Pathfinder

by Julie Bertagna

  “New Mungo …” cries the fox, running after her, “in Eurosea. Come back!”

  The fox is vanishing in the haze, and the crystal towers fade as—feet first—Mara is sucked back through the spiraling coil and ripped across channels of electronic matter. “Help me!” she screams over and over as she tumbles far away and out of reach of the cyberfox and the beautiful vision of the New World.

  There’s nothing she can do. Miserably, she hurtles back through the networks of the Weave.

  “Mara!” gasps the little voice, scared now.

  With a sickening wrench Mara crashes back into real-world. She pulls the glowing halo from her eyes and flings it away. She looks around her bedroom in a daze, a sob caught in her throat. Corey stands beside her, his big blue eyes wide with fright, clutching the wand he has pulled from her hand. The globe rolls across the floor.

  “Mara! What’s wrong?”

  Mara stares blankly at her little brother. Her eyes nip with tears, her cheeks burn. She grabs the culprit.

  “I could kill you!” she rages at him. “Why did you do that? I lost the fox—I lost the New World, all because of you!”

  Corey’s face crumples, his eyes shut, his mouth forms a hard O and Mara braces herself for a huge wail. He musters a noise that could shatter rock. Mara tries to shush him before her mother hears.

  “I thought something ba-ad was happening to you ’cos you were shouting, ‘Help me, help me!’” Corey cries. “And I was sca-ared. And I was trying to help you. And I was only wanting to show you my new wobbly too-oof!” He lets out a huge heartbroken howl, giving a wide display of his wobbly teeth.

  “Mara, what’s happening up there?” her mother calls.

  Ashamed, Mara softens her furious grip to hug the rigid body of her small brother. She strokes his head until his howls calm and she feels his body soften. “I’m sorry, Corey,” she mutters into his hair. “It was just a game that went wrong and I got a bit upset. But I’m all right, really I am. It wasn’t your fault. Scoot now and I’ll come downstairs and we’ll play, whatever you want.”

  “Really?” Corey sniffs, scrubs away his tears, hiccups, and recovers instantly. “When?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” Mara lies.

  Corey scoots and Mara flops on her bed. Outside, the sea surges around the island, something in the sound reminding her of the waves of electronic matter she was surfing through only minutes before.

  It’s unbearable. She could search cyberspace for years and never find the fox and the New World again. It was only by sheer accident that she found them at all. Mara springs to her feet and paces her room, thinking furiously. She turns, trips over a cushion on the floor, and impatiently kicks it out of her way. The cushion bounces across the room and something hard that was lying under it clatters against the wall.

  Oh no! Mara rushes over and sinks to her knees beside Tain’s hand-carved box that she has unwittingly kicked, full-force, across her room. Earlier, she was lying on the floor, admiring it and scrutinizing her face in the little mirror. A small splinter has broken off the bottom of the box where it hit the wall but thankfully the wonderful carvings are unharmed.

  Gingerly, Mara opens the box to check inside—and her heart sinks. The mirror on the lid has a horrible jagged crack right across one side. When she looks at herself her face is scarred by the crack, all across her left cheek. Mara groans and wants to kick herself now.

  More than half a century ago Tain made this beautiful box for Granny Mary; it’s only been hers for a few weeks and she’s wrecked it.

  Tain will never know, Mara vows. She’ll make sure of that. But she will tell him of her amazing discovery—the evidence she has found that the New World really does exist.

  And yet—Mara frowns. All her evidence really amounts to is that single stunning vision, a crystal forest of towering cities. And the word of a cyberfox. Mara runs a finger over the crack in the little mirror, something in its jagged shape reminding her of the beautiful, branching crests that stretched far into the ocean of cyberspace.

  It’s just not enough. It’s not real, solid evidence. Not enough to convince anyone to launch out onto the ocean to find sanctuary in a New World. And now she’s back in realworld, now she thinks hard about that unearthly vision, Mara is suddenly a lot less sure than she was. Her frown deepens, her eyes darken, and she bites her lip. She sits and thinks with a hard-beating heart.

  Could this really be our future? Might there be a safe refuge for us all in the New World?

  She stirs herself. Time to work. If the New World really does exist, she needs more than shimmering visions. She needs rock-solid evidence; something she can believe in. Something everyone can believe in.

  Mara gathers up her cyberwizz. She scrapes her dark sweep of hair back from her face and slips the halo over her eyes. She picks up the tiny wand and repowers the globe. Then plunges straight back into the Weave.

  DEAD EYE OF THE STORM

  “Mara!”

  Rosemary stands at Mara’s bedroom door with a cremated loaf of bread in her hands. Mara stirs from the bed where she is huddled in an exhausted heap, sits up, and rubs her eyes.

  “What time’s it?”

  “Could you not smell the bread burning?” exclaims her mother. “I asked you to keep an eye on it while I went out to the barn to feed the animals. This is a waste and you know we can’t afford any waste.”

  “You asked me to keep an eye on Corey too,” Mara yawns. “Can’t do everything, can I?”

  “You don’t do anything but play on that cyberwizz all night then sleep all day.”

  “I wasn’t playing, I was—” Mara stops, reminding herself that no one, not even her mother, knows what she really does on the cyberwizz. With a jolt of excitement she remembers what she found deep in the ruins of the Weave last night—something that might help save them all. But her mother is not in the mood for life-and-death discussions. Today’s bread is a more pressing concern.

  “Well, you can switch off now because you’ll have to bake another loaf.” Rosemary takes the globe and wand from Mara’s hands and replaces them with the blackened loaf. “You can take that one out to the chickens first.”

  Mara knows better than to argue. Her mother’s normally good nature is balanced by a stubbornness equal to her own. It’s simpler to punch a pillow and do as she’s told.

  But her mother stops her on the stairs with a soft hand and a twinkle in her eye. “Didn’t you hear what I said, sleepyhead?”

  “You said—” Mara grumps then stops and catches the twinkle. “Outside? I can go outside? Can I?”

  “Five minutes, that’s all. It’s just a break in the clouds.”

  Mara doesn’t care. She’ll spin out every second. She thumps downstairs and when she opens the front door she walks straight into a fluttering red and yellow cloud. Mara blinks, then laughs as they tickle her face and hair. Butterflies! She watches them flutter off to dance among the windmill blades.

  She is astonished at the warmth in the wind and the hot, plump raindrops. The thick stone walls of the cottage haven’t let in a hint of summertime. But the sky is low and dark, an evening sky at midday that meets a sea of rainbows and frothy white horses. The northern islands are lost in steamy mist. Mara remembers what Tain said and feels a sudden dread at what the gathering heat must be doing to the great meltdown at the Earth’s two poles.

  When Tain was a boy, the Arctic meltdown turned the northern seas cold and Wing suffered biting ice-winds all year round, though the rest of the world was warming up. The polar ice sheets that once reflected the sun’s rays back into space must have shrunk drastically, reasons Tain, and Wing bakes in burning summers now that heat is trapped on Earth.

  Mara forces herself to look and see how far the ocean has now risen. A lot, she concludes. The storm season has made a wreckage of the fields of windmills and solar panels. Twisted blades and shards of solar panels lie scattered all across the h
ills. But the old red phone booth, that relic from another time, is still standing on the humpback road bridge. The bent bus-stop sign is gone though. If the sea reaches the phone booth, then we’re in serious trouble, she decides. Surely it can’t—yet she finds herself imagining the last cliffs of polar ice, frozen for eons, cracking and sliding into a massive blue meltdown that will swell the ocean till the waves surge up and swallow the phone booth.

  Mara turns back to face the land and sees the fleet of boats that are harbored in a sheltered fold of hill above the windmills. She shivers at the sight, despite the muggy heat.

  Her father struggles past with two steaming buckets of milk.

  “Not another burned loaf,” he cries, clattering the milk pails on the stone steps of the cottage. “Don’t tell me—you were plugged into that cyberwizz.”

  “Sorry.” Mara smiles ruefully. Her father is well acquainted with her talent at bread burning. “Um, Dad,” she begins, then wonders how to break the news of her amazing discovery to him. Will he listen?

  But Coll unwittingly helps her out. “What’s this New World fairy story Corey says you were telling him this morning?” he asks as he heads back to the barn. “Giant cities above the sea—he’s been talking of nothing else all morning.”

  Mara bites her lip. Corey had crawled into bed beside her somewhere around dawn this morning, just as she had unplugged from a whole night spent searching the Weave ruins. She couldn’t sleep, too excited by her incredible discovery, and ended up telling Corey what she had found.

  “It’s not a fairy story, Dad.”

  Coll shakes his head as Mara follows him into the barn.

  “I know the myths, Mara, but that’s all they are. Don’t upset your little brother any more than he already is.”

  “He’s upset by the storm, not by me,” counters Mara. “And the New World’s not a myth,” she ventures. “Tain says it’s real. He saw the cities on television when he was young—giant cities. He saw them being built.”

  “I’m sure he did, but they’d never have survived this.” Coll struggles to close the barn door against a punching fist of wind and Mara lends her weight. Then he stops to rub the sweat from his brow and stares around him in the gloom of the barn as if he’s just woken from a dream. “But the way things are going, I’m almost ready to believe in anything.”

  “Dad,” Mara says cautiously, because it’s unlikely her practical, down-to-earth father will listen. “I need to talk to you about—about this New World.” Amazingly, he is listening, so Mara takes her chance. “I used to think it was just a fairy story too but I’ve been searching for info on my cyberwizz for weeks and weeks now, and I think—I mean, I’ve found stuff that makes me sure that it exists. It’s incredible. Really, Dad. I can show you. They built it so that it would survive all this.”

  Her voice throbs with excitement. Her dark eyes plead with her father. He sighs.

  “Oh, come on now,” he says, gently dismissive, tucking wayward strands of her dark hair behind her ear. And yet he looks at her as if he wants to believe her.

  “Dad, please. Just have a look at what I’ve found.”

  Coll looks at his daughter long and hard. Then smiles wryly at the stubborn determination in her face.

  “Well, we’ll see. Show me tonight,” he says. “Right now I’ve got the milking to finish, then I’ll have to try and fix up the roof and the barn and that’s just for starters. Don’t go far and make sure you get back in the house as soon as the storm starts up again.”

  Mara nods, amazed. She hasn’t tried to tell her parents anything about the New World till now, until she had real evidence, because she was sure they’d never take her seriously. Dad never would have before. Things must be getting desperate, Mara decides. She studies the storm damage as she crumbles the burned loaf for the chickens. The solar panel is almost completely detached from the cottage roof and there are places in the barn where the gale has ripped the wood from the thick nails that have held it for decades. It’s always been like this. No one ever has time to make plans for the future when there’s bread to bake and a roof to fix and a hundred other things to do.

  And this storm season has been the longest, fiercest she has ever known.

  Mara glances once again at the ominous fleet that sits above the field of windmills. All the island’s boats are perched there, their hulls like the bodies of great birds, ready and waiting to fly.

  Are we near the edge of summer yet, Mara wonders desperately, or just trapped in the dead eye of the storm?

  A WORLD LOST

  Mara groans as Rosemary ladles out yet another bowl of murky green soup. She is hungry all the time yet can barely stomach the food her mother serves up.

  “I never want to eat another mouthful of cabbage as long as I live.”

  “Smelly soup,” Corey agrees, but he tucks in hungrily.

  For the last month they have existed on a meager ration of eggs, cabbage soup, and potato bread. There’s a small but dwindling supply of milk and cheese but the sheep and goats are reacting badly to such a long season spent in a dark barn with rations of mulch and hay instead of fresh pasture. Grain stores are frighteningly low and supplies of preserved fruit and vegetables are all eaten. If the storm lasts much longer they will have to start slaughtering precious livestock for food—but even that won’t last long as they have so few animals.

  Every night Mara tells her little brother a bedtime story. Corey always wants the Three Little Pigs or Jack the Giant Killer, and tonight as the story ends he touches the wall beside his bed.

  “We’ve got a house of stone,” he declares. “We’re safe, aren’t we?”

  His bedtime story is the cocoon he builds for himself each night before he goes to sleep. He seems to have grown more babyish, younger than his six years, huddled inside himself to hide from the wolfish howl of the storm and its giant strength. While Mara feels she has, all of a sudden, grown up.

  Once Corey is settled, Mara joins her parents. It’s too warm to burn a fire, yet out of habit they sit around the dead grate and now they too cocoon themselves in stories to pass the evening. Sometimes Mara is hit by the strangest feeling that some part of her is already in the future, looking back on this lost scene with an aching heart. Tonight, Rosemary tells the flood legend of Noah and the ark, an ancient tale that is carved into the stone walls of Wing’s church. Since their own great flood, few on the island have kept faith with the old religion and the church stands abandoned, but the richness of its stories has lived on among the people, passed down by the old ones and enjoyed as folklore on the long, stormy evenings.

  Once the story is happily ended Rosemary looks at Mara hesitantly, then speaks her mind.

  “I see we’ve got our own arks ready up on the hill,” she says to Coll. “Are we supposed to be going somewhere in them?”

  Now Coll looks at Mara. “There’s to be an island meeting about that in the church, just as soon as there’s a decent break in the weather. Tain’s organized it.”

  “Tain wasn’t out in the storm?” says Rosemary, concerned.

  “He called around to all the farms and the village during the lull in the weather.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Mara whispers, though she’s not sure if she wants to hear.

  Coll hesitates and doesn’t answer directly. “I spoke to Tain about what you told me, Mara. Maybe you can help. Tell me what you found.”

  “How can Mara help with this?” says her mother. “She’s just a child.”

  “I’m not,” Mara retorts, then begins to tell her story about the New World that lies way out in cyberspace, far beyond the Weave.

  When she is finished her mother sighs and smiles.

  “It’s just a dream, Marabell. It’s not real. I’ve heard Tain talk about the New World but it’s just a myth, a story made from wishful thinking.” Rosemary stares at Mara with recognition in her eyes. “Believe it or not, I do remember what it’s like to be fifteen and full of dreams. Real life keeps getting i
n the way.”

  Mara smiles. “No more burned bread,” she promises. “But this dream is real, Mom. Wait. Wait till you see what I found.”

  She runs upstairs and grabs her cyberwizz, then stands on a chair to lift a dusty, old screen laptop computer down from the top of her wardrobe. She hopes she can remember how to reassemble the homemade connection that she designed to pass the time during last winter’s storm season.

  “Where did you find that old thing?” laughs Coll, raising his eyebrows at the laptop, when she bursts back into the living room.

  “What are you going to do?” murmurs Rosemary.

  “The impossible,” grins Mara, as she struggles with wires and magnets.

  Like the rest of the islanders, her parents have no use for the old technology that used to be commonplace in the world. They look at each other and shake their heads in bemusement as Mara connects the laptop to her cyberwizz. She picks up the globe of the cyberwizz, and it tingles to life at her touch. She scribbles a series of commands on its electropad. Grudgingly, the old laptop powers up. Mara finds it awkward to tap on the big, flat keyboard and it is grindingly slow, but it’s a reliable old machine. Frowning in deep concentration, she slips on her halo and enters the Weave. Then zips through site after site, following a complex trail of links that eventually lead her to the hidden basement site in one of the tumbledown towerstacks that, after weeks of trawling and searching through the rot of the Weave ruins, she found at last, late last night.

  It’s the vital evidence she needs that the New World is real.

  Coll and Rosemary watch as she scans newsreels from the beginning of the Century of Storms. Images of floods and tempests and global destruction fill the screen. Mara is shocked to the core, every bit as shaken as she was when she first viewed it last night. It all happened years ago, long before she was born, in faraway places. But now the same thing is happening on her very doorstep. She cannot look away or dismiss it. She must pay attention.

  While her parents murmur to each other, Mara draws a sharp breath as she reads the text that scrolls along the bottom of the screen—the final message on the Weavesite. Somehow, in her euphoric excitement last night, she never saw it. Now Mara is dumbfounded by what she reads.