ROBERT ONOPA

TRAFFIC

 *
"He must go by another way who would escape this wilderness, for that mad beast
that fleers before you there, suffers no man to pass. She tracks down all, kills
all, and knows no glut, but, feeding, she grows hungrier than she was."

Inferno I

What follows, like a snaking line of cars, is the story of the first time I ever
set foot inside a Nomad vehicle. It was one of those days: traffic was a bitch.
I was late for my analyst's, and the usual ground-level routes through Studio
City were tangled by buses and vans. The sidewalks along Moorpark were either
stacked with illegal parking or in use as right turn lanes. I was creeping along
in my Saturn, an old electric bomb, behind a silver Benz, a replica diesel; the
Benz belched black smoke so dense I didn't notice the gridlock at Coldwater
until I was part of it. I backed through an alley only to find my path
obstructed by an articulated trash hauler so huge, so sinister, I thought of
Dante at the beginning of the Commedia, his way blocked by the she-wolf of
appetite. And then, approaching the gridlock at Coldwater again via the
drive-through lane of the Marcos Whiplash Clinic, I saw in the fluorescent blue
haze blanketing the intersection a vision from Hell itself: out of the sea of
traffic a red intake port began to surface, snout-like, lupine. The glistening
black pickup on whose hood it was mounted was customized with enormous soft
tires twice the height of a man. Sounding an airhorn, it surged forward
mightily, first bumping the Lexus ahead, then climbing the slope of its trunk
and the Hyundai's in the next lane, cresting over both cabins, bumping,
gyrating, crushing its way forward.

Then it turned in my direction.

Only in L.A, I told myself, could it come to this.

So I swung through the telltale camp of shabby cardboard huts, the Nomad camp
everybody was pretending not to see. I blew my horn, scattering two poor Nomad
families in their earth-colored rags, then punched through to one of the
abandoned ramps of what used to be called the Ventura Freeway. I was trying, as
you may have guessed, to bypass the Coldwater mess by getting on a Nomad
Interface, a section of urban roadway Nomads are permitted to cruise when they
drop down off the Interstate, what they call The Way.

Usually Residents like me, even Residents like the madman in the truck, avoid
the Nomad Interface. I had a pirated ambulance chip mounted on my firewall to
get me through even undocumented barriers like this one -without the chip, of
course, you fry. At the end of the trash-strewn lane of crumbling concrete I
felt my old Saturn vibrate through the electronic membrane; I merged onto the
Ventura as if I belonged there.

On the Interface the right lanes were thick with Nomad load-carriers uncoupling
on the fly. If the drivers ever stop, as everyone knows, they forfeit their rigs
and wind up in cardboard shacks like those I'd driven through. Transfer cabs
licensed to switch the loads to and from the city zipped around the middle lanes
like house lizards in a world of brontosaurial thirty-two and sixty-four
wheelers. I finally got up to speed on the viaduct over Sepulveda Boulevard.

That's when my Saturn -- with a sickening whump and sizzle from the front end --
lost power.

I coasted onto the shoulder and made some calls on my celphone. Under the hood I
found my SunStar system and batteries fused into a blackened blob of polycarbon
and ceramics. I couldn't even find the socket for my chip.

Then the sirens went off, the ones in the membrane, the ones that announce the
daily clearing of all Nomad vehicles from the Interface: a fine time for this, I
remember thinking; you need a chip even to walk off.

That's when I saw the Nomad rig, a white forty footer, creeping my way on the
shoulder. A boy wearing an EARTHQUAKE/08 cap was leaning out, his hand on the
door handle as the rig loomed toward me. "Hey, mister," the kid yelled -- I
could see an old guy driving, his white hair long in the Nomad way -- "You wanna
upload?"

The sirens were wailing. Back a klick down at the foot of the viaduct Jurassic
earth-moving equipment was already clearing the stragglers.

I'd never been so close to a Nomad vehicle before. I put my driving shoe on the
brass footplate, grabbed the carved handhold, and swung through the open door.

The cab I tumbled into was dim with muted colors. My new silver suit, trendy in
L.A., made me feel immediately self-conscious. I took a deep breath and almost
gagged: organic fabrics, leather, grease, food, fossil fuels and . . . what
else? Was it true that Nomads never bathed?

"Hey," the old guy yelled above the high frequency wail. "You understand? We're
headed up the ramp."

Now the hair rose on the back of my neck. As the old guy'd said, the big 1-5
ramp, the ramp out of L.A., loomed in the tinted windshield. The Nomad swarm of
vehicles funneled its way, glimmering under their diesel stacks and solar
arrays. In the dusty red light a few illegal peds dodged police APC's, running
for the shoulder, scattering along the membrane like it was the southern border,
getting jolted: ash in a flash, as they say on the street. I started a quick
inventory of my life but never got past the problems I was going to talk to my
analyst about: tension at the architectural firm where I work, and my rocky
engagement to Denise, a woman obsessed with parking spaces. Maybe what I needed
was a short adventure.

"Boy, is my mom gonna flame when she finds out we loaded a porker," the kid
said. "I mean a parker. Sorry."

"I fused my chip," I told the old guy. "I don't know what to do."

"Then ride with us, stranger. There're places we can get you back across.
There's Hubbard's Cave in Chicago."

"Chicago?"

We approached the abandoned toll booths. They marked a kind of border: to the
east lay the Interstate, true Nomad territory, disappearing into land darkening
as with a change of weather.

Looking into the vast black heart of it, I swooned.

When I woke the next morning, I found myself in a bunk aft in the vehicle, a
small patch of UV glass beside me, the creosote scrub of Nevada stretching to
the horizon. The ruth was, it was sublime. A range of mountains stood clearly in
the distance, purple and clean. The electronic fence that kept the Nomads on the
road and off the land was barely visible as a series of thin towers. Horrible
though my dislocation was, I could see what the Nomads liked about their way of
life: the space, the steady movement, the low-level atmosphere you could see
right through.

And out there, well, traffic wasn't that bad. The big rigs -- the stupendously
oversize vans, the doublewide trailers, the canvas-flapping Omars, the sedans,
the commercial flatbeds -- all moved like a herd of animals, in an orderly,
coordinated way, our speed about as fast as a person can run.

Up forward, a graceful woman in her late twenties was driving She wore the big
Nomad earnings, the oversize tunic and chaps, the muted colors. She turned out
to be the boy's mother, Acura. I felt self-conscious about my silver suit again;
when the light hit the fabric the right way, it actually reflected its
surroundings.

I eased myself into the passenger's seat with an ingratiating smile. Acura was
attractive, even smelled good, spicy and floral at the same time.

I suppose I was a little intoxicated by her. Or disoriented by the experience of
continuous motion. "Isn't it maddening not to stop?" I blurted out, trying to be
friendly. "I've always felt you people had a right . . ."

Her ice-blue eyes narrowed. "You people?"

"I'm sorry. I mean, um, you . . . folk."

"Us folk? Just where are us folk supposed to demand our rights?" she asked, her
lips tight. "Just where?"

She was technically correct about the Nomad human rights problem.

Nomad life first began when the refinement of low-v solar rigs coincided with a
movement among long-haul truckers to stay on the road all the time; in the
cities, mobile offices had already hit the road in the shape of customized
supervans, "transient architectural mechanisms," wrote Newsweek, spawned by
roads so choked that cities like L.A. or Bangkok took days to cross. During the
housing crisis of '07, commuters with long drives and low budgets abandoned
their mortgages and started living full-time in enhanced RVs, joining the
thousands of Sioux and Arapaho on the Interstate who'd gone on trek in
Winnebagos. The traffic, as they say, merged. Intermarried. When children were
born on the road, Nomad Nation became history.

The downside was that native born, "indigenous" Nomads had no legal residence.
Their disenfranchisement remained starkly visible: if Nomads got past the
membrane, they were relegated to cardboard shacks on deserted freeway ramps.
They joined those who'd stopped, the lot of them illegal immigrants unable to
qualify even for survival welfare.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was just . . ."

"You're just lucky I was sleeping when they saw you."

"I was in trouble."

"I would never have let them pick you up," she said, a vein throbbing on her
forehead. "What were you doing out there, anyway? Taking a short cut? You
parasite."

"The sirens went off," I said sullenly. True, the problems I'd been driving to
discuss with my analyst, particularly the problems at work, seemed trivial now.
"They would have just scraped me into the Interface."

"All Ryder could talk about this morning was how we had a porker on board."

"The kid? His name's Ryder?"

"You just leave him alone."

Her anger made me ashamed. These nice people could wind up living on an
off-ramp. "I'll get out of your way as soon as I can," I said.

She turned to me as if to say something, but my suit had gone reflective and she
started looking at me as if I was some idiot who'd become partially transparent.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Hubbard's Cave," the old man, Mack, said. I could
see Ryder behind him, rubbing his eyes.

Alongside us Nomad traffic moved as relentlessly as a big ocean swell.

All the Resident newsmedia-- CNN, VNN, ABC -- paint a picture of the Nomads as
gypsy trackers, as transients with cattle trailers, as assorted other road
trash. But I saw a different world out there on the Twenty Lane Trail.

To begin with, at the heart of the swarm aren't transport herds but fleets of
caravans driving clustered around mobile shops and services to make up moving
communities. I saw curtains in windows, kitchen gardens under sliding skylights.
Around noon we passed Nomads eating in a self-propelled restaurant, retro-styled
as a railroad dining car, its power panels hidden in the silver of its roof. A
long doublewide functioned as a repair center; your rig was raised into it like
a dry dock. One supervan tuned out to be a veterinary clinic (one out of every
four Nomads towed animals). All the facilities were compact, and I'd guess you'd
have to say, primitive, but there was a beauty to them, to the funky efficiency
of wood and mylar docking ports.

That day I stuck to my compartment, ate lunch alone, staring out the window,
eventually watching the light fade over the traffic and Utah. Ryder came by and
invited me to dinner with him and his Grandad at a Nomad "Campfire" -- we'd have
to step over to a moving flatbed. Mack was behind him, said it was okay, a place
kids went to hang out, that I should see more of Nomad life.

I got up and stretched. "I'd love to," I said.

"You can't go like that," Ryder said, waving his hand at my shiny clothes.

"This is all I have."

Mack studied me for a long moment. "We've got some men's clothes in the back,"
he said.

He did indeed: from a locker beyond the galley he pulled oversize Japanese
trousers, an organic fiber shirt, and a soft jacket, a nice one, of burgundy
leather.

I saw the woman, Acura, briefly just as Mack docked, the moment before Ryder and
I stepped over. I'd been obsessed with her ice-blue eyes all day, her sharp
intelligence. Now her wavy brunette hair was loose around her shoulders. I
thought she might smile with some sort of approval when she saw the earth-tones
of my borrowed clothes. But she only seemed startled when she saw me. Then she
wouldn't meet my eyes.

The encounter left me slightly shaken for reasons I couldn't explain. I crossed
nervously to a huge flatbed at the center of which burned an artificial fire of
used railroad ties. There was a crowd, which took some getting used to -- lots
of teens, some of them couples, some of them chaperoned by their parents, older
people, babies in cloth carriers, a Sioux chief in full regalia, a group of
musicians. Dinner was a blur of wholesome simple food on non-slip plates;
afterward there was singing long simple chords and the warble of women's voices.
The company confirmed for me a sense that all of life was here on the road.

Acura's eyes had a bruised quality, as if she'd been crying, when I joined her
up front after we'd reboarded. I couldn't think of anything to say. Then Mack
stepped up to spell her at the wheel just as I was slipping off the burgundy
jacket.

In a flash I realized whose clothes I'd been wearing: the jacket in my hands was
much too big for Mack. The trousers, the coat, the shirt: they belonged to
Acura's husband.

As tactfully as I could, I asked about him.

"Why don't you tell us?" Acura said bitterly. "Tell us about Kill a Nomad Day.
Tell us about hospitals that have to keep moving. Tell us about living in
cardboard teepees." She pushed past me and disappeared into the back of the rig.

Mack looked at me after he adjusted the rear view mirrors. He nodded for me to
stay in the passenger's seat.

"He was shot by Residents?" I asked Mack.

He shook his head. "Wasn't that. We had to leave him at the Mayo Exit, up on the
I-94 in Minnesota. They sometimes help our kind --but they didn't help Chevy."
His son-in-law, he explained, had died of kidney problems well beyond the
capabilities of Nomad clinics; Chevy's entry into a Resident medical center had
been denied. The chance for help had meant abandoning him, but the help had not
come.

Now I felt stupid again, really stupid. "It was very generous of you to let me
board," I said.

The next day I kept out of Acura's way, out of respect. I played checkers with
Ryder and watched the landscape of Wyoming slide by a streaked side window as if
the white light mountains themselves were on the move. Then came the
interminable rolling plains of Nebraska and Iowa.

We crossed the Mississippi, gliding over a silver arch, and entered Illinois.

I'd put myself in the front seat beside Acura again, determined to part with her
on good terms.

"So it'll be good-bye," I said.

"And good riddance."

"Look," I said. "I've apologized as best I can for what happened to your
husband. I don't know what else I can do. I didn't make the world the way it is.
Give me a break, okay?"

"We're just different," she said. "I mean Nomads and Residents. We're different
kinds of people."

"I'm not sure that's what I've been seeing."

"Then you haven't seen straight. Nomads don't turn people away and Nomads don't
collect so much baggage in their lives they can't even move--like lead-walled
holo rooms just to play satellite link teledildonics. We don't leave scars on
the earth wherever we go. We don't leave anything."

"Maybe some people need less transience in their lives. They need to produce
something enduring."

"Human compassion can be enduring. What did you say your profession was?"

"I'm an architect," I said.

"That's not exactly what you told Mack."

"All right. I design parking structures. Portable elevated parking structures."

"That's a permanent contribution to life?" she asked.

My ears burned and I found myself focusing on her beadwork vest. In L.A., people
always told me they were grateful for what I did. "Nomads are a bit primitive,
you know," I said.

Now she laughed. "That's what they've been saying since the beginning of
civilization. The Romans defined Nomads legally as animals. But cities are
violent at a rate twenty times that of nomadic life. The violence goes back to
Cain and Abel. Cain was the settler, remember. The Resident. Abel was the
shepherd, the Nomad."

Could she be right? Cain the first land developer? Cain the architect of the
first parking lot? Now I wanted to make her ears burn. "You people still use
fossil fuels," I countered, even though I knew by now that the diesels were only
used during storms. "Anyway, you're exaggerating the hostility."

She looked at me with measured skepticism. "What about Kill a Nomad Day?
September first this year, right?"

"That's just sort of a drive-by thing," I said uneasily. "It could have happened
to me, before Mack picked me up. I'll grant you this," I admitted, remembering
the relief with which I left the shoulder of the freeway for even the strange
rig. "Nomads have more compassion." I took a deep breath. "At least I can still
get out of your way. Mack said we'd make Hubbard's Cave tomorrow. I'll be gone.
Back to my job, my neurotic fiancee, a Rottweiler who pees on my tires. I'm
sorry we couldn't get along."

She looked at me. Something else irritated her now. "I'm sorry too," she said,
and looked away.

The sunrise was blinding red, all toxic haze. The complex swirl of looping wide
ramps we were descending from the west culminated in a phantasmagoria of
cloverleafs and delicate concrete columns supporting roads on a dozen levels.
Traffic glinted in the sun, stretching east and south as far as I could see. A
huge billboard under the signature of Mayor Richard Daley XXIII welcomed
travelers to the Kennedy-Tristate Interface at Chicago, "the largest
intersection in the world."

There was something festive about the place, the carnival lettering of the sign,
the red and blue flags of the moving Nomad markets. The legendary break in the
membrane, Hubbard's Cave, turned out to be a wide tunnel where an expressway
passed beneath Hubbard Street, so deep into the city it would take us all day to
drive there. Mack described for me a set of service doors in the tunnel wall I'd
be looking for, and I practiced stepping out of the cab as far down as the
footplate.

The dry run turned into a close call. A gust pulled Ryder's cap from his head
and he nearly tumbled off the rig snatching it. I grabbed a handful of his
jacket and held on until he steadied himself, a dicey piece of footwork, it
turned out, for me too. Acura gave me a grateful smile, then said she was
embarrassed that she'd been so unfriendly the day before. So it looked like we'd
be parting on good terms after all.

We made a turn southeast through the Jefferson Park district in late morning:
the traffic of Chicago lay beside us, undulating like a sea. At Edens Junction
Ryder and I watched lane surfers jumping the median fence to run their ATVs back
upstream, then downstream again at high speed, in elegant cuts across eight or
ten lanes of waves of vehicles, touching bumpers as they slid by.

I was exhilarated and frightened by turns that day. We sighted the tunnel
entrance first at four, an ugly wide maw in the distance swallowing traffic like
Charybdis swallowing the sea. Ryder had been chattering away about how excited I
must be going back to HoloGolf and BumperBuses in L.A. but even he fell silent
when we drove through the dim green lights surrounding the tunnel mouth and into
the dark heart of it. It was a wild place, all roar and whine of gears. The
high-pitched scream of roller bearings wailed against some deep thumping in the
guts of it all, like a slow evil heartbeat. Dust in the air intensified the
darkness.

"It's up there," Mack said, squinting through the windshield at a faint glow
ahead. "In that strip of yellow light on the right." We all squinted, trying to
make sense of dark shapes moving ominously in dirty air. Mack interrupted my
distracted good-byes. "Something's wrong. I can't . . ."

We all saw the problem at once: down the ramp of a merging tunnel on our right
rolled a fleet of four-by-fours, black pickups and vans with enormous soft
tires. Sounding airhorns they were surging forward, bumping the traffic ahead,
rising over it, gyrating, crushing their way forward in purple light.

They were replicas of the truck I'd seen in L.A., the one with the hood with the
wolfish snout that had risen above the gridlock. The whole of the wide tunnel
began to fill with the glistening black shapes as the fleet swept across the
lanes on Nomad roofs. The coppery tang of fear in my mouth turned bitter now.

Yet some part of me marveled at what I saw: what traffic! what a nightmare!

"How are you going to get out?" Ryder cried.

Two lanes over a Nomad work crew was crushed before our eyes as one of the
monster trucks descended on a canvas-topped Omar. One of the four-by-fours took
on a big articulated loadcarrier just ahead; a figure leaped down from the
passenger's side of the truck with a chainsaw.

"They're hijackers," Mack shouted.

Mack was driving for his life. A four-by-four started bouncing on us. Mack
fended it off with a thick aluminum pole with a shotgun shell at its end, a bang
stick, which he extended out of his window and fired against one of the monster
truck's fat tires. The truck tumbled away into accumulating wreckage.

"The right lane's blocked," Ryder cried.

Through the twisted metal I could see peds fighting around the service doors in
the membrane; I thought I saw one make it through. "Just get me close," I said.

"No," Acura said. "Don't go. It's too dangerous."

"A promise is a promise," I told her. "I can't ask for more from you good
people. Good-bye."

A yellow van crashed on the left and burst into flame. I thought of just failing
to the pavement and accepting my fate, but I resolved anew not to die in traffic
without a fight. I took a deep breath and opened the door. Noise and bad air
flooded the cabin. We were bumped again, from above, as I swung out. A monster
truck's fat tire, near enough for me to feel its black heat on my face, bulged
and quivered; in the din I heard a chainsaw start up.

Mack and Ryder and Acura were goners if the chainsaw cut through their roof. I
saw an opening to the right but yelled for Mack's bang stick instead. I swung it
up and blew the truck's tire, taking a scrape as the entire black shape slid
between me and what had been my path to the service doors. They were already
behind us. I thought about running back on the roofs of the slower vehicles and
timed a leap for a wrecked trash hauler dead in its lane just as a diesel tanker
rammed the wall and burst into flame.

"No," three voices screamed in the din. And as I jumped someone grabbed me,
someone sweet-smelling and strong enough to pull me back through the door with a
grunt.

"We'll try New York," Mack said as I slumped against the dash. "There's a place,
the Core. . . . You'll have a better shot. This is crazy."

". . . even if we have to drive back to L.A.," Acura said.

Ryder shouted that he saw the end of the tunnel, a white ring of daylight in the
distance.

I was shivering with cold and fear. I felt Acura slipping something over my
shoulders -- the burgundy leather jacket Mack had let me wear days before.

The strange thing was how, when we were leaving the tunnel, another Nomad
survivor waved in companionship, waved with the four raised fingers of the Nomad
salute, waved directly at me. It felt pretty good to wave back.

We looped through Detroit. Mack had arranged for repairs and alterations to his
rig and we docked with an enormous moving custom shop.

We hadn't realized until Indiana how badly his left arm had been crushed fending
off the first four-by-four. Acura became exhausted pulling extra shifts driving
and circling the freeways of Detroit in the gray air before we docked, I'd
started driving shifts too. The rig seemed alive to me then, a huge powerful
animal beneath my hands, a wounded animal, but one that would stay the course.

While they worked on the damage I took in a number of Nomad Campfires --in
Detroit, they burned scrap lumber-- and listened to stories of pirates and Road
Runners and feuds and radical rigs, threads in the fabric of Nomad lore. An old
transmission specialist recreated tales of historic traffic jams so convincingly
I forgot where I was.

"I dunno," Mack grumbled beneath the swath of bandages around his shoulder, his
spirits low. "How the hell can you forget you're living on a conveyor belt?"

"But sometimes it's wonderful," I said. "Being a Nomad is like being one of
those birds who are only really alive when they're in motion, like a tern, or an
albatross. There's a poetic side."

"Now you're getting it," Acura said. And then she kissed me, a soft kiss on the
cheek.

"I might even miss you when you're gone," she said.

Ryder rolled his eyes.

We drove through Ontario, an idyll of flat land and small caravans. We crossed
the Niagara into thick freight moving through Buffalo and made the turn
downstate when we hit the Hudson River.

Four days out of Detroit, New York City traffic appeared in the distance as a
tight Byzantine mosaic simmering under the late afternoon sun. The Nomad Way
went underground, merged with the Interface they called the Core, then ascended
into steep-walled canyons of glass and steel buildings whose only exits seemed
gridlocked streets leading to gridlocked avenues whose vestigial traffic signals
served as standards for the electronic membrane, like buoys marking channels.
The Nomads kept in motion somehow, backing and turning, creeping klick by klick
downtown toward the Core's center with glacial inexorability.

Day turned to siren-filled night turned to bleak daylight once again. Residents
on cross-streets and in storefronts watched us with indifference, watched the
Nomad rigs streaked with road dirt from around the country as if they were all
just loads of freight shifting through the lowest form of transport; yet down
the sidestreets we could see traffic that had been frozen in place for days,
Residents making camp on the spot like Nomads, trucks, even buses, that had been
abandoned, festive street markets, packs of derelicts around fires in drums,
even silver-suited Residents fighting over cabs that were not likely to move
until nightfall.

Although we knew they'd be coming, we all went pale when we saw the black
pickups, the monster trucks, again on the third day. A fleet even bigger than
the one that had swept through Hubbard's Cave rose on a cross-street and poured
through a break in the electronic membrane so huge it seemed the four-bys had
official sanction to harass and hijack Nomads.

This time drivers like Mack were ready. He hit a switch and his own newly
installed hyperextendable tires began to inflate and the rig rose and shifted
into sixteen wheel drive. Using a pile of street rubble as a ramp we surged up
over the back of a transfer cab onto the roofs of ordinary traffic, joining a
second level bright in the sunlight between highrises, our weight so broadly
distributed we rode over the mass of Nomad rigs without crushing them. Then the
big rigs like Mack's proceeded to scatter the lighter pickups of the hijackers
and smear a few into the membrane. Even through the noise of chainsaws and
gunshots and the gnashing of gears you could hear the Nomad cheers. We headed
south toward Washington Square, our eventual destination, right down the famous
Interface at Fifth Avenue, the new fleet of upper-level Nomad vehicles turning
back two more attacks by swarms of black tracks.

I thought I was heading home to Denise that day. I played a last game of license
plate poker with Ryder, sketched a shelf design to reorganize Acura's closet
(parking lot architects do have some transferable skills), and tried to come to
terms with my regrets. I volunteered for a last shift at the wheel so my friends
would be rested when they turned to exit the Core.

So I was the first one to spot the trouble. We'd been prepared for the second
level of traffic on lower Fifth (indeed, we were part of it); we'd been prepared
for the gridlock in Washington Square; we'd even been prepared for the sight of
the mangled bodies of those who didn't quite make it to the service door in the
base of the Arch which led to a subway station and escape from Nomad territory.

But none of us were prepared for the sight and sound of a third generation of
black trucks which rose above the second tier of traffic. These were huge
sixty-four wheelers, big as houses, powered by gas turbines so loud their roar
shook the city for blocks. They came from the lower east side, their enormous
tires proceeding to crush even the bigger Nomad rigs on the second level beneath
their treads. Heading toward the Arch was like accepting a fate as filling in a
traffic sandwich, rigs above, rigs below.

"This traffic is awesome," Mack said. "It'll kill us. Maybe the only way to get
you across is back in L.A."

I realized then how good it felt to know I was going to keep riding with Mack
and Acura and Ryder.

We bailed out of the west side of Washington Square. In New Jersey we picked up
a load of freight to tow in order to pay our way, and settled back in for a
non-stop to Los Angeles.

We drove south through Kentucky, the days idyllic with Nomad music and warming
weather. Near Lexington, after I'd finished remodeling Ryder's bunk area, fixed
the plumbing and even worked on the auxiliary diesel replacing glow-plugs, Acura
asked if I thought about staying on the road.

It was not my best moment. I was trying to get pipe sealant from beneath my
fingernails and the smell of grease out of my hair. "I miss my sensurround
couch," I told her. "I miss my VR suit, I miss Denise --well, I dunno about
Denise. . . . "My stomach grumbled. "I miss Instant Lunch. I even miss making
goddamned Instant Lunch in my cubicle at work."

"Is it really better than Mom's vegetable soup?" Ryder asked after a moment.

I closed my eyes, and remembered. "Okay, definitely not. And your mom's twice
the woman Denise is."

"I can understand missing your dog" Ryder said.

"I didn't say I missed Rot. Truth is, he doesn't have enough space to be normal.
He lives in Denise's parking space and pees on my tires. Denise could keep him."

"I noticed your hair's growing longer," Mack pitched in.

"You look good in Nomad clothes too, you know," Acura said.

"But who. . . . ? I mean whose rig? Who's willing to . . . ?"

"We are," she said. "Me and Ryder and Mack."

The first time I made love with Acura, among the pillows and quilts on the wide
bed at the back of the rig was during a deep moonless night. Afterward I cranked
open the big hatch above us and we lay on our backs watching the sky together,
her body warm against mine and sweet with the odors of spice and wild vanilla.
The sky seemed huge, the stars brilliant. It felt like flying.

And that's how I came to stay.

Acura put it best. Traveling, she says, is good for the brain. It's true: you
get a sense of physical and mental well-being from a journey. The monotony of
settlement weaves patterns in the brain that make you feel tired and small,
traveling makes you feel bigger.

"It's a spiritual thing," Acura says.

True again, I say. Every day's an act of renewal on the road. Why do you think
they had pilgrimages in the old days? Dante's journey may have started in hell,
but it got him to heaven.

Of course, had we really tried to get me back across in L.A. (I thought of
dropping in to settle my affairs), I'm not sure I could have left The Way if I'd
wanted to. All the in-city Interfaces had been blocked off when we returned --
apparently from total gridlock in the urban corridor from Malibu south to San
Diego. We had to drop our load in Bakersfield.

On Mack's more pessimistic days, when his sore shoulder bothers him, he sees the
increase in both city and Nomad traffic and the fleets of black trucks as
indicative of a "swarming stage" in the cycle of human population. Some guy
named Malthus wrote about it long ago. It's like the suicidal march of the
lemmings in Scandinavia; the increased aggressive migrations signal an end for
the species in global starvation.

But my new bunkmate is more positive. Each day is a new beginning, Acura says.
The journey is eternal, each klick a step along The Way, I1-Rah, The Tao. That's
why, she says, we will find the human future in space, and why the first great
travelers there will come from the ranks of the Nomads. Ryder's electronic
school has already acquainted him with mobile launching.

The problems seem distant to me now, since we've crossed the land bridge from
Alaska into Asia. Of course Nomads have been on the roads here for years -- the
first mobile factories came out of Thailand, the first great wheeled musk herds
out of Ulan Bator.

Still, it's the experience of a lifetime to hit Outer Mongolia and watch the
traffic finally start to thin out. The road is gold across the steppes in the
morning light as we steer toward Irkutsk and thousands of klicks to drive.