Red Limit Freeway

Chapter 4

I frankly can't remember all of what went on that night. I know a great deal of alcohol found its way into my system. Events, as I perceived them, became rather… diffuse. Fitzgore and his compatriots turned out to be very good drinking companions. Excellent drinking companions. They bought all of us a round of drinks. We bought all of them a round of drinks. Everybody bought everybody a round of drinks. Serious drinking then commenced. At some point, I found in my field of vision the wavering image of a stein of beer fully three hands high. They called it the Brobdingnagian Thunder Cup.

I drank it.

That was quite late in the evening―I think. Before that, we did a lot of talking. They wanted to know everything about me, about the Roadmap, about everything. I introduced them to Winnie. She's the map, I said. Fine, they said. Let's trot out pencil and paper and see what she knows. Pencil and paper were trotted out. Winnie proceeded to show her stuff, looking like a kindergartner learning the rudiments of writ, pink tongue protruding as she executed cramped figures with arduous dedication. She filled page after page with spirals and other shapes connected by lines.

"By God," Fitzgore said, "that's the local group! It must be." He stroked his psychotic growth of red beard. "Dammit all, if we had a library on this planet, we could get books to check this." He tossed off half a stein of beer. "If we had any books on this planet."

"I think I've got a few astronomy books in the rig. Matter of fact, there should be a whole crate of 'em. That right, Sam?"

"Yeah, our manifest shows a shipment of book pipettes. But you don't really want go back there and―"

"Sure I do!"

"Oh for pity's sake."

"Jake," Roland said, "maybe later, when we're all sober. This array has to be the Local Group. Look, here're the Magellenic clouds, and… let's see… right here would have to be Andromeda and Messier 33―"

"Who's not sober?"

"And these two little puffy things are probably Leos I and Il. Over here are the galaxies in Sculptor and Fornax―"

"Who needs books," a toothless logger with a Strine accent said, "when you got this cobber?"

"Roland is a book."

"Thanks, Suzie. And all these lines," Roland went on, "are Skyway routes. But the interesting question is this. What is this major route coming in from this direction and going off here? Seems to be a major road."

"Very likely," Fitzgore said. "Look at these other things Winnie's done. Could these be galactic clusters connected by a road?"

"I should think they were," Roland answered. "And these cloudlike figures…"

"Metaclusters," I said.

"What're those?" somebody asked.

"Groups of groups. Supergroups of galaxies, all accessible by a major road system."

"Going where. I wonder?" another logger mused.

"To the bloody limit, mate."

"The what?"

"The Beginning," Fitzgore breathed. The very cradle of what-there-is."

"How's that?"

"When you look out at the universe," Roland lectured, his manner a trifle labored―he was drunk― "at faint galaxies and groups of galaxies, you look back through time. Speed of light, relativity, and all that. When you look really far out, as far as the most sophisimicated… sophifimis―" He burped. "'Scuse me. When you use really expensive astronomical stuff, you don't see so much out there. You're looking back to a time when the universe was in a radically different state from what it's in now. Before galaxies formed. You've bumped up against the limit of the perceivable universe, beyond which anything out there is redshifted practically to invisibility."

"You've lost me there."

"It's basic cosmology," Roland contended, his tone suggesting that any six-year-old child would consider it old hat.

"Yes, of course," Fitzgore said, more to himself than to anybody. "Shoot a portal, and you go back through time. If you follow a road leading to the farthest reaches of space, a road at takes you in faster-than-light jumps…"

"You will ultimately come," Roland continued for him, "to a point from which all spacetime flows outward."

"The Big Bang," one of the loggers said.

"Absolutely, if the Skyway goes that far."

"How could it?" somebody asked.

"I have no idea," Roland said, "but that roadbuzz has it that Jake will find out."

"I ain't goin' nowhere," I said. "I'm too goddamn drunk."

Imagine the rising dough of a four-dimensional loaf of raisin bread.

You can't do it. It's impossible to imagine a four-dimensional anything, but it helps to try.

As the dough rises, the volume increases, as does the distance between each raisin. Think of each raisin as a galaxy―really a group of galaxies―and you have the conventional representation of the theory of an expanding universe, first proposed about a century and a half ago. Now, inside the ballooning volume of that dough, the farther away one raisin is from another, the faster their mutual rate of recession―it just works that way geometrically. In the real universe, it happens at galactic clusters can be far enough away from each other to put their recessional speeds at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. Due to the Doppler effect, light from these distant objects, infalling on the instruments of local galactic astronomers, is "redshifted" to great degree, meaning that the lightwaves have decreased in frequency toward the red end of the spectrum. The same thing happens to the sound waves from a passing vehicle's warning signal. You hear the pitch change, go down, decrease in frequency. Light comes in frequencies, too; in the visible part of the spectrum, blue is the high end and red the low. Retreating galactic clusters doppler into the red. Redshift. The farther away they are from us, the more their light is redhifted. As Roland said, astronomers can look out to vast distances these days, using neutrino astronomy and graviton scanning. Once you get past the protogalactic core objects, traditionally called "quasars," you don't see much at all. Anything out that far is a retreating red ghost, exiting our ken at near the speed of light. At these distances, one looks beyond the red limit of the universe. If you can handle the notion that the universe has a boundary, this is it. But there is something beyond.

Pick any point of departure in the present-day universe, any place at all. Travel from there in any direction―you must keep that in mind―at faster-than-light speeds, and you go back in time. Go far enough, and you hit the edge. Go over the edge, and you run smack into Creation.

I pored over Winnie's maps. There.was indeed a major artery linking metaclusters. Roland and I began to fit pages together, with Winnie's help.

"See, Jake? The intercluster road comes in here at Andromeda and exits at the same point. Let's call it the Intercluster Thruway."

"And if you follow it," I said, "you go… wait a minute. Is the Local Group associated with other galactic clusters? Or do we go our own way?"

"I don't know. We'll have plenty of time to check this. It may be that the Intercluster Thruway and the big road, the intermetacluster one, are one and the same, at least locally."

"Okay. So, whatever this big road is, we have to take the Transgalactic Extension to Andromeda in order to pick it up. On the way we hit these little globular galaxies. Did you say you knew the names for them?"

"They're just New General Catalogue numbers. Can't remember."

"Doesn't matter. Okay, you come into Andromeda here, presumably with the option of taking local routes into the galaxy or making a huge jump to the next cluster or metacluster, whatever the case may be."

Roland refilled his mug. "Yes, that's the way it looks."

I sat back and puffed on a long clay pipe someone had handed me. It was charged with an untobaccoish weed. "So what does it all mean?"

"It means," Roland said, "that as you travel the main intermetacluster road, you take backward leaps in time in billions of years."

"Yeah." I puffed. "Yeah. But are we sure of that?"

"No. But put this all together with what we know about how the Skyway works, along with the legends that have grown around you, and it makes sense." Roland was drunker than I was. A dizzy spell hit him, and he shook his head to clear it. "But what the punk do I know," he added thickly.

"I think it makes perfect sense," Fitzgore said. "And I wish to hell I were going with you."

"Where am I going?" I wanted to know.

"To the Big Bang, mate," another of the loggers said.

I nodded toward the maps. "It's one hell of a long way to the end of the road." I slid one sheet over to Fitzgore and pointed to it. "Look at the Local Group map. You pick up the big road in Andromeda. Now, from here, that means you have to somehow get on the Galactic Beltway and go about 10,000 light-years to the rim of the Milky Way. How many road klicks would that be?"

"Doesn't Winnie's journey-poem give some indication?" Fitzgore asked.

"Darla's still working on the translation," I said. "Anyway, you then take the Transgalactic Extension out to this little splotch here. Hey, Roland. What did you say this could be?"

"Huh?"

"Wake up. This little cloud here?"

"Oh. Uh, an undiscovered extra burp galactic star cloud. Makes a nice little bridge to Andromeda."

"Yeah, but even with that, the jump is in the neighborhood of a million light-years."

"Prolly is. Gimme that pitcher, willya?"

"Sure you can handle it, Egg Roll?" a mountain-size logger said.

"Don't call me 'Egg Roll,' you tree-humping moron."

"Easy, son. Didn't mean anything by it."

"Then shut up and gimme that pitcher, or I'll teach you

some punking manners."

"You'll find me a willing pupil, mate. Anytime you've got the tune."

"The time," Roland breathed, struggling to his feet, "is now. Would you care to take the evening air with me, sir?"

"I would indeed."

"Gee, that rhymes," Susan said, nose wrinkling as she smiled. "Would you care… to take the eve-ning airrr…" She had a good singing voice.

"Oh, Roland," John said. "Sit down. Your honor has hardly been besmirched."

Susan laughed.

"'Besmirched'?" I said. "How 'bout just smirched?" I took a good inhale on the pipe and let it out. "Never did understand what the `be' was for."

Roland and the logger left.

"Well, anyway―"

In another part of the bar, someone fell, or was thrown, over a table.

Fitzgore said, "You were saying, Jake?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. What I was going to ask was―did you ever hear of a portal jump of that distance?"

"Hardly. But who knows?"

"Just what the hell is in this pipe, if I may ask?"

"Cruising weed, we calls it," someone said.

"Cruising weed. I've been inhaling this shit."

"Good idea, that."

"Pretty good shit, actually."

"Have some more beer, Jake," Fitzgore said, sloshing suds into my mug.

"Don't mind if I do, thank you." I relit the pipe with a long kitchen match. "Uh, your buddy there… he's got at least fifty kilos on Roland."

"Liam won't hurt him. He's a good man, Jake. Never hurt anyone, so far as I know."

"Well, I guess it's okay, then." I took a deep drag on the pipe. The weed was rather good, in its own way. Not smooth on the draw, but satisfying. Rather peppery. At any rate, I was cruising along just fine. "Getting back to the issue at hand," I went on. "My guess is we're talking about millions of kilometers of road, billions maybe, to get to the big road―the whachmacallit. Red Limit Freeway."

Fitzgore's eyes lit up. "Fine name for it!" Then he shook his head. "Not that much, Jake. It would be a long trek, surely, but I should think it would depend on the distances covered by each jump along the Galactic Beltway." He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. "Maybe there's a shortcut somewhere."

I nodded. "Maybe. Still…" I took the pipe from my mouth and used it to point at one of Winnie's drawings. "What about the Red Limit Freeway itself? How many metaclusters are there in the universe?"

Fitzgore laughed. "Cosmology's hardly my strong suit. However, I'd venture to say that the count of galaxies has to be in the billions."

"I've heard the figure of one hundred billion," I said. "Somewhere. Was that galaxies? I dunno. Anyway, say it's a hundred billion."'

"Probably a conservative figure."

"Yeah, but let's say one hundred gigagalaxies. Okay, let's put the average population of a cluster at―"

"Don't you mean a metacluster?"

"Right, metacluster. Let's say a thousand galaxies in a metacluster, on the average."

"I see where you're going, Jake. But consider this. Red Limit Freeway is a road back through time, not necessarily a road that links every large-scale structure in the universe."

"Who says it's either?"

"Who's to say it isn't both?" someone put in.

"Good point," I said.

Fitzgore exhaled and wrapped his meaty arms around his chest. "Well, as laymen, I suppose all we can do is make points and counterpoints, until somebody in a position to know comes along and settles the matter."

"Or until Roland sobers up," I said. "He seems to know something about this."

"Has he had scientific training?"

"Can you answer that, Suzie?"

"Roland knows everything," Susan said. "But, I think he studied political whatzis in school. Political whatever. Party member, you know."

"Really? Interesting. I take it he changed political stripes somewhere along the way."

"Yup." She giggled. "Or maybe he's a spy. A plant." She giggled again. "Or maybe he's just a plant. A veggie." This amused her as well. Then, suddenly, she sobered up and said, "Would it be all right for a lady to smoke a pipe?"

"I beg your pardon," Fitzgore said, taking another pipe from a carved wooden rack and charging it from the glass humidor. "Rude of me not to have offered. Darla, would you care to―?"

"No, thank you, Sean."

Darla and John had been unusually quiet. Subdued drunks. Carl was gabbing with Lori, who all along had been downing considerable quantities of beer. She had remained none the worse for wear. No one in the place seemed to care that she was well below legal drinking age. Winnie was still drawing―not maps, but crude animal figures. Cave paintings in a strange new medium?

Susan resumed snickering. "A carrot," she said, enjoying her private joke. Then she noticed me looking at her. "Roland's my friend. I like him. But sometimes…"

"I understand," I said.

She blinked her wet hazel eyes at me and smiled. "I like you too, Jake." Under the table, she took my hand and clasped it. The subtle pressure made it an, expression of more than friendship. I didn't know how I felt about it. I decided to try another mug of beer to see if it made a difference. It did. I rather liked it.

Liam returned; dragging Roland across the floor like last week's laundry.

"Could've given me real trouble," he said, "if he'd been half sober. Landed a good kick to me ribs, he did."

Liam yanked Roland up with one arm and plunked him in a chair, then poured half a pitcher of beer over him.

Roland lifted his head from the table, blinked his eyes and said, "Someone gimme a beer." He wiped his eyes. "Please."

Liam took another pitcher (there must have been two dozen on the table) and poured him a mug.

"Thanks," Roland said.

It was the cruising weed that really did me in. If the beer had made things blurry, the weed turned the evening (the day was gone, borne away on a sudsy tide) into a palimpsest of half-recalled events spread over layers of stuff I couldn't remember at all.

I was still trying to imagine that four-dimensional raisin loaf. Naturally I never made it, but I did think of a cone, a three-dimensional one, with space represented by the two dimensions parallel to each other and perpendicular to the plane of the base, and time running along the vertical axis. Time past lies toward the base of the cone, with the present occupying the apex. At the base is the beginning of time, the beginning of everything, the Big Bang. Here, everything is suffused with a brilliant light. Purest energy. Gradually, it wanes to darkness as time progresses in the direction of the apex. All is dark. Then, suddenly, brilliant beacons flare-quasars, the turbulent cores of young galaxies undergoing gravitational collapse. Farther along, they begin to take on their familiar wheeled shape. The universe expands and cools. Entropy extracts its toll, and density decreases. We come then to the point of the cone, and the present day. Look back from that vantage point, and the past is a widening tunnel whose farthest end glows dully with faint echoes of creation. Look in a direction perpendicular to the time-line, and you see nothing. Relativity tells us that we can have no knowledge of the universe of the present, since by the time lightwaves lollygag in with the information, it's yesterday's news. But you can look back in time, even to the first few seconds of the primeval flash.

Dreams of the road…

I don't know exactly when Susan and I made love. Sometime in the evening, I think, before my induction into the Brotherhood of the Boojum. It was around dinnertime, and the bar had cleared out a bit. We excused ourselves from the table more or less simultaneously, made our way upstairs more or less following the same trajectory, and intercepted each other. More or less. We found a bed and made a kind of quiet, groping, drunken love. But it was nice, in a fumbling, friendly way.

Then Suzie passed out. I nearly did, but somehow gaIumphed my way downstairs again. I was thirsty.

That, I believe, is when Sean announced that I was to be inducted into the Brotherhood. I was asked if I wished to join. I said sure, what the hell.

There followed a ceremony, of which I remembered not much. Candles guttered in sconces, incense burned. Incantations were muttered. Chanting and general mummery. I recited something, reading it from what I dimly remember as a sheep-skin scroll. It could have been a roll of shithouse paper. As to content, I think it would have been gibberish even if read stone sober. I was then confronted with the Brobdingnagian Thunder Cup. They bade me drink. I drank.

Next thing I knew, we were out in those weird woods. From the shadows came strange cries, sharp rustlings. Above the treetops, great winged things flapped their pinions. Things or persons were watching, peering from within dark bowers. We came to a clearing, and I was given a sword. My companions then withdrew, leaving me to face the fearful Boojum alone in the half-night. I was to make a cry, thus: Yuwkahoooo! Yawkahoooo! I managed to approximate the sound once or twice, then gave it up.

I sat on a stump and tried to think of the time-cone―which was really called a light-cone, for reasons which then eluded me. And the road. The road that twines back to the heart of mess, to the very core, the impenetrable fastness of Being. Or Nothingness.

That's how drunk I was. When you start capitalizing words with fuzzy meanings, you're either some wild-eyed nineteenth century German philosopher in a pince-nez, or you're very drunk. Possibly both.

I don't know how long I sat there: I thought of Susan, then of Darla, and the distance that had grown between us. Then the Paradox entered my mind, as it had been doing since this whole affair had begun.

But I didn't spend too much time on that. Brain cells were screaming in their death throes. Alcohol, that great shabby beast one always thinks is securely leashed, was turning on me again.

Suddenly, something crashed through the undergrowth and barged into the clearing.

I have an image of an animal somewhere between a giraffe and a kangaroo, with the head of a very strange dog. It resembled no other alien fauna I had ever seen. Yes, the head of a dog… well, not a dog, really. It had horn-shaped ears. Horn, as in musical instrument. Sticking out of either side of the small head. Must have been eight or nine feet tall. And it had purple and pink splotches over its inert yellow plasticine skin. It walked on two legs, and had two prehensile forelegs that dangled spastically as it moved.

Now, this is the part I'm really not sure about at all.

The beast stopped in its tracks when it saw me. It gave a yawp and said, "Oh! Dearie me, dearie me! Oh! Oh! Goodness gracious!"

Then it turned and ran, disappearing into the trees.

I thought about it a while. That Boojum, I decided, had been a Snark.

Then somebody whacked me over the head with something.