Starrigger s-1

by John Dechancie

  "Sam!" I yelled. "Anything we can do?"

  "I was just thinking that this is probably the most ridiculous situation you've ever gotten yourself into."

  "What?"

  "I said, I was just thinking to myself―"

  "I heard, I heard! You're a godsend, did you know that?"

  "What?"

  We passed through a valve, and I totally lost my bearings. We could have been upside down for all I knew. Somebody's leg flopped over my shoulder and I chinned it away. Somebody screamed. Visibility was zero, the headbeams reflecting off greenish-white tissue and half-blinding me. I wanted to turn them off but was afraid to take my hands from the control bars, useless as they were. Powerful contractions began, forcing us ahead in a kind of hellish birth process. The pitching and swaying lessened as Fiona settled down to the task of pushing us on to our destiny within the world of her bowels. After a few minutes ― it seemed longer ― we squirted through another valve and suddenly, mercifully, it was over. We hit water and were totally submerged. The rig bottomed on something soft, cab-first, then the trailer. I heard the antijackknifing servos groan, straightening the trailer out. Then we started moving forward again, more gently this time, carried by an inexorable flow of water.

  My passengers sorted themselves out and came up for air. Everyone was okay. John came forward to the shotgun seat and strapped himself in. I tried to keep the rig trimmed out straight, but the current was carrying the trailer around into a jackknife that the servos couldn't handle. Countersteering did no good, so I said to hell with it and hit the antifishtail jets. Through the sideview I could dimly see the gas bubbling away into the water. We were inside another tube, this one bigger, with walls that looked more rigid.

  "Where the hell are we?" Sam said.

  "Don't know, but it's a good guess we're out of the digestive system," I said.

  "How'd we manage that?"

  "Fiona must have a way of sorting the stuff she does and doesn't want to digest. We don't rate as food, I guess."

  "Not worth merte, are we?"

  The current grew stronger. We floated from time to time, bounding along, washed forward like flotsam in a rain sewer. I settled back and kept the rig trimmed as best I could, not wanting to broach to and start tumbling. It wasn't easy, but I managed. We went along like that for a bit until the passage narrowed and the water pressure increased. I lost all control then, but the rig kept itself straight by rebounding off the sides of the tube. The tissue-material was darker here, and tougher-looking. The back end slammed against it, then me cab.

  Soon, a rushing, rumbling sound grew, along with a low throbbing pulse-sound, and the water churned and grew bubbly. The turbulence shook us, but compared to the gastric action, it was nothing. The rushing sound increased gradually to a dull roar.

  "Hull temperature's been increasing steadily," Sam informed me.

  "Yeah? Well, now I think I know how Fiona propels herself. She must have a gill system that circulates water through her and shoots it out the back end. The system must carry off waste heat too." I looked out and saw a dark opening ahead.

  "Sounds reasonable," Sam said. 'Trouble is, this rig is no submarine."

  After a final surge and a burst of thunderous sound we left Fiona for calmer waters. The water outside was a blizzard of bubbles, gradually dissipating as we sank nose-first into the depths. I told Sam to keep up readings on the outside pressure, but it proved unnecessary. In the headbeams I could see a muddy sea bottom coming up fast. I groped around frantically for something to do to keep the nose up, but couldn't find anything. Fortunately the floor sloped downward and away, and the front rollers hit neatly. The cab slid forward and let the trailer fall in gently behind. We came to a stop.

  "How far down are we, Sam?"

  "About eighty meters."

  "Well, that's not too bad."

  "Sure, we'll just swim."

  "Let's see if we can't do a little better than that."

  I nursed the engine until the drive rollers were spinning slowly, then twisted the traction-control handles on the bars to maximum grab, and the rollers caught. We moved forward through a lake of sludge. The slope bottomed out into a trough and then the sea floor began to rise again, only to dip once more, continuing into a series of rolling hills.

  "How's Lori?" I called back. A moment later Darla came forward.

  "She's still out. Definitely a concussion, but her pupils are responding to light. But you can never―" Lori's scream interrupted her, and she rushed back.

  "Sam, how did Winnie wind up with you?" I asked.

  "I was going to ask the same question. There were a whole bunch of sailors snooping around me, and she must've sneaked through them somehow. I kept hearing a faint knock and I couldn't figure out what it was, and I couldn't locate anything on any of the monitors. So I took a chance and cracked a hatch open. And Winnie crawled through."

  "Amazing." I said. Addressing the Teelies I said, "By the way, people, you all did fine ― many thanks. But how the hell did you know where to find me?"

  "We didn't," John said. "But Darla told us about Wilkes and your predicament. She didn't tell us much, something about a dispute between your truckdriver guild and the other one. Anyway, when Darla vanished on us, we overtipped a few stewards and some of the other help to get some information. We didn't get much, but we did find out Wilkes' cabin number. We assumed the worst."

  "Again, many thanks."

  "Nothing, really. I only had a mild heart attack."

  "Jake, unless I'm badly mistaken," Sam said, "we're going up."

  The rolling hills continued for a while, then the sea bottom began to rise, turning from sludge to mud, then to packed sand. We were in a tidal area; no vegetation to speak of.

  Lori stopped screaming and began crying. She had remembered the Rikkis. Darla and Susan comforted her.

  It was another half hour before we made the beach. I drove through the breakers and up onto dry sand, pulled behind a dune, and parked. I had doused the lights as soon as we had broken water. Then I got out.

  About ten kilometers offshore, the Laputa was burning, a smeared orange glow on the dark horizon. I sat in the sand and watched it bum.

  Presently, a face took shape in my mind, the one that was a blank in my memory of someone bending over me in my cell at the Militia station. It was my face.

  Me.

  24

  It was a brave dawn, the disk-edge of a molten sun just showing above the vanishing point of the Skyway. The land was flat, magnificently flat, the kind of terrain the Roadbuilders had favored. A film of low rust-colored grass covered everything from sky to sky, bisected by the black line of the road. A brave dawn, cloudless and clear.

  We were taking a break before going on. We had spent all night finding the road, with Winnie's help, and now she was drawing her figures on some lading sheets with a pen that Roland taught her how to hold. He and the Teelies watched her draw, sitting with her in the grass by the road. The kid was inside the rig watching over Lori, who was less hysterical now. I told him to make sure she didn't fall asleep. It looked as if she would be all right.

  It was quiet, no wind at all, and the land was empty all around. Before dawn, we had seen some lights off the road; farmhouses most likely, but they were few. This was virgin land.

  I drew Darla aside.

  "Make a short story long and tell me, Darla. Who are you? And what are you?"

  "My name is Daria Vance," she said, then took a deep breath. "Surviving daughter of the late Dr. Van Wyck Vance."

  "And the legal lifecompanion of Grigory Petrovsky. No?"

  "Grigory Vasilyevich Petrovsky. Yes. Or his widow."

  "Is that grief? Or hope, maybe?"

  "Neither," she answered quietly.

  "All right, so much for what I know. What I don't know is who has the Roadmap."

  "You mean the real one, don't you?"

  "I mean the one I brought back. It wasn't Winnie."

  "No, it wasn't. That'
s why I was willing to give her to Wilkes in exchange for your life."

  "But aren't Winnie's maps accurate?"

  "I don't know that yet. They seem to be. Jake, you don't understand. Winnie was a total surprise to me, and when I made my contact with the dissident network on Goliath, nobody knew about her."

  "The contact. That wasn't Petrovsky?"

  A grunt of ironic laughter. "No."

  "Why did you shoot at the flitter?"

  "For the reasons I told you about." She turned to look at the sunrise. "And of course, I didn't want to be Grigory's prisoner."

  "His prisoner?"

  She looked at me intently, her small nostrils flaring. "At no time was I working for Grigory during this."

  I settled myself in the grass. "Darla, why don't you start from the beginning? Tell me the story of your life."

  She told me. About three years ago she was a graduate student at the University of Tsiolkovskygrad, and got involved with the dissident movement, peripherally at first, then more deeply. She found that the movement was vastly more organized than she had thought, but, like most revolutionary organizations, was confined to a small cadre of activists, in this case the usual assortment of bohemian hangers-on one finds around universities ― artistes-mangues, dropouts, perpetual students, oddballs, and other perennial types ― along with some genuinely idealistic younger students and seriously committed faculty. From this intellectual hub, the movement radiated out to the colonies to encompass a fair number of people from all walks of life. Politically, the movement was a hodgepodge of ideologies, from the beady-eyed right to the bearded, bomb-throwing left, with most everything in between, including a smidge of religious doctrine. (Wilkes had been halfway justified in suspecting the Teelies, though Darla was fairly sure that they had no formal affiliation with the movement.) Then, at a dinner party her father gave, Darla met Petrovsky, who took an immediate interest in her. The interest was not mutual. However, the dissidents thought it a dandy idea to have a pair of ears in the same bed with a high-ranking Militiaman, especially an intelligence officer. Darla was asked if she were willing to make the supreme sacrifice. She was. It wasn't very long after the signing ceremony that Darla was approached by her lifecompanion's superiors and asked to become an informer ― asked, in fact, to inform on friends who were suspected of being subversive. For some reason, possibly because of who and what her father was, it never occurred to them that Darla might be a dissident herself. Why should she turn against her father and her class? (That the bureaucracy was a social class couldn't be doubted, though to speak of it as such a thing was ideological heresy.) And hadn't she married within the Authority?

  "In other words, you became something of a double agent."

  "Right," she affirmed. "It was exactly what the movement was hoping for. We were then in a position to feed disinformation to the Authority."

  "All right," I said. "Now, from what I've gathered, this Roadmap is real enough, and so was my backtime trip. Okay. When did I come back? And who did I give the map to?"

  "About eight months ago, you barged into Assemblywoman Marcia Miller's office and dropped it on her desk. I think your exact words were, 'Happy birthday, honey.'"

  "That's all I said?"

  "No, otherwise she would have taken you for a crank, and the thing would still be on her desk, probably being used as a paperweight. You mentioned my name and the fact that I was a double agent, and that you knew, quote, 'all there was to know about the dissident movement,' unquote ― and told her what the object was."

  "Wait a minute. Was her office de-bugged?"

  "At the time, yes, or so I was told. And since the Authority didn't immediately act to seize her and the map, it probably was."

  "Okay. I have more questions about the map, but let me clear up some other things first. How did you get assigned to me? And who assigned you?"

  "The network did. Around the same time when you came on the scene, my situation vis-a-vis the Authority became untenable. We learned then that the Authority's infiltration of the movement was very deep, a fact even I hadn't been able to uncover, but you have to remember that I was primarily a conduit for bogus information from the movement to the Authority. "And when my disinformation started sticking out like a sore thumb, I was compromised. I had to go underground." She smiled wanly and shook her head. "A misnomer. There is no underground. I took to the Skyway, as everyone does who wants to stay loose." She ran her fingers gently through the grass. "That was when Grigory got kicked upstairs to his dead-end job."

  "And when your father became an unperson?"

  "No. His trouble goes farther back."

  I mulled it all over for a while, then said, "Here's a very big question. When you first got in my rig, why did you act as if we'd met before?"

  "I wasn't acting. The first time was about two months after you gave the map to Miller. We had been tailing you. For some reason, it was very easy, and since I've gotten to know you better, I can't help but think that you wanted to be tailed."

  "Where did I go?"

  "From planet to planet, no particular pattern to it."

  "Was I alone?"

  "Yes. Just you and Sam."

  "And you tried to pump me about maps and things, but got nowhere."

  "Exactly. I gave up and ducked out on you, and we dropped most of the surveillance. By that time our technical people had had a chance to examine the object you handed over. It was apparent to them that the thing was a product of an unknown technology."

  "But they weren't sure it was a map?"

  She nodded. "Oh, yes, they were sure. But the nature of the data was so complex, it was practically indecipherable. I was told to find you and try again to get more information. By that time, it seemed everyone in creation knew about you, about the map, everything. We then got a report that you were seen in Hydran Maze. You were tailed from there to Bamard's, where you picked up a load, the one you're carrying now. We found out you were going to deliver it to Uraniborg. On the way there you picked me up for the second time. The first time."

  The Paradox was real.

  "How did Wilkes get into all this?"

  She lowered her eyes. "Through me. I told my father about the map." She looked up at me defensively. "The Authority was closing in. There have been scores of arrests recently. Nothing about it in me news feeds, only the vaguest hints. The map-object was a hot potato being passed from hand to hand, sometimes minutes before the knock on the door. It looked as if the map would wind up in the Authority's hands after all. That was when I told him. He was going to take me with him ― here." A single, gelid tear welled in the comer of her left eye. "I tried to save him…. I tried to save the movement… both… I―" She bent over and wet the grass with bitter tears.

  I let her cry as long as she needed to, then took her shoulders and lifted her from the grass, gently pried her hands from her face. "I need to know one thing more, Darla. What is it? The object, I mean. And who has it now?"

  A mantle of calm settled over her. She stopped quivering and her breathing slowed. She did her straightening-up ritual, then took a deep breath. She reached for her pack, withdrew an ordinary-looking makeup box and opened the lid. It contained face coloring, the kind some women use for those partial Kabuki masks that are in vogue now, the kind of makeup job a lifecompanion of a high Authority 'crat might wear to the opera. She dug in two fingers and plucked out a black object. She wiped it off with a spare shirt from her pack, then took my hand. She pressed it into my palm. It was a jet-black cube about fifty millimeters on a side.

  "You do, Jake. You have it now."

  Stunned, I sat and gaped at it. The color was the blackest black I had ever seen. It wouldn't have made a good paper-weight; the thing was like air in my hand.

  "Touch two leads to it at any point," Darla said, "and you get a flood of binary numbers in a patterned sequence. No one's been able to figure it out, but the best guess is that it's a multidimensional coordinate system. No doubt touching leads to it is
n't the proper way of getting the information out."

  I rose to my feet shaking my head, confounded beyond words.

  "I know," she said. "It's a closed loop. The Paradox. A future self gives you ― the past self ― something that he got ^ from a future self when he was the past…. It's a classic contradiction. Where did the thing come from in the first place?" She got up, drew near me, and put a hand on my chest. "No one planned it this way. We gave up trying to make any sense out of the cube. And just a few days ago, when the Authority finally acted on what they got from running a Delphi on Miller, there was no one around to take the relay but me. I couldn't leave the cube behind. When you picked me up the second time, I wasn't sure about the Paradox. It was just rumor then. I thought you were… the 'you' who handed the cube over. You weren't."

  I walked away from Darla, transfixed, holding the cube as if it were about to explode in my hand. I don't know how long I stared at it. Presently, I was aware of being near Winnie and the others.

  Roland came over to me, an excited look on his face.,

  "Jake, it's fantastic!" he bubbled. "Winnie's map, I mean. There's a beltway, Jake. A beltway that circles the galaxy, spiraling in to the core. And as near as I can tell, about ten thousand light-years from here on the outer arm, there's a junction with a route that connects up the Local Group." He seized my shoulder. "The Local Group! Jake, can you believe it? The damn road goes all the way to Andromeda!" He squinted at the dark cube in my hand. "What the hell's that?"

  I didn't answer, and walked away.

  The sun was halfway up now, painting the sky with rosy promise, and the black road ran straight into it.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 1e90190e-71a3-4467-baa7-cad2365b9719

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 16.7.2012

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