Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

  “The more the merrier, I say,” Roland muttered. “What exactly is your problem, Jake?”

  “Problem? I don’t have a punking problem.”

  I stomped off the porch and went around to the back where Sam was parked. Sometimes these people got to me. One thing I don’t like is being cast as the villain of the piece. What the hell did they think this was going to be, a picnic?

  I climbed into the cab. “What’s up?” Sam said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I grumbled. “Leave the whole goddamn bunch of them.”

  “Now, now. You know you can’t.”

  “Honest to God, sometimes…”

  “How many times have I told you not to pick up starhikers?”

  “Dammit, Sam, don’t you start on me, too!”

  “Easy, son.”

  I sat in the driver’s seat, fuming, until Susan came over, climbed up, and sat in my lap.

  “Jake, I’m sorry.” She kissed me tenderly and smiled. “I didn’t know you were sensitive. You’re always so strong—”

  “Me? You’re kidding.”

  She didn’t argue. Presently, the temperature in the cab rose. “In case you’re wondering,” Sam said, “I have my eye turned off.”

  Susan giggled, then reinserted her tongue into my mouth.

  “Hi! Oh, excuse me.” We turned to see Darla walking away.

  Susan looked at me, some complex feminine emotion taking form inside her head. “Do you—?” she began, then looked away and chewed her lip.

  “Do I what, Suzie?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a lost little voice. Suddenly, she threw her arms around my neck. “Let’s sleep in the aft-cabin tonight.”

  “We have lots of work to do, Suzie.”

  “Don’t you think I’m going to help? After.”

  “Sure.”

  Then she hugged me, kissed me on the ear, and said, “I love you, Jake.”

  And I thought, uh-oh.

  We laid in provisions for a long journey. Sean and Liam emptied their larder and packed the trailer with lots of good stuff: homemade preserves, smoked meats, pickles, sausage, old-fashioned canned foods, barrels of potatoes, flour, jars of home-grown herbs and spices, a few cases of hotpak dinners—“We keep those for when we’ve drunk too much to be able to stand at the stove,” Liam said, “but not enough to’ve lost our appetites”—and cases and cases of beer. They brewed their own, and it was pretty good, if you like your beer dark and syrupy with a 20 percent alcohol content. They threw in all the tools and equipment they owned, some clothes, and about two long tons of camping and survival gear. Even some firewood.

  Then we all went out with Winnie and gathered food for her. She taught us to recognize several varieties of fruit and vegetable and root. With everyone helping, we laid in what looked like a year’s supply. Through Darla, she told us it wasn’t necessary to bring this much; she could find more food on the way. I said it couldn’t hurt, secretly doubting that we’d be lucky enough to chance upon another planet that could provide suitable food for any of us.

  Before we turned in, we planned our itinerary, trying to coordinate Winnie’s maps and her Itinerary Poem with what Sean and Liam could supply in the way of knowledge about the rest of the Outworlds. Darla had been busy translating for the last two days.

  “It just goes on and on,” she said. “I must have fifty stanzas by now.”

  “Winnie obviously knows where she’s going,” John observed.

  “As near as we can tell,” Roland said, “we hit five more Outworld planets before we exit this maze.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” I said. “In other words, we’ll be shooting a potluck portal at that point.”

  “Right.”

  “Sean, does this jibe with what you know?”

  Sean nodded. “Seems to, though Winnie’s descriptions of the planets are rather sketchy.”

  “The inevitable difficulties,” Darla said, “inherent in secondhand translations. The poem is in Winnie’s language, which is very different structurally from most human languages. I know only a few word-clusters—there really are no ‘words’ per se—so Winnie helps by giving me a running translation in English, which she doesn’t know as well as Spanish; which she doesn’t know well at all. Then I have to make some sense out of it.” She took a sip of dark beer and shook her head ruefully. “I’m probably making plenty of mistakes. It’s mostly guesswork.”

  “Under the circumstances,” John said, “you’re doing a fine job, Darla.”

  “Thank you.”

  I reached over and patted Winnie’s head. “Smart girl,” I said.

  Winnie took my hand, jumped up, walked across the table, and plopped down in my lap. She threw her arms around me and hugged, grimace-grinning with her eyes shut tight.

  “Affectionate little darling, isn’t she?” Sean said.

  “Yes, she is,” I said. I nuzzled her long floppy ear. “Have you ever noticed that she smells good all the time? Like she’s wearing perfume.”

  “Which is more than you can say for most sentient beings,” Sean said.

  “Yeah. Anyway, getting back to this…”

  “Look here, Jake,” Roland said. “This is the Galactic Beltway running through the Orion arm of the galaxy. You see where it cuts across here to the Perseus arm? That’s where we have to pick it up.”

  “How do we know when we reach that point?”

  “Well, we won’t know.” Roland put down his pencil and scratched his head, then smoothed his shock of straight black hair. “That’s what’s hard about all this. There really is no way of closely correlating the maps and the Itinerary Poem. The Poem is just a long set of directions. Go ten kilometers, turn left, you can’t miss it—that sort of thing. By following the itinerary, we’ll have a hard time knowing exactly where we are on the galactic map, unless we can make astronomical observations.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s a load of astronomical equipment in the truck, if somebody knows or can figure out how to use the stuff.”

  “Unfortunately,” Roland said, “my knowledge of astronomy is largely theoretical.” He tapped the pencil against the waxedwood tabletop. “And spotty at best.”

  “Did you find anything in that crate of book-pipettes?”

  “Not a whole lot. They’re mostly monographs and journals. Rarified stuff, pages and pages of equations. But I did find one useful bit of information. The Local Group is associated with a metacluster, and the Milky Way is on the outskirts of it. The nucleus is a galactic cluster in the constellation Virgo.”

  “So,” I said, scratching the fur over the bony knot between Winnie’s ears, which she loved to have done, “that may mean that the big road coming into Andromeda is Red Limit Freeway.”

  “I don’t think so, Jake. If so, it means that the Local Group is isolated from the rest of the metacluster, with no access to the Intercluster Thruway. No, this has to be the Thruway going into Andromeda.”

  “Why don’t we ask Winnie and make sure?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Instead of everybody trying to second-guess her, why don’t we come right out and ask?”

  Winnie looked at me expectantly.

  “Winnie,” I said, “can you draw more for us on this map?” I took the drawing of the Local Group over and put it in front of us. “This one here. Can you show us something that’s missing?”

  She looked the map over for a moment, then reached out toward Roland. Roland handed her the pencil. Grasping it awkwardly, she scored a line coming in from the right, ending at the Greater Magellanic Cloud. She looked at it, chewing the end of the pencil thoughtfully. Then she continued the line through the cloud and beyond, ending it at the exact point where the “Transgalactic Extension” left the rim of the Milky Way.

  “There’s the Thruway,” I said. “The Transgalactic Extension is part of it.”

  “Why did she leave it out?” Roland wondered.

  “Not important,” I said. “And I think I’
m beginning to understand why it wasn’t important. As John said the other night, this is a tourist itinerary. We’re at the edge of the metacluster. We want to leave it, not go into it, so we won’t need to bother with the Thruway.” I reached out with one arm and gathered in all the papers. “All of this, this whole thing, is definitely not a road atlas of the universe. It’s much too incomplete. These maps provide the traveler with a specific route to get to a specific place.”

  “And where is that?” John asked.

  “Winnie?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

  “Home.”

  “Yes, she keeps saying that.” Roland frowned and crossed his arms. “What could she possibly mean?”

  We left at dawn.

  But not before I had the shock of seeing what Sean and Liam had been referring to as their “Skyway-worthy vehicle.” Liam towed it out of a shed with the tractor.

  It was a tiny roadster, beaten, dented, splotched with emulsicoat patching, and looking for all the world like an overgrown child’s toy.

  “Where’s the key to wind it up?” I said.

  “Very funny,” Sean sneered. “But not very original.”

  “And what color is that?”

  “Magenta.”

  I rolled my eyes heavenward.

  It took a half-hour to start the thing. Then it ran at 25 percent of its rated power. Liam fiddled with the engine for another twenty minutes and coaxed it up to seventy-five.

  “Good enough,” Sean said. “We can stop somewhere and have it looked at.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Finally, we got going. It felt good to get back on the Skyway again. Give me the road any day, I thought. That black band rolling under me was freedom. I wanted no fetters, no encumbrances, no obligations. But of course I had them. My present situation was a trap, and the more I struggled, the more ensnared I became. I was acquiring people like an old wool sweater picks up lint. What did they want of me? What was my irresistible appeal? I didn’t know about anyone else, but I was looking for a way home. I wanted to do nothing more than deliver my load and go back to the farm. Wouldn’t see a soul for a year. I’d even sell my flat in town. Contrary to popular opinion, this starrigger had absolutely no intention to drive to the “beginning” of the universe or to the “end” of it either—equally absurd notions. I wanted to tear up Winnie’s maps, chuck the Black Cube out the port, and say to hell with it all. Then I’d go my own way, just me and Sam. Leave everyone to starhike it home.

  Sure. Sure, Jake. You go ahead and do that.

  I swore under my breath for two kilometers and felt better. So preoccupied with my thoughts was I that I didn’t notice the forest had given way to rolling plains in rather short order. The tops of the cylinders were edging over the horizon.

  Suddenly, I thought of something, and slammed on the brakes. I pulled off the road and came to a sudden stop. The Chevy overshot me, pulling off to the shoulder a good distance ahead. As I climbed out of the cab, much to everyone’s puzzlement, I saw Carl sticking his head out the window and looking back, equally baffled.

  I walked back to the roaster, into which our beefy logger friends were packed like … like … well, like two beefy loggers inside a ridiculously small vehicle.

  Sean slid back the dubiously air-tight port. “Trouble, Jake?”

  “I have to ask this before I repress the event entirely. Just what the hell was that thing I saw in the woods … that Boojum or whatever you call it?”

  Sean tugged at his anfractuous mustache. “Hard to say. Did it talk to you?”

  “Yeah, it—” I straightened up. “Yeah, it sure did!”

  “What did it say?”

  “Well … it said, ‘Good Gracious, dearie me!’ Then it took off into the woods.”

  “I see.” He stroked his beard, ruminating. Shaking his head slowly, he said, “Then that was no Boojum.”

  I would have strangled him right then if I had thought my hands would’ve fit around his fat neck.

  8

  When I climbed back into the cab, a yellow warning light leered at me from the instrumentation.

  “The spare,” I said. “Right?”

  “Right,” Sam said.

  I expressed my displeasure in colorful terms. At some length. “Curb your tongue, lad. There’re ladies present.”

  “My apologies, Suzie, Darla.” I looked back. “Winnie,” I added.

  “Oh, you should be proud,” Susan said. “That approached the status of a work of art.”

  “Thank you.”

  I felt even better than I had after the previous tirade. I goosed the plasma flow and peeled out onto the Skyway.

  The next few planets were wasteballs, barely habitable, but even here, human settlements clung, like lichen, to the rocks. Various odd-colored suns hung in lowering skies. On the third mudball, I decided we needed a palaver.

  “Sam, see if you can raise Sean and Carl.”

  “Right.”

  I put on the headset while Sam put out a call on the special frequency we had decided upon beforehand. I prefer an oldfashioned headset; why, I don’t know, but I’ve always had this odd affinity for outmoded technology. Besides, I keep losing those stickum things you put on your earlobe and throat. I considered the bone-conduction transducer, implanted in my mastoid bone, a necessity despite my aversion to biointerface gadgets. I never used it for general communications; it was reserved for the hush frequency alone.

  “Fitzgore here. Can you read me, Jake?”

  “Sure enough. Carl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, we’re going to take the left fork up ahead. Right?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Roger-dodger. ”

  “Roger-dodger?” I echoed.

  “Affirmative,” Carl amended.

  “Right. The next planet up is Schlagwasser. Carl, can you ask Lori—”

  “I’m here, Jake. And I told you I don’t want to see those people again.”

  “Lori, what you do after I drop you off is your business. It would’ve been dangerous to send you back to Seahome, and in good conscience I couldn’t have put you out on that planet of alcoholic perverts—present company excluded, Sean and Liam—”

  “On behalf of all perverts, alcoholic or not, I thank you.”

  “Sorry. Lori, you’re much too young, and—”

  “Punk you!”

  “—and I … Lori? Lorelei, honey, listen to me, please. I know you’re not more than fifteen years old—”

  “I’m eighteen!”

  “Sweet sixteen at the very most. I just can’t take the responsibility of letting you come with us. We don’t exactly know where we’re going, and we really don’t have the vaguest idea of how to get there. I have enough worries, honey, and I’m simply not going to—”

  “Jake, please take me along. Please? I won’t be any trouble. I promise! I can take care of myself, and I won’t—”

  “Lori, darling, it’s not a question of that. Listen to me. You should be in school and going to proms and having boys pick you up in their roadsters … all that sort of stuff. Now, I don’t know what Schlagwasser’s like—right off, the name doesn’t recommend it—but the fact that you had a foster family there speaks of at least a … Lori? Are you listening?”

  Over the two-way hookup, I could hear her crying. “Oh, great. Typical female tactics.”

  “Jake!” Susan was indignant. “That was uncalled for, and not true. She’s a child. You said so yourself.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Looks like I’m offending every sex and gender today. Lori, honey? Don’t cry, please.”

  “You’re forgetting the Reticulans, Jake,” Roland said.

  “No,” I said. “If those nightmares pick up the trail again, they’ll be after me. I can’t believe they’d waste time and effort going after Lori.”

  “But wasn’t she strapped to their cutting table? Doesn’t that make her sacred quarry? They’ll be after her, Jake.”

  “They’re after me. It
’s hard to believe they’d want to hunt rabbit when there’s bigger game.”

  “I agree with Roland,” John said. “We don’t know enough about the Reticulans’ habits and customs to take the chance. They seem to be driven by these ceremonial obligations. It seems hideous to us, but in the context of their culture … after all, they’re not human.”

  “Yeah, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, they’re after me. And if she stays with me, it’ll be more of a risk than if she hides out on her home planet, where her family can protect her. Reticulans won’t go snooping around on a human world.”

  “They’ve been known to,” Roland countered.

  I had to admit to myself that Roland was right. And that knocked a few props out from under my argument.

  “Jake?” It was Carl.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lori can’t go back there, to her foster parents.”

  “Why not?”

  “1’d rather not say just now. She just can’t.”

  “I want to know, Carl.”

  A pause. “Lori says to tell you.” I heard him take a breath. “Her foster father raped her.”

  After a moment, I said, “Right. Um… Lori? I’m very sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Yeah. Uh… over and out.”

  Rape seemed to be the national pastime of the Outworlds. Charming.

  I replaced the headset in its rack on the dash. “Sam, take over for me, will you?”

  “Sure, son. Don’t feel too bad. You couldn’t have known.”

  “I should have known that when a child cries, it usually means something hurts. I’m going into the aft-cabin. Raise the seat up for me. Hard for a two-inch-tall driver to see out the port.”

  I went back and dumped myself, pile of rags that I was, into the bunk.

  As it happened, we wound up stopping on Schlagwasser so Sean and Liam could fuel up. Sam was showing three-quarters of a tank; but we topped off anyway. This could be the last service station till the Big Bang, for all we knew.

  “Don’t need any gas,” Carl averred. “I’m okay.”

  “ ‘Gas’?” I said.

  “I mean, whaddycallit. Deuterium.”

  “What’s this thing run on, air?”

  Sitting at the wheel of his 1957 Chevrolet Impala, Carl knitted his brow and shook his head. “Y’know, to tell the honest-to-God truth, I really don’t know what the hell it runs on.”