"Sure I do!"
"Oh for pity's sake."
"Jake," Roland said, "maybe later, when we're all sober. This array has to be the Local Group. Look, here're the Magellenic clouds, and… let's see… right here would have to be Andromeda and Messier 33―"
"Who's not sober?"
"And these two little puffy things are probably Leos I and Il. Over here are the galaxies in Sculptor and Fornax―"
"Who needs books," a toothless logger with a Strine accent said, "when you got this cobber?"
"Roland is a book."
"Thanks, Suzie. And all these lines," Roland went on, "are Skyway routes. But the interesting question is this. What is this major route coming in from this direction and going off here? Seems to be a major road."
"Very likely," Fitzgore said. "Look at these other things Winnie's done. Could these be galactic clusters connected by a road?"
"I should think they were," Roland answered. "And these cloudlike figures…"
"Metaclusters," I said.
"What're those?" somebody asked.
"Groups of groups. Supergroups of galaxies, all accessible by a major road system."
"Going where. I wonder?" another logger mused.
"To the bloody limit, mate."
"The what?"
"The Beginning," Fitzgore breathed. The very cradle of what-there-is."
"How's that?"
"When you look out at the universe," Roland lectured, his manner a trifle labored―he was drunk― "at faint galaxies and groups of galaxies, you look back through time. Speed of light, relativity, and all that. When you look really far out, as far as the most sophisimicated… sophifimis―" He burped. "'Scuse me. When you use really expensive astronomical stuff, you don't see so much out there. You're looking back to a time when the universe was in a radically different state from what it's in now. Before galaxies formed. You've bumped up against the limit of the perceivable universe, beyond which anything out there is redshifted practically to invisibility."
"You've lost me there."
"It's basic cosmology," Roland contended, his tone suggesting that any six-year-old child would consider it old hat.
"Yes, of course," Fitzgore said, more to himself than to anybody. "Shoot a portal, and you go back through time. If you follow a road leading to the farthest reaches of space, a road at takes you in faster-than-light jumps…"
"You will ultimately come," Roland continued for him, "to a point from which all spacetime flows outward."
"The Big Bang," one of the loggers said.
"Absolutely, if the Skyway goes that far."
"How could it?" somebody asked.
"I have no idea," Roland said, "but that roadbuzz has it that Jake will find out."
"I ain't goin' nowhere," I said. "I'm too goddamn drunk."
Imagine the rising dough of a four-dimensional loaf of raisin bread.
You can't do it. It's impossible to imagine a four-dimensional anything, but it helps to try.
As the dough rises, the volume increases, as does the distance between each raisin. Think of each raisin as a galaxy―really a group of galaxies―and you have the conventional representation of the theory of an expanding universe, first proposed about a century and a half ago. Now, inside the ballooning volume of that dough, the farther away one raisin is from another, the faster their mutual rate of recession―it just works that way geometrically. In the real universe, it happens at galactic clusters can be far enough away from each other to put their recessional speeds at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. Due to the Doppler effect, light from these distant objects, infalling on the instruments of local galactic astronomers, is "redshifted" to great degree, meaning that the lightwaves have decreased in frequency toward the red end of the spectrum. The same thing happens to the sound waves from a passing vehicle's warning signal. You hear the pitch change, go down, decrease in frequency. Light comes in frequencies, too; in the visible part of the spectrum, blue is the high end and red the low. Retreating galactic clusters doppler into the red. Redshift. The farther away they are from us, the more their light is redhifted. As Roland said, astronomers can look out to vast distances these days, using neutrino astronomy and graviton scanning. Once you get past the protogalactic core objects, traditionally called "quasars," you don't see much at all. Anything out that far is a retreating red ghost, exiting our ken at near the speed of light. At these distances, one looks beyond the red limit of the universe. If you can handle the notion that the universe has a boundary, this is it. But there is something beyond.
Pick any point of departure in the present-day universe, any place at all. Travel from there in any direction―you must keep that in mind―at faster-than-light speeds, and you go back in time. Go far enough, and you hit the edge. Go over the edge, and you run smack into Creation.
I pored over Winnie's maps. There.was indeed a major artery linking metaclusters. Roland and I began to fit pages together, with Winnie's help.
"See, Jake? The intercluster road comes in here at Andromeda and exits at the same point. Let's call it the Intercluster Thruway."
"And if you follow it," I said, "you go… wait a minute. Is the Local Group associated with other galactic clusters? Or do we go our own way?"
"I don't know. We'll have plenty of time to check this. It may be that the Intercluster Thruway and the big road, the intermetacluster one, are one and the same, at least locally."
"Okay. So, whatever this big road is, we have to take the Transgalactic Extension to Andromeda in order to pick it up. On the way we hit these little globular galaxies. Did you say you knew the names for them?"
"They're just New General Catalogue numbers. Can't remember."
"Doesn't matter. Okay, you come into Andromeda here, presumably with the option of taking local routes into the galaxy or making a huge jump to the next cluster or metacluster, whatever the case may be."
Roland refilled his mug. "Yes, that's the way it looks."
I sat back and puffed on a long clay pipe someone had handed me. It was charged with an untobaccoish weed. "So what does it all mean?"
"It means," Roland said, "that as you travel the main intermetacluster road, you take backward leaps in time in billions of years."
"Yeah." I puffed. "Yeah. But are we sure of that?"
"No. But put this all together with what we know about how the Skyway works, along with the legends that have grown around you, and it makes sense." Roland was drunker than I was. A dizzy spell hit him, and he shook his head to clear it. "But what the punk do I know," he added thickly.
"I think it makes perfect sense," Fitzgore said. "And I wish to hell I were going with you."
"Where am I going?" I wanted to know.
"To the Big Bang, mate," another of the loggers said.
I nodded toward the maps. "It's one hell of a long way to the end of the road." I slid one sheet over to Fitzgore and pointed to it. "Look at the Local Group map. You pick up the big road in Andromeda. Now, from here, that means you have to somehow get on the Galactic Beltway and go about 10,000 light-years to the rim of the Milky Way. How many road klicks would that be?"
"Doesn't Winnie's journey-poem give some indication?" Fitzgore asked.
"Darla's still working on the translation," I said. "Anyway, you then take the Transgalactic Extension out to this little splotch here. Hey, Roland. What did you say this could be?"
"Huh?"
"Wake up. This little cloud here?"
"Oh. Uh, an undiscovered extra burp galactic star cloud. Makes a nice little bridge to Andromeda."
"Yeah, but even with that, the jump is in the neighborhood of a million light-years."
"Prolly is. Gimme that pitcher, willya?"
"Sure you can handle it, Egg Roll?" a mountain-size logger said.
"Don't call me 'Egg Roll,' you tree-humping moron."
"Easy, son. Didn't mean anything by it."