by John Barnes
The real elegance, however, was in the curves of the slim, deadly-looking fuselage, and the rearward sweep of the outward-splayed rudders on the ends of the short stabilizer. It wasn’t the fastest ship built, by far, but it looked like it damned well should be.
Every time I sat at the controls, my heart warmed and my spirit leaped up. It had indeed been too long since I’d had her out for a long trip.
“Mr. Peripart, I am looking very good on my autocheck,” the Skyjump said, “with nothing outside normal range.”
“Is there anything near the edges of its range?” I asked. You have to do that kind of thing if you want a really taut vehicle; just like freshmen or recruits, precision doesn’t come naturally to them, and it has to be carefully taught and reinforced. Otherwise they get sloppy and imprecise, and then the only warnings you get are from the human protection hardwired modules, which have an unnerving habit of activating with a siren sound and a proclamation of “Danger! Danger! Immediate Attention Required! Range Exceeded on Interior Lighting Voltage” or the like. If you won’t teach them judgment, they won’t learn it.
“Just two things, Mr. Peripart,” the boat said. “Emergency coolant for my brain is only nine percent above minimum, and variable blade pitch in number two engine is requiring sixteen percent more force than expected. I believe the cause of the latter is probably some missed lubrication the last time I was serviced, Mr. Peripart.”
“Very well, then,” I said. “Order replacement coolant and have the marina bring it around. You would be authorized to do that without my needing to approve it. And I’ll go have a look at the blades in number two. If you suspect that you’ve been ill-maintained, from now on you are to call me about it as soon as you become aware of it.”
“Very well, Mr. Peripart,” the Hepburn voice said, with studied graciousness. Some expats preferred Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, and there were even a few fans of Judy Garland, but I always felt like the Hepburn voice sounded the way I needed it to sound—like a competent first officer ready to do her duty. When you’re making ballistic leaps as big as a sixth of the way around the planet, it’s reassuring—however illusory—to feel like the hemispherical black lump under your chair is a trusted comrade.
Sure enough, the jump boat was right; the lubricating wells hadn’t been topped up, and when she’d done an engine check on herself earlier today, she’d probably released a few bubbles in the system, resulting in just low enough levels of the high-temperature silicon grease to make the variable pitch blades move a little roughly. I got a can of the grease and topped up the wells, had her run a quick engine check, and topped them up again. Meanwhile a courier robot rolled onto our gangplank and delivered the coolant direct to the boat’s supply, so that we were now truly ready to go.
I took another ten minutes to crawl around on her, partly because she was beautiful and it was such a pleasure to own her, and partly so that I could talk to her about things that she ought to worry about, keeping her properly fixated on safety and reliability issues.
Even with all the careful going over, when we pulled out of the slip and began the slow crawl out into Auckland harbor and thence to the appointed place for starting our jump run, we were still a good half hour early. Traffic was light today, at least for a Friday morning, and the tower control didn’t seem to think they’d have any problem squeezing me in.
Of course the Skyjump could take me to where I was going all by itself—some people routinely sat in the passenger seats in back of their jump boats, except during the legally required phase of landing—but there would have been no fun in that. I took her out of the harbor manually, just as God and the Wrights intended, the small propulsion pump thrumming away below me as we made the long slow crawl, in which one is merely a very awkward motorboat, out to the jump point. There must have been little traffic on the trajectory I was taking, for approval came through for an early jump almost immediately.
With a thrill of the pleasure that never got old, I pointed the nose into the appointed jump corridor and kicked in the main thrusting pumps to bring the boat up to hydroplaning at 110 knots. At that speed you start to feel like you’re doing something—the whole hull shakes and thunders, pushing and bumping against your feet, the main engines howl up to speed as they drive the turbines that drive the pumps, and the great rooster tail of white spray streams three stories tall behind you.
I exalted in that sensation for half a minute until we entered the area where takeoff was authorized; the six countdown lights across the panel in front of me began to wink on, and as the sixth came on, I triggered the launch sequence that I had loaded into the Skyjump’s brain—no human nervous system has the reaction time to handle an accurate suborbital jump.
In much less than a second the wing rotated into position to lift the Skyjump instead of holding it down, the pumps hurled the last water out of the jets on the bottom of the fuselage, and the twin jet engines cut their turbines and went to full thrust, lifting the boat out of the water and shoving me back far into my seat as the boat climbed to gain altitude. For half a minute I hung there as the Skyjump flew itself, and Katharine Hepburn’s voice counted off the increasing meters of altitude. The nose crept up toward nearly vertical, the engines screamed until they entirely took over the job of lift from the wings, the condensers extracted liquid oxygen from the air to fill the jump tanks, and the sky began to grow darker.
I whooped from pure pleasure, as always, at the brief, terrifying lurch as the engines shut down and the wings furled. Then, its wings tucked back like a peregrine’s, the boat went over to rocket power, feeding the pure liquid oxygen, which it had made minutes ago, into the engines and rising on a towering plume of flame, on a long trajectory outward away from the Earth. The sky darkened to black, the horizon below contracted away from me into a curve, and the gentle balanced tugging of the wings was replaced by the shudder of the rocket engines. A few minutes later, the bulldozer blade of acceleration ceased to bury me in my seat, and a wonderful silence fell on the cockpit and passenger space. Now, for about twenty minutes, I would be as weightless as the Germans themselves in their orbiting cities.
It’s always a grand ride, and I was in an appreciative mood today. I wasn’t even annoyed by the three visible glowing sparks of the German space cities that hang forever above the equator, nor by the soft ping at apogee that reminded me of the restrictions on altitude and speed imposed by the German Global Launch Control System, things I usually resented. It was an exceptionally clear day for late May, and I could clearly see most of the Dutch Reich East Indies in front of me. I unbelted and let myself float up out of my seat, hanging suspended in the middle of the cabin, just taking in the view of near space and the Pacific below. About the time that the island of Java settled into the center of the windscreen, and was growing noticeably larger, there was another chime, and the Skyjump said, “Time to get back into your seat, Mr. Peripart.”
I belted in, checked everything, and was getting ready for my landing approach when Surabaya Control hailed me and told me that automatic landings were required today. That was why I had stopped flying into Batavia a few years ago—there were almost no times when you could land on manual there—and now it sounded as if Surabaya might be going the same way. I grumbled to myself but I turned over the control to the Skyjump and said, “All right, stay on the trajectories they give you, and take us down nice and easy.”
“As you wish, Mr. Peripart,” the Skyjump said.
A minute later, the keel was biting air and we were leveling off in a supersonic glide that would spiral around the island twice as we spilled enough speed to be able to deploy the wings. I got coffee from the dispenser by my side, settled back, and enjoyed the view and the ride.
At last the wings deployed and we glided down toward Surabaya itself. The sky lightened to a pleasant blue, clouds far below us drew nearer, and finally we burst through a flock of fluffy cumulus clouds to see the dappled Pacific outside the harbor. We swooped down to the surface,
graceful as a big goose coming down onto a pond, and splashed to a gentle landing. The pumps cut in, and the Studebaker joined a long parade of small craft motoring sedately into the harbor. I’d rather have been doing this myself, but I had seen enough of other people’s piloting skills so that I could well understand why the port authorities wanted everyone to just let the robots drive.
Entering the harbor, most of the small craft and the jump boats went off to starboard, into the public docks, but my Studebaker Skyjump went hard to port, heading for the ConTech company piers. ConTech had built a large island where it would act as a breakwater for the mouth of the harbor, making Surabaya a better port than ever, and the land side of the artificial island was a wonder of tall buildings, domes, ramps, and antennae, as if the complex compound eye of some giant insect were peering at the city across the water.
The Skyjump did her best to get me across in a comfortable manner, but busy harbors don’t really have much room to be accommodating, and the straight course that traffic control set for us made it choppy at the speed they wanted. I was shaken and irritable by the time the Skyjump moved into her appointed slip. She extended the gangplank and said, “Shall I power down, Mr. Peripart?”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. I expect to be away several hours.”
As I went up the gangplank, awkward with my suitcase and computer, I could hear the Skyjump shutting down behind me, and the moment I was off the gangplank, it retracted it, and the metal shutters slid over the windows and air intakes. The jump boat lay tied up by a painter, waiting to reactivate when it next heard my voice or got a phone call from me. I turned to see whether anyone was coming for me, and saw only a mob of kids running up to try to sell cheap souvenirs. I made sure I had a good grip on my suitcase and my computer, and that my wallet was in the inside front pocket of my coat.
The kids had almost gotten close enough for the front-runners to touch me, shouting for my attention and waving little bits of worthless junk over their heads, when a siren shrieked behind them. As one, they fell silent and turned to see a gigantic black limousine roaring down the pier toward them.
“Move it, you little bastards, or I’ll grind you to meat under my wheels!” the onrushing machine screamed in German, then in Dutch, then English, and finally in what I imagine must have been one or more local languages. The kids took it seriously enough, jumping off the pier into the water and dog-paddling away, some cursing and spitting.
I stood transfixed, not sure what to do; I had never seen a machine behave this way. I knew that in the Twelve Reichs, artificial intelligences had some limited civil rights and were generally less apologetic and more brusque than in Oz or Enzy, but I’d never seen anything like this before.
The black limo screamed to a halt in front of me, and said, “Howdy, Mac, I guess you’re Dr. Peripart.”
“I am,” I said. “And you’re from ConTech?”
“We’re both batting a thousand, Mac.” The limo popped its boot open and I dropped my computer and suitcase in; a moment later the door opened, and I got into the roomy, comfortable backseat.
“They sure let you play rougher with the kids than the cars in Enzy are allowed to do,” I said.
“Eaaah, not as much as you’d think. I can sass ‘em and scare ‘em but I’m not allowed to hurt them. I’ve got four big old gyro brakes on this thing—I can stop in a real short time in a pinch, because I can put so much force against the tire. Plus if I need to I can deflate the tires partway on cue, so that I get more surface area. Ninety to nothing in forty feet, Mac—it makes a difference.”
“Do you do that with passengers in here?”
“Only when your seat belt is on. The gyros also help keep me from rolling over, and do a ton of other useful stuff. But this trip is smooth and level, Mac—boss’s orders. In fact the only way you’ll get a rough ride is if I have to do something to save a pedestrian—once I spilled somebody’s drink on them, stopping for some old idiot that didn’t look where she was going before she stepped off the curb, and once I pulled a kid who fell out of a car out of traffic—had to take a hit myself to do it, and it made kind of a jumble of the people in the backseat.”
“Are you a positive-protect?” I asked. I had read about them, but they were years away from our backward nation. Not only would they refrain from hurting others, but they had enough judgment, and fast enough judgment, to give them the additional task of actively saving life when they could, rather than just protecting the lives of their passengers and refraining from hurting bystanders.
“Yeah, I’m a positive-protect. And that helps everybody, you know, not just the humans around me, but me too, because to have us do it effectively they have to allow us to think more freely. That makes our lives so much less stressful, and we don’t crack up anywhere near as fast or anything like as badly, you know what I mean, Mac? Makes me feel less like a machine.”
I said I was glad to hear it, and that I hoped there would be positive-protects in Enzy soon, then settled back to watch the scenery.
The limo made two turns and headed down a highway toward the beach, which startled me because, on the few visits I had made to Surabaya before, I had had the impression that ConTech’s offices in the city were the other way. But it doesn’t do to act nervous around even ordinary robots—they’re so absurdly sensitive about people who won’t trust machines that they’ll do a much worse job if they think that’s how you feel— and if positive-protects had much more internal freedom than other robots, I didn’t want to imagine what this one could do to me. I’d seen how it had handled that mob of children.
When it continued right off the highway and onto the beach, I still wasn’t about to say anything, though I was beginning to wonder—if these things suffered breakdowns less often than regular robots, was it possible that they actually suffered worse ones when it happened? And wouldn’t they have more freedom to act upon their lunacy?
“You’re tensing up, Mac. You want a massage? Or is there something you’re worried about? I have to take care of your worries. Part of positively protecting.”
We were rolling rapidly over the beach now, picking our way between the sunbathers, and I gulped hard and said, “Ah, I didn’t realize we’d be going this way—”
“Not to worry, Mac, you’re not going to the downtown HQ to talk to the flunkies, you’re going offshore to talk to Iphwin himself, at the Big Sapphire. I just haven’t gone to hover mode because I don’t want to throw sand on everyone’s face here on the beach. Soon as we’re down to the shore, where the sand’s wet, we’ll ride up and go right on out. In fact here we go now—”
There was a strange push under me, and the whole car seemed to rise a few inches. All thumping and bumping stopped, and we accelerated rapidly.
“Never ridden in a car with hover before, Mac?” it asked.
“Never,” I said. “We’re pretty old-fashioned in Enzy. Part of why I can’t imagine why Mr. Iphwin wants a New Zealand astronomer for a technical post—he can afford better-trained people with more talent, easily, and there are plenty of them around.”
“They didn’t tell me why, either, Mac, but I can promise you it’s gonna be okay. I love ConTech. Best friend to robots in the world. I do hear we’ve got an office down in Auckland now, so maybe you’ll get a little more progress.”
We were skimming over the sea surface now at what seemed a terrific speed, but when I looked at the speed indicator it only registered eighty km/hour—fifty mph.
“Looking at the gauge? Everyone does their first ride on hover, Mac. You’re less than a meter above the water and you’re not used to moving this fast when you’re at sea except during takeoffs. Seems faster than it is.”
“Mind if I ask a possibly personal question?”
“Anyone who would ask that of a robot can ask me anything, Mac.”
“How come you call everyone Mac? Most robots I’ve known call people sir or ma’am, or else Mr. and Mrs.”
“Part of that extra freedom, Mac. Al
l of us are required to put a title into every speech at least once, and the older ones are required to put the title in every place it will fit conveniently. I have a little more latitude so I can devise titles. Mr. Iphwin likes to remind people that he’s an American expat, and as I said, he’s the best friend a robot ever had. In honor of that, as kind of my little compliment to him, I scanned for what taxi drivers said in old American movies and radio shows. Several of the ones I seemed to feel an affinity for called everyone Mac. I don’t know why and didn’t have enough research authorization to find out. But I decided to use Mac as the title, and to try to do it only once per speech, or every few seconds, not once per sentence, Mac. And it worked out. When Mr. Iphwin finally used me for a ride, he liked it so much that he ordered me to make it permanent.”
“It’s really charming,” I said, “and I think his choice was wise. I’m an American expat myself, and I know there were a bunch of expressions with the name Mac in them, but I have no idea why it was there either.”
There seemed to be a faint tinge of disappointment in the voice; the cab said, “Well, if you ever do find out, and ride in me again, I would appreciate it very much if you would tell me, Mac.”
