Red Limit Freeway

I climbed into the cab.

"What's up?" Sam said.

"Let's get out of here," I grumbled. "Leave the whole goddamn bunch of them."

"Now, now. You know you can't."

"Honest to God, sometimes…"

"How many times have I told you not to pick up starhikers?"

"Dammit, Sam, don't you start on me, too!"

"Easy' son. "

I sat in the driver's seat, fuming, until Susan came over, climbed up, and sat in my lap.

"Jake, I'm sorry." She kissed me tenderly and smiled. "I didn't know you were sensitive. You're always so strong―"

"Me? You're kidding."

She didn't argue. Presently, the temperature in the cab rose.

"In case you're wondering," Sam said, "I have my eye turned off."

Susan giggled, then reinserted her tongue into my mouth.

"Hi! Oh, excuse me."

We turned to see Darla walking away. Susan looked at me, some complex feminine emotion taking form inside her head. "Do you―?" she began, then looked away and chewed her lip.

I what, Suzie?"

"Nothing," she said in a lost little voice. Suddenly, she threw her arms around my neck. "Let's sleep in the aft-cabin tonight."

"We have lots of work to do, Suzie."

"Don't you think I'm going to help? After."

"Sure."

Then she hugged me, kissed me on the ear, and said, "I love you, Jake."

And I thought, uh-oh.

We laid in provisions for a long journey. Sean and Liam emptied their larder and packed the trailer with lots of good stuff: homemade preserves, smoked meats, pickles, sausage, old-fashioned canned foods, barrels of potatoes, flour, jars of home-grown herbs and spices, a few cases of hotpak dinners―"We keep those for when we've drunk too much to be able to stand at the stove," Liam said, "but not enough to've lost our appetites"―and cases and cases of beer. They brewed their own, and it was pretty good, if you like your beer dark and syrupy with a 20 percent alcohol content. They threw in all the tools and equipment they owned, some clothes, and about two long tons of camping and survival gear. Even some firewood.

Then we all went out with Winnie and gathered food for her. She taught us to recognize several varieties of fruit and vegetable and root. With everyone helping, we laid in what looked like a year's supply. Through Darla, she told us it wasn't necessary to bring this much; she could find more food on the way. I said it couldn't hurt, secretly doubting that we'd be lucky enough to chance upon another planet that could provide suitable food for any of us.

Before we turned in, we planned our itinerary, trying to coordinate Winnie's maps and her Itinerary Poem with what Sean and Liam could supply in the way of knowledge about the rest of the Outworlds. Darla had been busy translating for the last two days.

"It just goes on and on," she said. "I must have fifty stanzas by now."

"Winnie obviously knows where she's going," John observed.

"As near as we can tell," Roland said, "we hit five more Outworld planets before we exit this maze."

"And not a moment too soon," I said. "In other words, we'll be shooting a potluck portal at that point."

"Right."

"Sean, does this jibe with what you know?"

Sean nodded. "Seems to, though Winnie's descriptions of the planets are rather sketchy."

"The inevitable difficulties," Darla said, "inherent in secondhand translations. The poem is in Winnie's language, which is very different structurally from most human languages. I know only a few word-clusters-there really are no 'words' per se―so Winnie helps by giving me a running translation in English, which she doesn't know as well as Spanish, which she doesn't know well at all. Then I have to make some sense out of it." She took a sip of dark beer and shook her head ruefully. "I'm probably making plenty of mistakes. It's mostly guesswork."

"Under the circumstances," John said, "you're doing a fine job, Darla."

"Thank you."

I reached over and patted Winnie's head. "Smart girl," I said.

Winnie took my hand, jumped up, walked across the table, and plopped down in my lap. She threw her arms around me and hugged, grimace-grinning with her eyes shut tight.

"Affectionate little darling, isn't she?" Sean said.

"Yes, she is," I said. I nuzzled her long floppy ear. "Have you ever noticed that she smells good all the time? Like she's wearing perfume."

"Which is more than you can say for most sentient beings," Sean said.

"Yeah. Anyway, getting back to this…"

"Look here, Jake," Roland said. "This is the Galactic Beltway running through the Orion arm of the galaxy. You see where it cuts across here to the Perseus arm? That's where we have to pick it up."

"How do we know when we reach that point?"

"Well, we won't know." Roland put down his pencil and scratched his head, then smoothed his shock of straight black hair. "That's what's hard about all this. There really is no way of closely correlating the maps and the Itinerary Poem. The Poem is just a long set of directions. Go ten kilometers, turn Ieft, you can't miss it―that sort of thing. By following the itinerary, we'll have a hard time knowing exactly where we are on the galactic map, unless we can make astronomical observations."

"Well," I said, "there's a load of astronomical equipment in the truck, if somebody knows or can figure out how to use the stuff."

"Unfortunately," Roland said, "my knowledge of astronomy is largely theoretical." He tapped the pencil against the waxedwood tabletop. "And spotty at best."

"Did you find anything in that crate of book-pipettes?"

"Not a whole lot. They're mostly monographs and journals. Rarified stuff, pages and pages of equations. But I did find one useful bit of information. The Local Group is associated with a metacluster, and the Milky Way is on the outskirts of it. The nucleus is a galactic cluster in the constellation Virgo."

"So," I said, scratching the fur, over the bony knot between Winnie's ears, which she loved to have done, "that may mean that the big road coming into Andromeda is Red Limit Freeway."

"I don't think so, Jake. If so, it means that the Local Group is isolated from the rest of the metacluster, with no access to the Intercluster Thruway. No, this has to be the Thruway going into Andromeda."

"Why don't we ask Winnie and make sure?" I said.

"Huh?"

"Instead of everybody trying to second-guess her, why don't we come right out and ask?"

Winnie looked at me expectantly.

"Winnie," I said, "can you draw more for us on this map?"

I took the drawing of the Local Group over and put it in front of us. "This one here. Can you show us something that's missing?"

She looked the map over for a moment, then reached out toward Roland. Roland handed her the pencil. Grasping it awkwardly, she scored a line coming in from the right, ending at the Greater Magellenic Cloud. She looked at it, chewing the end of the pencil thoughtfully. Then she continued the line through the cloud and beyond, ending it at the exact point where the "Transgalactic Extension" left the rim of the Milky Way.

"There's the Thruway," I said. "The Transgalactic Extension is part of it."

"Why did she leave it out?" Roland wondered.

"Not important," I said. "And I think I'm beginning to understand why it wasn't important. As John said the other night, this is a tourist itinerary. We're at the edge of the metacluster. We want to leave it, not go into it, so we won't need to bother with the Thruway." I reached out with one arm and gathered in all the papers. "All of this, this whole thing, is definitely not a road atlas of the universe. It's much too incomplete. These maps provide the traveler with a specific route to get to a specific place."