"Then shut up and gimme that pitcher, or I'll teach you
some punking manners."
"You'll find me a willing pupil, mate. Anytime you've got the tune."
"The time," Roland breathed, struggling to his feet, "is now. Would you care to take the evening air with me, sir?"
"I would indeed."
"Gee, that rhymes," Susan said, nose wrinkling as she smiled. "Would you care… to take the eve-ning airrr…" She had a good singing voice.
"Oh, Roland," John said. "Sit down. Your honor has hardly been besmirched."
Susan laughed.
"'Besmirched'?" I said. "How 'bout just smirched?" I took a good inhale on the pipe and let it out. "Never did understand what the `be' was for."
Roland and the logger left.
"Well, anyway―"
In another part of the bar, someone fell, or was thrown, over a table.
Fitzgore said, "You were saying, Jake?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah. What I was going to ask was―did you ever hear of a portal jump of that distance?"
"Hardly. But who knows?"
"Just what the hell is in this pipe, if I may ask?"
"Cruising weed, we calls it," someone said.
"Cruising weed. I've been inhaling this shit."
"Good idea, that."
"Pretty good shit, actually."
"Have some more beer, Jake," Fitzgore said, sloshing suds into my mug.
"Don't mind if I do, thank you." I relit the pipe with a long kitchen match. "Uh, your buddy there… he's got at least fifty kilos on Roland."
"Liam won't hurt him. He's a good man, Jake. Never hurt anyone, so far as I know."
"Well, I guess it's okay, then." I took a deep drag on the pipe. The weed was rather good, in its own way. Not smooth on the draw, but satisfying. Rather peppery. At any rate, I was cruising along just fine. "Getting back to the issue at hand," I went on. "My guess is we're talking about millions of kilometers of road, billions maybe, to get to the big road―the whachmacallit. Red Limit Freeway."
Fitzgore's eyes lit up. "Fine name for it!" Then he shook his head. "Not that much, Jake. It would be a long trek, surely, but I should think it would depend on the distances covered by each jump along the Galactic Beltway." He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. "Maybe there's a shortcut somewhere."
I nodded. "Maybe. Still…" I took the pipe from my mouth and used it to point at one of Winnie's drawings. "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.