Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  “I’m a he and you’re a she,” Tim pointed out, “so we do have sexes.”

  “That’s just a convention of nomenclature,” she told him. “We robots have gender, for reasons of linguistic convenience, but we’re not equipped for any kind of sexual intercourse—except, of course, for toyboys and playgirls, and they only have sexual intercourse with humans.”

  “Which they don’t enjoy, I suppose,” Tom said, the intricacies of that partic u lar issue being one of the many fields of knowledge omitted from his archive.

  “Of course they do, poor things,” Audrey replied. “That’s the way their spectrum of desire is organized.”

  Personally, Tom couldn’t wait to get out into the healthy and orderly world of the open road.

  The bulk of the Highway Code was a vast labyrinth of fine print, but tradition and common sense dictated that its essence should be succinctly summarizable in a set of three fundamental principles, arranged hierarchically.

  The first principle of the Highway Code was: A robot transporter must not cause a traffic accident or, by inaction, allow a preventable traffic accident to occur.

  The second principle was: A robot transporter must deliver the goods entire and intact, except when damage or nondelivery becomes inevitable by reason of the first principle.

  The third principle was: A robot transporter must not inhibit other road users from reaching their destinations, except when such inhibition is compelled by the first or second principle.

  Once Tom was out on the road, he soon found out why the fundamentals of the Highway Code weren’t as simple as they seemed—and, in consequence, why there were such things as robopsychologists.

  Sometimes, RTs did get in the way of other road users; although the Dark Age of Gridlock was long gone, traffic jams still developed when more RTs were trying to use a particular junction than the junction was designed to accommodate. When that happened, smaller road users tended to put the blame on giant—mistakenly, in Tom’s opinion—simply because they took up more room in a jam.

  Sometimes, in spite of an RT’s best efforts, goods did go missing or get damaged in transit, and not all such errors of omission were due to the activity of ingenious human thieves and saboteurs. Because giants had more containers, often carrying goods of many different sorts, they were said—unfairly, in Tom’s opinion—to be more prone to such mishaps than smaller vehicles.

  Worst of all, traffic accidents did happen, including fatal ones, and not all of them were due to human pedestrian carelessness or criminal tampering by human drivers with their automatic pilots. Giants were said—quite unjustly, in Tom’s judgment—to be responsible for more than their fair share of those accidents for which human error could not be blamed, because of their relatively long braking-distances and occasional tendency to zigzag.

  It didn’t take long for Tom’s service record to accumulate a few minor blots, and he had to go back to Audrey Preacher more than once in his first five years of active service in order to be ritually reassured that he wasn’t seriously at fault, needn’t feel horribly guilty, and oughtn’t to get deeply depressed. In general, though, things went very well; he didn’t make any fatal mistakes in those five years, and he felt anything but depressed. He also felt, at the end of the five years, that he knew himself and his capabilities well enough to be confident that he never would make any fatal mistakes.

  Tom loved the open road more as ever after those five years, as he had always known he would. He had, after all, been manufactured in the Golden Age of Road Transport, a mere ten years after the opening of the Behring Bridge—the largest Living Structure in the world—which had made it possible, at last, to drive all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to Tierra del Fuego, via Timbuktu, Paris, Moscow, Yakutsk, Anchorage, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Panama City, and countless other centers of population. He only made the whole of that run twice in the first ten years of his career—he spent most of his time shuttling between Europe, India and China, that being where the bulk of the Company’s trade contracts were operative—but transcontinental routes were by far and away his favorite commissions.

  To loved Africa, and not just because the black velvet fields of artificial photosynthetics that were spreading like wildfire across the old desert areas were producing the fuel that kept road transport in business. He liked the rain forests, too, even though their ceaseless attempts to reclaim the highway made them the implicit enemy of roadrobotkind, and the vulnerability of jungle roads to flash floods was a major cause of accidents and jams. He loved America too, not just the west coast route that led south from the Behring Bridge to Chile, with the Pacific on one side and the mountains on the other, but the cross routes that extended to Nova Scotia, New York, Florida, and Brazil, through the Neogymnosperm Forests, the Polycotton fields, and the Vertical Cities.

  America’s artificial photosynthetics weren’t laid flat, as Africa’s were, but were neatly aggregated into pyramids and palmates, often punctuated with black cryptoalgal lakes, which had a charm of their own in Tom’s many eyes. Tom had nothing against the “natural” crop fields of Germany, Siberia, and China, even though they only produced fuel for animals and humans, but they seemed intrinsically less exotic; he saw them too often. They were also less challenging, and Tom relished a challenge. He was a giant, after all: a slim, sleek and supple giant who could corner like a yoga-trained sidewinder.

  As all long-haulers tended to do, Tom became rather taciturn, personality-wise. It wasn’t that he didn’t like talking to his fellow road users, just that his opportunities for doing so were so few and far between that brevity inevitably became the soul of his wisdom as well as his wit. He had to fill up more frequently than vehicles who didn’t have to haul such massive loads, but he didn’t hang around in the filling stations, so his conversations there were more-or-less restricted to polite remarks about the weather and the news headlines. He had opportunities for much longer conversations when he reached his destinations—it took a lot longer to load and unload his multiple containers than it took to turn smaller vehicles around—but he rarely took overmuch advantage of those opportunities. The generous geographical scale on which he worked meant that he didn’t see the same individuals, robot or human, at regular and frequent intervals, so he was usually in the company of strangers; besides, he liked to luxuriate in the experience of being unloaded and loaded up again and preferred not to be distracted from that pleasure by idle chitchat.

  “You were wrong, in a way, when you said that we aren’t equipped for any kind of sexual intercourse,” he told Audrey Preacher, during one of his regular check-ups at Company HQ. “In much the same way that my filling up with fuel and venting exhaust fumes is analogous to human eating and excretion, I think being loaded and unloaded is analogous to sex—not in the procreative sense, but in the pleasurable sense. I really like being emptied and filled up again, in between the hauls. I love being in transit—that’s baseline pleasure, the fundamental joie de vivre—but unloading and loading up again is more focused, more intense.”

  “You’re turning into quite the philosopher, Tom,” the robopsychologist replied, in her usual irritating fashion. “That’s quite normal, for long-haulers. It’s a normal way of coping with the isolation.”

  He didn’t argue with her, because he knew she couldn’t understand. How could she, when she wasn’t even an RT? She knew nothing of the unique pleasures of haulage, delivery, and consignment. She wasn’t even a follower of the Highway Code. She was just some flighty creature that haunted the kiosks in the night garage, operating a confessional for the Company. Anyway, she was right—he was becoming a philosopher, because it was the natural path of maturity for a long-hauler, especially a giant. Tom was not merely a road user but a road observer: a lifelong student of the road, who was in the process of cultivating an understanding of the road more profound than any pedestrian could ever possess. He was a citizen of the world in a way that no mere four- or twelve-wheeler could ever hope to be, let alone some pat
hetic human equipped with mere legs.

  It was because he was a philosopher of the road that Tom didn’t allow himself to become obsessively fixated on the road per se, the way some RTs did. It helped that he was a long-hauler, not confined to repeating the same short delivery route over and over again; for him, the road was always different, and so he was more easily able to look beyond it—not literally, because he wasn’t equipped to go cross-country, but in the better sense that he paid attention to the context of the road, in the broadest possible meaning of the word. He watched the news as well as the road, paying more attention than most robots to the world of human politics, which was, after all, the ultimate determinant of what the roads carried and where.

  Sometimes, especially in the remoter areas of Africa and South America, Tom met old-timers who lectured him on the subject of how lucky he was to be living in the Era of Artificial Photosynthesis, when politicians were almost universally on the side of road-users.

  “I remember the Fuel Crisis of the 2320s,” an ancient thirty-tonner named Silas Boxer told him one day when they were caught side-by-side in a ten-mile tailback. “Your archive will tell you that it wasn’t as bad as the Fuel Crises of the 21st century in terms of volume of supply, but they didn’t have smart trucks way back then, so there was no one around who could feel it the way we did. Believe me, youngster, there’s nothing worse for an RT than not being able to get on the road. Don’t ever let a human tell you that it’s far worse for them because they can feel hunger when they go short of fuel. I don’t know what hunger feels like, but I’m absolutely sure that it isn’t as bad as lying empty in a dark garage, not knowing where your next load’s coming from, or when. Artificial photosynthesis has guaranteed the fuel supply forever, which is far more important than putting an end to global warming, although you wouldn’t know it from the way politicians go on.”

  “So you’re not worried about the renaissance of air freight?” Tom had asked.

  “Air freight!” Silas echoed, with a baritone growl that sounded not unlike his weary engine. “Silly frippery. As long as there’s goods to be shifted, there’ll be roads on which to shift them. Roads are the essence of civilization—and the essence of law and morality is the Highway Code. There’s no need to be afraid of air traffic, youngster. Now that Fuel Crises are behind us for good, there’s only one thing that you and I need fear, and I certainly won’t mention that.”

  Nobody—no robot, at least—ever mentioned that. Even Audrey Preacher never mentioned that. Tom wouldn’t even have known what that was if he hadn’t been such an assiduous watcher of news and careful philosopher of the road. He knew that Silas Boxer wouldn’t have been able to mention that he was something he wouldn’t mention if he hadn’t been something of a news watcher and philosopher himself.

  After a pause, though, Silas did add a rider to his refusal to mention that. “Not that I really mind,” he said, unconvincingly. “I’ve been a good long time on the road. And there’s no need for you to mind either, because you’ll be even longer on the road than I will. It’s not as if we’ll be conscious of it, after all. They close us down before they send us there.”

  There, Tom knew, was exactly the same as that: the scrapyard, to which all robot transporters were consigned when their useful life was over, because the ravages of wear and tear had made them unreliable.

  Tom nearly got through an entire decade without being involved in a serious traffic accident, but not quite. While passing through the Nigerian rain forest one day, he killed a human child. It wasn’t his fault—the little girl ran right out in front of him, and even though he braked with maximum effect, controlling the resultant zigzag with magnificent skill, he couldn’t avoid her. The locals wouldn’t accept that, of course; they claimed that he should have steered off the road and that he would have done if he hadn’t been more concerned about his load than his victim, but he was fully exonerated by the inquest. He was only off the road for a week, but he was more shaken up by the experience than he dared let on to Audrey Preacher.

  “I’m not depressed,” he assured her. “It’s the sort of thing that’s always likely to happen, especially to someone who regularly does longitudinal runs through Africa. Statistically speaking, I’m unlikely to avoid having at least one more fatal in the next ten years, no matter how good I am. It wouldn’t have helped if I’d swerved—she’d still be dead, and I could have easily killed other people that I couldn’t see, as well as damaging myself.”

  “You were absolutely right not to swerve,” the robospsychologist assured him. “You obeyed the Highway Code to the very best of your ability. It could have been worse, and you prevented that. The Company can’t give you any kind of commendation, in the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve one. You mustn’t brood on those archival statistics, though. You mustn’t start thinking about accidents as if they were inevitable, even though there’s a sense in which they are.”

  Robopsychologists, Tom thought, talk too much exhaust gas, but he was careful not to give any indication of his opinion, lest it delay his return to the road.

  The same archival statistics that told Tom that he would probably have another serious accident within the next ten years told him that he wasn’t at all likely to have another before his first decade of service was concluded, but statistics, like robopsychologists, sometimes talked exhaust gas. Tom had been back on the road for less than a month when the worst solar storm for two hundred years kicked off while he was driving north through the Yukon, heading for Alaska and the Behring Bridge with a load bound for Okhotsk.

  The electric failures prompted by the storm caused blackouts all along the route and made a mess of communications, but Tom didn’t see any need to worry about that. While the news was still flowing smoothly, it was pointed out that the Aurora Borealis would be putting on its best show in living memory, and that the best place from which to view the display would be the middle of the Behring Bridge, where surface-generated light pollution would be minimal. Tom was looking forward to that—and so, it seemed, were lots of other people. All the way through Alaska the northwest-bound traffic was building up to unprecedented levels, to the point where the few broadcasts that were getting out began to advise people not to join the rush. It wasn’t just the aurora; thousands of people who had always intended to take a trip over the world-famous living bridge one day but had not yet found a good reason for going to Kamchatka took advantage of the excuse.

  The bridge had seven lanes in each direction, but Tom had the best position of all. The Highway Code required him to stick to the slowest lane, which was on the right-hand side of the bridge, facing north and the Aurora. Many of the other vehicles slowed down too, so the traffic in the lanes immediately to his left wasn’t going much faster, but the vast majority of drivers had put their vehicles on automatic pilot so that they could watch the aurora, and the automata were careful to maximize the traffic flow, thus keeping speeds up to sensible levels in the outer lanes. The bridge was very busy, but not so busy that there was any threat of a traffic jam.

  Tom had eyes enough to watch the aurora as well as the road and attention enough to divide between the two with some to spare, but he seemed to be one of very few vehicles on the bridge that did—there were no other giants he could see, ahead of him, behind him, or traveling in the other direction. Even if the other drivers who were on the bridge had noticed what he noticed, therefore, they would not have been sufficiently familiar with the living bridge to realize how profoundly odd it was.

  It was not the mere fact that the bridge was moving that was odd—it was, after all, a living bridge, and the sea was becoming increasingly choppy—but the way it was moving. Although a shorter vehicle might not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, Tom had no difficulty discerning what seemed to be slow long-amplitude waves of a sort he had never perceived there before. There was nothing violent or febrile about them at first, though, so he was not at all anxious as he rooted idly through his archive i
n search of a possible explanation.

  The archive could not give him one because it could not piece together the links in an unprecedented chain of causality, but it brought certain data to the surface of Tom’s consciousness that allowed him to put two and two and two and two together to make eight when the vibration began to grow more violent, at a rapidly accelerating pace. By the time he saw the rip opening up in the center of the bridge’s desperate flesh, he had a pretty good idea what must be happening—but he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it, or whether there was anything at all that he could do. He reported it, but there was nothing the traffic police or company HQ could do about it either; neither of them had time even to advise to slow down and be careful.

  What Tom had reasoned out, rightly or wrongly, followed from the fact that, in addition to their other effects, the showers of charged particles associated with solar storms caused flickers in the Earth’s magnetic field. Such flickers could, if the subterranean circumstances happened to be propitious, intensify and accelerate long-range magma flows in the mantle. Intensified long-range magma flows in the mantle could, if conditions in the crust were propitious, cause long-distance earth tremors. Because it was a living structure, the Behring Bridge was able to react to minor earth tremors in such a way as to negate their effects on its traffic, and it was bound to do so by its programming. Long-distance tremors were not problematic in themselves. Unfortunately, long-distance tremors cause by long-range magma flows could build up energy at crisis points, which could result in sudden and profound tremors that were, in seismological terms, the next worst things to detonations.

  If any such crisis point happened to be located directly beneath one of the bridge’s holdfasts, it was theoretically possible for the bridge’s own reflexive adjustments to cause an abrupt breach in its fabric. The living structure was, of course, programmed to react to any breach in its fabric with considerable alacrity—but adding one more “if” to a chain that was already awkwardly long suggested to Tom that sealing the breach and protecting the traffic might not be at all easy while the energy of the tremor at the crisis point was spiking.