Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

Sean said, “Hmph.”

  After another thoughtful interlude, John said, “We keep straying from the main line of discussion.”

  “You’re right,” Susan said. “What are we going to do?”

  “I have a suggestion,” Sam broke in over the cabin speakers.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “Send out Carl to scout this world, see if there’s anybody around. Then decide what you want to do.”

  “Have you picked up anything on the air?”

  “Nope, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the place is deserted. Granted, it’s not promising, but just to be sure, someone should have a look around first.”

  “Have you been scanning with the drone?”

  “Yeah, but nothing’s showed up.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to drive around. We have time.”

  “Sure, why not? As you said, we should take time to think things through for once. It’d be a nice change of pace. No use going off half-cocked if we can avoid—” He broke off, then said, “I spoke too soon.”

  “Someone shot the portal?”

  “No, somebody’s walking across the desert toward us. Looks human.”

  There was no proverbial sigh of relief.

  “Humans here, too,” John muttered. “We’re everywhere.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Just one. Let me train the exciter on him, just to be sure.”

  “Doesn’t he look friendly?”

  “He’s carrying something. Can’t tell what.”

  “Jake? Come in.” Carl’s voice came from the cab speakers.

  “Patch me through, Sam.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Yeah, Carl?”

  “We got company.”

  “We know. Sam spotted him. Are you and Lori locked inside the car?”

  “You bet.”

  “Does he have anything that looks like a weapon?”

  “He’s too far away to tell. He’s wearing a pressure suit, though.”

  “Pressure suit?”

  “Some kind of protective suit. Armor, maybe? Looks like—Hey! He just took off.”

  From out in the desert came the hollow whine-and-wail of jet exhaust. We all got up and filed out to the cab.

  “He’s got some kind of rocket backpack. Jesus Christ, just like Commander Cody.”

  “Commander who?” I said when I got my headset on. “Where the hell is he?” I looked out over the desert to the right. A white dot floated against the hazy sky just above a butte about half a kilometer away. A cloud of dust was settling over the area where he had apparently launched himself.

  “You see him?”

  “Yeah. What did he do before he took off?”

  “Nothing much. Looked like he was searching for something out there. Had some kind of weird equipment. Then he spotted us and blasted off. Took a good look at us first.”

  The white speck disappeared behind the butte. “What do we do?” John asked.

  “We wait,” I said.

  We waited, ten minutes. Then he returned, this time piloting a strange variant of a landjumper. He came across the desert at reckless speed, bouncing over rocks and rises, staying around five or ten meters off the ground. From the sound the craft made, I judged the engines to be of a rather primitive jet turbine design. The craft was big and bulky, but had room for at most two passengers and the driver.

  “Have him covered, Sam?”

  “I’ve got everything trained on him but missiles, of which we ain’t got any.”

  He zoomed in, stopped, and hovered over a hollow between dunes, then set the craft gently down.

  Instead of passengers, he was hauling a load of stuffboxes, sacks, miscellaneous parcels. He picked up a sack and another thing that looked like an animal skin, and came toward us.

  It was plain now that our visitor wasn’t human. He … it was much too thin and the arms had two elbows. Generally humanoid, but the proportions were all wrong. It wore a white reflective suit with what looked like a backpack respirator. The helmet was covered with the same sort of cloth as the suit. We couldn’t see a face behind the darkly tinted viewscreen. It stopped and looked the rig over, checked out the Chevy, then looked at us again. Apparently the rig seemed a bit intimidating. It went over to Carl, stooping to peer into the driver’s side window. The creature was man-high, which had led us to mistake it for a human being at a distance.

  Surprisingly, it greeted Carl with a raised right hand. I couldn’t see if Carl returned the gesture. The creature then reached into one of the sacks and pulled out what looked like a folded piece of paper, which he unfolded and presented to Carl, pointing out various markings and lines. “Hey, Carl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he trying to sell you?”

  “I think it’s a roadmap.”

  11

  The beings who had colonized this maze were known by the general name of Nogon, but we came to know only a very special and unrepresentative group of them.

  They lived in caves and called themselves the Ahgirr, a word which, in their liquid, gargly tongue, was roughly equivalent to The Keepers. Both an ethnic group and a quasi-religious sect, the Ahgirr preferred adhering to ancient ways and customs. Most of their race, both here and on their home planet, lived in huge high-tech arcologies, called faln, named after a giant plant that looks like a mushroom but isn’t a fungus. The Ahgirr, however, loved their cave-communities, believing that creatures spawned from the earth should keep close to their origins. For all that, they didn’t reject science and technology. No Luddites they, the Ahgirr, in their long history, had produced many of their race’s most brilliant scientists. Hokar, the individual who picked us up and brought us in, was a geologist. He’d been out prospecting in the desert when he was surprised by the sight of vehicles on that little-used ingress spur. He saw we were in trouble and came immediately. The Ahgirr were like that—warm, friendly, outgoing … and very human. Their species was the closest to human that anyone, to my, knowledge, had ever encountered on the Skyway. They were bipedal, mammalian, ten-digited, two-sexed, and breathed oxygen (Hokar’s suit was merely a protection against bright sunlight, which his species couldn’t tolerate). They had two eyes, one nose, one mouth, sparse body hair and lots of hair on the head—the whole bit. There were differences, though. You wouldn’t mistake them for humans. They had joints in the wrong place. Their skins were translucent, and their odd circulatory systems gave them a distinct pinkish-purple cast. The eyes were huge and pink and structurally dissimilar to the human variety. Their long straight hair was the color and texture of corn silk. (NonAhgirr—which meant, of course, the rest of the species—wore their hair in various styles. Coiffure was very important in distinguishing ethnic and nationality groups, of which there were many.) But after a while, it was hard not to think of the Ahgirr and their race as just an unusual variety of human beings.

  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 on its own power, which was a surprise to nobody. I was waiting for the thing to fly.

  All interspecies communication up to this point 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 frie
nds 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 for 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 cavecity. “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 on, “so we bought ‘em. Got a pretty good 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 turned 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. We 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: “Ah, 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.”