“Yeah, my Chevy got sucked up with me in it.”
“That Chevy?” I asked, pointing to the burgundy-colored oddity parked between the stacks of supplies.
“No, the original from which this copy was made.” He shrugged. “I think. This thing looks exactly the same, down to the little nicks and scratches in the paint. But it can’t be the same car I was driving that night. Right? So…”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Okay, now, you’re inside the ship.” Carl drew his lips together, pursing them into a thin line. “What’s the matter?” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
“Why, Carl?”
“Because I’ll go crazy if I do.”
“It was bad?”
He considered it a while before he answered, “Not bad physically. They didn’t do anything to me. But inside the ship, it was … I dunno, strange. I was disoriented. Scared. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”
“That’s not surprising,” I said. “Did they communicate with you at all?”
“Yeah, they talked to me. Somebody did. Some guy. I never saw him. I’ll never forget his voice, though.”
We were all surprised. “The voice was human?” I asked.
“Yeah. He had kind of an accent. English, maybe. A little like the way John talks—but not exactly. Actually, he sounded like a fag.”
“ ‘Fag’?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I mean … you know, a homo. Er, homosexual.”
“Oh.”
“Hell, I don’t know. He just sounded strange.” Carl looked at John. “Sorry, John. I didn’t mean to imply that you were strange or anything.”
“Quite all right,” John said affably.
“Okay,” I said, “so this guy was talking to you. What did he say?”
“Not too damn much that made sense. He didn’t say much except that I shouldn’t get upset and that everything would be all right and that they weren’t going to hurt me in any way. I remember I was pretty hysterical at first. I mean, I thought Debbie was dead. They told me she wasn’t, but I didn’t believe them. I still more or less don’t.”
I nodded, waiting for him to go on.
Presently, he did. “I guess I can talk about it to a degree. But I don’t want to go into what went on in the ship. It was like a dream. I have trouble remembering most of it. Next thing I knew… I mean, when things got a little clearer and it wasn’t like a dream anymore, I was driving my car down this strange road … and I saw a portal for the first time. But I knew what it was! Boy, it was weird. I’d never seen one in my life, but I knew exactly what it was and what I should do. Stay in the guide lane, maintain constant speed, all that stuff. And I knew where I was—out in space somewhere. I didn’t find out when I was until later.” Carl took a deep breath and looked down at Lori’s face. He smiled. “She looks like Debbie. A little bit anyway.”
“Maybe Lori would like to hear this,” I said.
“I’ve told her a little of what I’ve told you.” He looked up and grinned. “For some reason it was easier to talk to her.”
Lori’s eyes fluttered and opened; then she sat up suddenly and said, “Huh?” She looked around at everybody, frowned disapprovingly, and yawned. “You people still jawing?” she said huskily.
“I was telling them about, you know, the crazy stuff that happened to me, about how I got out here and all that,” Carl told her.
“Oh, that.” She looked at us. “I think he’s fibbing.”
“You should try out the whole story on Lori first,” I said, “then spill it to us. If she’ believes you, you know we will.”
“Oh, I was only kidding,” Lori said, snaking a possessive arm about Carl’s neck. “I don’t really think you’re lying, Carl. It’s just that it’s so hard to believe.”
Carl nodded. “Sometimes I think I’m dreaming this all up.”
Lori yawned again, then complained, “I’m tired.”
“So are we all,” John said. “Perhaps we should turn in.”
“I’m for that,” Roland seconded.
So we did; rather everybody did but me, after we had stowed all the comestibles back into their pressurized packing crates and had generally cleaned up. We also had to work Zoya and Yuri into the sleeping arrangements, split up the bedding and such, but we got it all squared away, and I took Susan forward with me, tucking her into the bunk in the aft cabin. I would take first watch, she the second.
I went out to the cab, slid the shotgun seat over in front of the keyboard console, and sat down to have a good look at what was going on with Sam. I had run a cursory check before the Voloshins had boarded, making sure the life-support monitors were working. Everything had seemed okay. Rechecking now, I found all systems functioning normally. I coded some diagnostic programs and went into main memory to see what was up, though I had a strong hunch what had happened. More than a hunch. Entity X had come out from hiding and had done his dirty work, that much was clear: I just wanted to know exactly what dirt had been done. Sam’s Vlathusian Entelechy Matrix, that semimysterious thumb-sized Read-Only Memory component which was the seat of Sam’s intellect and personality, had been completely bypassed. The phantom Artificial Intelligence program was in complete control. Hunched over the keyboard for two migraine-provoking hours, I tried and tried to alter that situation.
And failed miserably. There was little I could do but shut down the CPU—but you can’t run and monitor a nuclear fusion truck engine without a computer, at least not very well.
Entity X was calling the shots.
I folded up the console, slid the seat back, sat down on it, and put my feet on the dash.
“Okay,” I said, addressing the unseen malevolence that hung in the cab like a bad odor, “who are you and what do you want?”
“What have you got, Jake?” Corey Wilkes said.
19
Corey Wilkes.
He and Sam had been friends and business partners once. Together, they had founded TATOO, the Transcolonial Association of Truck Owner-Operators. Years later, shortly after I started driving, Corey engineered a power grab that installed him as president more or less for life. Sam resigned from the board of directors and eventually from the organization itself. I followed suit. Sam wanted to retire to the farm, but I persuaded him to help me start the Starriggers’ Guild, which he did. And that was the start of our troubles with Corey Wilkes. Wilkes harassed us, off and on, for the next ten years. Guild drivers kept disappearing. There were numerous suspicious mishaps, hijackings, and the like. It got so that some manufacturers refused to contract with Guild drivers, and most, while they would hire an occasional Guild member during peak periods, would not become signatories to the Guild’s Basic Agreement, which had been the organization’s raison d’etre in the first place. TATOO had become a combination private trucking company and labor union, run for the express purpose of lining the pockets of Wilkes and his friends in the Authority bureaucracy. Five years ago, Sam had died in an apparently unrelated Skyway accident: A few weeks ago I had learned from Wilkes himself that he had hired stunt drivers to stage the incident. I may have been the intended victim. Sam had been on his way to see a grain futures broker on Einstein, a meeting I had arranged and had intended to keep, but a job I couldn’t refuse—times being what they were—had come up and Sam had gone instead.
“I thought you were dead, Corey,” I said.
A faint chuckle came from the speaker on the instrument panel. “You know, Jake, I don’t believe I’ll tell you one way or the other. Right now I can’t think of a good reason not to level with you, but you never know when a little datum like that could come in handy if held in reserve.”
“I’d say you were dead. You took that .44 slug in the chest, as I recall: Looked like it hit near the heart if it didn’t hit dead center.”
“That very well may be. But let me preface this whole conversation by saying that you aren’t talking to Corey Wilkes. I am an Artificial Intelligence program imbued with the p
ersonality and some, but not all, of the accumulated life memories of Corey Wilkes. I have been updated on recent events, but not in detail. I have also been programmed with instructions.”
“Which are …?”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m not too specific, but generally I have been charged with the task of keeping an eye on you.”
“And with leaving a trail of radioactive wastes,” I added, “so we could be easily tracked.”
Again, a chuckle. “Hard to put anything over on you, Jake. I don’t know why I try.”
I exhaled noisily and crossed my arms. “Cut the merte. What do you want?”
A sound like a sigh came from the speaker. “Yes, what in the world do I want? A very good question. Unfortunately, as a mere Personality Analog I lack the psychic underpinnings to answer that with any depth—I don’t have the complete backlog of memory, the Freudian substrata, if you will. Something drives me; I don’t know quite what.”
I scowled. “The question wasn’t philosophical. What do you want specifically? Now.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry. Well, what with the facts that have recently come to light, I suppose I want the Cube.”
“You can have it.”
A short silence. Then, “That was easy.”
“I mean it. Take the punking thing. It’s yours.”
“Well, that’s settled.” Another pause. Then the voice said cautiously and a little wonderingly, “You’d really hand it over with no fuss?”
“Absolutely. It’s worth nothing to me. In fact, it’s been nothing but a liability. Besides, no one has any idea what the thing is. Odds are it’s not a Roadmap.”
“Yes, there’s no telling what it is. But it’s worth a great deal. To me, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Well, my original deal with the Colonial Authority still stands, I suppose, which is that I deliver you or the Roadmap or both to them in exchange for immunity from unpersonhood. But seeing as how the Authority wasn’t entirely straight with me, I don’t feel entirely obliged to hold up my end of the bargain.”
“How did they doublecross you?”
“It wasn’t a doublecross per se. More a matter of withholding pertinent information. They didn’t tell me anything about the Black Cube.”
“Maybe they didn’t know about it,” I suggested.
“I’m pretty sure they did. If Darla’s story about getting the Cube through the dissident network is true, and if key people within the network have been subjected to Delphi scans, they’d have to know about it. Mind you, I’ve pieced this together from snippets of conversation I’ve overhead since I came on board. I’m fairly sure you think they know about it.”
I saw no use in denying it. “You’re right.”
“And when the deal was struck, it was emphasized that they wanted you alive. And they wanted your truck, too. That tells me they were very interested in searching for something hidden on board or on your person. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t tell me about the Cube. I was ready to hand Winnie over to them, which of course would have elicited gales of laughter.”
“It might be a question of timing, Corey,” I said. “When did you cut your deal with the CA?”
“Several months ago. Two or three. There was a prolonged period of negotiation.”
“Uh-huh. Well, according to Darla’s timetable, they ran the Delphi on Assemblywoman Marcia Miller only a month or so ago. They could have found out about the Cube then.”
“Yes, there is a time element to be considered here. Hmm.” A long pause. “I think you may be right, Jake. When I bargained with them, they may only have had rumors to go on. Rumor had it that you were in possession of a Roadbuilder artifact, a Roadmap. They knew it wasn’t Winnie—of course they neglected to tell me—”
“No one knew or could have predicted that Winnie would come along on this trip. Our picking her up was a total fluke.”
“So I gather. As I was saying, at the time the deal was cut, the Authority may only have known that you had a Roadmap, nature unspecified. A few months later, they find out about the Cube.”
“And naturally enough,” I said, “they thought the Cube was the map.”
“Naturally enough. But they should have told me, dammit.” He sounded hurt.
I laughed. “And have you wind up with it? Tell me you wouldn’t have demanded that your deal be renegotiated just a tad.”
“I’m truly embarrassed. You’re right, of course.”
“You should be, you sneaky son of a bitch. When you had us aboard the Laputa, even I didn’t know that Darla had the Cube. She seemed to have thrown in with you guys then.”
“Yes, the cunt. I’d be wary of her, Jake.”
“I am.”
“But…” The voice did an imitation of a weary sigh. “But wouldn’t I have wound up with the Cube anyway?” A thoughtful interlude. “No, I guess not. I never suspected for a moment that Darla had it.”
“No, you didn’t, and you wouldn’t have as long as you had to string Darla’s father along in believing that all the brouhaha was for the purpose of protecting your little drug-running scheme.”
“I see your point. Talk about not being in the know. That fool … that contemptible idiot. And then he goes and shoots me, for Christ’s sake.”
“His finest moment.”
“Really, Jake. But it still seems to me I would have found out about the Cube eventually. Wasn’t the Authority taking an awful risk? After all, they didn’t know Darla was carrying the Cube. Did they?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe they did. If not, though, I’ll bet that when Miller spilled her brains they got really worried. That was probably when they dispatched Petrovsky to get the Cube. Your deal was rendered null and void then.”
“Ah, Petrovsky. Yes, I see. I see.” The voice clucked mournfully. “It all does seem to fit together, doesn’t it? Marvelous bit of deduction, Jake.”
“Elementary, my dear shithead.”
“Please, Jake, it’s been amicable so far.”
“I don’t feel the least bit amicable toward you,” I said.
“I suppose not. Can’t say that I blame you. And I must admit that I’ve bumbled through this whole affair shipping no small amount of merte in my cranial compartment. I made some bad moves.”
I was amazed. “The real Corey Wilkes would never make an admission like that.”
“No? I guess not.”
“I have a question for you.”
“Shoot,” the voice said.
“Why did the Authority agree to hire you to catch me? Why didn’t they assign Petrovsky to me in the first place? Or any other part of Militia Intelligence—or anybody else for that matter. Why you?”
“A couple of reasons,” Wilkes’ voice answered. “For one, I happen to be one of the highest ranking Militia Intelligence officers around, have been for years. I hold the permanent rank of Lieutenant-Colonel-Inspector. Plainclothes division of course, undercover section.”
I smiled, nodding. “Sam and I always suspected you were an MI agent.”
“So you see, all this has been in the line of duty, don’t you know.”
“Of course.”
“Also, the road and everything that happens on it is my bailiwick, and what with my past association with you, I would have been the natural choice anyway.”
“I see. Sounds logical enough.”
“And Petrovsky … if he’s still alive. He’s in bad odor with the Authority generally, by dint of his lifecompanion’s having turned up as a double agent. He was hardly their first choice.”
“Right.” I took my legs down from the dash, sat sideways on the chair and crossed my legs. “Well, what now?”
“Don’t really know, Jake,” the voice said. “I’m playing this strictly by ear. I suppose you hand over the Cube, then—”
“I want Sam back first.”
The voice was placating. “You’ll have him back, Jake. Don’t worry.”
“If you’ve done a
nything to him…”
“I said don’t worry. He’s fine. I simply erased him from main memory. His VEM is in perfect working order and you can load him back in anytime I give the word. In fact—” A long pause. “In fact, even as we speak, Sam is doing something strange down at the microcode level. Hmm. Now, how the hell …?”
I grinned evilly.
“I’ll be damned,” Wilkes’ voice said in awe. “I sensed that this hardware had three-dimensional system architecture, but there was really no way I could … Well, look at that, look at that.”
“Anything interesting?” I asked after waiting a few moments.
“Very. This is really strange. If they had only had more time back at the garage… Amazing. What could he be doing?”
“If you can’t take a castle by escalade,” I said, “you dig under the walls.”
“Apt metaphor.” The voice did an approximation of an admiring whistle. “Could he be setting up a simulation of his VEM in microcode? No, that’d take him years.”
I laughed.
“No? I don’t understand—” The voice made a noise like throat-clearing. “Well, I can see Sam is going to do his best to worry me to death at least, if he can’t do anything else—so, let me do this … and this.”
The voice was silent for about thirty seconds.
“There, that ought to hold him. I hope. Wily old Sam.”
“I still want him back first,” I said.
“Now, wait a minute, we still have some bargaining to do.”
“Concerning what?”
“Little matter of that young man’s automobile.”
“I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. You want it?”
“Yes, I think I do,” the voice said after a slight hesitation.
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think it has anything to do with the Roadmap affair, but it is an amazing artifact… and Carl’s story about his abduction is very intriguing indeed. That machine of his should be worth something to somebody. I think I should have it to keep in reserve to sort of strengthen my bargaining position vis-à-vis the Authority, should I choose to deal with them again.”
I got up and walked to the aft-cabin. Standing at the kitchenette, I loaded the coffee brewer and started it working. “The car doesn’t belong to me, Corey.”
Red Limit Freeway Page 25
