Paula was driving and since I was the current apprentice driver, I sat next to her. The Colonel sat in the middle seat to the right, behind me, so that he could see as much as possible from a protected position, since he was our de facto commander in the event of trouble, and also so he could cover one gunport. Esmé sat on the other side. Jesús and Helen were at the rear corners, able to use either side or rear gunports, and the front was covered by the remote-sighted machine gun on the roof, which either Paula or I could operate from controls on the dash, sighting through a small video screen between us. We weren’t a tank, but we were likely to be more heavily armed than any casual opponents, and that was the real idea—we didn’t want any trouble from the bandits who had come to infest the north in recent decades, so we were trying to be too tough a nut for them to crack. If there were an “other side” out there, we knew nothing of its resources but would have to guess that they were far, far more than this little armed bus could possibly handle.
There were four people, besides me, who weren’t arms-proficient—Terri, Kelly, Ulrike, and Iphwin—and they were allowed to float more or less freely with the understanding that in the event of any trouble, they would get down on the floor in the middle and stay there.
“What kind of range does this thing have on a tank of fuel?” I asked Paula.
“It has Telkes batteries,” she said. “It’s all electric.” Seeing my blank look, she added, “Telkes batteries are nuclear batteries, and they are supposed to be good for a million miles, and there’s only 350,000 in the mileage record on the central computer. Which doesn’t appear to have been tampered with, unlike the odometer.”
We were pulling slowly out of our spot in the parking lot of the expensive hotel in Mexico City, and Paula turned around to holler, “Anyone who is about to suddenly remember something that belongs in the baggage locker is welcome to do it now.”
“Everything’s down there,” Terri said. “Nobody’s got anything bigger than a purse up here.”
“Just making sure,” Paula said. “In the event of an accident I want to be hit by a nice warm soft human body, not by a suitcase. All right, pulling out, heading north, and if you can sleep where you are, do it, because today is a good day for resting up; we don’t really hit bandit country till tomorrow afternoon.”
The first day’s drive was as uneventful as she said; we cruised along a potholed but perfectly adequate road, and I got to drive more than half of it. Getting used to pointing the wheels with the steering wheel was easier than it seemed, and the load-balancer that fed power to the electric motors on the wheels worked pretty smoothly so that the response of the esty to the steering wheel was consistent. The thing I had thought was the accelerator was more properly speaking a speed pedal, the device that set the velocistat—i.e. it was the device you used to tell the car how fast you wanted it to go, rather than to make it go faster or slower. Push the pedal twice as far down and the vehicle adjusted its speed to go twice as fast regardless of what slope you might be on. The biggest problem, and the object of plenty of backseat-driver humor, was the brakes.
“The main brakes are recovery brakes,” Paula explained. “Basically when you apply the brake, a rotor on the wheel generates an electric current that sets up a field that opposes its own motion. It uses the car’s own energy against its motion—the faster you’re going, the harder the brake works, and if the tire locks, the brake lets go right away. Skidproof and stops you in the minimum possible distance—or rather it stops the esty. If you’re not wearing your seat belt, it might not stop you—or rather it will, but it will use the windshield instead of the belt.”
“Very comforting,” I said. “And I’ll try to keep it in mind.”
“Road’s nearly empty,” Paula said, turning and looking around, “and the whole group is belted in. You might as well practice. Give it a shot—try to brake smoothly.”
I pushed down as slowly as I could on the brake, and felt the drag slowing us down, but then the brakes seemed to grab and the truck jerked a couple of times.
“You have to lose that habit of pushing harder and harder on the brake,” she said.
“He sure does,” Ulrike said. “Are you really learning to drive this thing, Lyle?”
It was a stupid question in a tone that I think was intended to be flattering, so I said, “No, I’m not learning a thing and I haven’t a clue how to do this. Paula put me in this seat because she’s trying to kill us all.”
Ulrike managed to be perfectly quiet while still letting me know that she was wounded and that I had better apologize. I was really wondering what my other selves, in whatever other worlds, had been thinking, in marrying her. At least I could make a good guess about what they had been thinking in divorcing her.
The morning and then the afternoon rattled on, bouncing our way along the road that became more and more potholed, more and more badly marked, and more and more deserted, until finally we reached the mostly deserted fortified town of Torreón, the northernmost garrison on Federal Highway 49. Most of the old town was block after block of charred and bulldozed ruins, because as the city had lost most of its population the abandoned buildings had become cover for bandits, rebels, and other marauders, and so the local commandants had gradually smashed down everything outside the fences and walls of the central compound, which embraced the former town hall and church, and surrounded, for a radius of only about a block, what had once been the zócalo.
Iphwin had set us up with one whole floor of the one surviving large hotel in the compound, and had managed enough bribes to the garrison commander to get us electricity and hot water for the night. “This is it,” he said. “Last comforts, that we know about, anyway. Enjoy it while you can.”
A day of being shaken around, as we had been in the truck, takes a lot out of you, and everyone elected to eat in our rooms and get to bed early. Helen joined me in my room, just for company, and after the dinner had been delivered, we ate quietly for a while. “Not bad for where we are,” I ventured, at last.
“The food? Decent, I guess. Though I can see why they shred the beef—there’s probably not a knife that can even scratch the local stuff. But somebody knew his way around the kitchen, and that’s got to be pretty rare in a place this remote.”
“Isn’t that strange,” I said, having been hit by the thought. “I’ve never really been anywhere remote in my life before, you know. And I bet neither have you.”
After we’d finished eating, Helen said, “All right, I guess you really did think it was obvious. Why haven’t you ever been anywhere remote before?”
“Because with the net—and more generally the global information system—everyone’s equally in touch with everyone else. Even across event sequences, as it turns out. In terms of time and effort, which are the meaningful terms, everywhere is the same distance from everywhere else, and that distance is so small it might as well be zero. Now, since we don’t dare to connect to any of the global information system while the mission is on, places are now different distances from each other, and some of those distances are pretty big.”
She shuddered. “That’s weird. It really makes me feel alone.”
“I find it pretty weird myself.”
Helen sat for a long time, staring into space, and then finally said, “Uh, the other night—that wasn’t an act, was it? You really don’t like playing rough in the bedroom?”
“I really don’t.”
She sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. Damn. Lyle, you have no idea how long it took me to find the other Lyle. And I always thought you had just suddenly changed your mind one day. But if the Lyle that likes rough stuff is so uncommon, how come I’ve been with him for so long?”