'What about the Red Limit Freeway itself? How many metaclusters are there in the universe?'
Fitzgore laughed. 'Cosmology's hardly my strong suit. However, I'd venture to say that the count of galaxies has to be in the billions.'
'I've heard the figure of one hundred billion,' I said. 'Somewhere. Was that galaxies? I dunno. Anyway, say it's a hundred billion.''
'Probably a conservative figure.'
'Yeah, but let's say one hundred gigagalaxies. Okay, let's put the average population of a cluster at?'
'Don't you mean a metacluster?'
'Right, metacluster. Let's say a thousand galaxies in a metacluster, on the average.'
'I see where you're going, Jake. But consider this. Red Limit Freeway is a road back through time, not necessarily a road that links every large-scale structure in the universe.'
'Who says it's either?'
'Who's to say it isn't both?' someone put in.
'Good point,' I said.
Fitzgore exhaled and wrapped his meaty arms around his chest. 'Well, as laymen, I suppose all we can do is make points and counterpoints, until somebody in a position to know comes along and settles the matter.'
'Or until Roland sobers up,' I said. 'He seems to know something about this.'
'Has he had scientific training?'
'Can you answer that, Suzie?'
'Roland knows everything,' Susan said. 'But, I think he studied political whatzis in school. Political whatever. Party member, you know.'
'Really? Interesting. I take it he changed political stripes somewhere along the way.'
'Yup.' She giggled. 'Or maybe he's a spy. A plant.' She giggled again. 'Or maybe he's just a plant. A veggie.' This amused her as well. Then, suddenly, she sobered up and said, 'Would it be all right for a lady to smoke a pipe?'
'I beg your pardon,' Fitzgore said, taking another pipe from a carved wooden rack and charging it from the glass humidor. 'Rude of me not to have offered. Darla, would you care to??'
'No, thank you, Sean.'
Darla and John had been unusually quiet. Subdued drunks. Carl was gabbing with Lori, who all along had been downing considerable quantities of beer. She had remained none the worse for wear. No one in the place seemed to care that she was well below legal drinking age. Winnie was still drawing?not maps, but crude animal figures. Cave paintings in a strange new medium?
Susan resumed snickering. 'A carrot,' she said, enjoying her private joke. Then she noticed me looking at her. 'Roland's my friend. I like him. But sometimes…'
'I understand,' I said.
She blinked her wet hazel eyes at me and smiled. 'I like you too, Jake.' Under the table, she took my hand and clasped it. The subtle pressure made it an, expression of more than friendship. I didn't know how I felt about it. I decided to try another mug of beer to see if it made a difference. It did. I rather liked it.
Liam returned; dragging Roland across the floor like last week's laundry.
'Could've given me real trouble,' he said, 'if he'd been half sober. Landed a good kick to me ribs, he did.'
Liam yanked Roland up with one arm and plunked him in a chair, then poured half a pitcher of beer over him.
Roland lifted his head from the table, blinked his eyes and said, 'Someone gimme a beer.' He wiped his eyes. 'Please.'
Liam took another pitcher (there must have been two dozen on the table) and poured him a mug.
'Thanks,' Roland said.
It was the cruising weed that really did me in. If the beer had made things blurry, the weed turned the evening (the day was gone, borne away on a sudsy tide) into a palimpsest of half-recalled events spread over layers of stuff I couldn't remember at all.
I was still trying to imagine that four-dimensional raisin loaf. Naturally I never made it, but I did think of a cone, a three-dimensional one, with space represented by the two dimensions parallel to each other and perpendicular to the plane of the base, and time running along the vertical axis. Time past lies toward the base of the cone, with the present occupying the apex. At the base is the beginning of time, the beginning of everything, the Big Bang. Here, everything is suffused with a brilliant light. Purest energy. Gradually, it wanes to darkness as time progresses in the direction of the apex. All is dark. Then, suddenly, brilliant beacons flare-quasars, the turbulent cores of young galaxies undergoing gravitational collapse. Farther along, they begin to take on their familiar wheeled shape. The universe expands and cools. Entropy extracts its toll, and density decreases. We come then to the point of the cone, and the present day. Look back from that vantage point, and the past is a widening tunnel whose farthest end glows dully with faint echoes of creation. Look in a direction perpendicular to the time- line, and you see nothing. Relativity tells us that we can have no knowledge of the universe of the present, since by the time lightwaves lollygag in with the information, it's yesterday's news. But you can look back in time, even to the first few seconds of the primeval flash.
Dreams of the road…
I don't know exactly when Susan and I made love. Sometime in the evening, I think, before my induction into the Brotherhood of the Boojum. It was around dinnertime, and the bar had cleared out a bit. We excused ourselves from the table more or less simultaneously, made our way upstairs more or less following the same trajectory, and intercepted each other. More or less. We found a bed and made a kind of quiet, groping, drunken love. But it was nice, in a fumbling, friendly way.
Then Suzie passed out. I nearly did, but somehow gaIumphed my way downstairs again. I was thirsty.
That, I believe, is when Sean announced that I was to be inducted into the Brotherhood. I was asked if I wished to join. I said sure, what the hell.
There followed a ceremony, of which I remembered not much. Candles guttered in sconces, incense burned. Incantations were muttered. Chanting and general mummery. I recited something, reading it from what I dimly remember as a sheep-skin scroll. It could have been a roll of shithouse paper. As to content, I think it would have been gibberish even if read stone sober. I was then confronted with the Brobdingnagian Thunder Cup. They bade me drink. I drank.
Next thing I knew, we were out in those weird woods. From the shadows came strange cries, sharp rustlings. Above the treetops, great winged things flapped their pinions. Things or persons were watching, peering from within dark bowers. We came to a clearing, and I was given a sword. My companions then withdrew, leaving me to face the fearful Boojum alone in the half-night. I was to make a cry, thus: Yuwkahoooo! Yawkahoooo! I managed to approximate the sound once or twice, then gave it up.
I sat on a stump and tried to think of the time-cone?which was really called a light-cone, for reasons which then eluded me. And the road. The road that twines back to the heart of mess, to the very core, the impenetrable fastness of Being. Or Nothingness.
That's how drunk I was. When you start capitalizing words with fuzzy meanings, you're either some wild- eyed nineteenth century German philosopher in a pince-nez, or you're very drunk. Possibly both.
I don't know how long I sat there: I thought of Susan, then of Darla, and the distance that had grown between us. Then the Paradox entered my mind, as it had been doing since this whole affair had begun.
But I didn't spend too much time on that. Brain cells were screaming in their death throes. Alcohol, that great shabby beast one always thinks is securely leashed, was turning on me again.
Suddenly, something crashed through the undergrowth and barged into the clearing.
I have an image of an animal somewhere between a giraffe and a kangaroo, with the head of a very strange dog. It resembled no other alien fauna I had ever seen. Yes, the head of a dog… well, not a dog, really. It had horn-shaped ears. Horn, as in musical instrument. Sticking out of either side of the small head. Must have been eight or nine feet tall. And it had purple and pink splotches over its inert yellow plasticine skin. It walked on two legs, and had two prehensile forelegs that dangled spastically as it moved.
Now, this is the part I'm really not sure about at all.
The beast stopped in its tracks when it saw me. It gave a yawp and said, 'Oh! Dearie me, dearie me! Oh!
