Tall and muscular, with dark, shoulder-length hair, Charley looked like the Native American he actually wasn’t. Joyriders assumed travelling names to make it hard for the government to prosecute us, so the one he’d picked wasn’t his own. A ravenous reader, he’d found his nom de plume, of all places, in a nineteenth-century Western pulp novel, Buffalo Bill’s Feather-Weight, or Apache Charley, the Indian Athlete. He thought this was pretty funny for some reason. We knew very little of his past other than that he’d been on Hex for longer than the rest of us, was one of the original joyriders, and loathed the Janus Company.
On the other hand, Su Mi Tu really was of Asian descent and Su was her first name. She’d once been a lawyer until she got tired of everyone automatically assuming that she was a bloodsucking leech, so she’d pulled the plug on her career, sold everything she had, and migrated to Hex, where she’d met Charley and started a new life as a joyrider.
“No one has ever seen a pig fly, either,” Freddie said. “That doesn’t mean we should put our lives at risk to see one.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Marie sat on the ground beside his airchair, replacing a string on her guitar. “If you could actually promise me that pig had wings...”
“That’s just it,” Bob chimed in. “It’s like, y’know... okay, someone has told us that a pig can fly. But is it flying because it has wings, or because someone has taken a ham and thrown it across the room?”
“Now that’s waste of a good ham,” Freddie replied, and everyone got a laugh out of that. Fracked Up Freddie didn’t always get around in an airchair. Before he’d come to Hex, he’d been a navigator aboard a freighter that had regularly travelled to other worlds of the Talus, the galactic coalition to which Coyote (but not Earth) belonged. But some horrible shipboard accident – we never learned the details; he didn’t want to talk about it – nearly killed him and left his body mutilated, so he’d dropped out of the merchant marine and migrated to Hex. He was our tribe’s navigator, responsible for keeping track of the complex danui coordinates that allowed us to hitch rides aboard the trams.
“Yeah, but I’d give a lot to see a pig with wings,” Bob said. “If it didn’t... well, I’d still eat the ham.” A long time ago, as a younger man, he’d fought in the revolution that had overthrown Earth’s control of the original colonies on Coyote. He eventually became tired of being a soldier, though, so once Hex was discovered he’d resigned from the colonial militia and come out here for a fresh start.
“You’d eat anything,” Marie said, giving Bob reason to turn red and look away. Marie was the youngest, the prettiest, and the most free-spirited of our tribe. Her family had relocated from Coyote to Hex when she was a teenager and had been among the original founders of Nueva Italia. She wasn’t content to live on a hemp farm with Mom and Dad, though, but instead ran off to become a joyrider. She was sleeping with Bob, which was a little strange considering that he was old enough to be her father. On the other hand, the brief affair she and I had didn’t pan out, so who was I to judge? Eventually she might return to the farm, marry some guy, and have a barnful of kids, but not quite yet.
“Look, we know where there’s a pentagon,” Charley said, trying to get the conversation back on topic, “and it’s not too far from where we are now.” He looked over at Freddie. “You checked the map... show ’em what you found.”
With a sigh, Freddie set aside his empty plate so that he could unfold his comp. He ran his fingers across the screen and a small wire-frame holo of Hex was projected before him. Freddie zoomed in until one quadrant in the northern hemisphere took its place; he typed in a command and two tiny lights appeared: one at the equator, the other far above it to the northeast.
“Here’s where we are” – he pointed to the light in the northeast – “and here’s the pentagon.” He expanded the image to show that it did indeed have five sides instead of the usual six. “If the tsajan gave us the correct coordinates and the danui map is accurate, then, yeah, it’s not that far away. Only about seventy to eighty hexes, depending which route you take.”
“Seventy to eighty hexes?” Bob stared at him. “And you call that close? That’s...”
His lips silently moved as he performed a mental calculation. Freddie saved him the effort. “Somewhere between forty-two and forty-eight thousand miles,” he said quietly, not smiling. “Could be a little less, depending on which course the tram takes to get us there, but probably not much. It would be the longest ride any tribe has ever taken.”
“Except for random riders,” Su added. “And if they don’t call for help, no one hears from them again.”
An uncomfortable silence. Every so often, joyrider-wannabes who had no idea what they were doing would board a tram and enter a random combination of nineteen danui figures. Unless no hexagon had these figures as its coordinates, the tram would take them somewhere no one had ever gone before... and that could be anywhere on Hex. A habitat with an environment instantly lethal to any human who tried to enter it, or whose inhabitants were as hostile as the taaraq, or simply so far away that you might wind up on the opposite side of Hex, 186 million miles from where you started. You might even starve to death before you got to where you were going, if you plotted a route that neglected to provide stops along the way.
Those clueless enough to do this were called random riders. Unless they carried a long-range radio and used it to call for rescue – something no self-respecting joyrider would ever do, since it meant a stiff fine and possibly jail time – they were seldom seen again.
“I don’t understand,” Marie said. “What’s so interesting about pentagons?”
“Don’t they teach you anything in school?” I asked, and then winked. “Oh, that’s right... you dropped out, didn’t you?”
She responded with a one-finger gesture that was not an invitation to take her literally. Freddie answered the question. “When the Montero expedition found Hex, Captain Carson’s people thought it was entirely comprised of hexagons. It wasn’t until later that engineers studying this place corrected this assumption. In order for a sphere to be built from six-sided hexagons, five-sided pentagons... if only a few... had to be inserted so that they would all fit together. So mathematicians did the calculations, and they found that it would take just seven pentagons to make it work.”
“Just seven?”
“Uh-huh,” Charley said. “One at the north pole, one at the south pole, and five more along the equator, equidistantly spaced at every seventy-two degrees of arc... making them the rarest habitats on Hex.”
“Until now,” Freddie continued, “we’ve never known exactly where any of the equatorial pentagons are located. Remember, the coordinate system doesn’t follow a deliberately organized pattern, which helps assure the privacy of colonies that don’t want uninvited visitors. So even though we’ve always known that there’s five pentagons at the equator, we’ve never learned their precise locations or seen them for ourselves –”
“Except from orbit,” I said, “but even then they look pretty much the same as any of the hexes surrounding them. And so far as anyone can tell, the ones at the north and south poles are just structural braces without any habitats.”
“But the equatorial pentagons are inhabited,” Charley insisted. “Survey flyovers have shown that. They’ve got nodes, support cables, sailcells, everything you’d expect to find in a normal hexagon –”
“Yeah... all that and 2g gravity, too.” Freddie wasn’t impressed. “Which means that, even if we could reach it, our weight would double. How much do weigh in 1g, Charley? About two hundred pounds? How’d you like to weigh four hundred?”
“We’d get heavier and heavier the closer we got,” Bob said, “and our bodies would have to work harder.” He frowned. “I don’t know about you young’uns, but I don’t think this ol’ heart of mine could handle that kind of stress.”
“And you’re not stuck in this thing.” Freddie’s gnarled hands swatted the armrests of his chair.
; “Okay, all right... I understand.” Charley held up his hands. “It’s just that... y’know, the reason why we do this is because we want to see Hex, and not just the places the company lets people go. If we could reach a pentagon, we might find...”
His voice trailed off. “What?” Su asked, looking up at her lover. “What do you think we’ll find?”
Charley didn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said at last, “but I bet it’ll be amazing.”
IT SHOULD HAVE ended there. But it didn’t.
One of the things that often surprises people who visit Hex is how ordinary – how boring, really – life there is. Almost as soon the first human colony, Nueva Italia, was established in Terrania, there was a stampede of immigrants who wanted to establish a new colony beyond the confines of the Coyote Federation... as though Coyote, which by then had a global population of just over a million, was in danger of becoming overcrowded. But folks are always attracted to that which is new, and Hex, with its endless summer and tessellated sky, was stranger than anything ever imagined.
As Su Mi Tu liked to say, though, there’s no place humans can go where laws and lawyers won’t soon follow. Not that it was entirely our fault. When the danui built Hex and invited the rest of the Talus to colonize it, they imposed a few stipulations of their own, and one of them was that no colony could interfere with the affairs of another. Naturally, the Montero expedition managed to do just that when some of its members accidentally took a tram to the hexagon inhabited by primitive taaraq, where they very nearly lost their lives and had to be rescued.
After that, the hjadd, humankind’s closest allies in the Talus, informed Captain Carson and her people of the danui rules, which they’d have to abide by if humans wanted to establish a presence on Hex. So when Andromeda Carson became Terrania’s first colonial governor, one of the first things she did was use that particular rule as the main excuse for striking an exclusive trade agreement with the Janus Company.
Ostensibly, the purpose behind the deal was to prevent further mishaps by allowing only one company to make contact and negotiate trade agreements with other races inhabiting Hex. In actual practice, it was nepotism of the worst kind. Carson got Janus to put her son Sean – who, ironically, had led the ill-fated taraaq party — on the company’s board of directors, and in exchange she wrote laws that authorized only licensed traders and explorers to go anywhere on Hex besides Terrania. So most people who came to Hex thinking that they were going to see a world 186 million miles in diameter soon discovered that they were effectively confined to a collection of small towns in a habitat only a few thousand miles wide.
But Terrania contained ten stations on the tram network connecting it to all the other hexes (not including the two leading to the sixth biopod, which was closed to everyone except the danui) and the local constables couldn’t watch all of them all of the time. And the trams were very easy to use once you knew how. Inevitably, people began sneaking aboard trams and plugging in coordinates they’d learned through the grapevine.
This was how the joyriders came to be. The company considered us... well, go back and read the list... and perhaps we were what they said we were. But when it came right down to it, we were just folks who were naturally curious and had a low tolerance for boredom. And that may be the main reason why the Holy Fools were doomed the moment Apache Charley learned the pentagon coordinates.
OUR LITTLE BAND might have continued jaunting from one hex to another in a narrow range surrounding Terrania, never venturing very far from our comfort zone, but Charley wouldn’t let it go. Although he was our leader, we couldn’t go anywhere unless it was by consensus. Su and Marie were willing to make the long and possibly dangerous journey, while Freddie and Bob were opposed, and both sides had good reasons. Su and Marie were young, healthy, and intrigued by the idea of seeing something no human had ever seen before, but neither Freddie or Bob believed that they could survive the twice-Earth-normal gravity at Hex’s equator.
I was on the fence about the whole thing. I was young and healthy enough to make the trip, and just as curious as the women were to see what was there. On the other hand, I have a strong tendency toward self-preservation. Call me a coward, but I’ve always looked before I leaped, and most of the time after I’ve looked, I’ve chosen not to leap. And leaping aboard the next tram and punching in the coordinates for the nearest danui pentagon didn’t sound like a way of making sure that I’d live to be old enough to tell about it.
Charley couldn’t get his consensus, but that didn’t stop him. Long after the Fools left the tsajan hex, he continued to talk about visiting the pentagon, trying to sell Freddie, Bob, and me on the idea. And as time went on, I came to realize that he was going to make the trip whether the rest of us came with him or not.
We journeyed south through the middle latitudes of Hex’s northern hemisphere, riding the trams to habitats inhabited by races humans had met before. The hjadd hex, naturally, was a regular port of call; they resembled tortoises who stood upright and had no shells, and generally liked humans so long as we displayed good manners. We had to wear respirators while we stayed overnight in one of their floating villages, but our hosts enjoyed our performances and restocked us with food and drink to take with us, which was how we got by when we were travelling.
And then we moved on.
Most of the Talus races were concentrated in the same quadrant of Hex’s northern hemisphere. The danui didn’t explain why they’d put everyone from the same part of the galaxy in the same general neighborhood, but it was assumed that it was another effort on their part to keep the peace. In any case, it made things easier; the arrangement meant that our travel time between hexes was generally measured in days or weeks rather than months or years, and that we didn’t necessarily have to return to Terrania between visits.
So once we were through with the hjadd, we decided to visit the sorenta. We found ourselves welcome in their habitat, so we didn’t leave again for a couple of weeks. After that, it was long ride southeast to the nord hex. They were more reluctant to accept visitors, and perhaps with good reason; Nordash had been wiped out only a few years earlier when the rogue black hole Kasimasta passed through the HD 70642 system, and so the surviving nord had become a race of galactic refugees. It was sad to see their hovels and camps, and the nord really didn’t want us there, so we stayed only a day and then boarded the tram again... this time to arsashi hex, not very far from home but still a place where we were unlikely to run into the Janus Company, since this was where Sean Carson’s exploration team crash-landed during the Montero expedition and the arsashi had never completely forgiven him for that.
All the while, Apache Charley continued to make his pitch for travelling to the danui pentagon. The more he talked about it, though, the less rational his reasons for going there became. Charley began to theorize that the equatorial pentagons, located as they were at equidistant points, might be less about geometric necessity and more about metaphysics. He suggested that the pentagons might, indeed, be focal points for some mystic energy that the danui had learned to harness, a force that only an advanced K2 race such as themselves would understand. This was why it was important for us to see what was there. The future of humankind might depend on us solving this mystery.
The more he talked, the less the rest of us were persuaded. Freddie and Bob remained opposed, and after awhile Marie began to lose enthusiasm as well. Su remained loyal to Charley for a while, but it wasn’t very long before her interest began to wane. I think she also resented Charley’s belief that she would always side with him.
As for me... like I said, I’m not a courageous man, and making a long and hazardous trip to a place that might kill me wasn’t the sort of circumstance in which I wanted to find myself.
Charley didn’t care.
He decided to make the trip anyway, regardless of how the rest of the tribe voted. And so he did.
IN THE WEEKS that followed, Apache Charley devoted his free time t
oward mounting a solo expedition to the danui pentagon. With the relentless determination of a mountaineer preparing to climb an unconquered peak, he trained and planned, devoting long hours to a purpose that the rest of us had decided was obsessive and perhaps just a little mad.
Joyriders necessarily spend quite a long time aboard trams, riding from one habitat to another. Although the lozenge-shaped vehicles achieve transit-tube speeds of up to three hundred miles per hour, it often takes several days for them to reach their destinations. Charley began using this time to prepare both body and mind for his trip.
Exercise. Push-ups, sit-ups, jogging in place, isometrics, yoga, strengthening and toning his muscles so that they could hold up against the 2g of Hex’s equatorial region. Charley had always been a strong guy, but soon his body became lean and rock-hard. Apache Charley, the Indian Athlete indeed.
When he wasn’t working out, he was studying the maps and notes he’d downloaded from Freddie’s comp. At first, Freddie was reluctant to share this information, but when he realized that Charley wasn’t going to insist that anyone come with him he let Charley take what he’d learned from other tribal navigators, and after a while even began helping him figure out the best route to the equator.
To this day, I don’t think Charley could have reached the coordinates the tsajan had given him without Freddie’s assistance. Unfortunately, Freddie thinks so, too.
And during our visits to alien habitats, Charley acquired the supplies and materials he’d need. Joyriders usually prefer barter to money, but all of us carry specie cards that Hex inhabitants use as currency. That’s another reason why tribe members adopt travelling names; the Janus Company can’t shut down our bank accounts if they don’t know our true identities. So Charley began buying and trading for those things he required. An arsashi robe, warm even in temperatures well below freezing. A set of sorenta hand tools, wonderfully compact and adaptable for any situation. A taaraq hunting knife, its chitin blade lightweight, razor-sharp, and supposedly unbreakable.
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