Red Limit Freeway

by John Dechancie

  “What do we do first?” Susan asked. “Where do we go?”

  “You said that you were being desirous of equipment by which one lives in the wilderness, making camp and suchlike,” Tivi said.

  Susan laughed. “Well, I’m not exactly desirous of the stuff, but—” She put a hand on Tivi’s sloping shoulder. “I’m sorry. Yes, I’d like to buy camping gear. A backpack, maybe, if I can find one that fits my all-too-human frame. And a good flashlight …and, um, I’ll need an all-climate survival suit—hell, I’ll never find one that fits me. Forget that.”

  “On the contrary,” Tivi said, “they are having makers of clothing here who can possibly be accommodating you.”

  “Really? Designer fashions, huh?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve convinced me. I’d really like some new clothes … Oh, wait.” Susan turned to me. “We really should go get that electronic stuff you need first. Right?”

  “Nah, go ahead and have fun. We’ve got a little time.”

  “Oh, good.” She suddenly frowned. “Rats.”

  “What?”

  “Now I feel guilty that the others didn’t get to come along.”

  I nodded, looking around. “Yeah, they are missing some sights. But I thought they’d be safer in the caves.”

  “You were right. We shouldn’t take chances.”

  “Good rationalization.”

  “Creep. Let’s go.”

  “May I be suggesting,” Ragna said, “that we may be having perhaps a parting of the ways at this point, Tivi going with Jake and I myself escorting and otherwise leading Susan?”

  I said, “Let me get the feel of this place first. It’s big, and if we get separated—”

  “There is little need for the fear you are feeling, Jake. Unfortunately, Ahgirr are very familiar with this den of iniquity and other foul doings, being that they are coming here to purchase many necessary essentials which are, rats, unpurchasable elsewhere.”

  “Well, I’d rather tag along with Suzie first. Then we’ll see.” Ragna made circles with his forefingers and elongated thumbs, throwing his arms out. We had come to interpret this as a shrugging gesture, though it had other meanings. “As you are wishing, so shall we be tagging.”

  We set out into the tumult.

  We went down several levels and walked through a parklet. Children played there, running about and screeching just like children do all over the universe. There were lots of imaginative objects there to climb and swing from, monkey bars and that sort of thing. Parents seated at benches looked on. Susan was right in that everything was familiar in a way—but every object, every aspect of the design of this area and all the rest was totally nonhuman. Everything said alien.

  Something odd was transpiring on the other side of the park. A crowd of Nogon was gathered in the middle of a large expanse of green tile floor. Everyone was jumping up and down, facing in the direction of a platform upon which were displayed a variety of nutty looking objects: Household wares, maybe. Maybe objets d’art; who knows? As they jumped, the participants threw small balls of various colors into the air and caught them. As we passed, I asked Ragna what was going on.

  “This is of much difficulty to be explaining,” he said, tapping his headband.

  “Oh. Is it an auction?”

  “Auction.” He brought his hands up to reposition the headband. “Auction. No. It is in the nature of being a protest.” “Protest? What are they protesting?”

  “Again, this is of much difficulty.”

  “Right.”

  Language barriers are one thing, cultural and conceptual ones quite another.

  We entered another commercial area. The merchants here seemed of a distinct ethnic group, wearing their cornsilk hair in braids tied off with bright ribbons and floral bows. Their costumes were much more modest. Susan stopped to look at some pottery. Some items were quite attractive, though hard to identify.

  Ragna was chuckling. “It is being centuries since these people are living in anything but faln, yet they construct their traditional objects and sell them quite speedily. Making much money into the bargain, too.”

  “Indians selling beads and blankets,” I said. “You will be pardoning me?”

  “Well, it’s difficult to explain.”

  Susan managed to blow fifteen minutes deciding what she wasn’t going to buy.

  “Susan.”

  “Sorry, right. Let’s go.”

  Next up was a sunken arena where a sporting event was being held. The game looked like a cross between rugby and motorcycle racing. If that sounds confusing … well, you’d have to see it. We stopped briefly to watch, but I didn’t bother to ask Ragna to supply play-by-play commentary.

  We went on. After taking a path through a small forested area, we came out into another marketplace, this one bigger and offering all sorts of products—furniture, vehicles, foodstuffs, clothing, you name it. It took about ten minutes for Tivi to find the stall of a merchant who could possibly fit Susan. It was an alien, a slender little yellow-furred biped who looked somewhat feline.

  After conferring with the merchant, Tivi told us, “Yes, it has seen your species before. It can be accommodating your physique in the style of your choosing. But it says its merchandise is of so poor a quality that you would hardly be wanting to waste your money or your time.”

  I said, “Ask it … er, him or whatever—ask where he saw creatures like us.”

  She did. “It says it has traveled to many planets and has seen many creatures—your kind to be sure, but it is fearing that your ire will be aroused when it is telling you that the exact location of this sighting is not being remembered.”

  “Was it recently?”

  The alien made apologetic gestures.

  “It is saying also that this memory is not fixed with respect to a time element. It craves a thousand forgivenesses and begs that you not kill it.”

  “Well, tell him he’s safe for now. He was probably fibbing about seeing humans. Just wanted our business.”

  Tivi went on as the alien continued mewling: “It still is insisting that you could not possibly be interested in the worthless articles of apparel that it is dealing in. In matter of fact, it is willing to be paying person or persons to take the junk off his hands.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t have to go through Nogon dickering rituals with us,” I said.

  “As long as I am interpreting for you,” Tivi answered, “it will be afraid not to be doing this dickering and ritualizing.”

  “What’s his name?” Susan asked.

  “It protests that an obviously high-born female such as yourself, one who no doubt is in possession of uncountable husbands and slaves, would not be interested in inquiring as to the name of so low-born and abject a creature as we see before us.” As an aside, Tivi added, “I am thinking it is also a female—and also that this is being part of her own type of dickering and ritualizing.”

  “Tell her that I’d be interested in buying everything she has, and would be willing to pay her handsomely for the privilege,” Susan instructed.

  “Again she is protesting that such a wondrously beautiful creature such as yourself would be ill-served by—”

  This went on at some length, and I got bored. To kill some time, Ragna took me on a little tour of the area. We watched what he told me was an actual auction, but strangely enough, it looked more like a protest meeting. After that we browsed through a fast-food section. Some of the stuff looked edible, even good, but I knew that, while I wouldn’t be poisoned, I’d get sick as a pup if I had any. We had found that we couldn’t eat Nogon food, even though its peptide configurations weren’t too far divergent from Terran ones.

  By the time we got back, Susan was out of the fitting booth.

  “My survival suit’ll be ready in an hour or two,” Susan said. “I even got to design it myself: Custom tailored—how about that!”

  “Good. Now let’s—”

  “Oh, look over here,” Susan said, walk
ing off.

  We followed her over to a stall offering a wide variety of weaponry.

  “Guns.” Susan curled her lip in distaste. “I’m going to buy one.”

  “Whatever for?” I asked.

  “Everybody else is armed to the teeth. Even John’s carrying a gun now. Hell, with all the trouble we’ve been running into, I’d be foolish not to be packing some kind of shooting iron.”

  “I think we have enough to go around, Suzie.”

  “No, I want something that doesn’t kill.”

  “Oh.”

  “Something that’ll stop an enemy but not hurt him. I don’t believe in killing.”

  “That might be a tall order, but let’s see.”

  The merchant was a Nogon, and we found that the extent to which the alien had engaged in ritualizing and dickering had been a mere nod to local custom. Done properly, complete with nuances and byplay, the real thing could take hours. By being brusque almost to the point of insult, Tivi cut it dawn to twenty minutes. Meantime, Ragna went off to buy Susan a torch and some other camping gear. By the time he returned, the merchant had sold Susan a box containing three components which supposedly fit together. The sale of completely functional weapons inside the faln was illegal.

  “They are scanning all the time for operative armaments,” Ragna told me.

  The sale complete, our merchant growled something and stepped behind a curtain. He didn’t come out again..

  “What was that all about?” I asked Tivi.

  “He is saying that such a show of crass materialism and greed has been making him sick, at which point he will be expelling the contents of his gastric sac.”

  “Oh.” I turned and yelled, “Sorry!”

  “I wonder if this thing works,” Susan said, examining the contents of the box.

  “I wonder what it does,” I said. “Wouldn’t look like a gun, no matter how you’d put the parts together. What did the salesman say?”

  “Who knows. Tivi?”

  “He was saying that this particular weapon would not be killing one’s opponent. However, he was not saying in exactitude what in matter of fact it would be doing.”

  “That’s what came out of all that conversation?” I wanted to know.

  “Much was being spoken,” Tivi said, “but little was being said.”

  “Is it that these articles are to your satisfaction?” Ragna asked, displaying the various oddments he had bought for Susan—torch, mess kit, toilet articles, some sort of bedroll, other stuff, all of which were Nogon-made but eminently adaptable to human use.

  “Oh, they’re fine. Thank you so much, Ragna. Here, let me pay you.”

  “We may be settling monetary business dealings later, you are welcome.”

  I said, “We can’t thank you enough for exchanging our gold for currency.”

  Hokar had let slip that gold prices had taken a dive recently. Apparently, the economy of the Nogon maze was booming. “You are to think nothing of it, Jake, friend of mine. These things are not spoken of, not much.”

  “Here, Jake,” Susan said, dumping a load of parcels on me. “Now, let me check back at the dressmaker’s and we’ll—?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m going to take Tivi and get those parts. You go get your outfit and we’ll meet you here in an hour.”

  “Okay. Let’s divvy up these things. You take that and that, I’ll take this thing … don’t they give out shopping bags in this place?”

  “You may be needing this?” Tivi was unfolding a gray cloth sack which she had brought out from under her cape.

  Susan shook her head. “And we didn’t even think to bring a bag or something.” She stuffed the small sack, but the gun box wouldn’t fit. “This bulky thing. Maybe if we took the stuff out of the box. Ragna?”

  “No, let me take it,” I said. “Maybe I can find out what kind of weapon it is.”

  “But you’ll have the parts to carry.”

  “I have two of these,” Tivi said, producing another sack.

  “Tivi, darling, you’re indispensable.”

  “I am thanking you for not dispensing with me.” We finally split up.

  Tivi led me across the mall and up a ramp to a mezzanine. From there we took a connecting corridor and came out onto a curving balcony at least fifteen stories above a vast central floor alive with commerce and every other sort of activity. We walked along the balcony until it swung out over the floor and became a ramp leading down to platform. There were bunches of transparent tubes shooting up from the floor, and inside the tubes were platforms moving up and down. These were elevators, certainly, but I couldn’t figure out how they worked. We ran into a crush of shoppers well before we reached the boarding platform.

  “Too much crowd,” Tivi said. “We should be going back this way.”

  We walked back up the ramp and onto the balcony, then through another connecting corridor, coming out into a smaller open area that was a disconcerting architectural jumble. Nogon ideas of interior design were perceptually disorienting. Walkways made odd angles as they shot overhead without visible support. Ramps spiraled dizzily, walls bulged and sucked in, staircases obtruded into overhead spaces: Control, I thought. Control is what arcologies are all about—but what’s all this madness? Maybe arcologies were just about containment.

  Tivi led me into a side corridor. We stopped by a pair of doors set into the wall.

  “These freight-lifting mechanisms are not being in so much use,” she maintained.

  It looked like a conventional elevator, but when we got it going, it went up diagonally for a while, stopped for a moment, then continued vertically. In all, we went up about twenty stories.

  These upper levels seemed devoted to non-consumer items and were a little quieter, but not much. “Auctions” were being held here, too, complete with the pushing and shoving I had observed below. There were stores here, of a sort, though you couldn’t tell where one ended and one began. We found an area stacked with crates of what Tivi said were electronics parts. The store was full of shoppers, but there wasn’t the crush there was below.

  “I will be going to fetch a sales individual. Be waiting here, please.”

  “Right.”

  Tivi left and I examined some of the stuff. I could see now that my coming along had been unnecessary. I had thought that my experience with alien technologies back in the known mazes would have helped. No chance. This junk looked like dried fruit to me. Boxes and boxes of dried fruit. Looked good, too; handy for long trips when you can’t stop to, eat.

  Damn, I was tired. I sat on a box of delicious-looking Nogon technology and took a deep breath. Mall fatigue? Hell. Getting old.

  I spent the next few minutes thinking about nothing in particular. Memories of the last four weeks were a jumble. Running and hiding, capture and escape, over and over again. Nothing made sense. The universe was a senseless machine, grinding away to no purpose. I was caught in its gears.

  I digested that for a while. A faint feeling of nausea was the result.

  Where was Tivi?

  I got up and walked around the store looking for her. She was nowhere in sight. I went back out into the mall, walked one way, then turned around and walked back. I searched the store again, checked out the neighboring store areas. No Tivi.

  I waited another minute, then jogged as far as I could down the mall without getting lost. I huffed back, threading through the crowds, then ran in the other direction, searched, came back. She was gone.

  In desperation, I searched the store once again, sat down, waited, got up and paced, sat back down, waited.

  The next ten minutes were miserable. If I went looking for her, I’d surely get lost. I couldn’t ask anybody. I knew only a few words of Ahgirr, nothing of the mainstream Nogon languages. I could only wait. And wait.

  Ten minutes more. Fifteen. Helpless. Helpless.

  It was one of the few times in my life when the notion of panicking didn’t seem unattractive. Panic, at least, was action and maybe a
release, while sitting there was unbearable torture.

  The sheer immensity of the distance between here and home struck like a hammer blow. I was lost-doubly, triply lost. I had blundered through not one, but two potluck portals, and now, inside that maze-within-a-maze, I had found yet another labyrinth to contain me.

  I stood up. All right, enough of that crap.

  This place was big, but not infinitely so. I would walk and walk and walk and sooner or later Susan and Ragna would find me. They’d send out word, alert the security forces. I was easy enough to spot.

  But if something had happened to Tivi, could Susan and Ragna be safe?

  I was sure I could find that freight elevator. I did.

  There were no buttons to press. Tivi had fiddled with a single knob until the desired level designation had shown on the readout screen. No help to me. I tried remembering what symbol had been on the screen when we entered. Couldn’t. Okay. Then it was a matter of fiddling with the damn knob, going along for the ride until this contraption went down at least twenty stories. I fiddled, and the thing went.

  Sideways.

  Then it stopped and the doors slid open. A few Nogon waiting nearby made motions to enter, saw me, and backed off. The doors closed. Nothing happened.

  I spun the knob. The elevator went straight up. I spun the knob the other way. The elevator stopped, groaned, went down diagonally to the right. I kept worrying the control and the thing kept changing direction, going nowhere. Exasperated, I twisted the knob until a likely set of runes showed on the readout. I left it there.

  The contraption dropped like a rock. Which was fine, except that I couldn’t stop it. I must have given it some priority command. Okay, the hell with it, I’d just go along for the ride.

  It was a long ride, straight down. And down. And farther down still. The bargain basement-sale items, hardware, carpet remnants—the Seventh Circle of Hell.

  Finally the elevator slowed, sighed softly, and stopped. The doors opened: I peered out.

  Compared to the ceaseless roar of the mall, there was silence here. Out of the semidarkness, the quietly efficient whir and hum of machinery came to my ears. It was a world all to its own. Pipes gurgled, motors thrummed and throbbed, fans whined. The strangled scream of a turbine came from my right. But quietly, quietly.