Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

  Broomielaw nods, unable to speak.

  “Take this,” says Molendinar. She hands Mara a sprig of dried herb. “Thyme. For courage.”

  Mara breathes in its scent and remembers something. She unseals a small inner compartment of her backpack, takes out her mother’s sprig of rosemary, and binds it with the thyme.

  “Clear head and courage,” she tells Molendinar.

  Broomielaw grips Mara’s hand. Tears stand in her large green eyes. “You were wrong when you told us Mara means bitterness. I think Mara must mean a strong, long hope that doesn’t give up.”

  “Longhope.” Mara finds herself smiling in surprise as that was the name of their farm hamlet on Wing. She clasps Broomielaw’s hand. “I’ll find him, Broomielaw. I won’t come back till I do.”

  Broomielaw nods tearfully. “I’ve believed in you from the first day. But wait now.” She springs up into her nest and returns with a bundle of water-warped pages, covered in clumsy writing, that have been sewn along one edge with tough grasses to make a book. “Take these with you. They’re Gorbals’s poems.”

  “I can’t take them,” Mara protests. “He meant you to have them.”

  But Broomielaw pushes the lumpy pages into her hands. “Gorbals always says a poem belongs to whoever wants it or needs it. Don’t you want it? You might need it …” she nods fearfully, “up there.”

  Mara bites her lip and takes Gorbals’s handmade book of poems. Carefully, she seals it away in an inside pocket of her backpack.

  “Be ready,” Ibrox warns her. “For whatever is to happen.”

  And now she really must leave or she’ll break down and won’t be able to go. But there is still Candleriggs to say good-bye to. Mara walks over to the oak tree. The ancient owl eyes peer down from the greatnest.

  “You might lose your life, Mara Bell,” Candleriggs says quietly.

  Mara gazes up at her. “I know. But, Candleriggs, I wanted to die in the boat camp after I lost my family and my best friend, just like you did when you were thrown out of the New World. I tried to die but somehow I couldn’t—though if Wing hadn’t got me out of the boat camp I could well be dead by now. It’s my fault Gorbals was taken, so I have to try to get him back. Also, it’s a risk I have to take if we want to find a safe home in the world. But Candleriggs, it’s more than that. See, I’ve found something to live for again. Strangely enough, it’s worth risking my life to have that. And most of all …”

  Mara pauses and swallows hard. “I need to do it for my family—so that their lives weren’t lost for nothing.”

  Candleriggs nods slowly.

  “Well, all I can say is what I know,” says Candleriggs. “It’s this—you can betray someone with a word or an action. You can betray them with silence or inaction too. And in betraying that one person you can betray a whole world. I’ve seen almost thirty thousand sunups—that’s more than eighty years in old time—and that’s the most important thing I’ve learned. Except that the opposite might also be true. So yes, I think it’s worth risking everything to save another person’s life. And I know this too: the future will not depend upon the human mind; it belongs to the human heart. But Mara—don’t you believe any of this is part of the stone-telling?”

  “Um, possibly—I mean—well, not really. Oh, I don’t know!” cries Mara in confusion.

  “Don’t twitter like a sparrow,” says Candleriggs. There’s a spark of amusement in her voice. “Tell me what you really think.”

  “Well,” Mara debates, “maybe I’m meant to do it—who knows? I just can’t believe that the future is set in stone. Surely things only happen because of what you choose to do. And I choose to do this because I’m the only one who can. And because I feel I should, not because of those signs in the stone. They don’t mean anything to me.”

  But Mara has remembered something else. Now she tells Candleriggs about the water-smudged sentence she read in the fragments of pages about the Athapaskans. It told of a gift called a potlatch, the gift that must be returned. This is her potlatch for what Wing and the Tree-nesters have done for her.

  “And maybe,” her dark eyes flash and she grins up at Candleriggs, “maybe I want to get up there and just see.”

  Candleriggs laughs and the owl eyes disappear as she settles back in the greatnest.

  “Good-bye then, Mara Bell,” the old woman calls softly. “Try to do what I never could—keep a cool head above that fiery heart.”

  Mara lifts up her entwined sprig of rosemary and thyme and crushes them lightly in her palm to release their scents. “Clear head and courage,” she declares shakily. “Candleriggs,” she hesitates now. There’s something she has wondered about and never asked. “What was your real name?”

  The old woman’s answer is the faintest of whispers among the rustle of the leaves.

  “Lily.”

  Mara remembers the white lilies of the valley that scattered Wing’s shoreline each spring.

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “Once upon a time, so was I,” says the whisper.

  “Good-bye, Lily,” Mara whispers back.

  Down the dark hillside she runs, down the Hill of Doves and through the crab-apple trees that are aglow with moonmoths. Then she jumps on a raft and rows out into the branches of the night.

  NOOSPACE

  What you don’t trust in stone

  and decay, shape out of air.

  Eternal Moment, Sandor Weores

  Noos: mind, intellect (Greek)

  FOX TRAIL ONE

  Night is Fox time.

  A time for creeping to the very edge of things. A time for sneaking and snooping into the old, abandoned networks of the primitive cyberworld once known as the Weave, where the people of the New World never go. A time for prowling ancient nooks and crannies where once in a blue moon a fox can get lucky and dig up a precious nugget of a past that lies forgotten, undestroyed. There are some places only a fox can sniff out. Places full of lost and dead things. These are the night places where Fox goes.

  He is the rarest of creatures, a dreamer who gets things done. By day he zips through cyberspace, a Noosrunner for the New World’s Stellarka Project, snooping out new, glinting chips of scientific research and ideas that might one day take the New World into space, to a city in the stars. But that’s just his job. What Fox really lives for is the night. That’s when he seeks what he knows is the real treasure, the lost gold that is the past.

  Fox wants too much. Sometimes in the rush of hyper-speed he dreams impossible dreams, things that cannot be. The difficult thing, he has discovered, is not just knowing how to dream but knowing what to dream. And the most difficult thing of all is when you find the answer to both. Then you start to believe in your dreams—the impossible dreams that can’t come true.

  He is a child of New Mungo, the only child of two top cyberengineers who are rarely at home. His family is at the heart of the great global power that governs all the cities of the New World. Bored, brilliant, and lonely, Fox knew at the age of ten that most people use only a tiny kernel of the brainpower they own, and that somehow everything in the world had gone wrong. Now he only believes in what he finds among the crumbling ruins of the old Weave.

  Fox is a rebel. He wants to raise the past from the dead, the real past that lies abandoned in the junkheaps where the Grand Fathers of All have flung it. The past has become a carnival, a pantomime of what it really was. The New World roams and plunders a synthetic theme park of the past—caring nothing for truth, only for fun.

  Fox knows about the past. He knows that the only parts of the real, authentic past the Grand Fathers of All have not remade or banished are those guaranteed not to shock. What Fox thinks he has found shocks him to the core.

  At night, Fox joyrides at hyperspeed. He lives on his wits, too curious, with too little fear. Fox-instinct tells him when to stop and hide, when to escape from the half-lit highways where weird cybercreatures and Weave ghosts roam. He prefers to steal among the lonely lanes that lie in shadow
, searching, searching, for whatever truth he can find.

  Once, only once, there was someone else. A zip-zooming wizzer who verved through the Weave with daredevil skill. For a long time Fox stalked her, until one day she crash-landed into Nowhere, the vast chasm of cyberhaze that lies like an ocean between the Weave and the Noos. She held a key to the past, he was sure. Only that one time, when he saw her lost and floundering, did he let himself be seen. But he was too suspicious, too fox-wary, and all at once she slipped out of reach, vanished with a cry of despair that he will never forget. She never came again.

  Always alone now, Fox sifts the back-alley dustbins, searching forgotten nooks and crannies for morsels of the past. What he finds, he hoards away in secret pockets of cybermemory. He remembers each morsel, each hiding place, for one day he might use it. Fox tries to believe in the day when these true nuggets of the past will mean something once more. He feels lost in a world that lurches blindly into the future with no sense of its own past. Day by day now, his heart hardens against his world, and the only place he feels at home is among the shadows of the past.

  Night is Fox time. And somewhere in the eternity of cyberspace there is always night.

  CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

  At the very last moment Mara almost loses heart.

  The door of the lift capsule to the sky city is wide open. Workers from the early morning supply ship are surging through, sweaty and dirty and tired, along with a squad of sea police. Wearing the orange uniform, it’s easy to merge in. As she approaches the lift capsule she almost stops. A single step more will take her across the threshold that separates the two worlds. It feels like an impossible chasm. In the end it’s the crush of those behind rather than her own will that pushes her through the doorway into the large golden capsule.

  Mara is sure she is falling, not rising, when her heart plummets into her stomach as the lift moves upward in a smooth surge of speed; but it’s the world below that is tumbling away and the Earth-pull is strong. For a supercharged moment Mara feels, sees, hears, and smells everything that is the netherworld. Then it all dims and is gone.

  The first difference is the light. It’s too harsh and strong for eyes used to netherworld gloom. The next thing Mara sees when she steps out of the lift capsule is a line of city guards. Heart pounding, she avoids eye contact and walks past. Despite the beautiful white, flowerlike logos across their chests and backs, the gray uniforms of the guards are still threatening. Mara’s stomach lurches, and not just from nerves. She feels as if she is on a ship at sea—gently but unnervingly the city sways to the rhythm of the world’s wind, as it is built to do.

  “Hey, you! Over here!” a guard shouts, and Mara forces herself not to turn around, to keep moving with the rest. Her instinct is right. It’s someone else they want. Mara follows the crowd from the supply ship down a short corridor and waits her turn in the line, trying to look at ease but concentrating fiercely on everything around her.

  “To enter, please insert your identi-disk here,” announces a voice, over and over, at the head of the line.

  The voice is smooth, bright, and completely artificial. Its owner is a blankly smiling young woman who stands at the head of the corridor at what must be the official doorway to New Mungo. The material of the girl’s short dress flickers restlessly through each color of the rainbow and loops back again. With relief, Mara sees that she’s only a lumenbeing, crafted from light. She has met the girl’s broken-down ancestors in the Weave, wandering aimlessly and stuttering reams of data nonsense to anyone they meet. Mara used to bully and bother those defunct cyberbeings, just for fun. The lumen girl points at the slit in the wall where Mara should insert an identi-disk. The long, noisy line has given her time to think and she has ready the two shimmery, coin-sized disks that were in the young policewoman’s wallet.

  “To enter, please insert your identi-disk here,” the lumen girl instructs. Mara guesses and inserts one of the disks. The young woman flickers for less than a second—the lumenbeing equivalent of an irritated frown. “Incorrect disk.”

  The slot in the wall ejects the first disk. Behind her, the line mutters impatiently. Mara doesn’t dare look at the line of city guards and frantically, her fingers shaking, inserts the second disk, willing it to be the correct one.

  The sliding door opens. Mara slips through, her heart beating painfully.

  And she is in! Amazed, she stands inside a long silver tunnel.

  Mara struggles to control her fear as she walks down the gleaming walkway, trying to get used to the shifting world below her feet. She feels utterly lost.

  A clear, cool head and courage. One step at a time.

  The first step is to get out of her orange police uniform; it’s far too noticeable. Mara slows so that the crowd from the supply ship surges ahead of her around the bend of the tunnel. Then, with a quick check over her shoulder, she wriggles out of the orange uniform and crams it into her backpack. Underneath, she is wearing the soft, sleek everyday clothing of the young policewoman. She runs to catch up with the rest of the new arrivals who stand waiting on a platform inside an adjoining tunnel. Mara stands with them—since they seem to be waiting for a purpose—and realizes that the crowd has shrunk considerably.

  Where have all the others gone? She hears a loud sparking and the echo of diminishing voices. Quickly, Mara follows the echoes to an adjacent tunnel and, as she peers into it, just glimpses the last of the crowd as it speeds around a bend in a single, flowing movement, leaving a smoky trail of sparks.

  Mara walks back to the smaller group of waiting people, feeling dejected. What gave the sparking crowd such speed? She must find out. She envies that speed, wants that power and freedom.

  In a few moments a red and silver train zooms almost noiselessly into the tunnel. Mara boards with everyone else and the train moves fast and deep into the maze of sky tunnels, stopping at stations every few minutes. Mara hasn’t a clue where to get off and listens carefully to the voice that announces each station. The other passengers are either elderly or young children with parents, she notices.

  They pass through Nursery Bough, Senior Citz Care-farm, Great Western Harmony Block, Arcadia, then come to a halt at City Center, the final stop. Mara disembarks along with the remaining passengers.

  She follows the others as they exit the station platform and walk down a short tunnel that opens up into a vast airy hall. Straight ahead, she sees a pulsating sign above a tall, wide door that slides open and shut every few seconds, as people streamed through it. CYBERCATH, pulses the sign. Nervously, Mara approaches the door. It seems to be a hub of activity, so she may as well start exploring here.

  She stops for a moment to study the picture story that is etched in the huge metal door. At the foot of the door is an ark struggling through storms on a heaving ocean. Above that, numerous people are shown engrossed in industrious tasks—all kinds of building, creating, inventing. The figures work under a shower of mathematical-looking symbols, tools, and instruments. At the very pinnacle of the picture story, perched on top of all this human endeavor, are two angelic beings, a winged man and woman.

  The huge door slides open.

  A lumenbeing in a luridly flowered shirt beckons Mara to come inside. “Come on in and grab a free cupule,” he urges. “Have an interesting day!”

  Mara walks through the great door with a composure that is as fake as the doorboy and his welcome. She walks in as if she knows exactly where she is going and what she is doing. Which, ultimately, she does. All she needs to figure out is how.

  Mara stands awestruck inside the colossal hall that is New Mungo’s cybercath. Cybercath. She mulls over the word. It must be short for cybercathedral because a cathedral is exactly what this place reminds her of, only it’s much bigger than the one in the netherworld. You could fit ten of those in here. And instead of stone this cathedral-like place seems to be created out of light and air, glass and crystal and mirror—and yet more light. And wide open space. And soaring walls and ceilings t
hat make you look ever upward.

  But never down or out.

  Several thousand quietly industrious voices fill the air with a hum of discordant mutterings. The sound is oddly musical, almost choral. Is the fox here? Mara wonders, staring at row upon row of bent heads. He could be anywhere among the thousands who sit in the vast honeycomb of work cubicles that fill the cybercath. A city guard catches Mara’s eye and she jumps in fright. She must be careful to look normal and purposeful.

  Quickly, she finds a free workstation among the vast honeycomb. She sits down and the chair moulds itself around her like a cozy hug. How do you get out of it? She tries to stand and the hug chair releases her with a gentle sigh. Mara smothers a nervous giggle and sits down again, enjoying the hug this time.

  Now she thinks she sees what it is they all hum into—the tiniest boxes are clipped like brooches at chest level onto every person. She sees too the colored crystals that are stuck upon each forehead. There is a single instruction engraved upon the gleaming table of her cubicle.

  Do Not Remove Godbox or Headgem from This Cupule.

  Godbox. Mara picks up the tiny box attached to a pin. Must be this. Headgem. That must be the colored crystal. She clips the godbox to her chest as the others do. Then she puts the headgem on her forehead. It sticks as if by magic. Body magnetism? Mara can only wonder.

  Her priority is to locate Gorbals and Wing, and then figure out a way to access the boats, so she needs information about how the city works. If only she could find the cyberfox and get him to help her. But the only way to do any of that is to come to grips with the New World technology. That is her first, urgent step. Going by the tuneful murmurings all around her, voice seems to be part of the key.

  Mara tries asking the godbox for information on how to work the system. It doesn’t respond. She tries asking it in different voice tones. Again, nothing happens. She can’t understand the function of all this melodic humming but Mara suspects the New World cybersystem is a universe ahead of any technology she has ever known. The industrious hum of the voices and the concentration on every face makes it clear that the thousands in the cybercath are here to work, not play—but what kind of work? She can’t ask anyone; her ignorance would instantly give her away.