Another hour went by, and we came to the clearing. It was a shock. Over at least a dozen square kilometers the jungle had been ripped away like so many weeds. In its place lay chewed earth, shards of pulp, and row after endless row of neatly wrapped bales, bundles of vegetation sorted into homogeneous groups ? bark, logs, leaves, chips, pods, fruit, and vegetable mash (these in big metal canisters), all products useful as-is or ready for further processing. The thing that had done the deed was off in the distance, a Landscraper. The machine was a metal platform almost a kilometer long, moving on gargantuan tracks, biting off great chunks of forest at its leading edge, sorting, processing, digesting masses of material in its guts, and dropping the fecal result off behind. Eventually, farms, houses, and factories would follow in its wake. Cleared land was a premium on Demeter (the proper name for the planet and one everybody ignored; most people called it Hothouse).
Cheetah eyed the scene dolefully, and I couldn't help feeling sorry. She looked upon the ruins of her only home.
The road skirted the edge of the clearing for about a klick or so before it swung back into the jungle. At this point we were on the lookout for airborne vehicles, but none appeared.
The new section of trail was heavily overgrown in spots, and wound its way around marsh and hollow until it dead-ended into another road.
'That way!' Cheetah instructed.
Sam turned left, and beneath the feeling of utter tranquility and well-being, I recognized the absurdity of having to be led by the nose out of danger by an individual supposedly without a measurable IQ. But we usually take all the help we can get.
I fell asleep, kept popping awake when Cheetah yelled out a new direction, but eventually there were no more decisions to make and the road before us twined endlessly.
Night fell, as it does very early on Hothouse, with its sixteen-hour rotation, and we ghosted down leafy corridors with the headbeams playing among the trees. Pairs of tiny eyes glowed in the shadows like sparks in a dying fire, watching. Now and again came sounds of rustling in the bushes, nocturnal cries echoing out in the blackness beyond. I dozed, awoke, drifted sleepward, awoke, and the vista before me was the same, dream and reality indistinguishable. I don't know how long we traveled. The trail turned into a green Moebius way, endlessly twisting back on itself, like the Skyway laid out in a galaxy of verdure….
Skyway. Paradox. Causality reversed… living lives, loving loves, dying deaths out of natural sequence…. We are born, follow our useless paths to the grave, but the paths are two-way… cut and splice a lifeline and you get death before life, disappointment before expectation, fulfillment before desire, effect before cause….
The road was long and I drove it, taking the Backtime Extension… back to Terra, a lost, blue-white speck against the blackness, an exhausted little planet of fifteen billion souls ? despite the constant exodus of surplus population out to the web of worlds linked by the Skyway… back to a boyhood in a dying rural town in Northeast Industry, nee Pennsylvania, Federated Democracies of North America… a little mining town called Braddock's Creek, whose pits had given up their last flakes of bituminous at around the end of the fourth decade of the century, shortly after I was born… a demi-ghost town of boarded-up tract houses long foreclosed upon and abandoned to house-strippers and weather, a depopulated community in this age of overcrowding, victim of Climate Shift… short hot summers, long face-numbing winters, with no growing season to speak of…. A toddler spending the warm months barefoot playing on shale piles near the mines, mounds of blue-black rubble forever smoking with spontaneous combustion, cooking themselves into mountains of 'red dog,' gravel good for laying on dirt roads… a boy swimming in strip-mine holes brimming with acid-spiked runoff water…. We never went hungry in those days, with Father working when he could, coaxing fruits and vegetables out of our chemical garden when he was laid off; and when neither activity paid the bills, doing mysterious things, staying out late at night while I waited for him, sleeping in the big double bed with Mother, lying awake, listening to dogs bark out in the windy night', waiting, wondering when he would get in, wondering what he was doing, and where; Mother never saying anything about it, never acknowledging the fact that her husband spent whole nights away; waiting, until I fell asleep, to wake up next morning in my sleeping bag on the old mattress in the front room, dimly remembering Father carrying me there, kissing me and tucking me in…. Dim years spent in boredom and restlessness and missed school because of fuel shortfalls and lack of funding, meatless days, wheatless days, proud happy days when the sun was out and things warmed up and I could run and raise hell and play and not think about or not care about a world where millions, no, billions starved and the incessant brushfire wars raged on, or appreciate the profound implications of the fact that men lived on the moon and in lazily turning metal wheels in space…. I remember my father telling me about his remembering when the first portal of the Skyway was discovered on Pluto by a robot probe, and I thought. Why did they put it so far away out there at the edge of the solar system?… Watching viddy programs about it and hearing the commentators say what a mystery it all was ? who had built it? when? why? ? years that melted away too soon, because for all the privation, it was a childhood no worse than most, better man some…. And one day Father telling us that we would move, that he had applied for emigration and that we had been accepted, and that somehow he had come up with the 500,000 New Dollar emigration fee charged to all North American residents because economically the region was still better off by far when compared with other parts of the world…. The trip by hydroskiff to India, the unbelievable masses of people there, bodies in the streets, dead bodies and some that were not quite dead, stacked like cordwood and sprinkled with white powdery chemicals making them look like woodpiles in a first snow…. The shuttle port near Kendrapara on the Bay of Bengal, surrounded by tent cities of stranded emigrees… The thundering shuttle ride and my first space-sickness and the view of a dazzling Terra wheeling below… Being aboard the Maxim Gorky, a Longboost ship that made Pluto in eighteen months, most of the time spent with its passengers in Semidoze, an electrically induced twilight of semiconsciousness which made the interminable trip bearable… Spending about an hour on Pluto before boarding the bus which took us by Skyway to Barnard's Star, thence to 61 Cygni-A II, thence to Strove 2398, thence to Sigma Draconis IV, called Vishnu, where I spent the remainder of my childhood on a farm in a valley made green with water cracked from rocks, working as I never worked before or since; where I grew, finally became a man ? too soon, when my mother died giving birth to my brother Donald, stillborn….
… Until a bump woke me up and I saw that the road had debouched from the jungle onto the ten-meter-wide strip on either side of the highway where no plants can grow save low grasses.
Sam waited for traffic to pass. An impossibly low reaction-drive vehicle with some kind of frictionless underside roared by, its headbeams almost dim compared to its brilliant array of running lights. Sam checked the scanners and pulled out onto the road, the smooth, smooth road of Skyway. It felt good. Acceleration sat in my lap as Sam pinched the magnetic confinement, and soon we were wafting through patches of ground-hugging fog that smelled of dank things in a dank earth, a jungle smell, wet and fetid, a smell that I didn't want to have flushed through my nostrils for some time to come. I closed the vents and pressurized the cab. We would be making a many-light-year jump to Groombridge 34-B, where there was an interchange on the airless moon of a gas giant.
'
“More or less. How long did we spend touring those damn botanical gardens?'
'Almost all night. We should miss the dawn, though. I think we're about a hundred klicks from the portal.'
'Great. The sooner we get off this salad bowl, the better.' I looked back and saw Darla and Cheetah huddled together in the backseat, winked out like three-year-olds. I felt even less mature and sank into oblivion again. Dreamlessly.
The portal warning buzzer woke me up. I felt even better, but my mouth was stuffed with fuzz and I ached all over.
'
I yelled back and they woke up, rubbed eyes, and did so. Warning signs shot by, and then suddenly we were in fog that shrouded the approach. The safe corridor, a lane marked by two parallel white lines, spooled out at us from the mist.
'You on instruments?' I asked.
'
The fog got thicker, and the lines faded ? then, instantaneously, the fog was gone as we passed the flashing red commit markers and penetrated the portal's force-field shell. The shells keep out atmosphere but allow solid matter to go through. It's always struck me as pertinent to ask what would happen if the machinery generating the
