The first task was to get Sam unstuck. The Ahgirr didn't have very much in the way of heavy equipment, but they put in a call (to a nearby faln complex, as we learned later), and an odd-looking towing vehicle came out by Skyway and did the job. We detached the trailer, and the towtruck hauled Sam over the desert to the mouth of the Ahgirr cave-community. Ariadne had to be left in the trailer, but Carl's buggy made the trip an its own power, which was a surprise to nobody. I was waiting for the thing to fly.
All interspecies communication up to this paint had been via the usual half-understood gestures and signing, but fortunately the Ahgirr were computer whizzes, and once they solved the problem of system compatibility, they waded right into Sam's language files―the dictionaries, word-processing programs, compilers, and such. In no time the Ahgirr were speaking to us in English that was completely understandable if a little fractured.
They gave us an apartment to stay in while the language barrier was being broken down. As it turned out, we stayed five weeks, and at no time did we feel as though we were wearing out our welcome. The Ahgirr were eager to make friends with beings similar to themselves. Word spread over the planet; we were something of a sensation.
The second task was to see about getting a new roller. That was going to be a problem. My rig was a bit unusual. It had been built to Terran specifications and design, but an alien outfit had manufactured it. I always had a hard time finding parts far it. Here, light-years away from Terran Maze, it might just be impossible. We were told that a few planets away there was a stretch of Skyway along which lay a number of used vehicle dealerships and salvage yards. We might try there. Carl and Roland volunteered to go and Hokar offered to act as guide. They were gone two days. Meanwhile, the rest of us set about the job of repairing the trailer. Fixing the buckled door wasn't so hard, but all the rear cameras and sensors had pretty much been totaled, which meant buying alien gear to replace them. And that meant a lot of fudging and jury-rigging. But we had to do it if we didn't want to be blind out our back side. We had to make a trip to a faln to buy parts.
Before we got around to that, Hokar, Roland, and Carl returned with an almost-new pair of rollers. A stroke of long-overdue luck.
"We scavanged through junkyard after junkyard," Roland said over dinner in our suite of rooms within the Ahgirr cave-city. "Nothing even remotely resembled the vehicles you usually see in Terran Maze or any of the contingent mazes. We were pretty discouraged, but Hokar said he was sure he remembered seeing vehicles similar to your rig, though not driven by humans. And sure enough-"
"We found a junked rig, just the cab, but very similar to yours," Carl interrupted. "Even had the same markings, same decals. "
"The owner of the wreck said the people who'd left it there hadn't looked anything like us, meaning they weren't human, of course," Roland said.
"The front rollers were in good shape," Carl went an, "so we bought 'em. Got a pretty goad deal, too, with Hokar advising us on protocol."
"Yes, the Nogon have strange rituals when it comes to bargaining," Roland elaborated. "You have to approach the seller on the pretext of wanting to buy everything he has to sell, at any price he chooses to set, and the seller in turn has to pretend that you couldn't possibly want any of the worthless junk he's got, no matter how low he's slashed the price."
"Traveling salesmen must have it easy here," I commented, reaching for a second helping of the delicious vegetable stew Darla had concocted out of the fresh produce Sean and Liam had brought along.
"As I said, it's all posturing. Pretty soon everyone's self-interest emerges crisp and clear, and then it's no holds barred."
"Sounds healthy," I said.
"Time consuming," Carl said. "Took an hour to close the deal"
I turned to Ragna, who was sipping thin gruel through a straw from a decorative ceramic bowl. "I take it haggling is a high art with your people."
Ragna stopped slurping, blinked his enormous pink eyes, then touched his blue headband, a biointerface gadget that was the closest thing to a universal translator I'd ever seen. It was merely a very-large-scale integration computer, but the software was powerful. However, my colloquialisms and abbreviated grammar gave it trouble now and then. Also, figurative speech gave the translation program headaches. But it was integrating our responses nicely.
"I am thinking that the haggling with my people is indeed, true, yes, a high or fine art, in the mode of hyperbole and colloquial exaggeration. In the literal or denotative mode, no, forget it, Charlie."
I suppressed a smile. "Ragna, your facility with the language improves daily. I must compliment you on it."
"Of course I am undubitably thanking you."
"I should think," John said, "you'll be able to doff that headband soon enough."
"Oh, yes, this is quite a possibility I am thinking. Even now, you may be seeing… " Gingerly, Ragna removed the flexible headband with both hands and laid it on the table. In a barely intelligible liquid slur, he said, "Unassisting brain capability speaking quite good, is it not? Is aiding the biological analogue to being able to function, learning is this not so to be speaking?"
"Eh?" John said.
"Interrogatory remark, what?" Ragna's thin white eyebrows lowered in puzzlement.
We persuaded Ragna to put the headband back on.
The remainder of the meal was devoted to chitchat. When we were all sitting back drinking beer and burping, Suzie looked gravely at me.
"What is it, Susan?" I said.
"Where do we go from here?"
"Good question." I fumed to Sean and Liam. "What've you guys come up with in the map department?"
"Damn little," Liam said, then nodded deferentially toward Ragna. "Of course Ragna and Hokar and the others have been very helpful. It's simply that none of the mazes we've had a look at seem familiar." He ran a hand through his mass of tousled blond hair, then sighed and pursed his lips. "We're bloody well lost all right."
I nodded. "Darla, can Winnie help us?"
Winnie, seated by Darla, looked sad as she munched the remains of her meal of shoots and leaves.
"Afraid not," Darla said. "I think it's clear now that Winnie's knowledge of the Skyway isn't all-encompassing. And she's not going to lead us back to the proper path by sheer psychic power."
"Well, I never expected her to," I said. "Roland, have we pinpointed where we are in the galaxy?"
"It was easy enough. The Ahgirr are about as advanced as we are in astronomy. Had a little trouble interpreting their maps, though…" Roland shifted his eyes toward Ragna, then looked up casually at the smooth rock ceiling of the cave.
I knew what he was implying. Every race does something badly; with the Ahgirr, it was cartography in particular, and graphics in general. I had seen their graphics on computer screens―plots and charts and such―and couldn't make head nor tail of them. You would think some symbology to be universal and cross-cultural. Wrong. Draw an arrow on a map for an alien, indicating which way he should go, and he'll say, Yes, that's very interesting. Whatever does it mean? The Ahgirr didn't know from arrows either. Their symbol for direction of motion, vectors, stuff like that, was a little circle at the beginning of the line. Interesting, but stupid. Of course, I'm human, therefore biased. It all made perfect sense to the Ahgirr, but we were having a hell of a time reading their roadmaps, both computer-generated and paper varieties. (In regard to arrows, I theorized that, since the Nogon had been cave dwellers for a good part of their recorded history, they hadn't invented the bow and arrow until very recently. Roland disagreed, contending that both the weapon and the arrow symbol were comparatively recent human inventions.)
"As nearly as we can ascertain," Roland went on, "we're well off Winnie's route, somewhere along the inner edge of the Orion arm. a want to go in the opposite direction."
"How far can we go in the right direction before we have to shoot a potluck?"
"About a thousand light-years, which works out to about ten thousand kilometers of road."
>
I clucked ruefully. "That's one hell of a lot of driving just to shoot a potluck. We might as well pick any old one and take our chances, since we're shit out of luck anyway."
Roland frowned. "I don't like the idea of wandering aimlessly. We could get hopelessly lost."
"What are we now?"
Roland shrugged. "True." He stared pensively at his empty plate for a moment, then banged his fist on the table beside it. "Damn. If we could only get something out of that Black Cube."
I looked at Ragna. "Have your scientists had any luck with it?"
Ragna eyed me dolefully. "Luck, I am afraid, we are also shit out of."
Again, everyone had trouble stifling a giggle.
"Howsoever on the other hand," Ragna went on, "we are slightly doubting that it is a map."
Raised eyebrows around the table, except for Roland's.
"What makes you doubt it?" John was first to ask.
Ragna made a clawing motion with the five digits of his right hand-an expression of frustration and regret. "Ah, my good friends, that I cannot be saying. I am not a scientist. I cannot be making you understand if on the one hand I am not understanding what they are saying on the other."
John narrowed his eyes momentarily, then nodded. "Oh, I see."
Ragna's status in the colony was roughly equivalent to that of a mayor, but his position wasn't official, so far as we could ascertain. He was simply an individual to whose judgment everyone deferred in matters of great importance. He didn't run for office, didn't rule by divine right. It was more an obligation on his part. Somebody has to drive.
"But I can be saying this," Ragna continued. "Our technical individuals are saying to me that there is something strange inside. Also, they say that nothing can be going into this Black Cube on the contrary, however, things can be coming out."
I said, "Can you tell us what they suspect is inside the Cube?"
Again, he made the clawing motion. "Ali, Jake, my friend, this is that which is difficult. They are saying that… that inside is a vastness of nothing." He blinked, milky nictitating membranes coming upward before his eyelids closed down. "But it is a nothing that they do not understand."
"I see."
Right.
A collective sigh at the table.
"Well," I said finally after a long moment, "what say we hit those maps and figure out something. Every maze seems to have legends or rumors concerning what's on the other side of its various potluck portals. With Ragna's help, maybe we can make a decision based on that."
"In that case," Roland said, "I'm for picking one at random."
"You never know, Roland," I answered. "Rumors always have some basis in truth. Legends, too."
"I agree," John said.
"But the Ahgirr haven't settled their maze long enough to have developed a road mythology," Roland countered, turning to Ragna. "Have you?"
Ragna touched his headband. "I am not sure… Ah, yes. A mythology. Yes, I can be answering that in the affirmative, which is truth. We are having those stories and legends."
"Then again," Roland said, smiling thinly, "I could be wrong."
Ahgirr tradespeople helped us fit Sam with the new rollers. I offered to pay them but they wouldn't hear of it. No one had brought up the issue of compensation up to that point, and no one broached the subject after that.
The newbies fit fine, and Sam and I went back to the road and picked up the trailer. Doing so eased my mind a little. The trailer was a dead giveaway just sitting there. I thought it improbable that Moore would follow us through a potluck portal, but you never know. He just might be crazy enough. I'd also been worried shout looters and salvagers, even though this ingress spur was seldom used.
With the trailer now at the mouth of the cave complex, we began the repair job in earnest. There was more damage than we had thought. The small motor that raised and lowered the door was completely useless, and the airtight silicone bushing around the door itself was in tatters. Where would we find replacements? Carl and Roland were willing to go out and search for a junked trailer, and I was ready to say go ahead, but the Ahgirr craftspeople said don't bother. They could manufacture most of the mechanical parts we needed in their shops. For the electronics we'd probably have to make a trip to a faln complex. They could breadboard same stuff for us, but it would be easier just to buy modular components off the shelf. They would send a technician, a female named Tivi, along to advise us. I felt I had to make the trip myself; the craftspeople knew the local technology, but I knew my rig, and I didn't want them making trips back and forth should I be dissatisfied with the goods they bought. Besides, I wanted to see what these fate things were all about.
But a big block of Ahgirr religious holidays came up and everybody knocked off for a week. There were strict laws―no work, no shopping, no nothing on high holy days, and these, called the Time of Finding Deeper Levels (rough translation), were the highest and holiest.
"No sex, I bet," Susan ventured. "Pity the way same religions are."
"I'm not even sure what they have is a religion." I thought a moment, then said, "I'm not at all sure that what you have is a religion."
"Teleological Pantheism isn't a religion… It's just a way of looking at the universe and its processes."
"Uh-huh. Tell me more."
"Later. Let's mess around."
Besides doing the above, Susan and I took advantage of the slack time to explore some of the vast system of caves in which the Ahgfrr had made their home. It was a marvelous place. There is something of the claustrophile in me. I love eaves, and I found a fellow spelunker in Susan. So we set out into the restful silences of the unoccupied regions. We toured vast smooth-walled chambers, many-leveled galleries, huge caverns with floors populated by fantastic rock monuments standing like sentinels in the dark. We walked along lava flows that had hardened millions of years ago, traversed vaginalike tunnels through which one had to push and squeeze in a psyche-stirring imitation of birth. Once, we followed a sinuous side passage that coiled endlessly through the rock, finally dead-ending in a delightful little grotto, walls sparkling in the light of our torches with millions of tiny multicolored points. An underground stream flowed through it, cascading down a small waterfall. We spent the "night" there, discovering more delights in the darkness.
There were other marvels. We found spherical chambers, hundreds of them, which had probably been formed by pockets of gas trapped within the magma. We dubbed them the "Pleasure Domes." And in the regions that had not been disturbed by vulcanism, strange geological formations presented themselves at every turn. The processes at work here were, for the most part, totally unEarthlike. There were chambers with walls glazed with a ten-centimeter-thick coating of frosted glass ('Twas a miracle of rare device!), rooms that looked as if they had been designed by Bauhaus architects under the influence of hallucinogens, caverns that looked like the interiors of great cathedrals, alcoves with intimate seating in the shape of contoured folds of rock like a couch, passageways with corbelled walls, vaults with grained ceilings, porticos with fluted columns, elaborate suites of adjoining rooms, and all were unmistakably natural formations. There were no right angles; slabs of rack were sheared, not cut; no chisels marks, no debris about that would be evidence of stonecutting; nothing. There was an undeniable randomness to it all.
And not one goddamn stalactite in the whole place.
"I always forget," Susan said. "Is it stalactites that hang down and stalagmites that stick up, or vicey versy?"
"No, that's right. I think."
"Always get it confused."
"Well, there aren't any here to befuddle you."
"Doesn't take much, for me."
In the womblike darkness, Susan snuggled closer.
"I wonder why," she said.
"Why what?"
"Why aren't there any?"
"Any what?"
She nipped my ear. "Stalactites, silly."
"Oh. No limestone, I guess."
"Limest
one?"
"Yup. Makes sense. This is practically a lifeless planet, from what Ragna told us. Mostly microscopic organisms. Life never really got going here. Limestone comes from sediments containing coral, polyps, stuff like that. Back on Earth, that is. Here, who knows what they have going, if anything. You need water that's high in carbonate of lime to make stalactites."
"And stalagmites."
"And stalagmites,"
"Interesting."
"Hardly."
"No, I mean it. It always amazes me how much you know, for a truckdriver."
"Duh."
She giggled. "Sorry, didn't mean it quite like that." She kissed me on the cheek. "You're strange. So very strange."
"How so?"
"Well…" She lay on her back. "You obviously have some education. Quite a lot, it seems. True?"
"Oh, here and there."
"Right. U. of Tsiolkovskygrad, I bet."
"Right," I admitted.
"I knew it. Graduate work?"
"Some. A year, if I can remember back that far."
"Doing what?"
"I was going for a doctorate in government administration."
She was surprised. "How in the world did you wrangle your way into that program? Pretty restricted."
"Didn't wrangle at all. Actually, I was asked to sign up. Someone apparently thought I was bureaucrat material. They like to recruit from the provinces now and then. Or they did." I shifted to my side. "You have to remember, this was almost thirty years ago. U. of T. was a podunk school then, a bunch of pop-up domes and Durafoam shacks. It was the only university in the Colonies."
"The entrance requirements must have been stiff."
"They were. I'll admit to a certain native intelligence. I was young, in love with learning, tired of the farm. It seemed a good idea at the time."
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