Red Limit Freeway

Chapter 21

We were moving, but the rig's engine wasn't on. Neither would it start when I tried it. There were two Roadbugs in front of us, acting as locomotive and tender to our little train, which was composed of the rig, the riderless Voloshin vehicle, Moore's complement of buggies, and Ragna's vehicle.

I checked the instruments and found that the rollers weren't turning. The rig was floating about half a meter off the road. Neat trick, that.

Another Bug brought up the rear. Every train needs a caboose.

"I want to know," Sam said, "how they got all the air back in."

"Maybe each molecule of gas had its own gravitic envelope," Roland offered.

"I like that," Sam admired. "Makes no sense, but I like it."

We were already out of the huge chamber and into a tunnel, traveling at a terrific rate. Apparently the Bugs knew exactly where they were taking us. Probably to the incinerator.

"The Black Cube!" Roland exclaimed, holding the thing up for all to see.

"I wonder why they didn't keep it," Susan said, frowning suspiciously.

"I wish they had," I said glumly. "I can't even give that thing away."

"Sam," Roland said, "where were you?"

"It's a long story," I said. "What I want to know is, where's the Wilkes Al program?"

"My God," Roland breathed, "it was Wilkes in there?"

"It's safely bracketed in main memory," Sam said. "We can erase it anytime we want."

"Won't it load right back in," I wanted to know, "just like before?"

Sam chuckled. "That's where the problem was, in AuxStorage. I've blocked access to it temporarily, which is what we should have done in the first place. It's been tampered with physically; and we never would've been able to flush Wilkes out. We'll have to go there and fix it."

"Geez, Sam, I don't know if I can do it. I'm no computer techie."

"I'll help, don't worry. We've got the manuals―"

"But they're in AuxStorage, Sam."

"We have the hard copy back in the trailer, remember? In the egg-crate nook. If you'd clean this rig out once in a while…"

"Okay, okay. We'll get to that later. How did you manage to dig out from under Wilkes?"

"Well, when the hocus-pocus started, the stray radiation whatever it was―erased the CPU clean. That was all the opening I needed. The Al program is a computer, but one set up in software. I'm hardwired, therefore one hell of a lot faster. A few nanoseconds was all it took."

"Well, I'll be," said. "But how did Wilkes get the jump on you in the first place?"

"That was a fool's mate," Sam answered. "We should have seen it coming when we ran those diagnostics―"

"Wait a minute, let's save that for later, too. I want to see what the hell Ragna is doing here."

I got on the skyband and hailed him.

"Jake, my most special friend of mine! Hello and breaker breaker to all our buddies of the good variety!"

"Yeah, yeah. Ragna, how did you get here? And why in God's name did you come?"

"Oh, Jake. This is a situation of embarrassment."

"Come on."

"Oh, indeed. Doubtless I am in the process of incurring your wrath when I am telling you that various surreptitious individuals of our people followed you."

I laughed. "No, you won't incur my wrath. Everybody follows me, all the time."

"This is of truth. It was reported that many, many vehicles were being on your case like a ton of bricks. And on the planet where the highways are being interchanged, it was observed that material of an excremental nature, was coming in contact with the rotary blades, to employ a metaphor."

"Yes, that's exactly what happened," I said. "Go on."

"It was at the time that our science individuals are finally understanding what is going on inside the Black Cube."

"Oh?"

"Yes, they have been making some sense of the object. Their understanding is―let me be making this of perfect clarity―far from being of completeness, but they are arriving at the nub of its gist… if you are drifting with me."

"I understand," I told him. "So what is it?"

"Ah, Jake, as I have related, of scientific cognizance I am in possession of doodly squat. However and moreover, Oni is in ownership of vast quantities more than I, and she has been subjected to various briefings on the matter at hand. I will be having her talk with you, if this is not of inconvenience. Be standing by, please―"

"Wait a minute, Ragna," I cut in. "We have someone here who is possession of vast quantities of whatever you said. I want him to talk to Oni, but let's make it later, okay? We're knee-deep in debris here. And I want to find out where they're taking us."

"That is a stupendous ten four. We are having the same vicissitudes in this vehicle of ours. Okay, Jake! We are going to be taking off our ears at this moment, and we will be catching you down the starslab at a later point in time. Until this point is reached, we are wishing excellent numbers to all our good-buddies! Clear!"

"Right," I answered.

"My God," Roland groaned. "Where did they pick up that skyband lingo?"

"I dunno. Must have got it from our libraries." I looked around. "Where is everybody?"

"Aft," Roland said. "More room. But if you think this is chaos, you should see the trailer."

"All right, people," Sam announced over every speaker in the rig. "What do you say we get this mess cleaned up?"

"I like the 'we'," I sneered.

"Heh heh heh."

All attempts at communication with the Bugs failed. We could only guess as to our ultimate destination, and we were too busy at first to do that. The Bugs dragged us out of the underground garage, through a nearby portal, and across a succession of nondescript planets. We spent most of that time cleaning up the mess.

Carl was excused from clean-up detail. His scrotum had swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, and he was in horrible pain. All I could do for him was shoot him up with hydromorphone and cortisone, and hope for the best. Carl had talked, told them everything they wanted to know; they simply hadn't believed him. Toward the end, he'd thought they were coming around to buying his story about the saucer abduction, but he wasn't sure. Mercifully, though inadvertently, the Bugs had intervened. Lori was in a state, alternating between fits of crying and tantrums in which she'd smash things against a bulkhead and screamingly relate in detail the parasurgical procedures she would perform on the bastards who'd tormented her boyfriend. In a day or two, Carl was much better and she calmed down.

The clean-up lasted three days. We took inventory and found nothing missing. Sean's and Liam's vehicle was undamaged, as was Carl's of course, but Carl's car was now behind the magenta roadster, which was better, I thought. We might need to get the Chevy out quickly at some point. I regretted now ever having Carl drive it aboard. Talk about bad moves―I had made my share.

When it became apparent that we were in for a long trip, we settled down to a routine, sleeping and eating in shifts, standing watch at the instrument panel in turns, generally setting up some semblance of housekeeping. Thirteen bodies make living in a trailer truck an exercise in the art of the social contract. The truck was big, but with the vehicles and all the cargo, there was limited living space. Toes got constantly stepped on, elbows jammed into ribs, and there was a waiting list for the toilet. Nevertheless, at one point Darla and I found ourselves alone in the aft-cabin. I took the opportunity to sound her out on a few things. I sat her down on the bunk.

"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 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 head. "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 doppelganger. 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 concensus 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 four-day 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-year 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 concensus 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."