Eight Against Utopia

by Douglas R. Mason

  “We’ll get by”—Wanda had taken abstracts of every useful construction drill on the Research Center files—“just produce some basic raw material. Almost anything organic will do, and we can synthesize any dish you choose. The main problem will be power and replacing technical equipment, but that’s Lee’s headache.”

  “All the same, it would be nice to get back to some natural products. Keep your synthesizing for fringe benefits.”

  Peter Swarbrick swung himself up through the hatch and made his way past the sail to stand, swaying easily with the motion, at the tender’s blunt prow. The banked cloud seemed to make a darker bar on the horizon. It was difficult to sort out the sea and the sky. Only a faint white line floating somewhere between the two made a possible division. At their present sailing rate, it would be hours before there was enough change to establish whether or not the land lay among the smudgy grays.

  On the way back he gave the mast a trial shake. It was well supported and rock firm. With powerful heaves he hauled himself up until his head was above the sail. The extra height pushed the horizon back. Now the white line was clearly a boundary mark of the sea. Waves breaking on a beach. Beyond it there was solid ground before the gray of the cloud. A ragged skyline. Trees possibly. His call from the crow’s-nest brought the crew in a rush.

  “Land on the port quarter.”

  First up, Cheryl could see neither the land nor the busy matelot. When he dropped down beside her, she thought momentarily that it was something supernatural. Compression is the first grace of style; she said, “Eek!”

  In the event, confirmation at deck level had to wait several hours. Watches changed. The endless chore of bailing out went on. Slowly a tinge of color in the skyline made it clear that behind the shore was rising ground, heavily forested. In the great slow cycle of time the desert lands had made a patient regeneration.

  In the last of the daylight they rounded a rocky point and slanted into a wide bay. Coastal currents, moving the way they wanted to go, had been urging the shuttle on for the last ten kilometers. Now they came along at a spanking rate with the sail drawing full and a curving bow wave. At this speed water was coming in faster. Three were bailing out. Closer in, it was possible to identify the mouth of a narrow creek and they took her in. The sail was dropped at a run and Shultz jumped down into waist-deep, crystal-clear water and carried a line ashore. Then they hauled her up on slow shelving silver sand and sea motion stopped.

  Out beyond the bay a long pencil of light was moving east. Swarbrick saw it first and called insistently, “Still everywhere. No lights.”

  Frank Shultz looked round for Tania. She was halfway up the side of the dune flanking the inlet. From the top she would be in silhouette. Could make a light signal even. Before the analysis was fully made, he had caught her and brought her down in the sand.

  “What do you want?”

  She was lying on her back with her face white in the near darkness. It was a genuine query. She had not seen the passing Strikecraft. It was returning to base after a sweep along the coast, passing them in daylight.

  “A psychologist of your standing should know the answer to that question. Let’s say I can’t bear to have you out of my sight.”

  Seven

  Long searchlight beams over the sea were no novelty to the land party. The extravagant forestation of the coastal strip had made it impossible to make progress on a compass line cutting inland, and they were following the sea’s edge. Strikecraft had been on missions from after dark on the first night. They saw the returning craft, which had passed close to the tender, from the shelter of the tree line.

  It had taken Gaul and Jane a good half minute to secure their gear and follow Goda out from the city wall. It was a memorable experience. They expected that at any moment she would pitch forward and drop.

  They caught up with her when she was a hundred and fifty meters away from the city and fell in on either side.

  Gaul said, “That was a very civil gesture. No score is being kept, but you’re certainly all square.”

  Twenty meters ahead, there was a white hummocking barrier, circling the city, concentric with the walls. When they reached it they were ankle deep in brittle white bone. “That’s the limit,” Jane Welland said, “Over the years there would have been a lot of animals straying into the barrier. It’s a circular graveyard.”

  When it was well past, they stopped and looked back, feeling very exposed on the level plateau. The city looked vast and beyond belief.

  Gaul said, “The sooner we get into the trees the better.”

  They had left the city on its landward side, facing west. If the tender had got out, it would be on the North, leading down to the ancient harbor. There was no future in making a long trek round, risking the reactivation of the hostility screen and possibly meeting a posse of civil guards beginning on the trail. And if the tender had not got away, there was even less percentage in it.

  Half a kilometer of rubble-strewn rock led to the edge of a long escarpment. On the rim of it, they all turned as if pulled round by a master puppeteer to look at Carthage.

  Goda said, “Watch it. You might get turned into a pillar of plastic.”

  The proportions of the city were immensely satisfying. It was a mathematical concept of flawless beauty, rising from black terracing like a perfect silver breast, as stylized in Hindu architecture, like a dome of the Taj Mahal, and, like that ancient predecessor, a mausoleum.

  In silence they dropped below the line of sight. Now they were in an empty world. There was no going back.

  The slope had alternating stretches of rocky staircase—a simple matter of dropping down ledge by ledge—and pitches of loose scree, where it was only possible to slide. Goda had one more refining ordeal down a fifteen-meter vertical face and they were standing ankle deep in rough grass. Fifteen minutes later they reached the shelter of the trees.

  Jane said, “When you’ve said we are alive and well, you’ve said about all. What now?”

  Goda said, “It’s nice to be with an intellectual, who can externalize our secret longings in a frame of words. That’s just what I want to know.”

  One thing was quickly clear. There would be no progress made through the dark wood. A company with machetes would be needed to force a passage. Equally obvious, it was first-class cover.

  Gaul Kalmar said, “We go along the coast. That takes us west. First base is the tip of Spain. We have all the time in the world. If the shuttle got out, they’ll go there and wait for a month or two. Untutored soldiery from the first Carthage got as far as that on their flat feet. We can do it. Farther on, when the search is off, we might make some kind of boat.”

  “In the short term then”—Goda was inclined to press for detail—“now, for instance, what do we do?”

  “Put a few more kilometers between ourselves and the city. Along the beach. Then camp for the night.”

  “Do we get to eat?”

  “Keep your eyes open for something that looks edible.”

  “Edible moving or edible growing?”

  When not screaming, or otherwise honeycombed with angst, she was a dedicated questioner. It could be that P. V. Teague had been acting more in the public interest than was at first supposed.

  Keeping well up to the tree line, so that no Man Friday tracks pointed them out to an airborne searcher, added length to the journey and forced an early halt. It was impossible to get on when light levels dropped over this obstacle course. They forced a way into the tangle of waist-high undergrowth and found a small dry cell in a thicket of tall trees. The floor was springy with bracken, deeply layered with peat moss. Spare overall suits made a kind of groundsheet.

  Outside, the sea edge showed as a broken white line. There was more noise than they remembered from the quiet city. In Carthage, when the dome was darkened, there was almost complete silence. Here, there was the rhythmic noise of the sea and a continual metallic clatter from the forest, varying in pitch and punctured by instrumental solo
parts. A long, sustained howl, which, with no special logic, occasionally hit a high C in alt, was most loaded with menace.

  Tact had made Goda take up a billet at the edge of the nest, but a need for reassurance drove her closer in. She pushed back to back with Jane, saying, “This is where the wagon master throws out the most expendable peasant.”

  Gaul, moving carefully in pitch darkness, stood up to look around. There was nothing much to see. Through the tangle of foliage there was an indeterminate view of the beach in dim starlight. Then a ball of light moving on the water, two or three kilometers out, throwing a long lance of white ahead in a searching beam. He watched it out of sight and felt, rather than saw, Jane Welland join him at the loophole.

  “They won’t find us here.”

  She was even more sure. “We’ll be lucky to find ourselves.”

  Settling down again, Gaul found her, naturally and easily lying against him. Instinctively they knew that they would go to the end of the line in this relationship, but now was not the time to take it any further on its interesting road. He was content to feel the soft fall and swell of her breathing. Neither expected anything more and knew that the other knew. It was a very satisfying and comfortable thing.

  There was one more disturbance. They woke certain that a brand-new instrument had joined the orchestral group. It was like the approach of a small tornado. Light filtered through the screen of branches, bringing color briefly to the leaves and silver gray tree trunks.

  It was the returning Strikecraft coming overland, following the beach. If their tracks had been in the open, they would have been run to earth. The forest went quiet, and then the cacophony built up again to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawing roar.

  At first light they went on. There was nothing to wait for. Behind them every new sky color was a novelty. After an hour’s good progress, a tongue of sea pushed back in an inlet and making a track-free crossing took up a quarter hour. But the water was brackish, diluted by fresh water running out, and it was possible to wash.

  Another hour and it was fully light, but they were screened from the sun and it was still cool. Gaul reckoned they had covered ten kilometers and could take time off to find food. There was no shortage of fresh water in rock pools and in streams draining out from the forest edge. He took the P7 and disappeared into the forest.

  Goda said, “It was always told to me that primitive man had a life which was nasty, brutish, and short, principally because he was a walking showcase for every parasitic germ that ever sought a host. Sophisticates like ourselves will have to watch it. God knows what’s in this water. Do we have any medical kit at all?”

  “We had to leave in a hurry, remember. It’s all in the shuttle. If we find that we’ll be all right.”

  “I’m glad you said, ‘if.’ We don’t seem to have drawn much of a hunter in this lottery.”

  Gaul had been gone less than ten minutes, so this was harsh. Particularly as he appeared on cue with a large rabbit type creature, which looked very dead. He said, “Catch,” and threw it at Goda. As cook, she was in at the deep end.

  She proved, however, that anything at ground level was well within her scope. Using a small thermal lance, to make key incisions, she skinned and cleaned the carcass, then jointed it and spread the pieces on a flat stone.

  “Sticks, thin; about a dozen. Wands even.”

  They were provided.

  She was piling more stones to make a small oven and used the thermal lance as a fuel source. Inside, the heat was intense and meat, speared on twigs, roasted through in minutes.

  Praise was lavish and deserved. She squatted on her heels, handing out the ration with unsophisticated delight.

  “How did you know all about this?”

  “This is a bagatelle. Just you wait. There is an Elizabethan recipe, ‘to cook a cony with a pudding in his belly,’ which will have everybody singing about the house. It’s a hobby. I did some research on the history of dietetics.”

  “Not a second of it was wasted.”

  “Can you go on providing the red meat?”

  “For long enough. The P7 must have a hundred charges. And it isn’t a marksman’s job. Anything on a wide V gets a share.”

  It was unlikely that the civil guard had any backwoodsmen on the strength, but they made a clear sweep of the site and left no trace of the barbecue. Then they went on, making four kilometers in the hour, at a pace they could keep up for days.

  Everything was new, everything seemed good. It was incredible that man should have turned away from such a world and moved into a totally controlled environment. Rubble-strewn stretches of shore, where great aprons of concrete thrust back into the forest to show the beginning of arterial roadways, marked the ancient towns and settlements of the coast. They dated from the last phases of occupation, when it was a playground. Long boulevards had been pounded to rubble and then to pale sand. The wheel had come full circle.

  Leaving one bay, where the curve of the promenade, stepping down in long courses, could still be seen like a ruined amphitheater, Goda said, “Where did they all go?”

  “We should have brought Hitchen along. He might have given you the answer.”

  “Hitchen?”

  “A courteous historian acquaintance of Swarbrick’s. The cold would drive them back. These places were derelict before Carthage was sealed up. Don’t forget this sea was frozen solid for centuries.”

  Jane said, “We may not be the first to come back. There are other cities.”

  It was a thought that kept them silent. The headland which marked the limit of the bay, in any case, was making demands on concentration. Climbing up had been slow and steady; but difficult pitches of rubble and vegetation forced them continually towards the sea, until, at the highest point, they had been pushed out onto the tip of a spur, with a sheer drop of thirty meters to the sea washing the foot of the rock.

  From this height they could see the indentations of the coast ahead and the clear gain that would follow from a direct path cutting back into the wood and making for the third small bay in line. The total distance by this direct route was about ten kilometers. They would do it as a last stint for the day.

  Remnants of building work, huge, empty cisterns, which could have been swimming baths, littered the interior, broken by thrusting roots. Movement in the dark would be impossible.

  Gaul took up the last idea. “Would they come north, though? You would think they would stay in a warmer climate. There’s been time, too, for some eccentric developments in these closed communities. They wouldn’t all turn out like Carthage. Islands cut off from each other. Iguanas in their own Galapagos.”

  “So, if we meet anyone, we reserve judgment until we find out whether they have nice habits?”

  “Definitely. Eating habits even. You might be looked on as a main course.”

  Interesting though this could be, it got no further. A kind of localized storm center was coming up from behind. Gaul took a count of five to register what was happening. Then, with a swirl of leaves and dust visible only fifty meters distant, he said, “Strikecraft,” and flung them into the nearest cover. Flattened beside a tumbled ruin of masonry in grass and gorse, they felt the down-beating gust strike at their backs in a flurry of small trash.

  “Why do they mind so much?”

  Goda was picking burrs and twigs off her overall suit.

  “We make a dangerous precedent. They want to show the plebs that it doesn’t pay. Besides, if the President is finally dead, there won’t be anybody to say, ‘Stop.’ Presumably he said, ‘Start.’”

  Jane Welland asked, “Do you think there’s a chance that those things carry a monitor? They could pick up our frequencies and do a simple homing job.”

  “That’s the answer. If they did, they would have. I think the pilot was following the coast and saw the same short cut that we saw. We’ve had a good warning there. Before moving out of cover we should take a good long look.”

  It was two hours of weary slog
ging before any such action was necessary. On the last leg the wood was already growing dark, with a curious intensity about the failing light. It was as though they were moving towards something which would be a kind of revelation.

  Goda said, “I’ve not felt this way since I was about twelve, coming home from Esmun on a crowded walkway. It used to seem that anything might be waiting at home, that there would be a new thing, that the day would end differently from any other day. Not that it ever did. Everything was the same when I arrived.”

  There was a lull on in the general background orchestra and for the last hundred meters there was a gathering of fantastic light. The treetops were turning red. Red shafts of light dropped like columns of colored glass among the tree trunks. Patches of red serrated by leaf shadows fell onto their arms and shoulders as they hurried forward.

  Then they could see the sun, a huge fireball, barred and crossed by a haphazard grille of black tracery until they made out onto a rocky strip above the beach. As far as the eye reached, there was a tide of red gold.

  They were awed by it. Jane Welland’s hair seemed to absorb the light and be luminous with it. Gaul said, “This is your country. You’re a natural here. You look unbelievably beautiful.”

  Goda subscribed in a general way to the dictum “Rejoice in the happiness of others and it will still be possible for you to live,” but she briefly killed this promising gambit with “What goes up must come down. That Strikecraft may be back this way.”

  Certainly they would not see much of it if it came out of the eye of the sun. They lay down just inside the tree line to rest and watch until the color drained out.

  In the remaining light, Gaul went back into the wood to find something meal-sized.

  They had fallen into the natural rhythm of a day as if they had never been separated from it, moving at the first light and sleeping when it was dark. After the meal they saw the Strikecraft running back, well out to sea. It was the same one which had only fractionally missed the sailing tender’s arrival in its creek.