Getting back

by William Dietrich

  Maybe he was too selfish. Maybe the others saw something he couldn't perceive. Perhaps that explained their enthusiasm. He didn't know.

  Like many people, Daniel was a voyeur of lives that seemed more interesting than his own. He enjoyed cyber videos, movies, books, and music. He'd been bored by any practical course of study at university and so indulged himself with a pursuit of history: what his father called "the irrelevant weight of the past." There he could go back to a time when the world was still unmapped, and wit and skill were requirements for advancement. It seemed to him that choices were simpler then: to bend sail onto spars, blaze a trail, fight a battle. Life was more romantic, with a clearer trajectory of youthful ambition and mature accomplishment. At Microcore, things were backward. The young were promoted over the old. Enthusiasm was valued more than experience, provided loyalty was sufficiently demonstrated. The key to success was unity toward corporate goals and social cultivation. Daniel resented these requirements because he wasn't any good at them. He mocked the system because of his own lack of confidence at ever being able to succeed in it. He constantly betrayed himself.

  For a break from the monotony of code debugging, he walked to the supply room. He didn't need any supplies but he liked the smells of paper and glue in the room, a musty contrast to the antiseptic plastics of Microcore's corridors. He felt comforted by the accumulation of bulk products, like sheaves of arrows kept in a castle armory against attack by an enemy. Reams of colored paper were aligned like the ranks of Napoleonic soldiers, a bright and proud symmetry made glorious by the certainty it would be shattered- not by battle, he conceded, but rather by the more mundane sacrifice of memo and brochure. Glory! That's what life lacks, Daniel thought. The chance of sacrifice for a doomed ideal, or to run to a new world to create ideals for yourself. There was no room for glory in the modern world, he thought. No room for catapults.

  Raven had said to bring a light, and he liked that. How often in the city did you have to provide your own illumination? Or heat? It was so bright you could never see the stars. He liked the serendipity of their encounter, a chance meeting that was now to lead to a rendezvous in a subway station. "Bring a sense of adventure!" He'd thought it wasn't needed. Maybe tonight, with this intriguing new woman, it would be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She was prompt, which Daniel had learned not to expect from women. She was waiting for him.

  "Where are we going in the subway?" he asked.

  "Not where you'd expect."

  Daniel didn't really care. Her habit of answering obliquely amused him for the moment, and he frankly evaluated her at the entrance to the tube station as she'd evaluated him. Raven had not dressed in anything really feminine, but her cover-suit of synthetics stretched enough to show her to good advantage, slim but with some shape to her. Enough to make him curious to see her in something else. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders and subtle jewelry sparkled. Her choice was the understatement of a woman who understood her effect on men. Daniel had dressed casually but with thought as well, the walking shoes and durable denim shirt trying to suggest a kind of vigorous energy he calculated she might look for in a man. If so, she gave no sign she noticed.

  "You look nice," he offered.

  She smiled politely and dipped a shoulder to slip off a small backpack. "I carried this from home so now it's your turn for a while. It's dinner."

  "When I suggested eating out, I didn't mean to be so literal."

  "We're going to be far out. Did you bring a light?"

  "I didn't know what you meant. I've got a flashlight, an antique cigarette lighter, and a matchbook. I would have brought a table lamp but it was awkward under my arm."

  She laughed at that. "Good! It's best to be prepared." Then she skipped ahead of him and down the stairs into the tube station. He followed.

  Commuters were still streaming upward to go home, trudging in a sluggish gray river of the rumpled and tired. None smiled. Whisper-signs tried to cheer them. "In the world of United Corporations," murmured one, "security assures happiness."

  Daniel got out his fare card and prepared to breast the current but Raven tugged his arm.

  "This way."

  She ducked into a shadowy side corridor past posted signs that limited entry to authorized transit employees only. Did she work for the tube? They came to a locked door. A tapping of her fingers at the keycard panel and they were in, the heavy metal clicking behind them. They were in a maintenance storeroom, Daniel saw, filled with janitorial supplies. "You're a sanitation engineer?"

  "I got the combination from a friend. He works here part-time."

  "Ah." Was she looking for a mop and cleanser tryst? "Come here often?" he asked lightly, glancing around at the shelves of chemicals. "We could've just gone to my place."

  She was at the back of the room, working at something on the wall, and didn't even bother to glance back at him. "Don't kid yourself." There was a clank and she lifted a vent grate to one side. "Come on."

  There was a sign above the vent opening: ENTRY FORBIDDEN.

  "Can't you read?" he joked.

  She was already backing into a concrete chute, her legs dropping down out of sight. "Can't you think for yourself?"

  He followed her to the back of the room and ducked his head through the opening. A concrete tube with rungs led into darkness below. Raven had already swung onto the ladder and was rapidly climbing downward, a light at her belt illuminating the next rungs. Daniel followed, mystified, his feet fumbling in the gloom.

  When he reached the bottom thirty feet below he switched on his own light. Three tunnels branched out, bulbs glimmering distantly down two of them. There was the wet, dusty smell of concrete. "Are we supposed to be down here?" he asked.

  "Who are you asking, Daniel? Me? Them?" She pointed toward the surface. "Or yourself?" She waited a moment for his answer, watching his face.

  He looked around, then grinned at her. "Lead on."

  She took the central tunnel and they emerged in a wider underground corridor, this one brightly lit by lamps every thirty feet. It stretched to a vanishing point in each direction, branching tunnels marked by ovals of shadow. There was a low hum of ventilation fans and a current of air. The concrete tube walls were lined with pipes, two of them a meter wide and others stepping down in size to an electrical conduit the width of a garden hose. Signs dangled with numbers and arrows. Dyson felt as if he was in a labyrinth. "Where are you taking me? To the minotaur?"

  She glanced at him appreciatively. "A classical reference. Are you a scholar?"

  "A history major. Damned useless, my father called it."

  "Did he? What does your father do?"

  "He died in marketing, a profession so futuristic in its outlook that he had a heart attack trying to stay trendy. He didn't regard history as merely irrelevant, he saw it as a threat to all he worked for. Which guaranteed I'd gravitate to it."

  "He sounds like a man of strong opinions."

  "Loud opinions, anyway. He believed in the kind of progressive change that keeps things exactly the way they are. I think he liked what the world became. Organized."

  "And you don't?"

  "It's dull."

  "Do you really think so?" She looked at him with interest.

  "I feel squeezed, sometimes."

  "Yes." She nodded as if he'd given a correct answer. "And what about your mother?"

  "She learned not to have opinions, which I guess made her minor in feminist literature useless as well. All theory, no practice. She used to say I inherited some of her waffle genes."

  "And did you agree?"

  "I didn't agree with much of anything after age twelve. But like most kids I didn't prevail, I merely escaped. A history degree was my best revenge."

  "You sound about as close to your parents as I am to mine."

  "Too strict?"

  "Too… absent. I was adopted." She didn't seem inclined to elaborate.

  "When she was widowed my mother announced she was turni
ng over a newly independent leaf," Daniel said. "Three months later she married a clone of my father and retired with him to Costa Rica on the insurance. I haven't seen her for two years."

  "And you feel guilty?"

  "Relieved."

  She watched for some sign of how this estrangement affected him, but his mask was indifferent. "Well. My theory is that no one knows what's needed or useless until they're dead. Maybe not even then."

  "So how do you choose?"

  "You follow your heart."

  "Even into the pit of the minotaur?"

  "The mythical monsters have been sponged from our world, Daniel. We're not in a labyrinth, we're in the Utiligrid, the utility network that feeds the city. These tunnels go for miles- miles and miles. They lead to reservoirs, power rooms, sewers, waste masticators. It's amazing, really."

  "And we're not supposed to be here."

  "I'm supposed to be here."

  "Why?"

  "Because it makes me feel alive!" She lifted her head and shouted. "Alive!" The call echoed down the corridor.

  "Jesus! You'll get us caught!"

  She laughed. "Maybe. Are you frightened of that?"

  "No." He glanced over his shoulder. "Just nervous, okay?"

  "There's nothing down here but utility robots, with brain chips about as smart as the potato variety. And we're not hurting a thing by exploring. Come on, I can take the pack for a while. We'll go to our picnic spot."

  "No, I've got it."

  She teased him. "Gallant as well. A man of the past."

  "Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong century."

  "Do you?" Again, she seemed to be appraising him. It reminded him of the joke about a first date being a job interview that goes on all evening. She didn't offer agreement.

  Walking the Utiligrid was indeed like exploring a labyrinth but Raven seemed to know where she was going. "I've learned to read the signs," she explained. Occasionally the ground would tremble from the passage of a tube train overhead, or they would hear the rumble of pumps from behind steel doors, but mostly there was a humming stillness, their steps echoing on concrete.

  "It's eerie down here," Daniel said. "Empty, like a catacomb."

  "Don't you like it empty? Everywhere else is full."

  "I like to get away."

  "Down here is an away that gets to the heart of things."

  Suddenly a dot of red danced across them and there was a warning beep. A detection laser. They turned and saw the lights of a maintenance-bot growing in intensity as it sped down the tunnel toward them, its orange crown flashing. "Uh-oh," Daniel said. The machine could summon the police. "Run!"

  He yanked her arm and they sprinted down a side tunnel, Raven actually laughing as they fled. There was a bang as the janitorial vehicle took the corner too hard and bounced off the concrete. Then it was wheeling their way, beeping madly, its dim circuitry probably assuming they were some kind of giant rat in need of fumigation. He turned into one tunnel and another, utterly lost, and then Raven sprinted ahead of him to lead, twisting this way and that in the maze like a deer as the alarm shrilled behind them. Daniel followed her as he had on the run, noticing the swell of her hips and rhythm of her bottom as she ran. You sexually hopeless lunatic, he scolded himself. Then she pointed above at a dark hole in the ceiling and sprang, grasping a pipe. She looped her feet to catch the overhead piping with her heels and then boosted herself up into blackness. Daniel jumped, pulled, and kicked his legs to follow. They were in a tube that led upward but his climb ended when he banged into a steel cover. There was just enough room under its lid to squeeze together above the pipes.

  She was breathing hard, grinning at him as the robot cart went honking by underneath in what seemed to be a machine imitation of frustration.

  "What if it calls for help?"

  "I don't think the cops like to come down here."

  He realized that they were pressed against each other to wedge in place and he could feel the softness of her hair. Her smell had the sweetness of slight perfume and the tang of sweat. He was considering whether to try to kiss her when she turned and kissed him, quickly and hard. "That was fun!" she whispered.

  "You're going to get us detained."

  "No. The robots are stupid."

  He leaned forward to kiss her again but she pushed him back. "We can't stay here, though, in case they search this quadrant." She dropped down through the pipes to land lightly on the floor.

  "I thought you said the cops don't come," he called down to her.

  "I've never seen them, but… Come on, before it comes back."

  "Great." He dropped to follow her jogging form through the corridors.

  She turned this way and that with determined purpose, glancing upward at the dangling signs periodically for reference. The frantic beeping of the robot quickly receded and they began to relax, slowing to a brisk walk. As Daniel got his breath back he noticed a background murmur that rose in volume until it became the roar of falling water. She led him into a side passageway and down a flight of wet steps, his curiosity growing as the noise grew. Then out onto a balcony grating.

  "The water comes from the mountains," Raven said. "Someday I want to see its source."

  They were overlooking an underground reservoir, lit by only a few lights. A vaulted ceiling receded back into darkness. Water was pouring in from an unseen pipe, creating a pattern of ripples that sparkled in the artificial light. The water glowed blue, emphasizing the cistern's clarity.

  "This is my private spot," she said. They sat.

  "How'd you find this place?"

  "I've been coming down here for two years."

  "And you never got lost or caught?"

  "No one ever challenged me. I started drawing maps, deciphering signs, and slowly figured it out. It's been like exploring an underground world. When I found this reservoir it was like I'd discovered my own private lake."

  "Less pretentious than a restaurant, quieter than a club."

  She smiled. "Exactly. You should like me, Daniel. I'm a cheap date."

  She opened the pack and took out their dinner. Ordinary stuff: farmed-salmon sandwiches, wedges of genetically enhanced vegetables, vacu-packed brownies. "What did you bring us to drink?" she asked mischievously.

  He opened his mouth in surprise. He'd supposed they would buy something.

  "No matter." She pulled out a small pail that was tied to a string and lowered it over the railing to the pool below. When it filled, she lifted it up and sipped. Then she held it out to him with two hands like an offering.

  "Is it safe?"

  She laughed again, that delicious laugh. "It's the same water in your apartment except it hasn't flowed through the grub of city pipes yet. This way I don't have to carry a canteen. Water's heavy."

  He took the pail and drank, watching her over the rim. It seemed sweeter and colder than the water at home. "I'll bet this is against the rules."

  "Everything is against the rules, isn't it?"

  "Everything that's good."

  They ate quietly a moment, Daniel unsure whether he liked her or was merely intrigued by someone so eccentric. It would be interesting to get her in the same room with harridan Lundeen.

  Yet despite the kiss and her trespassing boldness she also seemed somewhat shy, he judged. Or at least reserved. Guarded. Her enigmatic replies deflected as much as they revealed, and she volunteered little. Why had she brought him here?

  "This isn't exactly the great outdoors," he finally ventured, trying to feel her out.

  "Don't you like it?"

  "It's weird. Interesting. Not a typical choice."

  "I'm betting you're not a typical man."

  "And you're not a typical woman?"

  "No."

  He made a guess. "A loner?"

  "I'm not alone with you."

  Daniel took a bite of brownie, watching her. Pretty. Smart. A bit full of herself, maybe. Self-absorbed, certainly. But interesting too. He leaned forward slightly and watched he
r unconsciously lean away. Standoffish: she liked to control relationships. Her assertion of leadership kept her safe.

  "Why did you bring me here?" he asked.

  She smiled mischievously again. "You're cute. Handsome, even."

  He rolled his eyes.

  "No, that's not it," she corrected.

  "Thanks, Raven."

  "It's more that you're curious. That you think. That you question. That you explore."

  "Like you."

  "Maybe like me." She sipped from the pail, setting it down. "So. Have you decided why you do?"

  He sat back. "I don't understand what you mean by that."

  "Well… what do you do?"

  "I work on software at Microcore. Dumb stuff. I hate it."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's pointless. Right now they've got me on a project called a Meeting Minder. It tracks your schedule and analyzes its patterns, prescheduling based on your past activity. The goal is to make the next year as close to the last one as possible, for maximum efficiency. They're expecting a best-seller."

  "I know it's dumb. I meant, why do you work on it?"

  He looked at her in surprise. "Because it's my job. Everyone has a job."

  "Why?"

  " 'United Corporations has the right job, in the right place, for everyone,' " he quoted.

  "No, why?" She looked impatient, as if he were slow.

  He felt irritated. "What do you do?"

  "I'm an investigator."

  "Investigating what?"

  She waved her hand. "Here. This. Now. Me. And you."

  "Not exactly the wilderness."

  "Something that's been explored by others can still be a wilderness to you, if it's your first time."

  He looked around. "Well, you've got me lost."

  "Do you like being lost?"

  "I don't know." Was this a conversation or an interrogation? "It's not a question that occurred to me."