Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "It's sort of open-ended. Unclear when I'll get back. It's not really a vacation, it's… a kind of lifestyle change. I want to do something different."

  Sanford thought about this. "When do we fight over your scanner and disk repository?" he asked, ever practical, scanning Daniel's desk for other valuables.

  "I'm on staff until the expedition starts. Then it's yours."

  "So when's that?"

  "I don't know. We're not allowed to know."

  "What?"

  "The surprise departure is part of the wilderness experience. You prepare, wait, they call, bang. You're off."

  "That's weird. Off where?"

  "To the desert."

  "Really?" Sanford had a fondness for Nevada.

  "To a wilderness desert, not a casino desert."

  "Oh. Which one?"

  "I can't say. I'm not allowed to say. I don't really know, actually. It's all set up by an adventure company. Some new outfit you've never heard of. Neither had I."

  "Jesus, Dyson, this is pretty offbeat. For what?"

  "To explore."

  "Explore what?"

  "I don't know. Nobody does. That's the whole point."

  "What's the whole point?"

  "To have an adventure. To go do something risky where the end isn't preordained. To trade security for excitement, comfort for experience, entertainment for self-exploration."

  "You sound like a commercial. Or somebody who's been brain-scrubbed. Let me get this straight. You're leaving Microcore to go on some expedition that starts who knows when, going to who knows where, for who knows how long, for who knows what reason?"

  Daniel shrugged. "It's not for everyone."

  "It's not for anyone with common sense. Have you totally lost your mind? You're going to give up a good job…"

  "Oh, please…" He looked amused.

  "… to go to some desert you can't even identify? And pay money to do it? Why, because you don't like the looks of Harriet Lundeen? Because you can't make it with Mona Pietri?"

  "Because I'm being buried here, Sanford. Buried alive. You are too."

  "Better than being buried dead out in some desert."

  "You paid to go down the Mekong…"

  "That was different."

  "How was that different?"

  "I didn't quit my job. They set up camp, set down camp chairs, and set out the booze. We had an itinerary, not to mention sonic-guard to keep out the insects. Women came along. It was fun, dammit. That's what was different."

  "Different? Or predictable?"

  "Here's a news flash for you, Dyson. I like things predictable. Most people do."

  "Such as this job?"

  Sanford glanced around the monotony of Level 31 and nodded solemnly. "Such as my pay. Predictable as clockwork."

  "There's got to be more."

  "There isn't any more. That's what you don't get, or won't admit. You're a romantic and life isn't. Life is just… life. You want green, go to the park. You want animals, go to the zoo. You want sunstroke and snakes, go to the desert."

  "No. I'm going to find more. I'm going to find it, and bring it back, and show you. Shove it in your face."

  "A rattlesnake?"

  "Freedom. Self-discovery."

  His workmate rocked back in his seat. "You'll discover things all right. Discover that hunger and fear don't make you free."

  "Maybe that's the point."

  "Suffering?"

  "To overcome it."

  Sanford laughed and threw up his hands. "Go! Wander in the desert. Have visions. Bring back a prophecy; my last fortune cookie was a bore."

  "I'm just tired of being safe."

  "Well, I predict you'll get tired of being unsafe in about fifteen minutes." He shook his head, looking at Daniel speculatively. "There's some other reason, isn't there? Something that pushed you into this. What? Some kind of trouble? A woman?"

  "There's no woman."

  "Some muscle-thighed rock spider with breasts the size of coconuts?"

  "There's no woman. It's just me. For me. I mean, don't you ever get tired of the routine here, Sanford?"

  "Of course I do. Everybody does." He stood up and gazed across the top of the cubicles. "And I'll tell you the one thing you'll get for your money. It will make Level 31 look pretty damn good."

  That night he called her again. Not because this was about Raven, of course, but because… because he wanted her to know. That he'd signed up. That they'd taken the man she thought they wouldn't take. So there.

  On the sixth ring the circuit transferred and a voice came on line but the video picture was grayed out. "Hello?" A man's voice. Damn.

  "Is Raven there?"

  "Who's calling?"

  "A friend."

  "Your name?" He could hear clicks on the line.

  "I'm just a friend. Look, could you put her on, please?"

  "I need your name."

  More funny sounds. Were they recording? "My name is none of your damn business. Let me speak to Raven."

  There was a long pause. Then, "Miss DeCarlo is no longer here."

  "What?"

  "Miss DeCarlo is not here."

  "This isn't her number?"

  "She's left the city for an outdoor excursion."

  He stopped at that. Had Raven gone too? "Do you know when she'll be back?"

  "No. Do you wish to leave a message?"

  Well there wasn't much point in that- if she was off on an Outback Adventure. Had he triggered her like she triggered him? "Who is this?"

  "Do you wish to leave a message?"

  More clicks. Was this guy a boyfriend, or something else? A mechanical monitor? "I want to talk to her before she goes."

  "That's impossible."

  To talk? Or was she already gone? "I want a forwarding number."

  "Do you wish to leave a message?"

  "There's no number?"

  "Do you wish to leave a message?"

  He drummed his fingers, considering. "Yeah, I want to leave a message. Tell her I called."

  "We'll do that."

  The connection went dead.

  Daniel stared at the phone a long time. They hadn't asked his name.

  Room upon room, level upon level, link upon link. A descent into an underworld in which the passwords and riddles and locks were always changing, identities shifting, allegiances unclear. Not just cyberspace, but a cyber pit of mysteries. He clicked and probed, searching for himself: could he find any reference to Outback Adventure? His search engines revealed no matches. Information on Australia had been wiped, except for rumor and uncertain memory. Coyle was right. It was ignorance that made wilderness.

  Disbelieve.

  Spartacus again, like an electronic nag. Have you decided, Daniel?

  "I'm going away."

  Away? Where?

  "To the wilderness."

  There is no more wilderness. Except here.

  "I'm going to a special place."

  Your place is here. With us.

  "I can't do your truth cookie. I don't know how and besides, they've made me. I'm dangerous to you now. They found out about my hacking and they watch me. So… I'm going."

  There was no response.

  "I'm sorry. I know this GeneChem stuff is- "

  There's nothing in the wilderness. That's why it's called wilderness.

  "I think I can find something there."

  What?

  What indeed? Raven? "My reason for being."

  Your reason for being is here.

  "Goodbye. I have to go now."

  The truth is inside, not outside…

  CHAPTER NINE

  "I'm crazy, but not a fool."

  The phrase became Daniel's mantra as he started his preparations. You make your own luck, he told himself. He would research, he would train, he would purchase, and because of that he would survive. When he awakened in the Australian desert he would be self-contained and self-sufficient, a twenty-first-century primitive, ready to live as prehis
toric man must have lived but with the added edge of modern technology. The challenge was daunting, but also energizing. Once equipped, he would need no one and nothing, except the fruits of the earth. He would enjoy total freedom.

  Because of the peculiarities of its challenge- the emphasis on self-survival, unaided and undirected- the training and guidance from Outback Adventure was alternately generous and guarded. The mix put him off-balance. From earliest memory Daniel's life had been crammed with advice: recited by parents, drilled by teachers, whispered to him from office walls, pounded at him in commercials, nagged by machines due for a tune-up, or scolded by corporate officials conducting performance appraisals. Everyone, it seemed, knew exactly what he should do next. Until now. He could learn quite a bit about generic survival tactics, and very little about the place he would use them. Survival could be taught. Australia must remain mysterious.

  What Daniel was presented with were catalogs. There were endless lists of available equipment. Inventories of Australian plants and animals. Data on the temperature (hot), rainfall (erratic), and elevation (low). Survival manuals so general that they included advice on building igloos, drying fish, and distilling sea water. The descriptions of the country he was to be deposited in, however, were spare.

  "That would defeat the whole purpose, wouldn't it?" said Elliott Coyle.

  "It's just odd, and difficult, preparing for a place that's been turned into a deliberate secret. There're no maps and no journals by previous adventurers."

  "How did Columbus prepare? Cabot? Boone?" Coyle tapped his head and heart. "In here, not out there. They knew little of where they were going, but an immense amount about seamanship or forest travel. They succeeded on common sense. If you succeed it will be because of you, not because of us."

  That's what he wanted. That's what he feared.

  The shopping was initially exhilarating. Suddenly, money seemed to have no meaning. Departing on something as timeless and ill-defined as Outback Adventure was liberating. He felt like a kid in a candy store who could buy to fulfill a fantasy: Second-Skin to don for cold desert nights. A solar blanket squeezed into the size of a matchbox. Chem-candles to start fires. Torso webbing to hold clip-ons. Freeze-dried Stroganoff, couscous, strawberry shortcake, and Szechwan chicken. A water purifier, a solar battery recharge wafer, vitamin drops, a solar-lithium flashlight, a hydrogen pellet stove, Spider-Line, Supra-Boots, and a bush hat with band pockets for fish hooks, spare buttons, a barometer, and data wafers for his palmtop computer.

  He spread it across the floor of his apartment and regarded its titanium glitter with initial glee. The paraphernalia of survival! Yet as he toyed with his acquisitions, weighing them individually while toting up his load, he began to feel misgivings. How much of this world did he really want to saddle onto his back? Every step would be a reminder of where he'd come from. Would that be reassuring, or oppressive? He sat on his couch and looked at his purchases, receipts curled like party streamers and box lids gaping like hungry mouths. He put on the bush hat and regarded himself in the reflection of a computer screen.

  "G'day, mate."

  He frowned.

  "You look bloody ridiculous."

  Suddenly the gear seemed a miniaturized replication of the United Corporations world, as cumbersome as a space suit. Out of curiosity he bundled the instruction booklets and weighed them. A pound right there.

  He sat down again and began to think.

  How could he carry enough on his back to keep alive for the months it would likely take to hike to the Australian coast and find Exodus Port? Even with the new food concentrates it suddenly seemed impossible. To be put down in the middle of nowhere, to find your own way to an unclear destination… was he insane? But then that was the nature of exploring, wasn't it? "Because of you, not because of us," Coyle had said. Damn right it would be a way to explore himself.

  Raven carried no water underground because she knew where to get a drink. "Water's heavy," she'd said.

  He moved to his window and watched the pigeons fluttering across Silicon Square. They carried nothing at all, and neither had primitive man. If you knew what to eat, the wilderness was a garden. He needed to carry less on his shoulders and more in his head.

  He went to a hardware store and bought a dowel and block of wood. Then he came back, sat down, and began drawing up a new list of what he thought he truly needed. Next to it he wrote a goal: "45 pounds." He scratched some items out and added others. How light could he travel? How fast could he move? He considered, then wrote again: "35 pounds?" He flipped through the books. How good a garden was Australia? He'd been taught all his life that information was the tool of success, and now information was frustratingly vague. He underlined a passage. "Your environment is neither friendly nor hostile, but rather the product of preparation and the discipline of your mind."

  He took the wood block and with a pocketknife whittled a small depression in it, then roughly sharpened one end of the dowel so it rested in the new hole. The wood shavings he carefully hoarded. Then he began to experiment with ways to pivot the dowel in the hole.

  Four hours later, the building superintendent was pounding on his door. "Dyson! Hey, open the door if you're in there!"

  Daniel opened it a crack. He looked tired.

  "Christ, the stink!" the super greeted. "The goddamned fire alarm sounded! You okay? You burn something?"

  His tenant held up a blackened piece of wood with a look of grim satisfaction. "I started a fire, Mr. Landau. With this."

  The superintendent looked at the charcoal in bewilderment. "With what?"

  "Friction. I made fire from my hands."

  Landau paused. Thank goodness this loopy kid had already given notice. "You're a friggin' nut case, you know that?"

  Daniel nodded.

  "Listen, Dyson, you can't start fires here. You know that. It's against the rules."

  "Everything is against the rules." He set down his wood and put up his hand to close the door. "I'm done now, don't worry. My arm is sore." He jerked his head in the direction of his carpet, littered with packages as if at Christmas. "I just have to take some things back to the store."

  If information on Australian geography was meager, information on survival tactics was not. Daniel became a repository of trivia. Rommel's troops drank two and a half gallons of water a day in the desert, he read. Workers at Hoover Dam consumed an average of six and a half. African natives had used pierced and blown-out ostrich eggs as canteens. Rubbing oneself with chewed tobacco warded off insects.

  "Too bad it's a controlled substance," he muttered.

  Physical training became an obsession. Now his miles were timed. Alternate days were spent with weight and tension machines. He logged endless crunches, sprints, and even began a martial arts class. Daniel wasn't especially quick or coordinated, but he decided the discipline and drills of Asian combat couldn't hurt. He also sought out advice on practical, gut-level street fighting- more to give himself self-confidence than because he expected to have to use the knowledge.

  One of the trainers, an ex-cop, looked at him doubtfully. "Hit first and give it everything you've got, Coogan," he said, wryly using the name of a current action hero. "It will all be over in fifteen seconds, one way or another." He looked Daniel up and down. "It wouldn't hurt to know how to run, either."

  Daniel loaded his pack, weighed it, and then went over his list again. He filled it with rocks equal to twice the weight and climbed the stairs of his building. Then again, and again, and again. He spent a night on the roof in a bedroll with ground cover, kept awake by the lights and the heat. His back was stiff by morning.

  He stalked, and butchered, a possum he spied prowling through garbage, comparing its internal architecture with the manuals he was reading. He practiced until he could hit crows with rocks. He ran in a downpour, drank water sluicing off an awning, and measured how much he could catch in his hat.

  People ignored his eccentricity. Everyone moved in a bubble of anonymity.
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  The exception to this was an orientation and final screening session for regional participants, the first of several weekend seminars for the next class of Outback Adventurers. "We thought you'd like to see who you might rub elbows with in the bush," Elliott Coyle told a gathering of two dozen in a windowless rented conference room in the basement of Outback Adventure's office tower. "Just so you know you're not alone in your desire for wilderness challenge."

  "Or our insanity," someone quipped. The group laughed nervously.

  Daniel glanced around. Most of the participants looked to be in their twenties and thirties, a third of them women. A few had the whippet leanness of endurance athletes but the majority looked reassuringly ordinary, and uncertain about whether they were in the right place. They glanced at each other shyly.

  "Some of you will insist on traversing the Outback on your own, we know, but most of our participants choose to form a small group," Coyle said. "I encourage you to consider it. For ourselves, it simplifies problems of delivery. For you, it enhances the chance of survival. Not to mention the possibility of forming friendships that will last the rest of your lives." He paused to let them consider that.

  They looked at each other uncertainly. Who would they get along with? Who could they trust?

  "We're also going to subject you to a physical, some inoculations, and a final psychological screening to make sure you're really Outback Adventure material. While some of this may seem intrusive, it's the kind of thing that could save your life in the end. So please, bear with us and accept our judgment."

  The group looked surprised. They'd already made their decision and paid a deposit. Now there were last-minute hurdles?

  A hand went up. "Did I miss something here?" the person who'd made the earlier quip now caustically asked.

  Coyle looked at the short, wiry, thin-faced young man raising the question. "Ah yes, Mr. Washington. Ico, isn't it?"

  "It is, Elliott." He stood. "So glad you remember me. Now, if I remember correctly, we're paying you. And we have to go through more bullshit tests? Come on! We're ready to go or we wouldn't be here."

  Coyle looked at him calmly. "If you're ready, Ico, you won't have any problem with our tests. And if you don't like the Outback Adventure program, then obviously you aren't ready and can expect a full refund." He let his stern gaze pass across the room. "This is your life at stake here. We're not going to put you out there if you don't belong."