky hologram readouts was blinking yellow. “What the hell’s that, Sam?”
“It’s that damn left-front roller, Jake. We get a yellow every time we go into portal-approach mode. Been getting one for, oh, couple of months now. You’d know that if you’d deign to take a look at your instruments once in a while.”
“I didn’t notice it. You’re right, I fly by the seat of my pants a little too much. Think we should stop?”
“The book says we should.”
I looked out over the bleak terrain. “And do what?”
“I’m only telling you what the book says.”
“Well, we’ll have to risk it. It’s done okay up to now.”
“Fine. But if she goes sugar-doughnut on us while we’re shooting a portal, don’t say I—”
“—didn’t warn you,” I finished. “Right, Sam, you’re covered.”
“It’s all the same to me, you know. I’m already dead.”
The road ahead was a black ribbon leading straight through the cylinders. They towered above, their tops festooned in wispy clouds against a greenish sky. Their color was black, utterly black, their surfaces sucked clean of light. It almost hurt to look at them directly; not just physically, but philosophically. To gaze upon an Absolute is discomforting. We’re too used to fudging, finding refuge in the interstices of things, content to see the universe in shades of gray. You could see all sorts of frightening possibilities in that categorical darkness, if you stopped to look and think.
One thing you don’t want to do is stop and philosophize near a portal. You might achieve a total and very unpleasant oneness with your object of contemplation.
“Darla, what’s Winnie’s description of the next planet up?”
“Um… ‘A Land Like Home; but It Isn’t.’ I think.”
“Does that mean jungle? Yeah, well, I guess so,” I answered myself. “I just hope there’s some kind of civilization. I want Lori to get checked out.”
“Does Lori know anything about this part of the Outworlds?” John asked.
“No;” Darla said. “She told me she hasn’t seen much besides her home planet and Splash.”
“Well,” I said, “she won’t have too much trouble getting back to Splash, if she wants to go. Unless this is a potluck portal.” I looked at the rearview monitor. Traffic was still behind us. “But I can’t believe all these people are following us into oblivion. This portal must go somewhere.”
“We’ll all have some decisions to make ab
out where we’re going,” John said. “Once we stop.”
“If there’s a place to pull over up ahead, I’ll do it,” I told him. “We can talk things over.”
“I’d just love to get out and stretch my legs,” Susan groaned. “Seems like we’ve been driving for ages.”
“Those were unusually long routes between portals,” I said. “Wonder why?”
“Judging from the gravity,” Roland put in, “and the apparent distance to the horizon, I’d say both Snowball and this place are big, low density planets: Maybe portals have to be positioned so as to balance out the planet’s mass.” He shrugged, looking over at me. “Just a wild guess.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about portals lately … the Skyway, the cylinders, how the whole system works. Never really gave it much thought before.”
“Everyone takes the Skyway for granted,” John said. “Simply part of the landscape.”
“We can’t be so complacent,” Roland said ruefully. “Right,” I agreed.
“If I never see this damn road again…” Susan grumbled, shaking her head.
“I’m in sympathy with that,” John said. “I think we’re all road-weary at this point.” He chuckled. “Except for Jake, perhaps. Do starriggers ever get tired of traveling, Jake?”
“You bet—but after a few years, you just get numb. Most of the time, though, I like it. I like the road.”
The commit markers were coming up. Here, they were just white-painted metal posts on either side of the roadway. The Roadbuilders hadn’t put them there—it was up to local inhabitants to mark the point beyond which it was unsafe to stop. Back in Terran Maze, and in most mazes I’d been in, the markers were more elaborate—flashing lights, holograms, and such.
I checked over the instruments. Everything looked fine. And just as I shifted my eyes to check the yellow warning tag, it began flashing red.
“Jake,” Sam said quietly.
“I see it. Too late to stop. Damn.” “What a time for it.”
“Trouble, Jake?” John wanted to know. “A little. We’ll be okay, though.”
I hoped fervently. The flashing red didn’t mean the roller was going sugar on us—suffering an instantaneous crystallization that could turn the supertraction tread into white congealed powder—but it did mean it could go at any moment. Maybe now, maybe two days from now; there was no way to predict.
We were past the commit markers and racing for the first pair of cylinders. The safe corridor, a narrow land bounded by two solid white lines, rolled out at us. Cross over either of those lines and you’ve had it. The rig shuddered and groaned, caught in the delicately balanced gravitational. stresses around us.
“Keep her steady, Jake,” Sam warned, “and be ready for a sudden jump to the right.”
The rig shook and buffeted us in our seats.
“This is a rough one,” Sam commented. “Just our luck.” I felt the tug of an unseen hand, dragging the rig to the left. I corrected, and suddenly the hand let go, sending us precipitously in the opposite direction. But I was a veteran at this; I hadn’t overcorrected, overreacted. This portal was a bit hairy, but I had seen worse. If only the roller would hold.
The cylinders marched by, a stately procession of dark monuments. Between them—I knew but couldn’t look—the view of the terrain was refracted into crazy, funhouse-mirror images, work of the powerful gravitational fields.
Ahead was the aperture itself, a fuzzy patch of nothingness straddling the road. We shot straight into it.
2
We got through.
The ailing roller was still intact, but the flashing red warning stayed on. I shut off the holo array. Then I lowered our speed to 50 km/hr, took my crash helmet down from the rack behind the seat and put it on. I rarely wear it, though I should. The bulky thing is more than a safety helmet; it has submicron chips in it for just about everything—CPUs, communications, shortrange scanning, even encephalo-teleoperator circuitry, though I never did buy the rest of the hookup. I prefer to operate machinery hands-on. The thought of just sitting there, steering the rig on a whim and an alpha wave, makes me a little nervous.
We had arrived on a world that didn’t look much like Winnie’s jungle home, and I was beginning to think that her Itinerary Poem contained some misinformation, until the Skyway plunged from the high plateau we were on into a series of hairpin turns, winding its way down a range of heavily forested mountains. I worried about the roller all the way, taking the curves at a crawl, not wanting to juice up the traction to high grab and aggravate the condition of the bad one. At full charge and maximum traction, I could have roared down there at 80 km/hr, had I a wild hair up my fundamental aperture.
The forestation was luxuriant, but not tropical. The trees looked vaguely Earthlike from a distance, but the foliage was radically different, and the colors varied from deep turquoise to brilliant aquamarine, with lots of stray pinks and reds mixed in. The effect on the eyes was slightly disturbing, colors shimmering and shifting as the retinal cells vacillated over what wavelengths to take first.
I didn’t have much time to look. The curves were getting dicey, and I had my hands full. Everyone else gaped out the ports, marveling at the strange palette of colors.
I did notice that the trees were enormous, with thick straight trunks shooting up as high as a hundred meters.
“Great logging country,” Sam said.
“I hope there are loggers,” Susan said, “and I hope they have restaurants to eat in, with clean restrooms, and I hope the food is good, and I hope there’s a place to stay with nice, big beds, and—” She broke off and sighed. “Don’t mind me.”
“We could all do with a break, Suzie,” John commiserated. Lori yelled something from the back.
“What was that, Lorelei?” John called.
“I said I have to piss so bad my back teeth are swimmin’!”
“Hey, Carl—” I began, then realized something. “Hey! What the hell is your last name, anyway?”
“Chapin.”
“Oh. Why don’t you let Lori up and let her use the … oh, hell. Suzie?”
Suzie started to unstrap. “Sure.”
I slowed down almost to a stop while Susan went back to make sure Lori didn’t re-bang her head on the way to the john. Chapin came up front, as there was no privacy back there.
He had joined our group rather recently; last night, in fact. Since that time he’d kept pretty much to himself, when not keeping an eye on Lori. I didn’t know if anyone really knew who he was, or why he was with us. For that matter, I was not completely straight on the facts myself.
The trip across Splash had taken most of the day, and the trek across Snowball and Nothing-to-See had eaten up the rest of it. Everyone had been trying to get some sleep, and there had been little conversation. What there had been, Carl had not participated in beyond pleasantries, except when cussing out Lori.
“About time you were formally introduced to everyone, Carl. Don’t you think? Have you met everyone?”
“I remember you from somewhere,” he said to me wryly. I smiled. “And I seem to have a distinct recollection of stealing your buggy.”
“Oh, my God, that car,” John remembered, slapping his forehead and rolling his eyes. “Where in the name of all that’s unholy did you get that thing?”
“That’s John Sukuma-Tayler,” I said. “John, meet Carl Chapin.”
“Hello. A little belated, but nice to meet you.”
“Don’t get up. Nice to meet you, too, John. And … it’s a little late, but thanks for the help last night.”
“You’re very welcome. But Roland, here, was responsible for engineering it.”
Roland unstrapped, got up, and took Chapin’s hand. “Roland Yee. It’s a pleasure. Where the hell did you get that car?” Chapin laughed. “I get asked that a lot. I bought it from a custom vehicle manufacturer.”
“Alien, I suppose.”
“Yeah.”
“Who?” Ro
land asked pointedly.
“Well…”
“The technology was fantastic. You couldn’t have gotten it from any known race on the Skyway.” Roland’s tone was a trifle accusing.
“Roland,” John interjected, “I think you’re being a bit—”
“I’m sorry,” Roland was quick to go on. “It’s just that our whole experience with your vehicle was … well, disconcerting to say the least.”
John nodded. “To say the very least.”
“I can imagine,” Chapin said, “but you shouldn’t go around stealing things that don’t belong to you.”
“I stole it, Carl,” I said. “They were kidnapped.”
Chapin winced, a bit embarrassed. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Natural enough mistake,” John said good-naturedly. “You couldn’t possibly have known.”
I had pulled off toward the side of the road and had stopped, waiting for Lori to get squared away and for everyone to decide to continue the chitchat sitting down and strapped in. Finally, everyone did. We were short a seat and harness for Chapin, but he wedged himself in behind my seat, squatted on a tool box, and hung onto a handgrip. Suzie even managed to persuade Lori to bed down again. Lori didn’t protest this time, not much anyway.
Something occurred to me. “Where’s Winnie?” I hadn’t seen her in hours. I yelled for her.
We heard the sauna stall door open. Winnie came into the cab, rubbing her eyes, scratching her furred tummy, and giving us all a grimace-smile. “Here! Winnie here!”
“This is Winnie,” I said to Chapin, twisting around to him. “Winnie, Carl.”
“Hi, Winnie.”
“Hi! Hi!”
Chapin held out his hand and Winnie took it, her doublethumbed grip enfolding it warmly.
“Where are you from, Winnie?” Chapin asked her. Winnie extended an arm aft, making a far-off motion.
“Way back!”
Everyone laughed. We had all come a long way.
Winnie sat in Darla’s lap, but when she saw that Darla would have some difficulty bearing up under the weight, she jumped over to John’s, hugging him. Winnie’s compactness was deceptive; she had a good deal of bulk on her.
Red Limit Freeway Page 1
