The Lost Puzzler Page 14

  He stroked the steering wheel gently. “I’ve asked her about them Tarkanians but she doesn’t like to talk about them.” He smiled. “Remember this for the future, boy: every woman needs a few secrets from her man, but not the other way around.” When Rafik’s face stayed blank, Captain Sam shrugged and chuckled to himself. “Well, the road you pass is behind you, that’s what we truckers say. Each SuperTruck is unique, and we lose one or two every year.” He shook his head. “Why anyone would try to stop a SuperTruck is beyond me. People are just plain stupid, or crazy, or both.”

  They lapsed back into silence. Captain Sam asked Sweetheart for the controls, and he drove himself for a while, steering the huge wheel. It seemed to Rafik the speech made Captain Sam sad, so he resisted the urge to ask more questions. There was not much for him to watch except trees and vegetation, and soon his mind started to replay the dramatic scenes of the day.

  “Khan? Are you asleep?” he asked softly.

  Khan, who’d had his eyes closed during the entire conversation, stirred a bit before answering reluctantly, “What is it?”

  “Is Dominique in heaven?”

  There was a long pause, during which both men were silent, then Khan said, “She’s in heaven, Rafik. I’m sure she is.”

  Rafik thought about it for a while. He didn’t want to upset Khan, but he was worried about Dominique. The holy scripts were very clear about letting only virtuous women into heaven, and he was pretty sure that Dominique did not fit that description. She drank cursed water all the time, wore far too little, and although she was loyal to her man literally to the end, she was in the habit of speaking so suggestively to the other men in her bar that she made even a few of the hardened truckers blush and many of their women angry. Rafik didn’t believe that Dominique would easily be admitted into heaven, but he desperately wanted her to be let in. He heard the Captain say, “Sorry about your gal,” and Khan replied something in a voice too low to discern. Perhaps Dominique was waiting to be judged by the Reborn Prophet right now, her life of sin weighed against her last heroic act. It suddenly occurred to Rafik that perhaps there was something he could do to help.

  “Can you tell me which way is east?” he asked aloud. A screen near his seat flashed an arrow pointing in the right direction, although Sweetheart warned him that the direction would change in a short while.

  For the first time since they began the journey, Rafik decided to speak to the Sweetheart directly. “Please let me out of my seat,” he asked, turning his head to the speaking tube.

  “Why do you need to move?” Sweetheart asked.

  Rafik touched the glove he was wearing. “I need to pray for my friend Dominique, so she can go to heaven.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too dangerous to let you do that now, Rafik, if we come to a sudden halt—”

  “Oh, slow down and let the boy pray,” the Captain said while keeping his gaze levelled at the road.

  The binds uncoiled themselves from around his body, and Rafik knelt down inside the SuperTruck, under the array of hanging sausages and beside the barrels. He did not have the holy book of the New Prophecies with him, of course, and he would have been forbidden from touching the book with his hands even if he did, so he just crossed his arms over his heart and uttered the words he could remember in the ancient tongue he’d never truly mastered. After the prayer he reverted to the secular tongue and begged softly, in his own words, to the one God and his Prophet Reborn to let Dominique’s soul into heaven because she was a good person and gave her life to save others, and surely that was a great deed worth far more than any small sins she might have committed.

  During his prayer, neither of the two men uttered a single word.

  Rafik was suddenly tired. He climbed back into his seat and found out to his surprise that it turned into a very comfortable bed. But as soon as he closed his eyes he saw Jakov walking into the bar and the two truckers falling down with blood spurting from their open chest wounds. He could smell the blood and hear the gunshots and Martinn screaming and Dominique’s muffled voice behind the closed iron door. He desperately tried to think of something else. The wall of symbols sprang to life in front of his closed eyes. It was soothing. He could block out all the other memories by concentrating on the wall and playing with the symbols.

  The next thing he remembered was Captain Sam waking them up, cheerfully declaring that they’d arrived at the Tarakan highway. The SuperTruck tilted at a sharp angle as it climbed up to the new surface. The only thing that Rafik knew about the highway was that it had been built by the Tarakan infidels to help vanquish and enslave all of the surrounding people. Looking at the glowing yellow road, ten times as wide as Sweetheart’s hull and stretching as far as the eye could see, he could not feel anything but awe and curiosity.

  “Pure Tarakan built,” said the Captain, as if reading the boy’s mind, “still as smooth as a baby’s bottom and specifically made to get SuperTrucks where they need to go as fast as possible. Without these roads Newport would be a hamlet no one would bother to visit, and people would have no way to carry out commerce beyond the next village. The north has steel and the oil refineries—that used to be the human’s way of getting their trucks to drive. You know about fuel, don’t you, boy?”

  He glanced down at Rafik, who nodded. You don’t get to serve tables in a bar filled with truckers without picking up a thing or two. Captain Sam nodded in satisfaction. “Well, problem is, the north has oil but the cold makes it hard to grow enough food. The south, on the other hand, has plenty of crops but no oil to feed their machines. The west has wood and coal and the east is good for sulphur, tin, and silver.” Captain Sam thumped his thick hand on the steering wheel. “Everyone has something to sell and something to buy, so this is where we come in. Unfortunately, in some parts of the land the Tarakan highway was destroyed, and we have to drive on human roads, but without the Tarakan highway and the SuperTrucks it would take days instead of hours, or weeks rather than days to go from place to place, and everyone would be left to fend for themselves.”

  Rafik looked out again. Except where the road met the Tarakan highway, it curved upwards on both sides, and a wall, about half the height of Sweetheart, divided it in the centre. Even though the Captain told him that Sweetheart’s windows were cancelling out most of the glare, the entire Tarakan highway glowed bright.

  “You need a special cover for your eyes if you stop too close to the Tarakan highway at night,” explained the Captain. “It stores energy from the sun during the day and somehow makes light into energy, which actually powers up the SuperTrucks as you drive on it. If you know your truck and are smart about the way you handle it, as long as you drive on the Tarakan highway you’ll never run dry. I’m telling you, those Tarkanians knew their business. Now watch this, boy.” He pressed a few buttons. “Let’s move, Sweetheart, the highway is calling.”

  “Initiating, Captain.” The humming noise grew into a loud growl.

  Watching the screens, Rafik saw how eight large plates lowered themselves from underneath Sweetheart, lodged themselves into the surface of the highway and pushed the entire SuperTruck up in the air. The giant wheels turned inwards and from their centres sprouted large metal tubes.

  Rafik gripped his seat as the SuperTruck rocked and heaved, but then Sweetheart announced something regarding internal stabilizers, and the movement soon subsided, leaving the vehicle suspended on nothing but air. “Beats me how this happens,” the Captain declared with unconcealed pride as the plates withdrew back into the truck. “Sweetheart told me it was something called a magnetic field, but I don’t care if it is Tarkanian voodoo. After Sweetheart here, it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. And now comes the fun part.”

  Through the screens Rafik watched in awe as all around the SupertTruck several large metal tubes emerged. For a few heartbeats everything seemed to freeze in its place as the normally soft humming sound grew into a roar, and then a burst and a flash of blue light came out of the metal tubes, and the
entire bulk of Sweetheart shot forward so fast, Rafik’s body crashed back into his seat.

  “Groovy, eh?” bellowed the Captain above the noise. “I just love that part!”

  “How . . . fast are we going?” asked Khan, his own hands gripping the sides of his seat. It was the first time he’d talked in a long while.

  “Oh, eighty at the moment, but we’re just warming up,” answered the Captain happily. “Don’t worry, the noise level will calm down in a few minutes, then we’ll go faster, much, much faster.”

  Rafik’s jaw dropped as he tried to imagine the distance they were travelling. The south fields of his village were the farthest he’d travelled before setting off to Newport, and that would take an hour of walking. He tried to calculate how long it would take him to go back to his village and realised that without Captain Sam and his Sweetheart it would take him a year or even a lifetime to get back. Would he ever be able to go back home? Images of his family and friends flashed before Rafik’s eyes. He felt his throat tighten and fought for control as Fahid’s voice berated him: Don’t cry like a little girl, Rafik, how do you want to fight bandits? Real men never cry. With a quick gesture he wiped away a few tears that managed to escape and bit his lower lip hard.

  Captain Sam pressed a few buttons, then swung out of the driver’s seat, leaving the wheel of the SuperTruck under Sweetheart’s control. “Are you okay, boy?” he asked. When the boy nodded, he added “I know exactly what you need” in a cheerful voice. He climbed down to the main cabin, plucked a giant sausage from behind Rafiks’s seat, and threw it at the boy’s lap before getting one for himself. He took a ravenous bite from it before pouring cursed water from one of the barrels into a metal mug and gulping it down so fast it wet his long beard. With meat in one hand and a sloshing mug in the other, Captain Sam turned back to Rafik and Khan.

  “Now boys,” he asked, his grin full of sausage. “Who wants some entertainment?”

  23

  So engrossed was Rafik with what Captain Sam called Sweetheart’s Internal Entertainment System, that he hardly noticed how the next five days passed them by. At first it was just the stories on the screen, which showed real people doing very exciting things and sometimes also kissing. They were made a long time ago, before the forces of God drove the Tarakan infidels away and the Prophet was Reborn. Each screen story was different, although a few had the same people in them. Rafik couldn’t figure out everything he saw, but he did learn that people used to live in huge cities, chased each other a lot in small, horseless vehicles called cars, constantly shot at each other, and kissed in public a lot, something that was forbidden in Rafik’s village even between husband and wife, but in the stories no one seemed to mind.

  There were 3,073 such screen stories in Sweetheart’s memory. Captain Sam didn’t know how all of them got into Sweetheart’s mind, but he knew them all by heart, sometimes mouthing the words to himself as they were uttered by the people on the screen. He told Rafik he could choose any story he wanted to see from the long list of names, except for some that he said were only for grown-ups. The movies were exciting, and although some of the actions reminded Rafik of his last day in Newport, all the people he liked seemed to be okay in the end. This made him think of Dominique again, and he became sad.

  Still, Rafik thought screen stories were the best thing he ever saw, until he discovered that Sweetheart’s entertainment system contained seven thousand games . . .

  Games were like the screen stories, but you got to be the hero and move about and do things by touching the screen, flailing with your hands, or moving in your chair, and Rafik thought that was by far the best thing he’d ever experienced, far better than warriors and infidels, but then he found the puzzle games. They were not like the wall of symbols in his dreams, but some worked on the same principles. There was a game in which you could manipulate falling objects and create whole lines, which then disappeared with a satisfying popping sound. Later he found a game where you had to press colours and symbols in long sequences, and another in which you touched a multitude of sequences among meaningless yet ever accelerating flashing symbols. Rafik got so absorbed in the puzzles he forgot all about the screen stories and the other games and even stopped thinking about Dominique and Martinn.

  At the beginning Rafik played these games one after another, alternating every so often, until, to his delight, Sweetheart suggested he divide the screen into several smaller sections so he could play them all simultaneously. Captain Sam showed genuine amazement at this, although Rafik did not think it was such a great feat. He played until his eyes hurt, then slept, but kept playing with the wall of symbols in his dreams. In one such dream he managed to hold twenty symbols at once. This gave Rafik enormous satisfaction and peace of mind. He was getting better. Life was getting better. On the third day of travel, he completely forgot to pray.

  Apparently, they were driving very fast now, covering in one day a distance that would take many months via pony cart and years on foot. The land around them was mostly wilderness, but they passed the occasional abandoned city, places so wrecked by the Catastrophe that no one but the most desperate looters and greediest of Salvationists dared visit. The ruined cities were too far to see in detail, but the sight of them made Rafik feel uneasy, and he would go back to the puzzle games. Every once in a while, the Captain would try to get Rafik’s attention by pointing out an interesting landmark, such as a mountain range or a river, but Rafik was too absorbed in his games to really care where he was. He even politely refused to learn Captain Sam’s card game, but the trucker didn’t seem to mind, saying, “Ah well, better that you don’t know about those things. Bring you only grief, those cards, unless you really know how to play.”

  They didn’t drive all the time on the Tarakan highway, because, Rafik learned, it was broken in many places. The Catastrophe destroyed parts of the highway, and floods, storms, and earthquakes had left their marks over the years. Captain Sam even told stories about a group he called “a bunch of crazy flat tyres” who, for reasons known only to themselves, destroyed a whole section of the southern road with ancient explosives before being demolished themselves. When Sweetheart exited the Tarakan highway, travelling felt pony-cart slow, although Captain Sam assured Rafik they were still going faster than any cart could travel.

  Every few hours the Captain insisted on stopping somewhere “for a rest,” although it seemed to Rafik that he was not doing anything resembling hard work during the drive. Khan tried to dissuade the Captain from making too many stops, but the trucker insisted it was good for Sweetheart to rest every couple of hours. “And with her, I always think long-term.”

  The scheduled stops annoyed Rafik, as he had to stop playing games. He joined Khan in urging the Captain to continue the voyage simply so he could get back to his puzzles. But the trucker wouldn’t budge. Even if they were on the Tarakan highway he would ask Sweetheart to exit to a normal road, drive a bit until they found a remote area, and stop there. Captain Sam would insist that Rafik give Sweetheart’s entertainment system a rest and “stretch his bones.” It was by far the most boring part of the journey, except for the time they stopped near a forest and Sweetheart forbade them from going out because of roaming wild hogs. Rafik was happy to stay inside, especially because Sweetheart had her very own shit shed. It was very small but really clean, and it even smelled nice.

  Two or three times a day, Sweetheart would announce that they were being hailed by another SuperTruck; this would be followed by mutual scans and then there would be a conversation between the Captain and the other trucker. They could even see each other on-screen, and although Sweetheart protested every time, saying it wasn’t true, the Captain kept telling the other drivers that his visual equipment was faulty and didn’t let them see the interior of his SuperTruck. The other truckers seemed to be taking the Captain at his word and didn’t mind. They had colourful and imaginative names such as Oil Rat Larry, Buttocks Brian, and Sunshine Suzette, who was Captain Sam’s favourite lad
y trucker.

  The other SuperTrucks had names, too. The first one was called Road Cutter, the other Wolf Leader, and Sunshine Suzette called hers Hope Wagon, but that was because she was carrying with her something she called “the light of belief.”

  The truckers exchanged gossip, news of the road, warnings of pirate activity, and weather reports. All topics of conversation were spiced with rude jokes, halfhearted insults, and a rich variety of colourful profanities, especially from Buttocks Brian.

  Captain Sam tried to keep the dirty talk to a minimum, glancing worriedly at Rafik and smiling apologetically at Khan, even though Khan was mostly pretending to be asleep or staring off into the distance. The boy wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the conversations—he was completely fixated on Sweetheart’s most challenging puzzles.

  When the SuperTrucks finally passed each other they would slow their speeds and honk their horns and flash their lights, but even at the slower speed they were going it was over in a blink of an eye.

  It was no wonder that Rafik didn’t even lift his head from the screen when Sweetheart first announced that they were being scanned.

  “Well . . . that’s not polite,” muttered the Captain. “Scan back and ask for identification.”

  “Our scanner is out of reach,” announced Sweetheart matter-of-factly.

  “Rust,” said the Captain. “I should have upgraded you, love.”

  There was an odd moment where everyone in the cabin was tense and silent, until Sweetheart suddenly declared “Scanner dropped off.”

  The Captain checked the screens. “Nothing on our radar?”

  “Nothing, Captain. The scanner was more than ten miles away.”

  “Trouble?” Khan straightened in his seat, looking alert for the first time in days.