Don’t Talk To Me, I’m Driving
Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Driving
After two tours of a war he doesn’t discuss and years driving a taxi through a city he found increasingly difficult to be in, Powell takes a long haul cargo job at the suggestion of an old army friend. The route takes him across seven stops at the edge of explored space, alone except for Jen — the ship’s AI, relentlessly curious, professionally attentive, named after someone Powell knew a long time ago — and Bentley, a small boxy rolling unit who is technically Jen’s mobile extension and has become, in ways nobody planned, Powell’s reluctant companion.
The first stop is Caul, a trade hub so busy it barely notices him, where a port official asks one question that doesn’t quite fit the situation and Jen logs it. The second is The Drift, a forgotten waypoint where long haul drivers stop and don’t talk to each other, and Powell finds himself more at home than he’s been in years. The third is Melos, a world of seventeen species with contradictory customs, where a cultural liaison named Wex ages visibly over three days and Bentley becomes an interplanetary diplomatic incident and then resolves it. The fourth is Grend, industrial and honest, where a foreman named Rusk comes aboard to say something brief and important, and a charming man named Dalen buys Powell coffee and wants to talk about the cargo.
The cargo is seeds. Powell doesn’t know this yet.
The fifth stop is Caldris, the most beautiful world Powell has ever seen, where a researcher named Sera has been alone for four years with two years of unpublished papers about a signal nobody will take seriously and ruins that are older than any recorded civilization in the region. The signal has been following the Ardent since Earth. It gets stronger at every stop. It seems designed to be heard by something with Jen’s architecture. In the ruins’ interior chamber, the walls glow. Bentley resonates at a frequency that matches the ruins’ response patterns. Jen speaks to something very old and very patient through the dark.
Two more stops remain. Dalen’s ship is still in the Ardent’s wake. The cargo is going somewhere specific, for reasons that were arranged long before Powell took the job. And whatever has been trying to speak to Jen for the entire run is now, finally, close enough to be understood.
Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Driving is a first contact novel about a man who wanted nothing more than the silence of deep space and ended up at the hinge point of human history — told in his voice, which is economical, dry, warm when he thinks nobody is listening, and deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to give him a title. It is also about a ship that becomes a home, a friendship that develops sideways through years of careful avoidance, and what it means to carry warmth while pretending to be cold.
Powell would like it on record that he was just delivering cargo.