'Is there any old business?' Fitzgore asked.
'I go' a boil on me bum!'
'Any new business?'
'I still go' a boil on me bum!'.
Laffs.
'I move we adjourn!' someone shouted.
'Since no new business has been brought up by the membership, I would like to call the following matter to the membership's attention, if I may be permitted.'
'According to the rules of procedure, the Acting-President must always entertain a motion to adjourn from any member!'
'Not,' Fitzgore retorted, 'when said Acting-President can beat said member's arse to a bloody pulp any time he so desires.'
'You and what regiment of the Home Guard?'
Cheers for the Home Guard.
'This matter can be settled later, but as for now…'
'Outside in five minutes, Fitzgore.'
'I will be honored,' Fitzgore acknowledged. 'As I was saying?'
'Oh, not again. Last time they were so snockered they couldn't see to swing at one another.'
'As I was saying!' Fitzgore roared. Then he cleared his throat and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. 'Brothers and Sisters,' he said quietly. 'It is not often… rather I should say, it is unprecedented for us to have among us as a guest…' He paused for effect as heads turned, searching the room.'… a figure of?how shall I put it??A figure of such epic stature. But that is the case.'
'Who?' someone wanted to know, but many eyes were on me.
'The Skyway,' Fitzgore continued in stentorian tone, 'abounds with legends, myths, tall tales, apocrypha, and general foolishness, all of which are to be taken with a grain of salt, if not the whole bloody cellar and the bloody mine it came from.'
'I think I'm going to puke,' Sam declared.
'But it is rare that one has the profound honor, the exhilarating pleasure, of meeting a protagonist of one of these sagas in the flesh. However, that is our honor and our pleasure this day. Brothers and Sisters, may I present to you?and would you join me in drinking a toast in honor of?'
'You closed the punking bar, you dolt!'
Fitzgore refilled his mug from a nearby pitcher. 'Then I open it again!'
Everyone raised his mug.
'Join me in a toast to that giant of legend, that king of the Skyway, the man who drove into the raging fires of the birthing universe and lived to tell the tale?'
He turned to face me.
'Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you… Jake McGraw!'
Chapter 4
I frankly can't remember all of what went on that night. I know a great deal of alcohol found its way into my system. Events, as I perceived them, became rather… diffuse. Fitzgore and his compatriots turned out to be very good drinking companions. Excellent drinking companions. They bought all of us a round of drinks. We bought all of them a round of drinks. Everybody bought everybody a round of drinks. Serious drinking then commenced. At some point, I found in my field of vision the wavering image of a stein of beer fully three hands high. They called it the Brobdingnagian Thunder Cup.
I drank it.
That was quite late in the evening?I think. Before that, we did a lot of talking. They wanted to know everything about me, about the Roadmap, about everything. I introduced them to Winnie. She's the map, I said. Fine, they said. Let's trot out pencil and paper and see what she knows. Pencil and paper were trotted out. Winnie proceeded to show her stuff, looking like a kindergartner learning the rudiments of writ, pink tongue protruding as she executed cramped figures with arduous dedication. She filled page after page with spirals and other shapes connected by lines.
'By God,' Fitzgore said, 'that's the local group! It must be.' He stroked his psychotic growth of red beard. 'Dammit all, if we had a library on this planet, we could get books to check this.' He tossed off half a stein of beer. 'If we had any books on this planet.'
'I think I've got a few astronomy books in the rig. Matter of fact, there should be a whole crate of 'em. That right, Sam?'
'Yeah, our manifest shows a shipment of book pipettes. But you don't really want go back there and?'
'Sure I do!'
'Oh for pity's sake.'
'Jake,' Roland said, 'maybe later, when we're all sober. This array has to be the Local Group. Look, here're the Magellenic clouds, and… let's see… right here would have to be Andromeda and Messier 33?'
'Who's not sober?'
'And these two little puffy things are probably Leos I and Il. Over here are the galaxies in Sculptor and Fornax?'
'Who needs books,' a toothless logger with a Strine accent said, 'when you got this cobber?'
'Roland is a book.'
'Thanks, Suzie. And all these lines,' Roland went on, 'are Skyway routes. But the interesting question is this. What is this major route coming in from this direction and going off here? Seems to be a major road.'
'Very likely,' Fitzgore said. 'Look at these other things Winnie's done. Could these be galactic clusters connected by a road?'
'I should think they were,' Roland answered. 'And these cloudlike figures…'
'Metaclusters,' I said.
'What're those?' somebody asked.
'Groups of groups. Supergroups of galaxies, all accessible by a major road system.'
'Going where. I wonder?' another logger mused.
'To the bloody limit, mate.'
'The what?'
'The Beginning,' Fitzgore breathed. The very cradle of what-there-is.'
'How's that?'
'When you look out at the universe,' Roland lectured, his manner a trifle labored?he was drunk? 'at faint galaxies and groups of galaxies, you look back through time. Speed of light, relativity, and all that. When you look really far out, as far as the most sophisimicated… sophifimis?' He burped. ''Scuse me. When you use really expensive astronomical stuff, you don't see so much out there. You're looking back to a time when the universe was in a radically different state from what it's in now. Before galaxies formed. You've bumped up against the limit of the perceivable universe, beyond which anything out there is redshifted practically to invisibility.'
'You've lost me there.'
'It's basic cosmology,' Roland contended, his tone suggesting that any six-year-old child would consider it old hat.
'Yes, of course,' Fitzgore said, more to himself than to anybody. 'Shoot a portal, and you go back through time. If you follow a road leading to the farthest reaches of space, a road at takes you in faster-than-light jumps…'
'You will ultimately come,' Roland continued for him, 'to a point from which all spacetime flows outward.'
'The Big Bang,' one of the loggers said.
'Absolutely, if the Skyway goes that far.'
