in the human spectrum, and I shall treasure my grief as I shall treasure my love for you, which will never be emulated or replaced. In time, I suppose, Mary and I might marry. Perhaps we shall take the Grand Tour together. We might even range much further, in time, although it will doubtless be prudent to wait until more nests have been established in Africa and the Far East, before we take the slightest risk with the welfare of the infant. I always yearned to be an explorer, as you know, and now I shall be able to take my explorations further than I ever dreamed.”
I hesitated momentarily after pronouncing that word, which produced a faint echo of doubt in my mind—but the echo was immediately overridden by my newly-sanitized intellect. “No, Emily,” I continued, “what happened on the moor today was no dream. There will be no idle dreaming for me, from now on; all my dreams will be ordered and constructive. I shall have a great deal of work to do, in furthering the cause of my adoptive folk by every means available to me, including my pen, although my first and foremost duty will be to the child whose primary education is my current mission in life. I shall love and cherish the Mother Superior’s child, Emily, and I shall be loved and cherished in my turn. I still have a duty, of course, to the ephemerae of our own kind, towards whose permanent liberation from the frailties of primitive flesh I shall work tirelessly, through centuries to come. The work will be slow, and it will be painstaking, but in the end, it will all be worthwhile. In the fullness of time, the entire evolutionary legacy of Earth’s biosphere will be incorporated into the flesh and spirit of our adoptive cousins, ready for exportation to the worlds of other stars. Everyone, then, will have the best of both our worlds.”
Emily could make no reply, of course, but I had known her well, and I was certain that she would have judged what I had told her to be a wonderful prospect. She would have understood, and would have given me her blessing.
“I shall make a permanent record of what has happened to me, Emily,” I told her, “in order that our secret will have an objective existence of its own. In two or three hundred years time, if the Mother Superior permits, it might become possible to publish it, or at least to show it to my children…which is to say, my foster-children. I doubt that you have any cause to be jealous of Mary, in that regard.”
I had a sudden vision, then, of looking into Emily’s tender blue eyes, and my eyes filled with tears. I did not blink the tears away immediately, but savored their implications to the full. Then, by a voluntary effort, I supplemented the vision with another, of looking into Mary’s much darker eyes.
Mary’s pupils seemed so utterly black as to be windows into the infinity of interstellar space.
“Tomorrow, or the next day,” I told my dead beloved, “I’ll ride to Raggandale to pay my formal respects.”
Emily smiled, at least in my imagination, and again I savored the tingle of emotion, which was followed by a faint but distinct echo in the other soul that now dwelt within me, in blissful harmony with my own.
At last, I thought, I have begun not merely to perceive but to comprehend the Divine Plan, in all its richness, promise and beauty. Father would be proud of me—and Mother too.
THE HIGHWAY CODE
Tom 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 of 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 particular, 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 pre-loaded 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: “I 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, in order to demonstrate that he too was capable of occupying the intellectual high ground. “Fifty-six wheels are 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 being 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