Starrigger

4

The stream meandered through cathedrals of jungle, its banks overhung with weeping vinery. We strapped in and let the rig jostle us as Sam sent it banging over rocks and slamming down over half-meter-high cataracts. It was rough going, but not as difficult as barging through rain forest. The gradual downgrade soon leveled off and the stream got deeper. Then it got very deep.

As the water level gurgled up to my viewport, I said, "I knew those optional snorkels on the vents would come in handy someday."

"I think this is about as deep as it gets," Sam said.

He was right. Ahead was white water. Sam stopped for a moment to decide on his approach, then gunned it for a place where the drop was lowest. We rolled over smooth rocks and splashed into the hydraulics below, like some great, lumbering water beast beached in the shallows.

Anyway, the rig was getting a long-needed washing. The stream widened out farther down, and Sam stopped long enough for Darla to clean the triple-puncture wound on my leg and bandage it up. I suddenly felt very weird.

"You're in luck," she said. "Cheetah says the weegah, which is what bit you, isn't poisonous to humans. Unfortunately, the chemical of the venom resembles chlorpromazine, a tranquilizer, if I remember correctly. You should be winking out soon. You probably got a good dose."

"I feel very calm, but kind of strange. How did you know all that?"

"Oh, passing interest in xenobiology, especially exotic zoology."

"If I die, I want you to do something for me. Go to my flat and kill every houseplant in it."

"Sounds so petty."

But my ire grew abstract as a nirvanalike mood descended. The pain in my leg and ankle subsided to alternating twinges, and I sat back to enjoy the ride as Sam resumed driving.

About half an hour later we picked up the dirt road, but we almost hung ourselves up getting out of the water. We scraped bottom with the sickening sound of abused metal, then gained the rutted road, which bore us away from the stream and slightly uphill.

I grew terribly sleepy. I told Darla to fetch a stimtab from the medicine kit, but she advised against it, contending that the interaction of the drug and the venom was unpredictable, owing to the weegah's alien chemistry. I acquiesced. Now she was a doctor.

Another hour went by, and we came to the clearing. It was a shock. Over at least a dozen square kilometers the jungle had been ripped away like so many weeds. In its place lay chewed earth, shards of pulp, and row after endless row of neatly wrapped bales, bundles of vegetation sorted into homogeneous groups ― bark, logs, leaves, chips, pods, fruit, and vegetable mash (these in big metal canisters), all products useful as-is or ready for further processing. The thing that had done the deed was off in the distance, a Landscraper. The machine was a metal platform almost a kilometer long, moving on gargantuan tracks, biting off great chunks of forest at its leading edge, sorting, processing, digesting masses of material in its guts, and dropping the fecal result off behind. Eventually, farms, houses, and factories would follow in its wake. Cleared land was a premium on Demeter (the proper name for the planet and one everybody ignored; most people called it Hothouse).

Cheetah eyed the scene dolefully, and I couldn't help feeling sorry. She looked upon the ruins of her only home.

The road skirted the edge of the clearing for about a klick or so before it swung back into the jungle. At this point we were on the lookout for airborne vehicles, but none appeared.

The new section of trail was heavily overgrown in spots, and wound its way around marsh and hollow until it dead-ended into another road.

"That way!" Cheetah instructed.

Sam turned left, and beneath the feeling of utter tranquility and well-being, I recognized the absurdity of having to be led by the nose out of danger by an individual supposedly without a measurable IQ. But we usually take all the help we can get.

I fell asleep, kept popping awake when Cheetah yelled out a new direction, but eventually there were no more decisions to make and the road before us twined endlessly.

Night fell, as it does very early on Hothouse, with its sixteen-hour rotation, and we ghosted down leafy corridors with the headbeams playing among the trees. Pairs of tiny eyes glowed in the shadows like sparks in a dying fire, watching. Now and again came sounds of rustling in the bushes, nocturnal cries echoing out in the blackness beyond. I dozed, awoke, drifted sleepward, awoke, and the vista before me was the same, dream and reality indistinguishable. I don't know how long we traveled. The trail turned into a green Moebius way, endlessly twisting back on itself, like the Skyway laid out in a galaxy of verdure….

Skyway. Paradox. Causality reversed… living lives, loving loves, dying deaths out of natural sequence…. We are born, follow our useless paths to the grave, but the paths are two-way… cut and splice a lifeline and you get death before life, disappointment before expectation, fulfillment before desire, effect before cause….

The road was long and I drove it, taking the Backtime Extension… back to Terra, a lost, blue-white speck against the blackness, an exhausted little planet of fifteen billion souls ― despite the constant exodus of surplus population out to the web of worlds linked by the Skyway… back to a boyhood in a dying rural town in Northeast Industry, nee Pennsylvania, Federated Democracies of North America… a little mining town called Braddock's Creek, whose pits had given up their last flakes of bituminous at around the end of the fourth decade of the century, shortly after I was born… a demi-ghost town of boarded-up tract houses long foreclosed upon and abandoned to house-strippers and weather, a depopulated community in this age of overcrowding, victim of Climate Shift… short hot summers, long face-numbing winters, with no growing season to speak of…. A toddler spending the warm months barefoot playing on shale piles near the mines, mounds of blue-black rubble forever smoking with spontaneous combustion, cooking themselves into mountains of "red dog," gravel good for laying on dirt roads… a boy swimming in strip-mine holes brimming with acid-spiked runoff water…. We never went hungry in those days, with Father working when he could, coaxing fruits and vegetables out of our chemical garden when he was laid off; and when neither activity paid the bills, doing mysterious things, staying out late at night while I waited for him, sleeping in the big double bed with Mother, lying awake, listening to dogs bark out in the windy night', waiting, wondering when he would get in, wondering what he was doing, and where; Mother never saying anything about it, never acknowledging the fact that her husband spent whole nights away; waiting, until I fell asleep, to wake up next morning in my sleeping bag on the old mattress in the front room, dimly remembering Father carrying me there, kissing me and tucking me in…. Dim years spent in boredom and restlessness and missed school because of fuel shortfalls and lack of funding, meatless days, wheatless days, proud happy days when the sun was out and things warmed up and I could run and raise hell and play and not think about or not care about a world where millions, no, billions starved and the incessant brushfire wars raged on, or appreciate the profound implications of the fact that men lived on the moon and in lazily turning metal wheels in space…. I remember my father telling me about his remembering when the first portal of the Skyway was discovered on Pluto by a robot probe, and I thought. Why did they put it so far away out there at the edge of the solar system?… Watching viddy programs about it and hearing the commentators say what a mystery it all was ― who had built it? when? why? ― years that melted away too soon, because for all the privation, it was a childhood no worse than most, better man some…. And one day Father telling us that we would move, that he had applied for emigration and that we had been accepted, and that somehow he had come up with the 500,000 New Dollar emigration fee charged to all North American residents because economically the region was still better off by far when compared with other parts of the world…. The trip by hydroskiff to India, the unbelievable masses of people there, bodies in the streets, dead bodies and some that were not quite dead, stacked like cordwood and sprinkled with white powdery chemicals making them look like woodpiles in a first snow…. The shuttle port near Kendrapara on the Bay of Bengal, surrounded by tent cities of stranded emigrees… The thundering shuttle ride and my first space-sickness and the view of a dazzling Terra wheeling below… Being aboard the Maxim Gorky, a Longboost ship that made Pluto in eighteen months, most of the time spent with its passengers in Semidoze, an electrically induced twilight of semiconsciousness which made the interminable trip bearable… Spending about an hour on Pluto before boarding the bus which took us by Skyway to Barnard's Star, thence to 61 Cygni-A II, thence to Strove 2398, thence to Sigma Draconis IV, called Vishnu, where I spent the remainder of my childhood on a farm in a valley made green with water cracked from rocks, working as I never worked before or since; where I grew, finally became a man ― too soon, when my mother died giving birth to my brother Donald, stillborn….

… Until a bump woke me up and I saw that the road had debouched from the jungle onto the ten-meter-wide strip on either side of the highway where no plants can grow save low grasses.

Sam waited for traffic to pass. An impossibly low reaction-drive vehicle with some kind of frictionless underside roared by, its headbeams almost dim compared to its brilliant array of running lights. Sam checked the scanners and pulled out onto the road, the smooth, smooth road of Skyway. It felt good. Acceleration sat in my lap as Sam pinched the magnetic confinement, and soon we were wafting through patches of ground-hugging fog that smelled of dank things in a dank earth, a jungle smell, wet and fetid, a smell that I didn't want to have flushed through my nostrils for some time to come. I closed the vents and pressurized the cab. We would be making a many-light-year jump to Groombridge 34-B, where there was an interchange on the airless moon of a gas giant.

"Hey, look who's awake. Feeling better?" Sam spoke softly.

“More or less. How long did we spend touring those damn botanical gardens?"

"Almost all night. We should miss the dawn, though. I think we're about a hundred klicks from the portal."

"Great. The sooner we get off this salad bowl, the better." I looked back and saw Darla and Cheetah huddled together in the backseat, winked out like three-year-olds. I felt even less mature and sank into oblivion again. Dreamlessly.

The portal warning buzzer woke me up. I felt even better, but my mouth was stuffed with fuzz and I ached all over.

"Better tell those two to strap in," Sam said.

I yelled back and they woke up, rubbed eyes, and did so. Warning signs shot by, and then suddenly we were in fog that shrouded the approach. The safe corridor, a lane marked by two parallel white lines, spooled out at us from the mist.

"You on instruments?" I asked.

"Nah. Using the guide markers."

The fog got thicker, and the lines faded ― then, instantaneously, the fog was gone as we passed the flashing red commit markers and penetrated the portal's force-field shell. The shells keep out atmosphere but allow solid matter to go through. It's always struck me as pertinent to ask what would happen if the machinery generating the shell faded. As far as anyone knows, it's never happened, and no one seems to worry about it but me. Nor is much sleep lost fretting over the possibility that a portal could completely fail and drop its cylinders, which has never happened either, at least not in the known mazes.

We felt the fleeting tug of an unseen force, work of the grasping gravitational fingers around us. "Watch it, Sam."

"This has always been a rough portal. Needs recalibrating."

Whump!

The rig dropped, slamming onto the Groombridge Skyway. The jungle was gone, and around us stretched the bleak rolling terrain of the satellite, bathed in the dull red glow of Groom-bridge 34-B's dwarf primary, overhung by a black starry canopy. The gas giant loomed off to our right and was in gibbous phase, taking up more than 45 degrees of sky.

"Remind me to file a complaint at the nearest Skyway maintenance office," Sam kidded, knowing full well that the re-calibration would be done in time by the portal itself. Like the Skyway roadbed, the portals were self-repairing. "One of these days, we're going to materialize under the roadway," he said, repeating a bugbear that was part of the lore or the road. "Really, I wonder what the hell would happen. Explosion?"

"Sam, you know damn well it can't happen." I had rung the changes on this argument a hundred times in a hundred different beerhalls. A portal transition is a question of geometry, not of matter transmission. The spaces on either side are contiguous, not congruent. We had just experienced a misalignment in which the ingress side was higher than the egress side. If the situation were reversed, and the difference were a few centimeters, it'd be like going over a bump. No problem. However, if the misalignment were larger, say a meter or more, you'd run smack up against a cross section of roadmetal delimited by the aperture, in which case you'd stay on the cylinder side of the portal and get smeared. But no explosion per se. For the nth time, I explained this all patiently to Sam, and he laughed.

"Just ribbing you, son. I like to see your hackles rise when you argue with dumb truckdrivers. But tell me, why don't we hear of accidents like that?"

"For the same reason that all portal accidents are hard to verify. But who knows? Maybe there's some safety mechanism, or maybe there's something about the nature of warped space-time that precludes it. I don't know. It's a wonder they can make the alignments with any degree of accuracy over dozens of light-years. There are lots of things about the Skyway we don't know. One of the biggest mysteries is why there's a road at all."

"Well," Sam said, "my guess has always been that they were used to haul heavy equipment from the entrance point to the next cylinder site during construction."

"A technology that controls gravity so well makes vehicle roads seem unnecessary. Doesn't it?"

"You have me there. Hell, maybe there was surplus money in the budget and the bureaucrats couldn't bring themselves to hand back the cash. Had to spend it, bureaucrats being what they are all over the universe."

"I take it you're joking."

"Not entirely. Compared to the staggering engineering feat of building the portals themselves, laying down a self-maintaining road between them would have been a breeze. An afterthought."

"I never looked at it that way," I said, scratching my head. "But, damn it, why did they plunk the cylinders down on the surface of planets? Why not in space?"

"Too many questions, Jake, and we don't have many answers."

The conversation had jogged my memory. "Which reminds me, I had a very interesting talk with Jerry Spacks back at the motel."

I related what had been said. Sam didn't comment for a while, then said, "Sounds like roadapples to me, Jake."

"My sentiments exactly." I looked back at Darla, who had been following the exchange with interest. "What do you mink?"

"About what? The Skyway, or the stories about you?"

"Either. Both."

"I believe it. The story about you, I mean. If anyone could discover a backtime route, it would be you guys."

"Thanks." I looked up at the gas giant. It was awesome and majestic, painted with pastel parallel bands, dotted with the black beauty mark of another moon in transit. Below, the powdery regolith of the moon's surface was molded into sensuous low mounds, peeked here and there by blur-edged craters.

I turned back to Darla. "By the way, the question never came up before, but where were you going when we picked you up on TC–II?"

"Mach City," she answered without hesitation. "I've spent time there before, singing. But I was looking for a job as a nighclub manager. Had a line on a job in the city."

"Uh huh." What I didn't know about this woman would overload a rig or two. "Well, folks, what do we do now? Any suggestions? The floor is open, even to Cheetah here."

"We have three choices," Sam informed us, "since there are three portals on this planet. One, we can go back the way we came. Shall we put the matter in the form of a motion?"

A pair of strangled screams from me and Darla, mine being louder.

"The motion has not been carried. Two, we continue our original itinerary and deliver our load of scientific equipment to Chandrasekhar Deep Space Observatory on Uraniborg, and take our chances. Nix on that, too, since Wilkes doubtless knows we're bound for there. That leaves portal number three."

"Which goes to the boondocks of Terran Maze," I put in.

"Well, we could go to Uraniborg and not stop," Darla suggested. "We could stay on Route Twelve and go through to Thoth Maze."

"Hm. The Thoth are friendly enough," I ruminated. But what would we do there?" No answer. "Hell, we have no choice, really."

"The ayes have it," Sam pronounced, "but the point is moot, because something's coming up fast on our tail. And I mean fast."

I unbuckled from the shotgun seat and almost cracked my head against the roof getting into me driver's seat, forgetting the reduced gravity. I checked the scanners.

"I see what you mean. Too fast for a civilian vehicle, not a rig. Either alien or a Colonial cruiser."

"It's a cruiser all right," Sam confirmed, "and why do I get the funny feeling he's going to pull us over?"

"I'm getting it, too. There's not much we can do, though."

"But we can match him gun for gun."

"No, Sam. We've already got Wilkes on our case. I don't want to tangle with the Colonial Authority."

"Yep, he's got his sye-reen a-blarin'. I'm getting it on all frequencies. Merte!"

"Well…" I sighed and resigned myself to the depressing inevitable, braked, and started pulling over. Just for the hell of it, I decelerated as fast as I could, and sure enough, the cops overshot us, hotrodding it as they were in their Mach-one-capable reaction-drive interceptor.

Sam laughed. "Look at 'em, the assholes."

The road ahead lit up blue-white with their retrofire, and the poor darlings found themselves about half a klick downroad from us. They had to back on the shoulder, which would probably put them in a good mood right off the bat.

"Getting pretty cheeky, aren't they?" Sam wondered. "I mean, pulling us over like this."

"It's not the first time," I said, "and it won't be the last. Cops just have to do cop things every once in a while. It's traditional. They hate not being able to make an arrest on the road."

The com speaker went splup!

"Jacob Paul McGraw?" The voice was female.

I put on a headset. "Yes?"

"Hi, Jake? How're things?"

"Oh, God, not Mona," Sam groaned.

"Just fine," I answered. "How's things with you?"

"Great," Constable Mona Barrows told me in her cheery bird-song voice. "Jake. I'm afraid I have bad news for you."

Mona, you made my whole day by showing me your pretty back end. Nothing can throw me now. I meant the cruiser, of course."

"Jake, you're all talk, always were. Still, I think this'll smother your fusion-fire. There's a warrant for your arrest back on Hothouse."

Notice how she put that. She didn't have the warrant, nor was she arresting me. She couldn't ― at least not here, on the Skyway.

"Really? What's the charge? Have they finally called in all my back citations?" But somehow I knew.

"A bad one this time, Jake. Homicide with a Powered Vehicle."

Of course.

"There are other charges. Leaving the Scene of an Accident, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, and a bunch of minor ones."

"Gee whiz, let's hear 'em all."

"Oh, Illegal Off-Road Driving, Failure to.. Jake, do we really have to do this?"

The cab was quiet. I, for one, could see no way out. I sat there and tried to predict what Mona would do if we tried to make a run for it. It wasn't difficult, since they rarely came tougher than Mona. "Am I to understand that this is an arrest, Constable?"

"Why, whatever gave you that idea? I am, however, officially notifying you that charges have been brought against you within my jurisdiction. My suggestion is that you turn yourself in."

The word "suggestion" was heavily stressed. "Then, why have you pulled us over, may I ask?"

"Oh, Jake, don't go Skyway-lawyer on me. I can't drive and talk at the same time. Besides, you were coming up on the turnoff to Eta Cassiopeiae and I didn't want to drag you all the way back. I've got things to do, and I'm in a hurry. Now, you know you'll have to turn yourself in sometime, Jake. Why not do it now and save us all a lot of bother? Okay?"

"Love to oblige, Mona, but I'd hate myself in the morning."

"Now, Jake," she warned, "don't get any funny ideas. If I have to, I'll follow you until you have to come out of that rig to take a pee."

"I keep an empty fifth of Old Singularity behind the seat for that purpose, dear. I usually offer a snort to officers who're kind enough to pull me over to chat."

"Don't get cute. You know what I mean. You'll be pulling over for food or fuel sooner or later."^

She wouldn't wait that long. Contrary to Sam's bravado, she could probably outshoot us. Disabling us in this airless environment would, of course, necessitate a "rescue."

"And if I leave Terran Maze?"

"That's your privilege. But you will have to stay out permanently. Not very good for your business, is it?"

"I must agree with you on that point."

"So, what do you say?"

I squelched the circuit. "What's the game, Sam?"

"String her along. We'll figure out something by the time we get back to Hothouse. Maybe Cheetah can find us more of those back jungle roads."

The very thought of such an eventuality made me say, "No chance, Mona. Mona honey, I don't know how you can sleep nights. You know the charges are trumped-up, and I think you know exactly what happened back at Greystoke Groves, and at Sonny's."

"Just doing my job, sweetie. It was Wilkes who reported the fatality and pressed the assault charge. I'm only following orders. True, I know Wilkes wants your blood in a crystal decanter… but I have nothing on him! You'd have to press counter-charges for me to help you. But it seems to me he's getting the worst of it. He has one boy dead and another in the iso-clinic growing a new trigger finger."

"In other words, if I turn up dead eventually, the moral weight of the issue will be on my side."

"I'm sorry, Jake. But, as I said, I have orders."

I looked back at Darla. "Darla, it's up to you. She didn't mention anything about a woman suspect. Say the word, we'll go back, and you're out of it completely."

"I'm for making a break for that third portal," she said, those ionospheric blue eyes glowing strangely.

"Jake, are you listening? I want to assure you that you will get all the protection you need, from Wilkes or anybody. I'll personally guarantee that you… wait just a sec."

The radio sputtered as she stopped transmitting.

"What is it, Sam?"

"Something coming in ahead. And I think I know what it is."

I looked at the forward view, switched it telescopic, and punched it on the main screen. A large vehicle was decelerating from a terrific rate of speed, l looked at the tracking readouts.

"Mach two point three and decelerating at fifteen Gs," I observed. "And it's not a reaction-drive buggy." I looked up to eyeball it. "There's only one thing it could be."

"Mona's in a truckload of trouble," Sam said, an edge of troubled concern to his voice.

The vehicle, as it appeared on the video hookup, was almost featureless, a low, lengthwise half a watermelon on rollers, gleaming bright silver. As it closed with frightening speed, it looked like a minimal-art representation of a mammoth beetle, or the overgrown pull-toy of a giant child. It was at once comic and deadly.

Mona was obviously thinking of making a run for it, but the thing was coming up too fast. She pulled away about a hundred meters or so, an effort, I suppose, to appear innocent.

Moments later, the "Skyway Patrol" car swooped in soundlessly, pulled off onto the shoulder between the cruiser and us.

The speaker boomed. The voice spoke in Intersystem. "STATE THE REASON FOR THIS INTERRUPTION OF TRAFFIC."

Imagine the most nonhuman voice possible, add all sorts of skin-crawling overtones from the extreme ends of the aural spectrum, then boost the signal till it breaks your ears. I turned down the gain on the amplifier.

"We are rendering assistance," Mona stated firmly, covering her nervousness. There was no question whom the Patrol car was addressing.

"STATE THE PROBLEM."

"The vehicle behind you was experiencing mechanical difficulty."

A pause. Then: "WE DETECT NONE."

"The problem has been corrected."

"DESCRIBE THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM."

Mona was resentful. "Why don't you ask them?"

"OCCUPANTS OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT VEHICLE: CAN YOU VERIFY THESE CONTENTIONS?"

"Yes, we can. We had a loss of magnetic confinement due to a defective electronic component. The component has been replaced."

"FALSE." The voice was emotionless. "WE DETECTED THE ARRIVAL OF TWO NEUTRINO EMISSION SOURCES WHILE PATROLLING THIS SECTION. NO LOSS OF FUSION REACTION WAS OBSERVED FROM EITHER SOURCE."

It was over. "Sorry, Mona. I did my best." I did not transmit that.

"OCCUPANT OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT VEHICLE:

YOU ARE AWARE THAT HALTING TRAFFIC ON THIS ROAD IS NOT TOLERATED."

It was not a question.

"EXCEPT FOR EMERGENCY PURPOSES OR MECHANICAL FAILURE, THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS. YOU ARE AWARE OF THE PENALTY. PREPARE TO END YOUR EXISTENCE. TIME WILL BE AFFORDED FOR RELIGIOUS CEREMONY OR CUSTOM. UPON THE FIFTIETH SOUNDING OF THE TONE, YOU WILL BE TERMINATED."

There began a bonging.

Mona was dead and she knew it, but her ass-end exploded in plasma flame and she took off. Instead of heading downroad, she swung sharply out over the dust-coated surface of the planetoid, trailing a spectacular plume of reddish-gray soil. She was trying to make it to the far side of a nearby rise for cover in the blind hope that the Patrol vehicle couldn't follow. Nobody knew enough about the "Roadbugs" to say one way or the other; none had ever been observed off-road. It was the only chance Mona had, and she took it.

But her engines went dead before she got two hundred meters away. The long, black interceptor sank into the dust. There followed a horrible silence, save for the lugubrious gong-ing.

Presently, Mona transmitted. "Jake, tell them. Tell them I was helping you. Please!"

"Mona, I'm sorry." There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do.

"I don't want to die like this," she said, her voice cracking. "Killed by one of those bugs. Oh, God."

Almost without thinking, I fired the explosive bolts on the missile rack above the cab, activated one, and let it check out its target. When the green light blinked on the control board, I fired. An invisible arm snatched the thing and flung it aside. It exploded harmlessly out in me moonscape.

…bong…bong…bong…bong…

"Jake?" She seemed composed now, strangely calm.

"Yes, Mona?"

"We… we had some pretty good times, didn't we?"

"We did. Yes, we did, Mona."

One sob broke through the repose, but was quickly covered by a voice turned bitter. "It wouldn't even let me get a shot off, the bastard."

…bong.. bong.. bong.. BONG!

"Goodbye, Jake."

"Goodbye."

The flash seared my retinas, left purple spots chasing each other in front of me. When I could see again, the interceptor was gone. A blackened pit lay where it had been.

The Roadbug was already pulling away.

"OCCUPANTS OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT VEHICLE: YOU ARE FREE TO GO."

It left us sitting under a tiny red sun and a world of unspeakable beauty.