Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

  “Then again,” Roland said, smiling thinly, “I could be wrong.”

  Ahgirr tradespeople helped us fit Sam with the new rollers. I offered to pay them but they wouldn’t hear of it. No one had brought up the issue of compensation up to that point, and no one broached the subject after that.

  The newbies fit fine, and Sam and I went back to the road and picked up the trailer. Doing so eased my mind a little. The trailer was a dead giveaway just sitting there. I thought it improbable that Moore would follow us through a potluck portal, but you never know. He just might be crazy enough. I’d also been worried about looters and salvagers, even though this ingress spur was seldom used.

  With the trailer now at the mouth of the cave complex, we began the repair job in earnest. There was more damage than we had thought. The small motor that raised and lowered the door was completely useless, and the airtight silicone bushing around the door itself was in tatters. Where would we find replacements? Carl and Roland were willing to go out and search for a junked trailer, and I was ready to say go ahead, but the Ahgirr craftspeople said don’t bother. They could manufacture most of the mechanical parts we needed in their shops. For the electronics we’d probably have to make a trip to a faln complex. They could breadboard some stuff for us, but it would be easier just to buy modular components off the shelf. They would send a technician, a female named Tivi, along to advise us. I felt I had to make the trip myself; the craftspeople knew the local technology, but I knew my rig, and I didn’t want them making trips back and forth should I be dissatisfied with the goods they bought. Besides, I wanted to see what these faln things were all about.

  But a big block of Ahgirr religious holidays came up and everybody knocked off for a week. There were strict laws—no work, no shopping, no nothing on high holy days, and these, called the Time of Finding Deeper Levels (rough translation), were the highest and holiest.

  “No sex, I bet,” Susan ventured. “Pity the way some religions are.”

  “I’m not even sure what they have is a religion.” I thought a moment, then said, “I’m not at all sure that what you have is a religion.”

  “Teleological Pantheism isn’t a religion. It’s just a way of looking at the universe and its processes.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell me more.”

  “Later. Let’s mess around.”

  Besides doing the above, Susan and I took advantage of the slack time to explore some of the vast system of caves in which the Ahgirr had made their home. It was a marvelous place. There is something of the claustmphile in me. I love caves, and I found a fellow spelunker in Susan. So we set out into the restful silences of the unoccupied regions. We toured vast smooth-walled chambers, many-leveled galleries, huge caverns with floors populated by fantastic rock monuments standing like sentinels in the dark. We walked along lava flows that had hardened millions of years ago, traversed vaginalike tunnels through which one had to push and squeeze in a psyche-stirring imitation of birth. Once, we followed a sinuous side passage that coiled endlessly through the rock, finally dead-ending in a delightful little grotto, walls sparkling in the light of our torches with millions of tiny multicolored points. An underground stream flowed through it, cascading down a small waterfall. We spent the “night” there, discovering more delights in the darkness.

  There were other marvels. We found spherical chambers, hundreds of them, which had probably been formed by pockets of gas trapped within the magma. We dubbed them the “Pleasure Domes.” And in the regions that had not been disturbed by vulcanism, strange geological formations presented themselves at every turn. The processes at work here were, for the most part, totally unEarthlike. There were chambers with walls glazed with a ten-centimeter-thick coating of frosted glass (‘Twas a miracle of rare device!), rooms that looked as if they had been designed by Bauhaus architects under the influence of hallucinogens, caverns that looked like the interiors of great cathedrals, alcoves with intimate seating in the shape of contoured folds of rock like a couch, passageways with corbelled walls, vaults with grained ceilings, porticos with fluted columns, elaborate suites of adjoining rooms, and all were unmistakably natural formations. There were no right angles; slabs of rock were sheared, not cut; no chisels marks, no debris about that would be evidence of stonecutting; nothing. There was an undeniable randomness to it all.

  And not one goddamn stalactite in the whole place.

  “I always forget,” Susan said. “Is it stalactites that hang down and stalagmites that stick up, or vicey versy?”

  “No, that’s right. I think.”

  “Always get it confused.”

  “Well, there aren’t any here to befuddle you.”

  “Doesn’t take much, for me.”

  In the womblike darkness, Susan snuggled closer. “I wonder why,” she said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why aren’t there any?”

  “Any what?”

  She nipped my ear. “Stalactites, silly.”

  “Oh. No limestone, I guess.”

  “Limestone?”

  “Yup. Makes sense. This is practically a lifeless planet, from what Ragna told us. Mostly microscopic organisms. Life never really got going here. Limestone comes from sediments containing coral, polyps, stuff like that. Back on Earth, that is. Here, who knows what they have going, if anything. You need water that’s high in carbonate of lime to make stalactites.”

  “And stalagmites.”

  “And stalagmites.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Hardly.”

  “No, I mean it. It always amazes me how much you know, for a truckdriver.”

  “Duh.”

  She giggled. “Sorry, didn’t mean it quite like that.” She kissed me on the cheek. “You’re strange. So very strange.”

  “How so?”

  “Well…” She lay on her back. “You obviously have some education. Quite a lot, it seems. True?”

  “Oh, here and there.”

  “Right. U. of Tsiolkovskygrad, I bet.”

  “Right,” I admitted.

  “I knew it. Graduate work?”

  “Some. A year, if I can remember back that far.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I was going for a doctorate in government administration.”

  She was surprised. “How in the world did you wrangle your way into that program? Pretty restricted.”

  “Didn’t wrangle at all. Actually, I was asked to sign up. Someone apparently thought I was bureaucrat material. They like to recruit from the provinces now and then. Or they did.” I shifted to my side. “You have to remember, this was almost thirty years ago. U. of T. was a podunk school then, a bunch of pop-up domes and Durafoam shacks. It was the only university in the Colonies.”

  “The entrance requirements must have been stiff.”

  “They were. I’ll admit to a certain native intelligence. I was young, in love with learning, tired of the farm. It seemed a good idea at the time.”

  “And you quit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “To drive a truck.”

  “No. I went back to the farm. By that time, my eyes had been opened.”

  She turned over on her side to face me. “You gave up a lot. By now, you could have been a high-level Authority functionary with a six-figure income and a dacha on the resort planet of your choice.”

  “Instead, I have the freedom of the road, very few responsibilities, and a clear conscience. No punking money, no dacha, but I have what I need.”

  “I see.”

  We were silent for a long while. Finally, I said, “Should be stalactites.”

  “Hm?”

  “Seems to me there should be something like them here. Caves are usually formed by the erosion of water-soluble rock, like limestone. I don’t know what this stuff is—I’m nobody’s geologist. Gotta be gypsum, dolomite, something like that. But in that case—”

  “Didn’t the lava do some of it?”

  “Yeah, there are definitely volcanic processes
at work. But most of the weirder formations have to be the result of some pretty exotic geochemistry.”

  “Well, it’s an alien planet,” she said.

  “Uh-huh. But we’re the aliens here, honey.”

  “Move closer, you horrible alien beast.” After a moment, she said, “my, what’s this?”

  “A stalactite.”

  “ ‘Mite,” she said, moving to position her body over me.

  We even got lost down there, which bothered me not much. We had food, rivers of fresh water, more peace and quiet than I had had in a decade. It was the first real vacation I had taken in… I didn’t know how long. Eventually, Susan became a little nervous, suggesting that it would be a good idea to begin a serious effort to find a way back. I told her we had time, nothing but time.

  “But we’re getting more and more lost,” she protested. “Not so,” I said, crouching near the tunnel wall. “Getting some interesting readings here on this handy-dandy pocket seismometer Ragna gave me. Remember that room we called Chichester Cathedral? It’s probably not more than five meters away, on the other side of this wall.”

  “But we were there days ago.”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “How do we get through five meters of rock?”

  “Oh, there’s another way back. This just means we aren’t really lost. We’ve been keeping to the same general area. All we have to do is find a shortcut back to Chichester. From there we’ll have no trouble locating that last transponder.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Besides, Ragna and his people should already be looking for us. This was supposed to be an overnight trip originally, if you remember. They’ll be worried.”

  “To say nothing of John and everybody.”

  “Well,” I said, “they shouldn’t be. This is the first non-life-and-death situation we’ve had in weeks. We’ve been shot at, bombarded, and kidnapped. We almost got stomped by a Roadbug, and we shot a portal with a giant sugar doughnut for a roller. God! You name it, we’ve been subjected to it. How can you let a little thing like this worry you, Suzie?”

  “It’s my nature, I guess.”

  “Take off your clothes.”

  “Okay.”

  Before long, though, I had to concede that we really were lost. Susan was for probing farther, but I came down squarely for staying put, making camp, and waiting for a rescue party. I reminded her of her warning that wandering around blindly would probably just get us more lost. She remembered, and concurred for more than one reason. Food was getting low, and there was zero chance of finding anything down here. Limiting our activity would help to conserve it, and so would strict rationing. We were pretty good about the former, but we caught each other raiding the food satchel more than once. Neither of us could be totally serious about the situation, but as time progressed and the realization grew that we had set out fully four days ago, we gradually sobered up.

  Then things got worse.

  It happened in a narrow corridor whose walls were broken by side tunnels sloping up to vertical chimneys through which only Susan could squeeze to see if any of them led to higher levels: We had gradually descended over the past few days, according to the air pressure readings.

  I was lying with my back against the pile of our backpacks and caving gear, just beginning to doze off. I was bushed. Susan had doffed her Ahgirrian hard hat (which fit just fine, by the way) with the mounted electric light, and had taken a biolume torch to explore a likely-looking chimney at the end of a short side tunnel. She had insisted I stay and rest, and I wasn’t worried. I could still hear her boots scuffing and scraping at the end of the tunnel. She had said that she wouldn’t climb up very far, just enough to see if it went anywhere and if it widened out farther up. If so, I would try to squeeze through and follow, after tethering our packs to the line and having Susan haul them up.

  So I lay there, waiting, eyes focused on some interesting crystal patterns on the ceiling that glowed peculiarly in the light of my helmet lantern. It was a moire pattern, shimmering and shifting as I moved my head slightly and the light with it. The colors were indigo and violet, edged with pink and red. It was hypnotic, in a way, watching it weave and dance. I slipped into a strange reverie, thinking mostly about Darla, and about Susan, trying to sort out my feelings. I saw Darla’s face after a while; it took form behind the pattern, or was superimposed over it. Darla’s was a perfect face, if such can exist, except perhaps for a slight overbite (which actually I found irresistibly seductive—it gave her lower lip a sensuous pout). The symmetry was compelling, the graceful proportions almost approaching a work of art. That profile: what combination of curves and lines could be more subtle yet so mathematically precise? A millimeter’s difference here or there, and the whole organic rightness of it would be gone. Mathematical, yes, but no equation, however abstruse, could describe it. Faces such as hers were meant to be taken in all at once, in one short intake of breath. Everything fit together well: the sculpted helmet of dark hair, the full lips, the elevated cheekbones, the slightly cleft chin … and the eyes, yes. Blue the color of some cold virginal sky viewed from stratospheric heights, as from the cockpit of a hypersonic transport; the blue behind which stars are barely hidden. Hers was an arctic beauty: But look a bit farther into the eyes—what do you see? Molten points, tiny burning highlights. Inside, she burned for something; I didn’t know what. The cause, her dissident movement? Maybe. Me? I doubted it. She had deceived me, even used me, though she adamantly maintained that it all had been for my benefit. At moments, I was inclined to agree. At others… The jury was still out on Darla’s motives. Doubtless she bore me no ill will, but I had the nagging feeling that I was just another cog in some vast creaking mechanism—admittedly not of her own design or creation—for which she had appointed herself the maintenance engineer, responsible for applying daubs of oil here and there to broken-toothed gears and squeaking cams. She was dedicated to seeing that it all hung together, that it kept clanking and groaning until it completed whatever mysterious task its designers had set for it. It was the Paradox Machine, and it was running the whole show.

  I realized that I was deeply in love with Darla. Despite everything. It was one of those facts that lurks about in the shadows, then steps out from a dark embrasure and says, “Hi, there!” as if you should have known all along. Despite everything.

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Susan?

  Susan. I replayed scenes from the last few days. In one sense, a lot of it was porno footage; looking at it another way, here were two people who enjoyed each other’s company, enjoyed giving each other pleasure. There was warmth, friendship … perhaps even love, of a sort. I found it impossible to compare my feelings for Darla and for Susan. They were not quantifiable. The rest is semantics. Call what I felt for Darla passion—it well may have been, but it was of a rarefied variety. I was not altogether sure that the emotion was not indistinguishable from my strong intuition that Darla’s destiny and mine were in some way inseparably mated.

  And I was not sure at all whether I liked Darla. She tended to make people uncomfortable in strange and subtle ways. Perhaps it was only her striking beauty—most people, let’s face it, are not beautiful, and a flesh-and-blood reminder in our midst stirs up odd feelings—but I suspect her aloofness was what put me off the most. She was a distant observer of events. She wasn’t uninterested in what was going on; rather, she seemed disinterested. Unbiased, objective. I do not say cold. The Keeper of the Machine. However, I liked Susan. Semantics again. While she was not always easy to get along with, she was in the end always supportive, of me, of what I did. She trusted me, and I her. I could understand her. Her weaknesses were not blemishes on an otherwise admirable human, but reflections of what was infirm and uncertain in me.

  Part of me hadn’t wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run … not from something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back
to safety, to the familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility: I was no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.

  But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She hadn’t come apart.

  Why not say I loved Susan?

  I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the darkness, the deep well of her mouth …

  Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet lantern.

  I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream, the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.

  I was unarmed. We hadn’t brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If I could create a diversion …

  I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away from where I’d been lying.

  My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.