Red Limit Freeway

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 synthesized 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 Sukuma-Tayler reported.

I chanced a look back. John, Susan D'Archangelo, and Darla Petrovsky née 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 Land 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 It Isn't.' I think."

"Does that mean jungle? Yeah, well, I guess so," I answered myself. "I just hope there's some kind of civilization. I want Lori to get checked out."

"Does Lori know anything about this part of the Outworlds?" John asked.

"No," Darla said. "She told me she hasn't seen much besides her home planet and Splash."

"Well," I said, "she won't have too much trouble getting back to Splash, if she wants to go. Unless this is a potluck portal." I looked at the rearview monitor. Traffic was still behind us. "But I can't believe all these people are following us into oblivion. This portal must go somewhere."

"We'll all have some decisions to make about where we're going," John said. "Once we stop."

"If there's a place to pull over up ahead, I'll do it," I told him. "We can talk things over."

"I'd just love to get out and stretch my legs," Susan groaned. "Seems like we've been driving for ages."

"Those were unusually long routes between portals," I said. "Wonder why?"

"Judging from the gravity," Roland put in, "and the apparent distance to the horizon, I'd say both Snowball and this place are big, low-density planets. Maybe portals have to be positioned so as to balance out the planet's mass." He shrugged, looking over at me. "Just a wild guess."

"Maybe," I said. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about portals lately ... the Skyway, the cylinders, how the whole system works. Never really gave it much thought before."

"Everyone takes the Skyway for granted," John said. "Simply part of the landscape."

"We can't be so complacent," Roland said ruefully.

"Right," I agreed.

"If I never see this damn road again..." Susan grumbled, shaking her head.

"I'm in sympathy with that," John said. "I think we're all road-weary at this point." He chuckled. "Except for Jake, perhaps. Do starriggers ever get tired of traveling, Jake?"

"You bet--but after a few years, you just get numb. Most of the time, though, I like it. I like the road."

The commit markers were coming up. Here, they were just white-painted metal posts on either side of the roadway. The Roadbuilders hadn't put them there--it was up to local inhabitants to mark the point beyond which it was unsafe to stop. Back in Terran Maze, and in most mazes I'd been in, the markers were more elaborate--flashing lights, holograms, and such.

I checked over the instruments. Everything looked fine.

And just as I shifted my eyes to check the yellow warning tag, it began flashing red.

"Jake," Sam said quietly.

"I see it. Too late to stop. Damn."

"What a time for it."

"Trouble, Jake?" John wanted to know.

"A little. We'll be okay, though."

I hoped fervently. The flashing red didn't mean the roller was going sugar on us--suffering an instantaneous crystallization that could turn the supertraction tread into white congealed powder--but it did mean it could go at any moment. Maybe now, maybe two days from now; there was no way to predict.

We were past the commit markers and racing for the first pair of cylinders. The safe corridor, a narrow land bounded by two solid white lines, rolled out at us. Cross over either of those lines and you've had it. The rig shuddered and groaned, caught in the delicately balanced gravitational stresses around us.

"Keep her steady, Jake," Sam warned, "and be ready for a sudden jump to the right."

The rig shook and buffeted us in our seats.

"This is a rough one," Sam commented. "Just our luck."

I felt the tug of an unseen hand, dragging the rig to the left. I corrected, and suddenly the hand let go, sending us precipitously in the opposite direction. But I was a veteran at this; I hadn't overcorrected, overreacted. This portal was a bit hairy, but I had seen worse. If only the roller would hold.

The cylinders marched by, a stately procession of dark monuments. Between them--I knew but couldn't look--the view of the terrain was refracted into crazy, funhouse-mirror images, work of the powerful gravitational fields.

Ahead was the aperture itself, a fuzzy patch of nothingness straddling the road. We shot straight into it.