The island was a trade-fair of vehicle design. There were objects lying about that didn't look like vehicles at all, odd geometrical shapes and flowing, melted things giving no clue as to how they moved. There were humans here too, waiting patiently like everyone else. And rigs as well, strangely enough. I asked one starrigger when the ferry was due in.
"She'll be in," was all he said, and spat in the sand.
"Thanks." I walked away.
The harbor was large but did not look deep, though the water's clearness may have been distorting. I was puzzled by the fact that there wasn't a dock or pier or anything in sight. Instead, at the apex of the deep indentation that formed the harbor, a graded section of beach angled steeply into the water. The sand looked packed and hard mere.
"What do you make of it?" I asked Roland.
"A hydroskiff?"
I rubbed the scratchy stubble of my beard. "Funny, when I heard 'ferryboat' I thought of just 'that, a water-displacing vessel of some kind. Besides, you'd want flat beach to pull up on."
"Right. Things seem primitive enough here, at least as far as humans are concerned. Maybe it is a boat."
"Well," I yawned, "we'll see eventually." I plopped myself down on the sand.
Winnie was drawing again, and this time I watched her. She made one big spiral figure, smaller ones nearby, and linked them with lines. I was intrigued, and asked Darla if Winnie had explained.
"Something to do with her tribal mythology," Darla told me. "Haven't figured out what it's all about." Her answer gave me the ever-so-slight feeling that she was being evasive in some way. But no, she was just tired and didn't want to be bothered. Still, I wondered. Winnie now was drawing lines within the big spiral. I went over to her, knelt in the sand, and asked her as clearly as I could what she was doing.
"Twee, many twee," she said, indicating the large figure. "But not like twee… like light! Many big twee like light." She pointed to the smaller spirals. "Many light, many light, many light…" I couldn't follow the rest of it, but if she was talking about galaxies and the Skyway linking them, it'd be a remarkable mythology indeed, if it weren't for the fact that it could have been learned by osmosis from contact with humans. That was the most likely explanation. A more sensational interpretation was an old pitfall some anthropologists in the past had spent time at the bottom of. Many light, many light… Winnie had passed through the Great Trees at the Edge of the Sky and was now in the realm of the gods, plying the paths through a forest of stars. Or whatever. As I watched her I again felt some share of guilt for what humans had done to her natural habitat, and wondered if there could have been any way to avoid it. Surely there was more jungle on Hothouse than Cheetah homeland. I couldn't imagine the species' total population planet-wide as being anything over a few hundred thousand, if that, but I wasn't sure. Hothouse wasn't all jungle, of course. True, there were millions of square kilometers of rain forest, but the planet had more ocean surface man Terra, plus the usual assortment of climates. It boasted icy polar continents, though small ones, deserts, plains, everything. The problem was that a lot of the tropic regions were parched and uninhabitable, and temperate areas were scarce due to the fact that Hothouse's land masses were bunched up around the equator. Mulling it over, I soon had it figured out: Winnie's people had naturally settled in rich food-gathering areas. These same areas of jungle produced high yields of organic raw materials used for a wide range of products, including antigeronic drugs ― definitely the most lucrative cash crop ever. Hothouse was one of the few sources for them.
I looked at the web of lines within the big spiral. She'd executed them meticulously. The lines crisscrossed the entire figure, and I was curious as to how she could be so definite about them if they were mostly imaginary. Well, she'd learned the pattern from somebody, who'd learned it from somebody else, who'd learned it from…? Did the Cheetah who started the tradition have an active imagination… or could the pattern be based on fact? More to the point, was it possible that Winnie's people could have had contact with alien cultures long before humans invaded their planet? Yes, not only possible, but probable. And could they have picked up hints of where major Skyway routes led throughout the galaxy? Yes, it was ' possible all right, and I should have thought of it immediately.
Something dawned on me, and the'very thought of it made me laugh out loud. Absurd, no? Winnie's sand drawings… the Roadmap? Couldn't be. This was no map, merely a stylized rendering. Fascinating cultural phenomenon, yes ― but an accurate map of the most labyrinthine road system in the universe? Not even close. First, you'd want to know what portals to take, and you'd need supplementary planetary maps for that. Make the first right, go x number of kilometers, etc. And you'd want to know what stars were on the routes, what part of the galaxy you were in, and all that. There was a limit to how detailed you could get in the medium of sand and stick. No, it seemed to me that a proper Skyway map would be not only three-dimensional, but hyperdimensional as well. Graphically impossible perhaps, but you'd need some sort of mathematical understanding of how the time element worked into the picture. Over long distances you'd want to keep an eye on the curve of the geodesic, since every jump involved some time displacement. Simple relativity. And somewhere along the line, according to legend, the geodesies took weird shortcuts and closed up "timelike loops," causing you to double back on yourself, or do something even more outrageous.
But the more I thought about it, the more the idea grew on me. No, I could never convince my self that this was the vaunted Roadmap, but what if everybody thought it was? I tried that on for size. Maybe the Reticulans wanted Winnie ― maybe they came to the farm to kidnap her. But how could they have found out about her mapping abilities when I had just learned myself? If they knew about it before me, they could have grabbed Winnie at the motel anytime. Unless… unless ― ridiculous! It was all nonsense. Well, what else? Let's see, how about this ― maybe they're figuring this way. They see me shoot a potluck portal. They know I didn't have the Roadmap on my person, since the Militia didn't get it… and they're thinking, wait a minute, what's this guy doing? He must have the map. Sam doesn't have it, because Sam didn't shoot the portal. Hell, maybe they disabled Sam and searched him. So Sam's out, and they think ― well, what the hell does he have, since he barely got out of the station with his skin? The Cheetah! It must be her, because why the hell did he bother bringing her along? Yeah, that's it. The Cheetah. Sic 'im, Fido. Get that map.
Oh hell, Sam back there disabled and helpless, and me here on the other side of nowhere. No, think a minute. Wouldn't they have let Sam shoot the portal and then search him? Because if they saw Sam turn around and go back, or hesitate, then they wouldn't bother with him. In that case I'd have to have the map, otherwise I'd be expecting Sam to shoot through. But if all that were true, why didn't Sam shoot the portal? What happened to him?
I gave up, slumped back into the sand, and threw my arm across my face.
"Darla?"
"Yes, Jake?"
"Are you keeping a lookout?"
"Uh-huh."
"Good girl. G'night."
"Sleep tight."
13
It was a ferryboat.
Rather, that's what it looked like when it first appeared above the horizon. Then it started looking strange. There was a boat there all right, or at least the superstructure of one, but close to the waterline something else was going on. Far out, it looked like a ship run aground on a shoal, but as we watched, the shoal moved with the boat ― it looked like it was carrying the boat. Other objects appeared, globular translucent things in the water, and as the whole improbable apparition neared shore, they looked like inflated bags bobbing in the water at the edges of the dark line of land. The overall impression I got was one of a shipwrecked vessel plunked down on top of an island. There was even some vegetation growing here and there.