"And that," Yuri said, "is what the Ahgirr scientists think is going on inside the Black Cube. At any rate, that is their best guess."
We listened to the howl of the slipstream for a while.
"It's almost unfathomable," John said.
"Quite so," Yuri agreed. "Quite so."
"I think it's a neat idea," Susan said. "A Universe Egg." She looked around at everybody, grinning delightedly. "That's what the Cube is. An incubating universe."
"I wonder if it's ours," Roland mused.
Another week went by.
Then another.
The days were featureless, colorless, distinguishable only by the random shape some snippet of conversation or tiny event gave them. I recall a few.
One day, Susan said to me:
"I know you still love Darla. I know it has nothing to do with the baby either. You two are… I don't know. Destined for something. It's bigger than both of you." She crinkled her nose. "That sounds ridiculously overdramatic. I really don't know how to put it."
I asked, "Is this Susan the Teleological Pantheist speaking?"
She put a hand behind my neck, tilted my head down, and kissed me. "This is Susan speaking, who loves you."
And another day Darla made some little joke over breakfast, a passing remark that struck us both funny―I can't recall what exactly―and we laughed as we hadn't done in a long time. And when we were done her face was bright and her cheeks glowed and her eyes looked lovely, the tiny highlights in them like sparks from a cheery hearth-fire.
And Lori making me feel old when she said I reminded her a bit of her grandfather, who had raised her until she was five, and whom she vividly remembered. (When pressed, she admitted her grandfather had been only around thirty-eight when she was born.)
And the fight the Voloshins had over a toothbrush. With their personal effects still in their vehicle, they had lacked certain necessities. Liam had made toothbrushes for both of them, handles whittled from firewood, brushes made ingeniously out of stiff plastic thread from some undisclosed source. Yuri had lost his and Zoya refused to share hers, berating him for being so careless. They didn't speak for three days.
One of Moore's men calling on the skyband, God knows why, or why he thought anybody here would want to talk with him―Krause I think it was, but maybe not―wanting to know how our food was holding out. I asked how theirs was holding out. He said it was getting low. I told him I sincerely hoped what they had left was growing botulism. He thanked me and signed off. He didn't call again.
Susan and Darla had a reconciliation, of sorts, an unspoken one. Susan delivered a typical wisecrack and Darla laughed. Susan looked at her tentatively, then they both laughed. Still, they maintained a warily respectful distance between them.
Ragna saying, "Ah, Jake, friend of mine, I am wearily contemplating the continuation of this merte of the bull."
John spending an hour with the Cube in the palm of his hand, staring at it, then suddenly looking up at me. "Is it possible?" he asked. "Could it be possible?"
I didn't answer.
One day I walked into the cab to find Roland at his favorite post, staring out into an alien night.
"Jake, come and look at this."
I sat in the driver's seat. "What's up?"
"Look at the sky."
I did. There were very few stars, and on one side of the sky, there didn't seem to be any.
"We're on the edge of a galaxy," Roland said. He pointed to his right. "Over here is intergalactic space. Nothingness. Now look over to where the stars are. See the glowing cloud behind them? The disk-edge of the galaxy."
I saw and agreed.
"We've been hitting these planets regularly. Sometimes there are a few stars on the other side and it's hard to tell. But this planet belongs to a star right on the very edge of its galaxy."
Teleologists must cultivate a sense of destiny, I thought. Roland's face glowed with it, and he regarded me with the self-assured smile of a man who relishes his meeting with the inevitable.
"This is it, Jake," he said. "We've been on it almost the whole trip. We're on Red Limit Freeway."
I looked at him solemnly and nodded. "I know," I said. "And at this rate, it won't be long before we reach the end of the road."
Chapter 22
About four weeks into the journey, the Bugs pulled us over for a rest stop. You could call it that, but it might only have been to give the Talltree contingent an opportunity to bury Corey Wilkes. Apparently the strain had been too much for him.
They didn't bury him, though. We had to do it.
We stopped in the middle of one of the most attractive landscapes I had ever seen. It could have been Earth itself.
"Maybe it is," Roland said. "We have no idea where we are in space or in time." He pointed to a range of mountains lifting snow-capped peaks above the horizon. "Those could be the Pyrenees two million years ago. Or maybe the Appalachians."
"I'd be willing to bet," Yuri said, "that we're a bit farther back than that. Several billion, in fact. This might be a planet of a star that lived and died a billion years before Earth's sun was a gleam in the universe's eye."
"Hey, they're getting out!" Carl yelled.
Sean ran into the cab with a handful of weapons, but the men who had come out of one of Moore's vehicles weren't in a position to make a move. Chubby, Geof, and two others were carrying the limp body of Corey Wilkes. They dumped him like a load of garbage just a meter or so from the shoulder, looked around briefly, then returned to their vehicle and shut the hatch. I wondered whether they had done this on their own or at the Roadbug's behest.
I radioed and asked.
"He was beginning to smell a bit," Chubby told me. "So we requested permission to open the hatch and throw 'im out as we were going along. Instead, the Bugs stopped."
"They answered you?"
"No, they just pulled over, and we found we could open up."
"Okay, thanks."
"Right-o."
"Weren't the Bugs afraid they'd escape?" Roland wondered.
"To where, pray tell?" Sean asked, gesturing toward vast expanses of rolling pastureland dotted with stands of tall timber. It all looked friendly and inviting, but there wasn't very much to do out there.
"True."
"The patrol creatures must have had their reasons," Zoya said.
"They have orders to take care of us," Lori said, sounding as if she knew.
"Who?" I asked.
"'The Bugs. They got orders to deliver us safe and in good health. And you can't have a stinky body lying around, can you?"
"Hmmm," I said, and thought about it. Then I asked, "Who ordered them, Lori?"
She looked at me and said impatiently, "The Roadbuilders, of course." She shook her head. "Really, Jake, sometimes you're just a little bit thick. Don't you realize that we're going to meet them? Where do you think they're taking us, on a punking picnic or something?" She rolled her eyes up in exasperation. "Sheesh!"
"Ohhh, I see."
We looked out at Wilkes' pale body.
"We can't just leave him lying there for the local scavengers," Sam said. "Somehow it's just not right."
This surprised the hell out of everybody, including me, but nobody commented.
"You really think?" I asked halfheartedly.
"Look, as far as I'm concerned, Wilkes was the lowest form of life in the known universe. But he was human, dang it, and if he deserves to rot in hell, which he surely does, he also deserves a decent burial―or the best one we can give him." Sam grumbled to himself for a moment. "Besides, I think we should do it because we're better than he was."