Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "How can you not admit the worth of the scientific and political expertise that has allowed more humans to live today than ever before in history?"

  "Raven, this is a mausoleum," Ethan objected. "I mean, come on."

  "Because of one accident," she amended with exasperation. "Before that it was a city, with life and laughter, created as part of a system I still feel an allegiance to. Of course this is wrong. All of it. All of Australia. If I get back, I'll be working to expose that. But not the rest. I can't not believe in the rest. I can't give up on the rest. I have to believe in something."

  Daniel looked at her sadly.

  She wouldn't tolerate his pity. "What do you believe in besides your wilderness nihilism, Daniel? What do you believe in besides running away?"

  "I believe in what feels right," he said quietly. "I believe in what we are, instead of what we build." He glanced around. "I believe that United Corporations lost something along the way- not their soul, but our soul, and that we've come to a place like this to get it back. Not this city, but this continent."

  "Even if that were true, not everyone can come here."

  "Maybe everyone doesn't have to. Maybe it's enough to have the wild for the few who truly need it, and who bring back its spirit to the rest. None of this would be so wrong if they allowed us to get back. It's the keeping us here that's so wrong."

  "Now you're going in circles, contradicting yourself, just like in the tunnels. It's your determination to get away from here that makes the lesson of Outback Adventure so right."

  Her dogged certainty irritated him. "I'm not- "

  "Enough!" Ethan held up his hand. "This is the debate we'll get to have if any of us can get past Rugard and back home. For now we have to keep moving."

  "I think we should look around a bit," said Amaya. "Raven and Daniel both have a point, and here in this city we've got both worlds: the technological and the wild. Let's see if there's anything worth taking."

  "Don't take!" Oliver exclaimed. "It's bad luck!"

  "Just for an hour or two," Amaya said. "It won't hurt."

  Some of the trekkers nodded. They were looking speculatively at the stores, wondering what might still be worn or acquired after more than three decades.

  "It would be fun to go shopping again," Iris said.

  "Fun not to have to pay for anything," Ned added.

  "No!" Oliver said. "This is a bad place, a dangerous place. We need to move on! Too many died here, I can hear them."

  "We're just looking around a bit," Amaya said. The others nodded. "Why don't you and Angus go ahead and wait for us at the end of town?"

  The native Australians reluctantly agreed.

  "All right, we meet back here in two hours," Daniel told them. "Be careful in these old buildings!" He looked at one of the towers. "I'm going to go up to one of these rooftops and try to see the ocean."

  The office tower was fifteen stories high, modest by the standards of the city they'd come from, boxy and plain. Still, it was imposing after months in the wilderness. Daniel recognized the name at its base from the corporate subsidiaries and institutional advertising elsewhere: Coraco. Industrial mining and development. The security pod in the central lobby was deserted, of course, and its news kiosk was frozen in time. Many of the periodicals had been shredded by rodents for nests, but a few pages of the Gleneden Paradise revealed a yellowed November 19, 2023.

  "Illness Spreads," one headline stated. "Massive Relief Effort Promised." Had that been the day of panic? The day of realization that no relief was actually coming, that there was no escape, and that the only alternative was blind flight that became as hopeless as staying? What about the few who'd survived, like Oliver and Angus? He remembered from his college days the dire prediction of what would occur if the bizarre arms races of the twentieth century had ever resulted in nuclear war: "The living would envy the dead."

  He heard her bootsteps on the broken glass behind him and ignored her. He was tired of trying.

  The elevator wouldn't work, of course, so he took the stairs.

  Daniel climbed steadily. She followed, two or three flights behind, their echoes a kind of lonely conversation. The paint was flaking and water stains from the failing roof ran down the walls. The structure itself was solid, a web of concrete and steel. How many centuries would it last before sharing the fate of Australia's eroded mountains? Or would someone come back, implode it, and start over?

  On a whim he left the stairs on the fourteenth floor. There was no thirteenth, but superstition hadn't saved them. There was a dark hallway, and then a brighter, windowed expanse of office cubicles lit by broken windows. The carpet was rotting, mold grew on the walls, and bird droppings spotted the desks, and yet nothing had really changed. Dark computer screens- this was before the cheaper opti-glasses- were the central shrine on desktops that still bore yellowed or wadded memos, cracked cups, dried pens, and posted corporate guidelines. Everything had been abandoned abruptly. Chest-high beige dividers formed a succession of cubicles. As familiar as Microcore.

  This was my life, he thought.

  He could hear the light breathing of Raven, resting after their climb of the stairs. She'd come in behind him. "Look familiar?"

  "Too much so."

  "What we're trying to get back to."

  "What I came here to escape from."

  "These people were happy, Daniel. They had lives."

  "Yes. They did."

  He walked past a supervisory desk to a window and looked out over the city. Its rational grid reminded him of the sole of Ethan's boots, a street plan that dated back to the Roman military camp. What do the animals call us, he wondered, we of the right angle and straight line? The rulers, of course. We rule, with rules, from streets and towers of ruled calibration. Until it all goes wrong. Until we bet everything on our own cleverness, and disappear so fast we leave no explanation of the fatal mistake. How many other lost civilizations had succumbed like this one?

  "So do you feel nostalgic at all?" she persisted. "Do you feel the pull of society?"

  "Of course. My society."

  "You mean the pull of your tribe. The pull of the primitive."

  He looked down. Some of his followers were coming out from stores, chortling over improbable finds of small appliances and decaying clothing. They'd try on something, or punch the buttons of a powerless machine, and then abandon them in the street. In truth, little that was useful remained.

  "The pull of my new friends, Raven. Of people who need people. Not some gigantic institution like this company. Not like United Corporations."

  "Daniel, an institution is people. That's all it is."

  "No. When it gets too big something happens to it. Like getting too much money, or eating too much food. It can make you sick, mentally and physically. That's what's wrong with United Corporations. The more they envelop, the less they become. Until finally they start decaying and destroying, like this place."

  "It was an accident."

  "Was it? When it grew out of the total domination they try to achieve, of both man and nature? When does an accident become inevitable?"

  She closed her eyes. "When is a mistake just a mistake?"

  He looked out across the city. "You could defend a tower like this, I suppose," he mused absently. "From people like Rugard, I mean. But a castle also becomes a trap. When you lock the door you have to have a way back out."

  "You're speaking of us in Australia."

  "Yes. Like Australia." He turned then and smiled at her, suddenly feeling lightened at this encounter with the ruins. He hadn't been sure of his own reaction and now realized he missed none of this old world. His past held no allure for him, despite all the hardships in this one. "I said I don't blame you for putting me here, Raven."

  "And I forgive you for throwing away the activator. The trip has been good for me. I admit it. So why is this so difficult?"

  "Why is what so difficult?"

  "Us."

  "Because… I'm in love w
ith you without even being sure I like you. Because you won't love me."

  She sighed, saying nothing.

  He watched her carefully. "Ethan wants me to come back with you, you know."

  "He does?"

  "He wants to give up his place on the rescue plane. He's falling in love with Amaya, and falling in love with Australia. It's beautiful here, far more beautiful than home. He wants to stay and send me in his place. Send me, to tell the world."

  "Would you?" She said it cautiously.

  "I don't know." He cocked his head, as if this were the first time he'd truly considered it. "I don't know if anyone would listen, or care, even if they knew the truth. I don't know if they'd let me live to tell anyone."

  "I wouldn't let them hurt you, Daniel."

  "You already did, remember?"

  She flushed, and he instantly regretted the retort.

  "But that's not why I'm hesitating. I'm unsure because I've come to believe the planet does need a place for misfits like me. It always has."

  "You understand that?"

  He moved away from the window, walking back into the cubicles. "Not in the way you do. Come here. I want to show you something."

  She followed warily as if he were going to shock her with a pile of bones. But there was nothing like that, just a sheet of faded paper pinned to a cubicle wall. He pulled it off and gave it to her. "Your institution."

  The paper was so aged it was hard to see. At first she thought it was something abstract, or a painted copy of the aboriginal designs they'd seen on rock walls. Then she realized it was a child's drawing. She squinted, looking closer. There were faint pencil lines on the drawing, forming two words.

  For Daddy.

  "It's not about economic systems, Raven. It's about the human heart."

  She blinked, flustered at this offering from a little girl long dead. The child would have been a woman now, with children of her own, looking ahead to grandchildren. Except she wouldn't.

  "It's about letting people be themselves. Letting people be. This child didn't deserve her fate."

  "That's not fair." There was a tremble in her voice that she hated. "This city- this girl- might never have even existed without- "

  "We have to go outside in order to get into our inside. Because if we don't then all that United Corporations stands for doesn't mean anything. It's just stuff, and disastrous mistakes, and little girls that end up killed by our own plagues in our mania to control our environment. We don't need an Australia as a dumping ground. We need wilderness to save us from ourselves, to remind us what's basic and simple and true."

  She squeezed her eyes shut again, the drawing fluttering to the floor. "You have to look at the big picture…"

  "That's why I don't know if I can go back with you, Raven. Because my heart doesn't know where it belongs."

  She was quiet for a while and then she spoke. Her voice was small. "I'm sorry I can't say I love you. I don't know what I am supposed to say, to make you come back with me. I just want you to."

  "Why? I challenge everything you stand for."

  "To save the others."

  "That's not why."

  "I do care for them, you know. I do like them."

  "That's not why."

  She lowered her eyes. "So I'm not alone."

  He stepped close, reaching out to grasp her arms. His grip was firm, his eyes intense as he looked into hers. "Then say you'll stay here with me, Raven. Say you'll give it all up, for me. Say you'll stay in Australia. Say that and maybe it won't matter where I am, so long as I'm with you." And then he bent to kiss her.

  She stiffened again, but only for a moment. Then she was kissing him back this time, her lips open, her arms coming around him, her body pressing and then moving against his. He held her roughly, hungrily, his hands roaming to caress.

  "I do love you, dammit," she admitted fiercely when she broke briefly away. "You know I do! I love all the mixed-up craziness that's in you, all the longing, all the desire. That's been the problem from the beginning!"

  "Then it shouldn't matter where we are, should it?"

  "No." She sighed and kissed him again. "It shouldn't."

  He took her hand and led her back to the musty stairs. Instead of descending, they climbed upward. It took two kicks to break open the door to the roof. Birds flew up, crying, but the couple found a corner away from their nests that was clean and warm, bleached deck boards providing a platform above the vinyl roofing. She knelt with him beside her, looking east. "I wonder when we'll see the ocean."

  He reached over her shoulders from behind and began undressing her, watching the garments slide off her brown shoulders and mounding around the swell of her hips. Her nipples were hard, her belly trembling, and he caressed her torso as he kissed her, pulling the luxuriant fall of her dark hair aside to bare her neck. "Say you'll live with me in Australia," he murmured. "Say you'll trade that world for this one."

  And with a moan she pulled him down on top of her, making a bed of their clothes on the wooden slats of the deck and promising nothingexcept, that for this moment, they were one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ico Washington believed he knew what Exodus Port really was.

  He hadn't found a geographic Exodus, of course. There was no bay on Australia's eastern coast that harbored an exit from this continental hell, of that he was sure. But there was a way to get back, Ico thought, a way that depended on exercising the mind more than the legs. You had to find a key to the lock, the answer to the riddle: that was the test of Outback Adventure. A test of wits! And in his case the answer was the transmitter. Whoever successfully signaled deserved to get back, and whoever did not deserved permanent exile. Every man for himself! Survival of the fittest! The orange-speckled cube that he'd safeguarded across half of Australia, and the battered transmitter that Raven had stolen, were- in combination- Exodus Port! With them he could not just escape, but return to the world of United Corporations a designated winner. Unless Raven got out from under the Cone and signaled first.

  Right now Ico was in a world of losers. A dust-shrouded column of the crude, stupid, stinking, and dull. Rugard's Expedition of Recovery seemed to have developed some kind of perverse gravity, drawing in the desperate and cruel to make a small army, despite periodic desertions from its less-than-reliable ranks. People liked to belong to a group, Ico supposed. They liked being led. Plus, the vaguely understood promise of possible escape fired the growing mob like a promise of treasure. None knew, of course, that there was no room on a rescue craft for anyone but Rugard and himself. They'd realize that when the pair were gone.

  Ico's conscience was not bothered by this planned abandonment because he'd come to loathe his allies. Familiarity had given him time to despise their tasteless jokes and vile nicknames and adolescent gang mentality. They deserved to be forgotten! They'd called him Psycho! And yet he was the only one who had brought them this far, he and the map that everyone had laughed at from the beginning.

  Well, he'd leave them soon. Ico would win, he told himself, because unlike the others who were marooned, he'd been thinking from the beginning. That, he was convinced, was what United Corporations was secretly looking for. While the others had been drugged to sleep, he'd fought to stay awake. While the others had sheepishly agreed to geographic ignorance, he'd been out buying a black market map. Admittedly the map was crude and somewhat inaccurate. It showed highways that didn't exist, and omitted some that did. In main, however, it was a decent redraw- maybe from memory- of an Australia that had been real. Ico was convinced of this now because the map had been right too many times. Now, after the report of the confusion at the dam, the main army should meet the transmitter thieves on the road. Maybe in this abandoned city ahead in the foothills. The Expedition could see its towers.

  Information was the edge, always the edge. Ico had it.

  He looked back along the line of trudging men, swaying camels, and captured horses, the Warden riding commandingly on one steed liberated fro
m an owner whose foolish resistance had gotten him killed. There were clusters of women too, some as heavily armed and nasty as the males and others the terrified and subdued inductees to Rugard's Cohort of Joy. A mob united by greed and fear. But they were following him. And if his guess was right, they'd already outflanked the fugitives and now, heading back west, they would shortly intercept them. It was possible he was wrong, of course, but Ico trusted his own instincts. Dyson had been bullheaded about direction from the very beginning: east, east, east. Dyson would think he could still outrun Rugard's big group. But then Dyson thought the map was useless, that Ico would tolerate being left behind, and that the bitch he was smitten with could be trusted. Dyson was a smug, immature, naive nitwit who deserved to be left behind. He belonged here.

  Ico couldn't wait, from the door of an aircraft, to wave goodbye.

  It was a scream which jerked Daniel awake, a wail of fear that penetrated the afternoon slumber he'd fallen into after satiation with Raven. He jerked up guiltily, momentarily disoriented. There were shouts of alarm in the plaza below.

  He crawled to the edge of the parapet surrounding the flat roof. There was a confused knot of people and two horsemen galloping wildly away, one swaying unsteadily as if injured. There'd been some kind of brief fight, Iris weeping. He watched the mounted scouts retreat toward a stream of people coming into the outskirts of the city just two miles away down the main avenue, a swarm of convicts trotting toward them with excited purpose, yipping and crowing like animals. His heart sank. They'd been found, and not just found, but likely trapped.

  He woke Raven and they hastily began to dress.

  "Daniel! Where are you!" Amaya's voice.

  "Just a minute!"

  They both were half covered when Amaya stepped out onto the tower roof, jerking to an abrupt halt when she saw them. Then she blinked and composed herself.

  "Thank God I found you. They surprised Iris and the men just barely saved her. Everyone's coming into the lobby."