OLD PAINT

Megan Lindholm

Megan Lindholm was born in 1952 in California, raised in Alaska, and currently resides in Tacoma, Washington. She began selling short stories for children when she was eighteen, but quickly moved on to attempting to write fantasy and science fiction. Harpy's Flight was her first fantasy novel, which she sold in 1982. She wrote a number of novels as Megan Lindholm, of which the best known is Wizard of the Pigeons. She continues to write short stories as Megan Lindholm, and is a Hugo and Nebula finalist under that name. Her most recent Lindholm stories include "Blue Boots" and "Neighbors." She also writes as Robin Hobb. Her first published work as Robin Hobb was the Farseer Trilogy (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassin's Quest) and the most recent Hobb novels are the Rain Wilds Chronicles (Dragon Keeper, Dragon Haven, City of Dragons, and Blood of Dragons).

"Old Paint" was published in Asimov's. The future setting is subtle and convincing, and the family dynamics portrayed are evoked and displayed with masterful precision and emotional impact. It reminds me of the work of Connie Willis at her best. I chose this story to begin this collection because I think it will be read, and enjoyed, and admired long into the future.

I WAS ONLY nine when it happened, so I may not have the details absolutely right. But I know the heart of my story, and the heart is always what matters in a tale like mine.

My family didn't have much when I was growing up. A lot of lean years happened in that first half of the century. I don't say I had it as tough as my mom did, but the 2030's weren't a piece of cake for anyone. My brother, my mom, and I lived in subsidized housing in the part of T-town they call New Tacoma. It sure wasn't new when I was a kid. Tacoma's always been a tough town, and my mom said that her grandpa kept her on a short leash and she survived it, and so her kids would, too. Everyone knew we had the strictest mom in our apartments and pitied us for it.

We weren't like a lot of folks in the subsidized housing. Mom was ashamed to be there. It was the only thing she took from the government, and I think if she had been alone, she would have lived on the streets. We got by on what she made working at an old folks' home, so we budgeted hard. She cooked our meals from scratch and we carried our lunches to school in the same battered lunch boxes and stained backpacks, year after year. She mended our clothes and we shopped at the Goodwill. Our cellphones were clunky and we all shared one computer. And we didn't have a car.

Then my great grandpa died. Mom had hardly seen him in years, and we kids didn't know him at all, but she was in his will. She got what was left in his checking account, which wasn't much, and the old furniture in his apartment, which was mostly particle board crap. The old rocking chair was good, and the ceramic canisters shaped like mushrooms were cool. Mom said they were really old and she remembered them from when she was little. But the one big thing he did have was a car, parked in his parking slot where it had been gathering dust for the last twelve years since they'd taken his license away.

The car was vintage, and not in a good way. Back in the 2020's, there was this rage for making new energy-efficient cars that looked sort of like the old classic gas guzzlers. People wanted rumble and roomy to go with their solar and alternative fuels. I guess my great grandpa had been a surfer back in the day, because what he chose was something that was supposed to look like a station wagon. The first time we went down to the parking garage and looked at it, Ben, my older brother, groaned and asked, "What is that crap on the sides? Is it supposed to look like wood or something?"

"Or something," my mom said absently. She pushed the button on the key, but the battery for it was long dead. So she opened the car the old-fashioned way, putting the key in a hole in the door handle. I was fascinated and proud of my mom for knowing you could do that.

The outside of the car was covered in fine dust, but inside it was immaculate. She sat in the seat for a little while with her hands on the wheel, acting like she could see out the windshield. She was smiling a little bit. Then she said, "The smart thing to do is sell him. If the interior is this good, I bet he kept the engine cherry, too." She reached down and pulled a little handle, and Ben and I jumped when the hood of the car popped up.

"Mom, I think you broke it," Ben said. "Maybe we shouldn't touch anything until we can have a mechanic look at it." Ben was fourteen then, and for some reason, he now believed that if he didn't know something, Mom didn't know it either. She just snorted and got out of the car and went around to open the hood the rest of the way.

"My goodness," she said softly. "You did take care of him, Pops."

I didn't know what she was talking about, but I do remember that the inside of that engine compartment was spotless. She shut the hood, unplugged the car from the supplemental charger, and retracted the coil. She had a license and knew how to drive, because that was part of her job at the old people's home. I was still surprised when she slid in behind the wheel and put the key in a slot-thing and turned it. The vehicle had an anti-theft box on the steering column. She hesitated, and then put her forefinger on the sensor. "Hello, Suzanne," the car said in a rich, brown voice. "How are you today?"

"Just fine," she said quietly. "Just fine."

Ben was freaked. Mom noticed that and grinned. She patted the steering column. "My grandpa's voice. A little customization he did on the systems." She tossed her head at the back seat. Ben opened the door and we both got in. There were shoulder strap seat belts.

"No airbags?" Ben asked in disbelief.

"They're there. But when he was new, cars had both. It's safe. I wouldn't put you in a car if I thought it wasn't safe." She closed her eyes for a minute and tightened up her mouth as if she'd suddenly wanted to cry. Then she opened her eyes and shifted her grip on the wheel. "Let's blast," she said loud and clear, and the engine started. It was a lot louder than any other car I'd ever heard. Mom had to raise her voice to talk over it. "And when he was new, cars were electric and internal combustion. And much noisier than they are now."

Ben was horrified. "This car is running on gasoline, right now?"

Mom shook her head. "Sound effects. And loudest inside the car. My grandpa had a sense of humor." She stroked the car's dash. "All those years, and he never took me off the security system."

"How smart is this car?" Ben demanded.

"Smart enough," she said. "He can take himself to a fueling station. Knows when his tires are low on air, and can schedule his own oil change. He used to talk to the dealership; I wonder if it's even in business still. He's second generation simulated intelligence. Sure fooled me, most of the time. He has a lot of personality customization in his software. My grandpa put in a bunch of educational stuff, too. He can speak French. He used to drill me on my vocabulary on the way to school. And he knew all my favorite radio stations." She shook her head. "Back then, people wanted their cars to be their friends. He sure was mine."

"That's wack," Ben said solemnly.

"No, it was great. I loved it. I loved him."

"Love you too, Suzanne," the car said. His voice was a rich baritone.

"You should sell this thing, Mom," Ben advised her wisely.

"Maybe I should," Mom said, but the way she said it, I knew that we had a car now.

Ben had begun to think he was the man of the house, so he tried to start an argument with Mom about selling the car and using that money and her inheritance money to buy a real car. She just looked at him and said, "Seems to me it's my inheritance, not yours. And I'm keeping him."

And so that was that.

She opened a little panel on his dash and punched in our address. She moved a handle on the steering column, and the car began to ease backward. I held my breath, thinking we were going to hit something, but we didn't. She stopped the car, moved the handle again, and we slid forward, smooth as a slide, up and out of the parking garage and into the daylight.

On the way home, she kept pushing buttons and chatting with the car. It didn't have instant-net, but it had a screen that folded down from the ceiling. "What good is that? You have to sit in the back seat to see it," Ben complained. Mom reached under the seat and opened a drawer. Inside was a bunch of old style DVD's in flat plastic cases.

"They're movies," she said. "Supposed to entertain the kids in the back seat. The screen is back there so the driver won't be distracted." She picked up the stack and began to sort through them. She had a wistful half-smile on her face. "I remember all of these," she said quietly. "Some were my favorites."

"So the driver's supposed to just sit up front by himself and be bored?" Ben demanded.

She set the movies down with a sigh and turned to him. "The driver is supposed to drive." She turned back and put her hands on the wheel and looked out over the hood. "When this fellow was built, cars were only allowed to go a short distance without a licensed driver in the driver's seat. Less than a mile, I think it was. The auto-brains were really limited back then. Legally limited more than technically limited. People didn't really trust cars to drive themselves. They had emergency services locators, of course, so they could take you to the hospital if you passed out, and sensors to help you park, but when he was built, drivers still did most of the driving."

"Why do you keep calling the car 'he' and 'him'?" Ben demanded.

"Old habit," my mom said, but she said it in a way that ended the conversation.

We had a parking spot at our building that we'd never used before. The first time we pulled up in the car, every kid hanging around outside came to see what the noise was. They watched as the car plugged in to charge. Our car was about twice as long as any other car in the lot.

"Look at the size of those solars," one boy whispered, and Ben's ears went red.

"Old piece of junk," said another knowingly. "Surprised it still runs at all."

Mom did the one thing that Ben hated the most. I didn't much like it either. All the other moms in the building would have just ignored the wanna-be gangers hanging around the parking lot. Mom always looked straight at them and talked to them as if they were smart, even when they were so drugged out they could barely stand.

"He's old, but he runs like a clock. He'll probably outlast most of the Tupperware crates here. They still used a lot of steel when this guy was built." Mom set the alarm, and the tattle-tale light began to circle the car.

"Wha's that stuff onna size spozed to be?" Leno asked. He was smiling. Leno was always smiling, and I'd never seen him with his eyes more than half open. He looked delighted to see the car, but I'd seen him look just as enthusiastically at a lamp post.

"It's wood. Well, pseudo-wood. My grandpa was so proud of it. It was one of the first nano-products used on any car. It was the latest thing, back then. Guaranteed not to peel or fade or scratch, and to feel like wood grain. Most minor dents, it could repair, too." She sighed, smiled, and shook her head, remembering something. Then, "Come on, kids. Dinner to cook and homework to do."

"Homework," one of the boys sneered, and two girls laughed low. We ignored her and followed Mom into the house.

Ben was mad at her. "How come you know so much about that car? I thought you didn't have anything to do with your grandpa. I thought he, like, disowned you when you were a kid or something."

Mom gave him a look. She never talked much about her family. As far as I remembered, it had always been just her, Ben, and me. Someone must have been our father, but I'd never met him. And if Ben remembered him, he didn't say much. Mom firmed her mouth for a minute and then said brusquely, "My grandpa and I really loved each other. I made some choices in my life that he didn't agree with. So he was really angry with me for a long time, and I was angry with him. But we always knew we still loved one another. We just never got around to making up in time to say it."

"What decisions?" I asked.

"Getting knocked up with me," Ben said, low. Either Mom didn't hear him say it or she didn't want to discuss it.

So, after that, we had a car. Not that we drove it much. But Mom polished it with special wax, cleaned his solars, vacuumed out the inside, and hung up an old-fashioned pine tree scent thing from the mirror. Once we came home from school on the bus, and found her asleep in the driver's seat, her hands on the wheel. She was smiling in her sleep. Every once in a while, on the weekend, she might take us out for a ride in the station wagon. Ben always said he didn't want to go, but then went.

She didn't upgrade the car, but she made it ours. She put us both on the car's security system, and updated the old GPS settings with our home, schools, the hospital, and the police station, so in an emergency either of us could get help. The car greeted us by name. Ben pretty much ignored its personality program, but I talked to it. It knew a lot of corny old jokes and had a strange program called "Road Trip Games" about license plates and "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral." I tried out every seat in the car. I watched some of the old movies on the little screen, but they were really long and the people talked too much. My favorite seat was the one in the back that faced backward. I liked watching the faces of the people as they came up behind our car. Lots of them looked surprised. Some of them smiled and waved, and some turned their heads to look at the car as they passed us. The only time I didn't like it was at night when the headlights of the cars behind us would hit me right in the eyes.

The car was a sometime thing, and mostly it didn't change anything about our life. Sometimes, when it was pouring rain and we had to walk to the bus stop and then walk home again, Ben would grumble. Other parents sent their cars to pick up their kids from school. Ben whined about this a lot. "Why can't the wagon pick us up from school when it's pouring rain?" he'd demand of her.

"Your grandfather was a 'drive it yourself' guy. Like me. I doubt he ever had the block removed."

"Then it's just a software thing? You could take it off?"

"Don't get any ideas, Benny-boy!" Mom warned him.

And for a while, he didn't. But then he turned fifteen. And Mom decided to teach him to drive.

Ben wasn't that interested at first. Most kids didn't bother with a personal license anymore. As long as a car met the legal standards, anyone could get in it and go. I knew little kindergarteners who were dropped off by their cars each day and then picked up again. Mom said it was stupid that it took three thousand pounds of car to transport a forty-pound kid to school, but lots of people did it. Ben and I both knew that Mom could have had the car's brain upgraded or unblocked or whatever, and we could have had wheels any time we wanted them. But she chose not to. She told Ben the only way he was going to get to use the car was if he knew how to physically drive it. Once he passed his test, she told him that we might even have it updated so that he could just kick back and tell the car where he wanted to go.

So that was the big attraction for Ben. I got to ride along on his driving lessons. At first Mom took us way out of town in the evenings and made him practice in parking lots outside vacant strip malls. But Ben actually learned to drive pretty well. He said it wasn't that different from a lot of his video games. Then Mom reminded him that he couldn't kill himself or someone else with a video game. She was so serious about it, and Ben got so cranky. It was a thing they went through for about a year, I think. Any conversation about the car always turned into an argument. He hated the "dorky" paint and wood on it; she said it was "vintage" and "classic." He said we should get a cheaper car; she said that all the metal in the body made it safer for him to drive, and that he should be happy we had a car at all. Their conversations were always the same. I think Ben said, "I know, I know!" more than a million times that year. And Mom was always saying, "Shut up and listen to what I'm saying."

Ben was absolutely set on getting the car upgraded so he could ride around with his friends. Most of his friends' parents had said "no way" to them riding if Ben was actually driving the car, even after he got his license. He kept telling Mom how the car would be safer if it could drive itself and how we could get better mileage because it would self-adjust routes to avoid traffic or to take short cuts, and that statistics showed that car-brains actually reacted faster than human brains in dangerous situations.

"Maybe so, but they can only react one way, and human brains can think of a dozen ways to react in a tough situation. So the answer is still no. Not yet. Maybe never."

Mom scored big points on him the next week when there were dozens of accidents on I-5 that involved driverless cars. Mom didn't care that it was because of a virus that someone had uploaded to the traffic beam. No one knew who did it. Some people said it was an environmental group that wanted to discourage private cars. Other people thought it was just a new generation of hackers making their mark on the world. "It wasn't the cars' fault, Mom!" Ben argued. "The beacon gave them bad information."