John DeChancie
Red Limit Freeway
In Memory of Gene DeChancie
THERE'S NO SPEED LIMIT ON THE FREEWAY TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
Chapter 1
There they were, up ahead-the Trees at the Edge of the Sky. That's what Winnie called them. Other people called them different things: Kerr-Tipler objects, tollbooths, noncatastrophic singularities, portal arrays…
I called them cylinders. That's what they were, big ones, some as high as five kilometers. They were lined up on both sides of the roadway like impossibly huge fenceposts, their color impossibly black, blacker than the interstellar space they bent and twisted and warped to their creators' ends, and to our benefit. Everything about them was incredible. They were said to be spinning at unimaginable speeds, though their featureless surfaces gave no perceivable confirmation of this. A few experiments had been done on them, measuring Doppler shifts of infalling particles and Hawking radiation flying out. But the Colonial Authority had a long-standing ban on the publication of data and even theoretical studies concerning the portals. One only had rumors to go by. And the rumors were: The results were impossible.
Their rotational speeds worked out to be faster than light. It couldn't be, but that's what the numbers said.
'What's our speed, Sam?'
'Oh, we're moseying along nicely. If you'd care to move your eyeballs a few millimeters to the right, you'd see for yourself.'
'You know I can't read instruments and drive at the same time.' '
'Good Lord, and I was just about to offer you some chewing gum.'
'Oh, cut the merte, Sam.'
'Is that any way to speak to your father?' Then Sam guffawed, in that scratchy/liquid synthesised voice of his?if the oxymoron can be forgiven, it's the only way I can express what the sound is like. In no way does it resemble my deceased father's voice, except in emotional tone and inflection. I didn't have a recording of Sam to pattern the waveforms after when I ordered the voice-output software for the rig's computer.
Sam went on, 'We're right in the groove. Forget the numbers, I've got her on speed lock.'
I glanced at the digital telltales, the array of numbers suspended in the air at eye level and at about thirty degrees to either side of my line-of-sight straight ahead positioned so as to hide in the retinal blind spot, they were unobtrusive until looked at directly. I usually had them turned off; ?if you moved your head a lot they seemed like pesky fireflies flitting about.
'Okay, fine. Everybody strapped in?'
Roland Yee was in the shotgun seat. 'Check,' he said.
'I think we're all secure back here,' John Sulcuma-Tayler reported.
I chanced a look back. John, Susan D' Archangelo, and Darla Petrovsky n‚e Vance were in harnesses in the back seats. The cab accommodated five comfortably. I heard squabbling in the aft-cabin?a little living space useful for long hauls.
'Hey, Carl!' I yelled. 'Is Lori strapped down back there?'
'Like trying to hog-tie a?give me your damn arm!?like trying to wrassle a she-cat!'
'Lori!' I shouted. 'Be a good girl!'
'I'm okay, for God's sake. Let me?'
'Gotcha!'
'I'm okay, I'm telling you!' .
'Look, you had a concussion,' Carl told her. 'Now, behave, or we wrap you in confetti and ship you with the rest of the load.'
'Oh, get folded.'
'Think I don't know what that means? Should be ashamed of yourself.'
'Punk you!'
'Such language! And from a mere slip of a girl, too.'
I had insisted that Lori be strapped to my bunk during portal transitions. She'd taken a nasty whack on the head back on Splash, during our escape from the ship-seamonster Laputa. I wanted to take no chances; shooting an aperture can be rough sometimes, and it wasn't at all clear whether Lori was completely all right. She had been complaining of headaches. Normal enough, but I wanted to be sure. She needed to be looked over. However, we had to leave Splash in a hurry, and the next planet up, Snowball, lived up to its name. No one and practically no thing lived there. We were now on what Winnie's Itinerary Poem called ''The band of Nothing to See' (per Darla's translation). You called it, Winnie. The planet?or this part of it?looked like the old photographs of Mars I used to pore over as a kid, a place of vast rock-strewn plains with sand sifted in between the rubble, kilometer after endless kilometer of it. Except the sand was a crappy gray-green instead of an alluring, alien red. But there were beings here. Probably humans, if the occasional mail-order pop-up domes far off the road were any indication.
These were the Consolidated Outworlds, a maze of planets linked by the Skyway, but with no way back to Terran Maze.
No way home.
But I wasn't thinking of that just then. One of my pesky hologram readouts was blinking yellow. 'What the hell's that, Sam?'
'It's that damn left-front roller, Jake. We get a yellow every time we go into, portal-approach mode. Been getting one for, oh, couple of months now. You'd know that if you'd deign to take a look at your instruments once in a while.'
'I didn't notice it. You're right, I fly by the seat of my pants a little too much. Think we should stop?'
'The book says we should.'
I looked out over the bleak terrain. 'And do what?'
'I'm only telling you what the book says.'
'Well, we'll have to risk it. It's done okay up to now.'
'Fine. But if she goes sugar-doughnut on us while we're shooting a portal, don't say I?'
'?didn't warn you,' I finished. 'Right, Sam, you're covered.'
'It's all the same to me, you know. I'm already dead.'
The road ahead was a black ribbon leading straight through the cylinders. They towered above, their tops festooned in wispy clouds against a greenish sky. Their color was black, utterly black, their surfaces sucked clean of light. It almost hurt to look at them directly; not just physically, but philosophically. To gaze upon an Absolute is discomforting. We're too used to fudging, finding refuge in the interstices of things, content to see the universe in shades of gray: You could see all sorts of frightening possibilities in that categorical, darkness, if you stopped to look and think.
One thing you don't want to do is stop and philosophize near a portal. You might achieve a total and very unpleasant oneness with your object of contemplation.
'Darla, what's Winnie's description of the next planet up?'
'Um… 'A Land Like Home, but lt Isn't.' I thlnk.'
'Does that mean jungle? Yeah, well, I guess so,' I answered myself. 'I just hope there's some kind of
