Pathfinder

by Julie Bertagna

  “She lost everything, her family and friends, everyone. But somehow she survived. And all the time, all through the nightmare that followed, she held on to the hope that she would find the cyberfox again—that he might help her.”

  It’s hard to go on. The fox says nothing, just stares at her. If a fox could cry, this one looks close to it.

  “Do you understand?” Mara asks.

  The fox nods. Mara is sure tears stand in its eyes.

  She lets out an enormous breath she didn’t know she has been holding. A sob shakes her. She glances around quickly but the Noosrunner behind her is still too deep in concentration to notice.

  “It’s a long story, too long to tell it all now, but amazingly I ended up here in your world,” Mara whispers to the fox. “I asked you for help once. I still need your help. Desperately. I need someone I can trust in realworld. I don’t know if I trust you but …” Mara grinds to a stop. She must trust him. She has no choice. She looks into the unblinking fox eyes and takes a deep breath.

  “Where exactly are you? Where can I find you?”

  There’s a long pause. Then the fox speaks.

  “Turn around,” he says huskily. “I’m right behind you.”

  Behind her? But he’s here, in front of her, on the Noosstation platform. What does he mean? And then it dawns on her. The shock of it rushes like a hot wave through her body. He means in realworld. The fox is here, right behind her, in the cybercath.

  Mara turns around. The Noosrunner in the cupule several rows behind is looking straight at her. Mara stops breathing.

  It’s David, the ace Noosrunner. The boy she crashed into in the tunnel, who was so cold to her in the café tonight.

  Or appeared to be.

  Mara doesn’t know what to do, so she turns back to her godgem, back to the cyberfox in the Noos. They stand staring at each other, a girl and a fox on a deserted platform with the chaos of the Noos swirling all around.

  “How did you know?” she gasps.

  “When I heard your name and the name of your island.” The fox looks electric; its hair stands on end. “You told me and I never forgot.”

  “I thought I’d never find you. I couldn’t think how I ever would.” Mara is trembling. “What do we do now?” she whispers into the godgem.

  “Leave the cybercath,” says the fox, and suddenly Mara feels scared. “Go straight to the Leaning Bridge and I’ll meet you there.”

  Her heart pounds as she takes off the godgem. It feels unreal. After all this time, after all that has happened to her, she is going to meet the human being who is her old Weave-stalker, the fox. She stands up and tries to make her face as bland as a lumenbeing’s. Fear and excitement are racing through her but she must be careful not to show it. In his work cupule, David seems deep in his work.

  At the Leaning Bridge Mara pretends to gaze into the shimmering water of the Looking Pond. A noisy mob of zappers pass by, then silence falls and the tunnel is empty. Out of the corner of her eye she sees David leave the cybercath and head toward her. Mara leans upon the mock-stone wall of the Leaning Bridge, so full of suspense she can hardly keep still. Her senses are so heightened she can hear the soft pad of the boy’s feet as he nears the bridge.

  The pad-pad of his feet stops. Mara waits. David has paused right behind her—she can hear his breath, light and fast. Her heart thuds painfully.

  “Hello,” breathes the husky-voiced boy at her side. The fox, who is just a boy called David, leans over the edge of the bridge.

  Mara turns and meets the untamed eyes of a dreamer. They gaze into hers through his mess of tawny hair. David gives her a wobbly smile.

  “Hello,” Mara whispers back.

  Neither seems to know what to do or say. Mara craves the safety of a cyberworld—some synthetic moment where she can cloak herself. Reality is far too raw, too naked.

  “I want to know the rest of your story,” David-Fox says at last.

  “But can I trust you?” pleads Mara.

  “Can I trust you?” he repeats, and again Mara wonders what he means. Some zappers zip past and he pauses, watching her closely till they are gone. Then he seems to decide and nods with a sharp, foxy movement that is so at odds with his dreamy eyes.

  “Okay,” he decides, but wary still. “Let’s go to my place.”

  Fox’s place is one of the superior tower apartments that Dol talked of so enviously. He has a spacious round living room with walls that look strangely soft, as if they’re melting in the gentle waves of color that ripple across them.

  “Take a seat.”

  Mara sits on an armchair so plush it feels as if she is perched precariously upon nothing—a sumptuous, enfolding nothingness that molds with amazing gentleness to every curve and fold of her body.

  “Ooh, this is gorgeous. Would you, um, mind if I take off my shoes—they’re too tight and my feet are killing me.”

  “Make yourself at home,” he says, amused. Yet he sits tensely on the edge of his own seat.

  She floats in the moment, in the blissful sensation of being held in invisible arms. But the moment shatters as she recalls Fox’s riddle of words just a moment ago, as they zapped through the nexus to his apartment. She sits up.

  “What did you mean just now when you said the New World has no past?”

  “Just that. The past is banished. It’s been deleted. All anyone ever thinks of is here and now. “There is only the power of now,” he chants. “That’s what we all believe,” he adds, drily.

  “But now is only now when it’s now. Then it’s past. And right bang in front is the future,” says Mara. “It all knits together.”

  “Well, no one sees it that way here,” says Fox.

  “How come you live like this?” Mara demands, gazing around his luxurious apartment. “You must be a really ace Noosrunner to get promoted so highly so young!”

  A quick, wry grin breaks across his face.

  “I’m a pretty hot Noosrunner,” he responds. “But the truth is, I live like this because I’m the grandson of a Grand Father of All. The Grand Father of All, as it happens. Caledon, the Supreme Ideator, the creator of the New World—that’s my grandpa.”

  “Oh, so that’s why all the girls—” Mara begins with a knowing smile, then stops in astonishment.

  Caledon, creator of the New World. The Grand Father of All. Cal. The one who dreamed up the idea of a city in the sky. Cal, who threw Candleriggs out of the New World when she rebeled against the cruel empire it had become. Fox is his grandson?

  Mara is dumbfounded.

  “Fox, there are things I have to tell you,” she gasps, once she finds her tongue. “So many things.”

  He lifts his head sharply, but gazes at her with the gentle, yet untamed eyes of a dreamer. But Cal was a dreamer too, Mara remembers. Can she trust the grandson of such a man? She has no idea. She can only hope that what she thinks she sees in his eyes is true.

  Mara takes a deep breath and begins her incredible story.

  THE TUG INSIDE

  “Slaves? People who nest in trees? And a boat camp?” Fox paces around and around the room, then suddenly slumps down on the floor beside her chair. He is trembling. “I’ve wondered about the outside world for so long but I never knew there was a wall around the city. I never knew there were refugees…”

  “What exactly do you know?” Mara asks gently.

  Fox takes a deep, tremulous breath.

  “I knew something of the true story of the world’s drowning from all the SOS messages on the dead Weavesites and from listening to Weave ghosts. That’s why I was amazed when we first met in Nowhere,” he continues, “and you said you were from an island. I’d thought there was no land left in the world. We’re taught at school that the world is all ocean. But I knew from what I’d found on the Weave that they’d hidden the truth of the past from us. That’s what I’ve been searching for, the truth.”

  He laughs huskily, sourly. “Nobody has any interest in the past or the truth or the outside wor
ld. No one talks or thinks about any of that. The old people must know what happened but most of them are dead or in care-farms now. Officially, we all believe that everyone was housed in the New World during the Meta, so everything’s fine.”

  “What’s the Meta?” Mara interrupts.

  “The world change. But this boat camp—and slaves? Child slaves?” Liquid eyes plead with her. “I can’t believe my own grandfather would allow that. He’s not a bad man.” Now his brown eyes grow hard. “Maybe there’s another side to the story. I can’t believe he would allow the New World to use refugees and children as slaves. If it’s really true, I can’t believe he knows about them.”

  “Then why was that great wall built? To keep out refugees!” cries Mara. “Where does he get all the labor for his New World expansion projects from? Slave labor. Maybe he started out meaning well, maybe he’s a nice old grandpa to you, but it’s all gone wrong somewhere. It’s turned bad, and so has he. My best friend died out in that boat camp and my other friend, her brother, might well be dead by now. My family drowned before they even got here, on the way to that stinking camp. My six-year-old brother!”

  Suddenly she is choking on tears. Fox looks at her, shocked and silent.

  “What could my grandfather have done?” His voice breaks. “How could he save everyone in the world? Maybe the people of the New World did what they could!”

  Mara rubs away her tears and tries to steady herself. Now she tells Fox the story of Candleriggs and her rebellion over the New World’s refusal to take in anyone that didn’t pass its stringent intelligence test, of the abandonment of the flood refugees, and of how his grandfather had thrown the girl he once loved out of the New World with the other rebels, in order to save his dream.

  “Candleriggs was sure that there must have been people in the New World who felt as she did,” Mara remembers, “but they were too fearful for their own safety to speak out. She wishes now that she had been less hotheaded and had spoken out with more understanding about their fears. Then the rebels might have had many more people with them, they might have changed public opinion and Caledon would have had to listen to his citizens—he couldn’t throw them all out of the New World, could he? He would have had to make the kind of world that they wanted to live in. But nobody else spoke out so it was easy to get rid of the rebels. Fox, there might be plenty of good-hearted people here who would be horrified if they knew the truth about the outside world. Surely they would want to help.”

  Mara thinks of Dol and her friends. She has judged them all so harshly. Perhaps, if they knew about the slaves and the refugees, they would be appalled. But would they be willing to stand up against it?

  Fox is trembling violently, shocked to the core by what she has just told him. Suddenly Mara is full of fear too. What if he’s so upset that he confronts his grandfather? Then she will be found out. Or he’ll decide he doesn’t believe her after all and then what will he do?

  She must calm him down.

  “Look,” she says softly, and slips off the armchair onto the floor beside him.

  Mara takes off her small backpack. It goes everywhere with her, to keep its contents safe.

  On the floor she lays out her treasures: the black lump of meteorite, Wing’s bone dagger, Gorbals’s book of poems, A Tale of Two Cities, the dried herbs, her old-fashioned cyberwizz. And the book on Greenland.

  “This dagger,” she tells him, “is thousands of years old. It’s from a museum in the old place of learning that sits high on a hill in the drowned world—the university your grandfather went to. It’s the place he began his dream of the new cities. An urchin found it, a small child who risked his life to get me out of the boat camp and inside the wall. He has nothing, no parents, not even a name, so I called him Wing, after my island. Now he’s a slave.”

  Fox stares.

  “This lump of meteorite is even older than the dagger,” she continues, holding it in the palm of her hand. “It’s older than anything on Earth—as old as the universe.”

  Mara points to her globe and halo and wand. “Here’s my cyberwizz that I used on my island, when you stalked me on the Weave. It’s ancient technology compared to yours.” She touches the leather-bound books. “These are from the book rooms of the university. This one is an amazing story of the old world. The other—well, I’ll tell you about it later. These …” she picks up Gorbals’s notebook, “are the poems of a Treenester. My friend. He rescued book litter from the sea, pulped it into new paper, and wrote his poems on it with charcoal embers from the sundown fire. But like the little urchin, he’s been stolen from his world to be a slave for yours.”

  Now Mara opens the book to the pages where she has pressed the sprig of rosemary entwined with wild thyme. “Herbs,” she tells Fox, “one from my island, the other grown in the netherworld. All these things are from the past or from the drowned world.”

  Now Mara opens a page of Gorbals’s lumpy paper and begins to read the clumsy scribbles.

  Fox stares at Mara’s treasures. Gingerly, he reaches out and picks up the sprigs of rosemary and thyme, sniffs them, and blinks in surprise at their sharp scents that are so unlike the synthetic aroma of noofood. One by one he picks up each object and examines it closely. Last of all he picks up the bone dagger and turns it over in his hands, testing the blade. His eyes are faraway and full of thoughts Mara can’t read. But he’s calm now.

  “I didn’t just come here to find you,” she says quietly. “I came here to find my friends Gorbals and Wing—the Treenester poet and the little child who were taken to be slaves. I came to rescue them. The Treenesters are surviving on a tiny island in the ruins of the drowned world but if the ocean rises again, and it’s sure to soon, they won’t even have that and they’ll drown too. Then there are all the people in the boat camp …” Mara sighs in despair. “Fox, I need you to help me. Maybe I can’t rescue them all but I want to give as many people as possible the chance to escape, to get them in boats and—”

  She stops.

  “And?” Fox demands. “What will you do then? Set them free upon the ocean to drown there?”

  “No,” says Mara, picking up the book on Greenland and hugging it tight to her chest. “There’s land in the north of the world. I’m sure of it. This book convinced me. It’s called the land of the people. I’m going to get there—I’m going to take the slaves and the Treenesters and the boat people—as many as I can rescue. But Fox, the New World should be doing all this! It could. Even if it won’t take in refugees it could at least seek out whatever high, safe places there are left on Earth and provide ships and give us a chance to have some kind of future. Why can’t you do that? You don’t need those places. You’re all stuck up here, safe in your own world, and you just don’t care!”

  There is a long, awkward pause. Fox doesn’t look at her. He stares at the floor, his face mostly hidden by his hair.

  “Why do you care so much?” he asks quietly, at last.

  “Look at me,” Mara commands.

  He flinches at her tone and looks up. Then flinches again at her fierce gaze. But her eyes hold his.

  “I care …” Mara’s voice shakes with anger, “because I’m one of them. I’m a refugee.”

  His lips part. He gives a soft gasp and his pale face flushes.

  “And because of my family and all the people I’ve lost,” she says bitterly.

  “Of course,” he murmurs.

  Fox blinks, and she feels him, in one long, encapsulating glance, register her skinny body, her skin tone, the sharp bones of her face, and the fading scar on her cheek. Her body burns with humiliation; she can feel him judging, gauging, evaluating her in an uncomfortably different way from before. When he meets her blazing eyes, he drops his gaze in confusion.

  “I suppose I was imagining that a refugee would be, well, different. You are different—different from anyone I’ve ever met—but you’re not so unlike me … I mean you’re not—not …” he trails off, embarrassed, unwilling to voice what he thoug
ht.

  “Not what? Not stupid? Not dirty? Not quite human? Just some kind of—of outcast?” Mara’s anger becomes confusion as she remembers gentle Broomielaw’s contempt for the urchins for exactly these reasons. And also, she’s scared. Scared that Fox won’t want to have anything to do with her now that he knows what she is—someone his world considers to be less than human, undeserving of care or compassion or even the right to a life.

  “I’m sorry,” says Fox. His face flushes even deeper. “You’re obviously not any of those things. You’re quite, um, amazing, I think.”

  “Amazing, am I?” Mara lets out a breath of relief. Then she gives a brittle laugh. “I was filthy enough in the boat camp and the netherworld. And I’ve certainly been stupid.” Her voice shakes and she swallows.

  Hesitantly, Fox reaches out and touches her hand. The touch zips up her arm like electricity.

  “Listen,” she says, his touch unsettling and steadying her, all at once.

  Now she tells him the final part of her story—all about the legend of the Face in the Stone and the statue of Thenew that is her own image, even down to the scar on her face that is also strangely repeated in the crack in the mirror of Granny Mary’s little box. Last of all, she describes the signs in the old city that the Treenesters believe is the stone-telling.

  “And they say that when the signs come together then the stone-telling will happen and they will be free. The one who is the Face in the Stone will lead them to their true home in the world. That’s what they believe. They believe it’s me,” Mara finishes quietly. Her face crinkles in a frown. “I don’t believe it’s me but somehow I seem to be trying to live out their expectations because—because …” she casts around for the reason and finds it, “I don’t have anything else to live for.”

  Fox stares at her, mesmerized.

  “Will you help me?” Mara pleads.

  Fox puts his head in his hands. The tawny tangle of hair spills over his eyes again, but this time his eyes stay fixed on hers. Mara feels the tug inside that pulled her toward him even in a distant electronic universe. Nervously, hesitantly, she reaches out and touches his hair.