"By Christ," was all Sean could say, staring out the port. "By Christ."
"Well, gang," I said, "what do you make of this?"
"If Bugs can fly," Carl wondered, "why do they run on the road?"
"Good question," I said. "But I never doubted that Bugs could do anything they wanted to do. They probably keep to the Skyway for their own good reasons. Which are… who knows?"
"The stars," Yuri said, leaning forward in his seat and looking out the front port.
The stars ahead were taking on a violet-blue cast, and in an area directly in line with our path, they were disappearing.
"We're approaching lightspeed," Yuri said. He sighed and leaned back, shaking his' head, his expression troubled. "I may be losing my mind."
"Hang on for a while," I said, but I knew what he meant. There is only so much wonderment the human mind can absorb before it just takes a cab. This journey had been one long assault on the limits of endurance.
"Anybody have any speculation?" I asked, "on where they're taking us, and why?"
"I think we've pretty much run that subject into the ground over the past month," Susan answered. "Haven't we? I mean, first we thought they were taking us to Bug jail, then back to T-Maze, then to the Roadbuilders, and now… God, who could possibly guess? What would the Roadbuilders be doing off the road?"
John said, "I think at this point we have to dispose of all the common assumptions made about the Skyway and whoever created it. None of the usual explanations ever made any sense anyway."
"Exactly," Yuri said. "It's always been taken for granted that the Skyway is an artifact of some long-vanished civilization. But just think about it. Here we have a road system that actually goes nowhere. There are no ruins of cities along it, nothing that would indicate that the road was ever used by those who built it. There were always the patrol vehicles―but now we know they're not vehicles at all but actual beings of some kind. Jake said it best, I think, when he likened them to civil servants. The Bugs were created to keep the road passable and relatively safe… for us. I've always believed that the Skyway was built for the express purpose of providing a way to bridge the fantastic distances separating the intelligent races of the universe. And for no other purpose."
"But why are we now off the road?" John asked.
Yuri shrugged. "We all saw that road crew spin up a new cylinder."
John nodded. "Of course. It's still under construction."
"We're on a detour," Susan put in.
"Very good, Susan," Yuri said, smiling.
John's brow knitted and he put a long-fingered hand to one side of his face, massaging it. "So confusing," he muttered. "See here. You just said that the Skyway doesn't go anywhere. But we've just spent a month on Red Limit Freeway. I don't know where in God's name we're going, but we're surely going somewhere, and it bloody well seems to me that Red Limit Freeway was built for the express purpose of taking us there."
Yuri sat forward and propped his chin up on his fists, his eyebrows twitching perplexedly. "Yes," he said. "Yes, it does seem that way, doesn't it? You're absolutely right, John, and I have to confess that it undermines my theory." He sat up sharply and pounded a fist into his thigh. "But dammit, if the Roadbuilders wanted people to be following a prescribed path, why the devil didn't they make that path abundantly clear? Why the blind alleys, the cul-de-sacs, the obscurity, the whole tangled mess of it all?" As he spoke, the accumulated frustration and stress of the past two years and the boredom and uncertainty of the past four weeks rose from whatever place it is where such things cook and stew under pressure until they have to be released. "Dammit all, I've spent half my life trying to understand one basic thing, trying to find some sort of clue, struggling to shed a single ray of light on a single overriding question and it's been like butting and butting my head against the roadbed itself. Sometimes I think I've been a fool―but that's of little importance. It was my choice―I made it and I must live with it. But the question still remains, dammit. It won't go away." He crashed a fist into the armrest, his voice erupting to a shout. "If the goddamn fucking Roadbuilders had wanted us to follow their fucking road―' He began pounding the armrest in cadence. "―why the bloody fucking HELL didn't they give us a fucking MAP!"
The last thwack on the armrest nearly broke it.
After a pregnant pause, Sam began to laugh. And that set us all off.
Yuri looked around at us, his eyes wide. Then he collapsed inside, spent, the redness in his face quickly turning from anger to embarrassment. He fell back in his seat in total helplessness and started to laugh, too.
We spent at least two full minutes laughing ourselves silly.
We began sobering up when we realized that Yuri had dovetailed into crying. Zoya got up, stood behind him, and began massaging his shoulders, stroking his tousled hair.
Yuri wiped his eyes on his filthy, tattered sleeve. "Forgive me," he said, his voice choked with remorse. "My friends… you must… forgive me."
"Nothing to forgive, Yuri," I said. "You were entitled to that, and it was just about time you collected."
"Still, I must apologize for the outburst…" He managed a smile. "And the language."
"You won't find any virgin ears around here," Susan said, "so don't worry about that." She thought a moment. "Of course, I've never tried it that way."
This set us off again and this time Yuri's laugh was unadulterated mirth.
When we had sobered up again, Sean got up from the deck, straightened his black turtleneck, and thumped his stomach, which had become drastically reduced in the last few weeks.
"I'm for grub," he said. "What there is of it left, anyway. What do you say, me hearties?"
"None for me," Zoya said. "Maybe a drink of water."
"Zoyishka, you're wasting away," Yuri said.
"Good for the soul."
"Not so good for the body, Zoya," I said. "You should eat. Come on, we're not on starvation rations yet."
She shrugged, then looked at me and relented. "You're right, I should. It's just that my appetite seems to have disappeared. And when I do eat, my digestion is frightful. There's some pain."
"What about Winnie?" Roland broke in.
The non sequitur brought everyone up short. Carl asked, "What did you say, Roland?"
"What about Winnie's map―and George's? Isn't it clear by now that they were planted? Maybe there are other races, other borderline-sapient animals who have map knowledge. Thousands, millions of species seeded along the Skyway like that. It all fits." He ground fist into palm, his lips pursed. He seemed to be off somewhere on his own magic carpet of thought. "It all fits."
Yuri was willing to plod back to the previous conversational sequence. "Yes, that's a distinct possibility, and in fact that's been one of the operating assumptions of our investigation into the matter. But it's also manifestly clear that Winnie and George's so-called knowledge is anything but reliable."
"Yeah," I said, "which brings us back to square one. So quit grinding your teeth, Roland, and relax. It's a safe bet we're not going to get to the bottom of this for some time."
Roland seemed miffed. "I wasn't grinding my teeth."
"Just an expression." I reached back and slapped his knee "Take it easy. Okay?"
He unwound a bit and smiled a little sheepishly. "Sure Sorry."
"It's okay."
"I have an announcement," Sam put in.
"Let's have it," I told him.
"We've just gone superluminal."
"What's that?" Susan said.
"Fancy for 'faster than light'."
Yuri and Zoya exchanged glances. Then a slow, world-weary smile of capitulation spread over Yuri's face. "Well, we knew the Roadbugs had superscience. Now we know they have magic."
"Sam, are you sure?"
"Hell, no. I'm not equipped to analyze data like these, but I'm damned if I can explain this crazy stuff any other way. Do you see any stars out there?"
I looked. Blank space. "Wow. No, I don't."
"I watched them disappear, but they didn't just disappear, they dopplered right off the scale."
"What's he saying, Jake?" John asked.
"I have an inkling, maybe."
"I can't really explain it," Sam said. "I don't have the wherewithal to put it into easily understandable terms. Not really in my programming. I can give you figures, but you wouldn't want 'em."
"Sam," I said, "this radiation. I was wondering about that. Even at lightspeed, we'd be smacking into stray hydrogen atoms with terrific energy. It'd fry us. What kind of count are you reading?"
"I'm not getting any high-energy particles, but I'm tracking very high frequency photons, about one per second. Which is nothing, really, in terms of health hazard."
"You say you're tracking them at faster-than-light speeds?"
"No, no, no, of course not. Light that's faster than light? The situation isn't that crazy yet. What I am saying is that these little buggers used to be starlight."
"Oh."
"Here's my hunch. We have just crossed the lightspeed barrier. No hyperspace, no fifth dimension', none of that horse nonsense. We are simply going faster than light."
"Oh," I said again, not knowing what else to add.
Susan was befuddled. "Hey, isn't that supposed to be impossible?"
We all looked at her.
"Just trying to be helpful," she said lamely.
"Let's eat," I said.
* * *
Our space journey lasted three days. We spent the time pretty much as we had done up till then, eating, sleeping, attending to personal matters, playing cards, playing chess (Sam took us all on in a marathon session―he won hands down against all comers. "It's not me, it's just my game files," he said modestly), reading, gabbing, although that tapered off after a while. We had hashed over everything of moment and were running out of small-talk material. We'd decided not to trade life stories. Carl was still reticent on the subject of Everybody-Knew-What, but he said he was working on it.
Sam eventually admitted he had given up trying to make sense of the data he was getting. And pretty soon he wasn't getting anything.
"Nothing out there, I guess," he said. "I'm not equipped for radio astronomy, so there's no use even speculating."
Along about a Tuesday morning… Actually, it was a Tuesday, and it was the fourteenth of March―at least it was back on a little blue planet some billions of light-years away, billions of years in the future, or the past, who knows. Anyway, along about a Tuesday morning we spotted something up ahead. That is, Sam did through the light-amplifier. I looked into the scope. Nothing but a faint smudge of light. Couple hours later, though, it was brighter.
"A star?" I ventured. "That'd mean we're nonsuperluminal, wouldn't it?"
"I think so. Actually, judging from the blue-shift, I'd say we were strolling along at a little under point nine cee and decelerating."
"So that's our destination."
"Well, seeing that there's no other place around the place, I reckon that must be the place… I reckon."
"Hmph."
"Except that's no dang star," Sam said.
"What is it?"
"Beats the living hell out of me."
I sat back in the driver's seat. "From what Yuri's been telling us, we're billions of years back in the history of the universe, no telling how many billions. Obviously far enough back so that stars haven't even formed yet. Maybe this is a quasar."
"No, if you swing that thing to these settings, you'll see something that looks like what a quasar should look like."
I positioned the scope and looked. A fuzzy blob of light with a faint spike coming out of it came into focus. "Yeah, that's what they're supposed to look like―some of 'em, anyway. But it should be a lot brighter, shouldn't it? I mean, if we're back when quasars first formed, we should be a hell of a lot closer to them, and…" I sat back. "Hell, who am I kidding. What I know about astronomy you couldn't stuff a flea with."
"Maybe it isn't a quasar," Sam said. "I was just guessing. Why not ask Yuri?"
"We've been picking his brains for three days now. Zoya's and Oni's, too. They're sleeping." I thought a moment, then said, "Yuri told me that if we had the right kind of microwave scoop we could tune in the cosmic background radiation and calculate exactly how far back we are."
"If we had the right kind of microwave scoop," Sam snorted. "Look, this is fun, but another hour and we're gonna be there. So let's wait."
So we did.
When we first began to see some detail, the strange object looked like a small star cluster with a bright core that was a bit off-center. Then it got very strange. It wasn't a cluster but a perfect sphere of stars with a brilliant spot near the very edge. But here was a problem.
"Those can't be stars," Sam said. "We're too close to that thing. They're just points of light."
"Artificial objects?"
"Gotta be."
Soon, an interior feature revealed itself, a solid disk bisecting the sphere. We were viewing it almost edge-on. It had the albedo of a planetary body and reflected its light from the much smaller sunlike disk riding just below the outer surface of the sphere. Our magic spaceship changed course, and eventually the disk tilted up toward us. I got out the missile aiming sight, cranked it up to full gain and had a look.
The surface of the disk was a world.
There were blue areas and brown areas―seas and continents. Wisps of cotton floated just above the surface. Clouds. As we got closer, rivers, mountain ranges, and other details appeared. A patchwork of tans and browns and greens spread over the land masses and details of the coastal regions revealed themselves. There were deserts, plains, and areas of what seemed to be thick vegetation. All this geography, though, was on a smaller scale than one would expect. It looked like a planet in miniature.
"Five thousand kilometers in diameter," Sam said. "Exactly."
"Nice round number."
The star sphere was just that. It was like a glass bubble spattered with drops of luminous paint. Not everything in the skies above the planet-disk orbited in the same plane, though. The sun-thing, whatever it was, hung a little lower, and there were other points of light and a smaller, less luminous disk―a moon-thing?―which looked as if they were borne along on inner concentric spheres.
The entire construct―it had to a construct―looked like a medieval astronomer's orrery.
"A damn planetarium," Sam said.
"It's a working model of the Ptolemaic universe," Roland said. "Though I think even Ptolemy accepted a spherical Earth, so it's a mixture of ancient astronomies, probably alien ones at that."
Beyond this, no one was willing to speculate.
The disk of the surface tilted full face toward us and we began our descent. We could see now that the back side of the sunlike object, also a disk, was dark.
In a few minutes we reached the surface of the star globe and found nothing there. Individual stars were still only points of light, all floating in exactly the same plane.
"What, no crystalline ethereal spheres?" Sam complained.
"Well, you wouldn't see them anyway," Yuri pointed out, "if I remember my ancient astronomy correctly." He laughed. "Imagine crashing into one and leaving a hole."
"So all these screwy objects up here are just artificial satellites of this even goofier planet," I said.
We dropped quickly. The sun object, which had become a dark oval when we got above it, turned its bright side to us again and we were in brilliant daylight. You couldn't look directly at it, and it looked for all the world like a sun, a Sol-type one at that. The stars faded and a blue canopy of sky came up, dark and cold at first, lightening and warming as we continued to drop.
The surface was a patchwork of every kind of terrain. There were deep forests, wastelands, mountains, grasslands, stretches that looked like alien planets, stranger areas where it was hard to tell what was going on. It was a crazy quilt down there. And there were signs of intelligent life. I could see roads now,
though not many. Structures, too, some very big and very unusual ones, dotting the landscape at random. I didn't see any cities but there was an immense green-colored edifice below that seemed centrally placed. It could have been an arcology of some sort. The thought made my skin crawl.
The jumble and variety reminded me of something, and the notion was so incongruous, when juxtaposed with my expectations of what this place could possibly be, that I laughed aloud. I was reminded of what, in my day, used to be called disneyworlds. I forget what they're called now―in fact, I really don't know if there are any on the colonized planets. Amusement park is another and even older term.
Were we being taken on a school picnic?
In any event, we were about to land. I looked back at everybody. We were all armed, Lori included. Everyone had the same expression: a little fear mixed with expectation. We had discussed what to do at journey's end. We had no idea of what to expect, but we all knew it could be bad. That was one possibility. It was also possible that we could be greeted by brass bands and cheering crowds, and be hailed as intrepid explorers. We could hope. Of course, nobody had any delusions of defending ourselves against either the Roadbuilders, if they were down there, or the Bugs, if this was their home planet. But the slight glimmer of hope existed that we could be set free, and so could Moore and his gang. We simply did not know. In any event, and for any event, we were prepared.
I looked down and saw a familiar sight. The black band of the Skyway. So we never really did get off it. Just a detour, as Susan had said. But one thing we did not see on this planet was a portal. The Skyway was here all right, but this was it. This was Road's End.
Below, strange buildings lay along the highway. Maybe these were the ancient ruins Yuri and everyone had been looking for. But maybe not―from this height they didn't look ruined, just incredibly varied and uniformly strange and wonderful. Were they temples?―palaces?―residences? I hoped we would get to find out.
Our magic carpet was coming in for a landing.
"Okay, people, this is it," I said. "Whatever 'it' is."
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