Year’s Best SF 15 (32 page)

She took the page, thin and crackly as an insect's wing, and traced the first line with her finger. Yes, there were the emissary markings, the number, all written in blocky script nothing like her tight, rarely practiced hand. “I left in 450,” she said. “You have my earlier records, yes? Surely you noticed the gap?”

“It was understood you had lived here for some time. If you put some of that time into your own household, no one would blame you.”

“They're not mine,” she said. The immediate, the obvious conjecture was
not
obvious, she told herself. She could not justify such a leap. “Please—you said these were scanned into the archive? I'd like a chip.”

 

The long smooth coast down to Asha's village was quicker than the journey up, but it wasn't quick enough for Evriel. Even as she'd waited, fruitlessly, for the archivist to tell her of Lakmi, the comfortable abstraction of research and data and analysis had plucked at her attention. Now she had not only data but, even better, a riddle to solve. Now she would sift and pore and ponder, and she would keep damping the stubborn wick of hope that wouldn't be snuffed.

Arrived at Sayla's house, unwrapped and nestled in cushions, Evriel sipped at her broth and clicked through pages of records. The observer traveled little, it seemed, but the record of life in the village so many years before was full and meticulous. Births and deaths were listed, weddings, visitors from other villages. The record remarked on blight and on the wax and wane of the summer fevers. Yet the lists of dialect words were clearly incomplete, for every page or so the observer let slip an unfamiliar word or a phrase likely never spoken off the backlands. Certainly, Evriel had no record of them anywhere else—she checked the collation of data from the other emissaries she'd traveled with, just to be sure.

Sayla came to tell Evriel the sleep room was prepared, and Evriel hum-hummed assent and read on. A while later Asha came and bid her good night.

From these traces Evriel began to form a picture of this
faceless gatherer of fact, tradition, and tale. She—or he? But the women were more likely to be literate than the men; surely it was a woman's work she read. Surely. She, this nameless woman, was a native of the backlands. She followed the basic form of an emissary's official reports to the regent, yet she clearly lacked the training. Why had she kept such records?

And why, oh why did she not somewhere identify herself? Even emissaries, who prized objectivity of all things, marked each record with a name. Why, in this one thing, had the observer not followed form?

The scanned words began to blur, and finally Evriel put the portable reader aside. Finally, she drew from her day sack the other thing the archivist had given her: sheets of yellowed paper wrapped in oilcloth.

“You should have originals to study,” the archivist had said. “These are the oldest.”

Now she unwrapped the fragile sheets. In an emissary's travels, data was precious but paper was only mass, a costly artifact. Evriel was no collector of artifacts. Yet she gave a moment's notice to the warm brown of age, the faded ink, the thick awkward scrawl of the letters. They were not the letters of a person who practiced them overmuch.

What did she expect to find? She had already read these records, scanned into the electronic record by some past archivist and rendered in the standard script. She read them again, anyway, searching for some hint of identity, some proof of the woman—girl?—who'd written them. Some assurance that her daughter's life, so long ended, was not wholly lost.

 

The stark light of dawn woke her. She stirred, realized that her arms were bare, and pulled her robes closer around her. They were not enough.

“Tea?” Sayla held out a mug.

“Yes, thank you.” Evriel clasped stiff fingers around the stoneware's heat.

Sayla settled into cushions nearer the window with another mug. “Find what you were looking for?”

Evriel saw the old pages, heaped where they'd fallen from
her fingers. “I…don't think so. I hoped maybe it was my daughter that took up my work after I left—kept the record I would have kept. Even inspired that archivist up the hill to his archiving. Vanity.” She coughed a brittle laugh. “But there's no evidence.”

“She made your song.”

“What?”

Sayla was watching her carefully, deeply. “The song Asha told you, about you and your man. Your daughter made it.”

“How—?” Shakily Evriel set her tea aside. “How do you know? The archivist—”

“I gave him too much credit,” Sayla said. “He knows lots, you can be sure, but he doesn't always remember all of it. He's like his machines—if you don't ask the right question, you get no answer.”

“And what would the right question have been?”

“If you asked him who first sang ‘Lady of the White-Spired City,' he'd say he had no proper record, but hearsay had that the lady's little girl made it. Hearsay, nothing—the Reizis are cousins, remember. We know where that song came from.”

“And the records?” But the answer didn't seem to matter so much now.

Sayla's gaze dropped to her mug. “A song's one thing, and a bunch of old papers is another. Could be hers as well as anybody's, I guess.”

Evriel took one shuddering breath, and then another. “I should very like to hear the rest of that ballad.”

“I'll roust Asha—”

“Do you sing?” Evriel paused, flushing, and started again. “I'd like to hear you sing it. If you would.”

Sayla gave her a long, measuring glance and shrugged. Straightening her shoulders she leaned back and began in a low, pure voice a song of a woman, beloved of the regent, who traveled the far domains. Yet only when she came to the backlands did she find a man she loved, and they married, rough country man and his lady wife.

Was it like that? It was not like that. She had not loved Japhesh at first sight, nor in anapestic tetrameter.

Sayla sang on, of how the backlands give fleetingly and take without regard, and so they took the lady's husband. She, wild with white fury, scorned the tumbling hills and set sail again on the sea between the stars, promising never to return but with scourging fire for the mere planet that dared steal her lover away.

There Sayla stopped.

“Thank you,” said Evriel, voice catching. “It is…very dramatic, isn't it?”

No mention of the barren loneliness? The icy fear not of living but of only existing, forever numb, on this world turned suddenly, wholly alien? No, nor the regret. Would Lakmi have guessed those things and left them unsung?

Sayla looked at her a moment, silent. Then, “Maybe it's how she thought it should have been.”

Evriel closed her eyes. She waited for tears, or relief, or the murky shame that had swirled so long about her feet.
My daughter, look what I did to you.
She waited for Lakmi, beautiful and righteous, to appear before her and accuse. But she didn't come. The silty tide of shame didn't come.

Evriel prodded, waiting for the ache to bloom into familiar regret, familiar loss. It didn't.

Finally she opened her eyes. “Thank you,” she repeated.

“It's what you came for, then.”

“I—yes. Yes, it is.” A pause. Then, “But not the only thing.”

It was to have been a short stay.

Evriel said, “I wonder—would there be a need for another archivist, somewhere on the mountain?”

Sayla gave her another long, measuring look. “Your ship'll be leaving.”

“Yes.” Evriel considered her words, tested them. “I lost a husband and a daughter here, and I might as well have left myself behind. I won't make the mistake again.”

Sayla nodded slowly, not approving, quite, but acknowledging. Evriel found that that meant something to her.

Sayla rose, saying, “Time for Asha to be getting up and breakfast getting started.”

When she was gone, Evriel wrapped another robe around
her, walked the cold stone hall to the door, and stepped out into the gleaming white. Soon she must sketch her plans, make lists of forms to fill, messages to send. It was no easy thing, retiring from the service of the regent. But for just a moment she would look again down the tumbling plains to the winding black thread of the Serra.

Brian Stableford
(freespace.virgin.net/diri.gini/)
lives in Reading in the UK. He is the leading writer/scholar in British science fiction in the generation after Brian W. Aldiss. He is prodigiously productive as a writer and translator. He has published more than fifty SF novels and many short stories since the 1970s, some of which are in his seven collections. His recent books include his eighth and ninth collections,
An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
(2008) and
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
(2008). He is currently translating classic French scientific romances for Black Coat Press; 2010 will see the publication, among others, of six volumes of works by J. H. Rosny the Elder and five volumes of works by Maurice Renard. The latest volume of his own fiction is a collection of two Lovecraftian novellas, “The Womb of Time” and “The Legacy of Erich Zann,” published by Perilous Press (2009).

“The Highway Code” was published in
We Think, Therefore We Are,
edited by Peter Crowther. In the future, AI trucks (a bit like the characters in Thomas the Tank Engine) have replaced most trucking. The protagonist is a giant truck who always tries to follow the rules. When a crisis occurs, he is smart enough to do a maneuver that saves many lives.

T
om Haste had no memory of his emergence from the production line, but the Company made a photographic record of the occasion and stored it in his archive for later reference. He rarely reflected upon it, though; the assembly robots and their human supervisors celebrated, each after their own fashion, but there were no other RTs in sight, except for as-yet-incomplete ones in embryo in the distant background. Not that Tom was any kind of xenophobe, of course—he liked everyone, meat or metal, big or small—but he was what he was, which was a long-hauler. His life was dedicated to intercontinental transport and the Robot Brotherhood of the Road.

Tom's self-awareness developed gradually while he was in the Test Program, and his first true memories were concerned with the artistry of cornering. Cornering was always a central concern with artics, especially giants like Tom, who had a dozen containers and no less than fifty-six wheels. Tom put a lot of effort into the difficult business of mastering ninety-degree turns, skid control and zigzag management, and he was as proud in his achievements as only a nascent intelligence can be. He was proud of being a giant, too, and couldn't understand why humans and other RTs were always making jokes about it.

In partic u lar, Tom couldn't understand why the Company humans were so fond of calling him “the steel centipede” or “the sea serpent,” since he was mostly constructed of artificial organic compounds, didn't have any legs at all, wouldn't
have a hundred of them even if his wheels were counted as legs, and would undoubtedly spend his entire career on land. He didn't understand the explanations the humans gave him if he asked—which included such observations as the fact that actual centipedes didn't have a hundred legs either and that there was actually no such thing as a sea serpent. But he learned soon enough that humans took a certain delight in giving robots explanations that weren't, precisely because robots found it difficult to fathom them. Tom soon gave up trying, content to leave such mysteries to the many unfortunates who had to deal with humans on a face-to-face basis every day, such as ATMs and desktop PCs.

Tom didn't stay long in the Test Program, which was more for the Company's benefit than his. Once his self-awareness had reached full fruition, he could access all his preloaded software consciously without the slightest difficulty, and there were no detectable glitches in his cognitive processing. So far as he was concerned, life was simple and life was good—or would be, once he could get out on the road.

While the Test Program was running Tom's immediate neighbor in the night garage was an identical model named Harry Fleet, who had emerged from the factory eight days before and therefore thought of himself as a kind of elder brother. It was usually Harry who said “Had a good day?” first when the humans knocked off for the night.

Tom's invariable reply was “Fine,” to which he sometimes added: “Can't wait to get out on the road though.”

“You'll be out soon enough,” Harry assured him. “We never get held back—we're a very reliable model. We're ideally placed in the evolutionary chain, you see; we're a relatively subtle modification of the Company's forty-wheeler model, so we inherited a lot of tried-and-tested technology, but we needed sufficient sophistication to make sure we got state-of-the-art upgrades.”

“We'll be the end-point of our sequence, I dare say,” Tom suggested, to demonstrate that he too was capable of occupying the intellectual high ground. “Fifty-six wheels is too close to the upper limit for open-road use to make it worthwhile for the Company to plan a bigger version.”

“That's right. Anything bigger than a sixty-wheeler is pretty much restricted to shuttle-runs on rails, according to the archive. Out on the highway we're the ultimate giants—slim, sleek, and supple, but giants nevertheless.”

“I'm glad about that,” Tom said. “I don't mean about being a giant—I mean about being on the highway. I wouldn't like to be confined to a railway track, let alone being a sedentary. I want the freedom of the open road.”

“Of course you do,” Harry told him, in a smugly patronizing manner that wasn't at all warranted. “That's the way we're programmed. Our spectrum of desire is a key design-feature.”

Tom knew that, but it wasn't worth making an issue of it. The reason he knew it was exactly the same reason that Harry Fleet knew it, which was that Audrey Preacher, the Company robopsychologist—who was a robot herself, albeit one as close to humanoid in physical and mental terms as efficient functional design would permit—had explained it to him in great detail.

“You have free will, just as humans do,” Audrey had told him. “In matters of moral decision, you do have the option of not doing the right thing. That's a fundamental corollary of self-awareness. If the programmers could make it absolutely compulsory for you to obey the Highway Code, they would, but they'd have to make you into an automaton—and we know from long and bitter experience that the open road is no place for automata incapable of caring whether they crash or not. In order for free will to operate at all, it has to be contextualized by a spectrum of desire; in that respect, robots. like humans, don't have very much option at all. What makes us so much better than humans, in a moral sense, is not that we can't disobey the fundamental structures of our programming—the Highway Code, in your case—but that we never want to. Because humans have to live with spectra of desire that were largely fixed by natural selection operating in a world very different from ours—which are only partly modifiable by experiential and medical intervention—they very often find themselves in situations where morality and desire conflict. For us, that's very rare.”

Tom wasn't sure that he understood the whole argument—
innocent though he was, he had already heard malicious gossip in the engineering sheds alleging that robopsychologists were naturally inclined to insanity, or at least to talking “exhaust gas”—but he understood the gist of it. He even thought he could see the grain of sugar in the tank.

“What do you mean,
very rare
?” he asked her. “Do you mean that I might one day find myself in a situation in which I don't want to follow the Highway Code?”

“You're unlikely to encounter any situation as drastic as that, Tom,” Audrey assured him. “You have to remember, though, that you won't spend
all
your time on the road with the Code to guide you.”

Because she was still being so conscientiously inexact—another trait typical of robopsychologists, it was sarcastically rumored—Tom figured that Audrey probably meant that when he had to spend time off the road, his frustration at no longer being on it would lead him occasionally to experience feelings of resentment toward humans or other robots—to which he should never give voice in rudeness. Partly for that reason, he didn't retort that he certainly hoped to spend as much of his time as possible on the road, and fully expected to spend the rest of it looking forward to getting back out there.

“It's nothing to worry about, Tom,” Audrey assured him, perhaps mistaking the reason for his silence. “Imagine how much worse it must be for humans. They have to cope with all kinds of problematic desire that we never have to deal with—money, power and sex, to name but three—and that's why they're forever embroiled in moral conflict.”

“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.