“Wilkes told me, or rather his analog told me, that he hadn’t heard of the Black Cube until he actually saw it through Sam’s eyes here in the truck. That make sense to you?”
Darla raised her eyebrows slightly and said, “I guess. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so keen on finding Winnie aboard the the Laputa. He didn’t know I had the Cube. Nobody did.”
“Nobody except the person who gave it to you. Who was that person?”
“That person is dead. His name was Paavo and he was a very good friend of mine. He died in the shootout I escaped from on Xi Boo.”
“Are you sure he died?”
“Paavo always vowed never to be taken by the Authority.”
“Did you see him die, or hear for sure that he did?” I asked.
“No. Is it important?”
I nodded. “I think. I’d like to know exactly at what point the Authority learned of the Cube’s existence.”
“I’d always thought that they found out from running the Delphi on Marcia Miller.”
“Probably,” I said, “but when was that? When was she arrested? Sam and I can’t find anything in our news files that would fix the date—which isn’t surprising, because it was probably a secret arrest.”
“Most likely it was. But why is the timetable so important?”
“Let me go into something else first.” I leaned back and rested my shoulders against the bulkhead. “You never told me any of the details about what happened at the Teelies’ farm that night, after they took me away, that is.”
She shrugged. “I gave up, they took us all in.”
“You were with the Teelies all the time up until Petrovsky questioned you?”
“No, they took me to the hospital first to get my burns treated. I insisted on it and they grudgingly gave in. I think one of the Militiamen took a fancy to me. I never saw the Teelies after that until we met them on the street in Maxwellville.” She frowned and shook her bead. “Funny, I expected to find them at the Militia station, or at least get some indication they were there, being held, questioned, something. The cops didn’t seem to be very interested in them.”
I filed that datum away, then said, “Okay. Now, Petrovsky didn’t know you had the Cube. Right?”
“That surprised me to no end. He didn’t even search my pack.” Darla gave a little sarcastic grunt and smiled strangely. “Of course, he had a personal interest in my case.”
“Even so, if he’d known you were carrying the Cube he would have searched you and found it. No?”
“Yes.” She nodded emphatically. “Most assuredly.”
I wove my fingers together and put them behind my head. “So. Petrovsky didn’t know about the Cube, and Wilkes didn’t, if he isn’t lying again. My question is, who did the Authority send to get it? Who is the person representing their interests in all this?”
Darla thought about it a long time. Then she said, “There does seem to be a void in that area. Grigory must have been acting completely on his own. His career was ruined. I ruined it. They would have told him nothing. He was investigating your case as a matter of routine.” She considered it a bit more. “But maybe it’s a question of the timetable. Maybe whoever they sent just didn’t catch up to you in time.”
“Or to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” I said. “You were, and are, a fugitive: Maybe the Authority knew exactly who had the Cube, and they knew it all along, You had it, and they caught you! On Maxwellville! It may be that Petrovsky’s and the Authority’s paths converged there. Grigory was having a devil of a time getting cooperation from the local cops. But he was the ranking officer, and before Reilly, the nominal CO, could get authorization to shove Petrovsky aside, we were sprung by my mysterious doppelgänger. Or whoever did it.”
Darla bit her lip and shook her head slowly.
I looked at the ceiling. “Then again, I could be wrong. But I’ve had this growing feeling lately, the feeling that something is missing. Or someone. Someone who’s playing it very close to the vest.”
Darla looked at me, puzzled; then a startling possibility occurred to her. “You don’t mean … one of the Teelies?”
I sat forward. “Funny you should say that,” I said.
Her eyes were wide and disbelieving. “No, they couldn’t…” Then her face fell and her shoulders slumped. A look of profound exhaustion came over her, and she leaned against me. “Oh, Jake, I’ll never make sense of all this. I thought at one time I knew what was going on. But I don’t know anymore. I just don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Who can make sense of a paradox?” We sat unmoving for a while. The rig seemed unusually quiet; no engine sounds, no voices near us, just the ever-present whistle of the slipstream as we were towed through another alien wind.
Presently I noticed my shoulder was moist. I tilted Darla’s chin up with one finger and watched a big, round tear roll down her cheek.
“What’s wrong, Darla?”
She wiped the tear away and straightened up. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
Coming from vast eternities ahead, the wind whistled cold and drear.
“How could you …?”
She laughed mirthlessly. “How?”
“I mean, how could you let it happen?”
“I’m on the cusp of a three-year pill. I wasn’t in the position to go into a clinic for another one, and I couldn’t get one. They’re very expensive, you know. There wasn’t much of a chance—I still had a month of 80 percent effectiveness left, 60 percent after that. But…” She shrugged. “It’s been known to happen.”
“How late are you?”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I have a pregnancy test kit in my pack. I knew forty-eight hours after.” A slow, bittersweet smile crept across her face. “It may have been the night before, but I think it was that day on the beach.”
I kissed her then; I didn’t know why. Perhaps because, simply, I loved her.
The Bugs should have gone into the railroad business. The ride was transcendentally smooth, incredibly fast. Planets whooshed by so quickly you couldn’t look out the ports for any length of time without getting a little dizzy. Lori, John, and Liam came down with motion sickness, which fortunately responded well to the drugs we had. Roland seemed to enjoy the ride. He spent hours in the shotgun seat, looking out, smiling enigmatically (I hesitate to say inscrutably).
A week went by.
Every once in a while we’d come out on another service planet. The first time it happened we thought we had arrived at our destination—but no, the Bugs shot us through another portal, and our fateful journey continued.
We passed some of the time gabbing, at one point speculating as to why the Bugs had put Moore’s gang back in their vehicles but had deposited the Voloshins with us. The consensus was that the Bugs somehow knew that the humans were divided into two antagonistic factions, and, as usual, wanted to reduce the potential for trouble. Also, they had checked all vehicles, found little food in the Voloshins’, and had put them in with us for the long journey. The Bugs were harsh, but fair. John said that, and I laughed, remembering an old joke.
A conversation stopper, though, was what Yuri told us about the Cube. He thrashed the subject about with Oni over a fourday period, then called a conference. Here’s what he said:
“If I can make any sense out of what Oni has been telling me, the Cube is one of the strangest objects in the universe.” He laughed. “Odd choice of words, as you’ll see in a moment. And strictly speaking, it’s not an object in the conventional sense. It’s made of almost nothing at all … literally nothing at all. What it is, is a space. A space within a space. The space without is our universe, our continuum. The one within is…” He scratched his beard and hunched up his shoulders. “Another space.”
“Are you saying there’s a universe in there?” John asked. Yuri sat back in his seat and shoved his hands into his pockets. “It may be no more than a light-ye
ar across.”
“Only a light-year,” Susan gasped, then fanned her face with her hand in mock relief. “You had me worried there for a minute.”
“How can that possibly be?” John demanded. “You mean it’s been… shrunk?”
“Folded,” Yuri said. “Most likely. Folded and refolded along many dimensions.” He withdrew his hand and turned his pocket inside out. “Think of it this way.” He made a fold in the pocket. “Now, keep tying this up, rolling it up, and fairly soon you can’t put your hand in anymore. But the pocket still exists, doesn’t it?”
“I see,” John said. “I think.”
“Now, all this is pure speculation on the part of the Ahgirr scientists.”
“What are they basing it on then?” I asked.
“The stream of raw data that seems to be coming out of the Cube. I can’t imagine what can be supplying that data, or perhaps it’s just energy that becomes data when it gets out. It’s in the form of some very exotic radiation, part of it. And the other part is simple radio signals.”
“So,” I said, “this universe is losing energy.”
“Yes. Now, at first blush the data doesn’t seem to make much sense at all. It didn’t to the Ahgirr until somebody made the association and looked in a cosmology text. The values coming out, and the states of energy within the Cube that the values seem to imply, correspond very closely to what cosmologists think existed in the very early stages of formation of our universe.”
“You mean the Big Bang?” Darla asked, amazed.
“No, long before the Big Bang. Before there was any matter at all, and very little energy. Almost none of that either.” He swung around in the driver’s seat toward his lifecompanion. “Neither of us are really qualified in this area, but Zoya has had more exposure to the subject than I.”
Zoya sighed. “I don’t know where to begin.” She smiled thinly, then said, “Let me put it this way. In the field of theoretical physics, the last century was spent wrestling with some very basic subjects. Among them was the fundamental nature of matter itself. Absurdly simplified, the current consensus is that matter is space tied up in knots. Vortices, matrices, call them what you will…” She scowled and scratched her forehead. “No, let’s try that again. Think of a state of affairs in which…” She thought a moment. “Can you imagine a cloud of mathematical points arranging themselves by random processes into a pattern that may define a geometrical space? Coming together out of absolute nothingness, purely by chance? And can you imagine this defined space, this completely empty metrical frame, undergoing evolutionary changes, random fluctuations which induce a knotting up of itself at certain discrete points? Now imagine the knots as little blobs of energy. And since matter is equivalent to energy—” She held up a palm. “Please. As I said, this is absurdly simplified. But do you understand me so far? What I’m describing is nothing less than how the universe could have come to be created out of nothing.”
“And that,” Yuri said, “is what the Ahgirr scientists think is going on inside the Black Cube. At any rate, that is their best guess.”
We listened to the howl of the slipstream for a while. “It’s almost unfathomable,” John said.
“Quite so,” Yuri agreed. “Quite so.”
“I think it’s a neat idea,” Susan said. “A Universe Egg.” She looked around at everybody, grinning delightedly. “That’s what the Cube is. An incubating universe.”
“I wonder if it’s ours,” Roland mused.
Another week went by. Then another.
The days were featureless, colorless, distinguishable only by the random shape some snippet of conversation or tiny event gave them. I recall a few.
One day, Susan said to me:
“I know you still love Darla. I know it has nothing to do with the baby either. You two are … I don’t know. Destined for something. It’s bigger than both of you.” She crinkled her nose. “That sounds ridiculously overdramatic. I really don’t know how to put it.”
I asked, “Is this Susan the Teleological Pantheist speaking?”
She put a hand behind my neck, tilted my head down, and kissed me. “This is Susan speaking, who loves you.”
And another day Darla made some little joke over breakfast; a passing remark that struck us both funny—I can’t recall what exactly—and we laughed as we hadn’t done in a long time. And when we were done her face was bright and her cheeks glowed and her eyes looked lovely, the tiny highlights in them like sparks from a cheery hearth-fire.
And Lori making me feel old when she said I reminded her a bit of her grandfather, who had raised her until she was five, and whom she vividly remembered. (When pressed, she admitted her grandfather had been only around thirty-eight when she was born.)
And the fight the Voloshins had over a toothbrush. With their personal effects still in their vehicle, they had lacked certain necessities. Liam had made toothbrushes for both of them, handles whittled from firewood, brushes made ingeniously out of stiff plastic thread from some undisclosed source. Yuri had lost his and Zoya refused to share hers, berating him for being so careless. They didn’t speak for three days.
One of Moore’s men calling on the skyband, God knows why, or why he thought anybody here would want to talk with him—Krause I think it was, but maybe not—wanting to know how our food was holding out. I asked how theirs was holding out. He said it was getting low. I told him I sincerely hoped what they had left was growing botulism. He thanked me and signed off. He didn’t call again.
Susan and Darla had a reconciliation, of sorts, an unspoken one. Susan delivered a typical wisecrack and Darla laughed. Susan looked at her tentatively, then they both laughed. Still, they maintained a warily respectful distance between them.
Ragna saying, “Ah, Jake, friend of mine, I am wearily contemplating the continuation of this merte of the bull.”
John spending an hour with the Cube in the palm of his hand, staring at it, then suddenly looking up at me. “Is it possible?” he asked. “Could it be possible?”
I didn’t answer.
One day I walked into the cab to find Roland at his favorite post, staring out into an alien night.
“Jake, come and look at this.”
I sat in the driver’s seat. “What’s up?”
“Look at the sky.”
I did. There were very few stars, and on one side of the sky, there didn’t seem to be any.
“We’re on the edge of a galaxy,” Roland said. He pointed to his right. “Over here is intergalactic space. Nothingness. Now look over to where the stars are. See the glowing cloud behind them? The disk-edge of the galaxy.”
I saw and agreed.
“We’ve been hitting these planets regularly. Sometimes there are a few stars on the other side and it’s hard to tell. But this planet belongs to a star right on the very edge of its galaxy.”
Teleologists must cultivate a sense of destiny, I thought. Roland’s face glowed with it, and he regarded me with the self-assured smile of a man who relishes his meeting with the inevitable.
“This is it, Jake,” he said. “We’ve been on it almost the whole trip. We’re on Red Limit Freeway.”
I looked at him solemnly and nodded. “I know,” I said. “And at this rate, it won’t be long before we reach the end of the road.”
22
About four weeks into the journey, the Bugs pulled us over for a rest stop. You could call it that, but it might only have been to give the Talltree contingent an opportunity to bury Corey Wilkes. Apparently the strain had been too much for him.
They didn’t bury him, though. We had to do it.
We stopped in the middle of one of the most attractive landscapes I had ever seen. It could have been Earth itself. “Maybe it is,” Roland said. “We have no idea where we are in space or in time.” He pointed to a range of mountains lifting snow-capped peaks above the horizon. “Those could be the Pyrenees two million years ago. Or maybe the Appalachians.”
“I’d be willing to bet,” Y
uri said, “that we’re a bit farther back than that. Several billion, in fact. This might be a planet of a star that lived and died a billion years before Earth’s sun was a gleam in the universe’s eye.”
“Hey, they’re getting out!” Carl yelled.
Sean ran into the cab with a handful of weapons, but the men who had come out of one of Moore’s vehicles weren’t in a position to make a move. Chubby, Geof, and two others were carrying the limp body of Corey Wilkes. They dumped him like a load of garbage just a meter or so from the shoulder, looked around briefly, then returned to their vehicle and shut the hatch. I wondered whether they had done this on their own or at the Roadbug’s behest.
I radioed and asked.
“He was beginning to smell a bit,” Chubby told me. “So we requested permission to open the hatch and throw ‘im out as we were going along. Instead, the Bugs stopped.”
“They answered you?”
“No, they just pulled over, and we found we could open up—”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Right-o.”
“Weren’t the Bugs afraid they’d escape?” Roland wondered. ”
“To where, pray tell?” Sean asked, gesturing toward vast expanses of rolling pastureland dotted with stands of tall timber. It all looked friendly and inviting, but there wasn’t very much to do out there.
“True.”
“The patrol creatures must have had their reasons,” Zoya said.
“They have orders to take care of us,” Lori said, sounding as if she knew.
“Who?” I asked.
“The Bugs. They got orders to deliver us safe and in good health. And you can’t have a stinky body lying around, can you?”
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