Getting Back (32 page)

He straightened himself up. "As straight as a ruler, missy. I believe in the law."

"So, where did you come from?"

He looked impatient. "Now that's what your kind never understands. I didn't come from nowhere. I'm just here. On walkabout, you see."

"Walkabout?"

"The aborigines did it," Raven said quietly. "Sort of like a native American spirit quest. Go out alone into the wilderness to wander and survive and find a spirit. Magic."

"Like the old prophets," said Daniel.

"Like us," said Ethan.

"No, not like you," Oliver objected. "You're no abo, I can tell. Me, I've got some of the blood. I can hear the old ones when the wind blows. Heard 'em just now."

"How long have you been on walkabout, Oliver?" Raven asked.

He shrugged. "All my life."

"Do you remember the time before the Dying? Before the plague? When there were cars? Buildings? Other people?"

He looked troubled. "I dream it, sometimes. That's what I look for, missy. Not that I've ever found it."

"Great God," Ethan whispered. "He's a damned survivor. Somehow, he's immune."

Raven nodded at Oliver encouragingly. "And have you ever looked to the east? Ever looked where the sun comes up?"

He turned to look in that direction, his eyes bright in dark hollows under the dust like the mask of a raccoon, his stubble beard gritty, his body overclothed in the vagrant manner of someone who had no other way of carrying his belongings. "A bit. No different than here."

Their spirits sank.

"Unless you go to the wet part. Hard walking, some of that. Too many trees."

Raven brightened. "You've been there?"

"Oh yes. I've been everywhere. Have to, when you're the only one."

"Could you take us there?" She pointed.

"What? Across the sand? Are you crazy, missy?"

She looked confused.

"This is the bloody desert, right? No water here. We'd die, we go out there." He looked at them as if they were daft.

"Where then?" she asked in despair.

"Up to the mountains, the way I was going," he said impatiently. "Then east. You can find water up there along the ranges."

Their smiles cracked their dust-covered faces in an eruption of hope. "Ollie, we're lost," Raven said carefully. "Can you show us the way to the mountains? Show us how to get east?"

"East!" He considered a moment, scratching his beard. "Why east? Of course, then again, why not? I could go that way I suppose. What's east, I wonder?" He squinted at them. "Eh? What in the devil makes it so important to go that way?"

"Our home, Ollie. We're lost, and we want to get home."

"Home! Ah, well. That's what I'm looking for too."

They turned north, following the sinuous line of the dunes. The walking was easier now that they could march along the sandy crests, and their guide, however strange, boosted their spirits. Oliver pointed out the occasional track of an insect or lizard across the sand that suggested the dunes were not quite as sterile as they seemed. Still, when the sand gave way to a more familiar hard and arid plain, rocky and thorny and spotted with stunted trees and shrubs, the adventurers greeted the transition with relief. Here, at least, was something green.

A day later they began to cross stony ridges running east to west, a change in topography that broke the Outback's monotonous flatness. They could visually measure progress! As Oliver had promised, springs were easier to find at the base of these outcrops. Finally they came to a more imposing ridge about a thousand feet high. The range was the worn, polished nub of once-great mountains, the surviving sedimentary layers sculpted into battlements so shiny that they seemed to sweat. Touch confirmed the rock was as dry as old enamel, however. The adventurers began following the base of the range, camping in gaps where intermittent floods had cut passageways as direct and level as a highway. These canyons were shaded by gum and acacia trees.

Without quite realizing it, the group fell into a new rhythm. During the first couple of weeks in Australia, Daniel's whole body had been sore from unfamiliar exertion. The ground had been hard and lumpy, his neck had bent at unfamiliar angles in sleep, his feet constantly ached and his muscles had stiffened. Now the miles seemed routine to a body that had become leaner and harder. The adventurers had far less gear than when they'd arrived in Australia and were more comfortable despite that, or perhaps because of it. Their load was lighter and their tasks simpler. The ground had become a familiar bed, and the open sky a familiar roof. Bird calls, a fold of land, the march of insects, or a change in vegetation could all, they'd learned, direct them to water.

Alert and more familiar in their surroundings, they found the daily search for food to be easier as well. Fruit-bearing plants had become recognizable, and their skill as hunters was growing. Oliver proved an apt teacher. Sometimes he would disappear for a day or two and reappear with game, but at other times he would take one of the party with him and patiently point out animal sign, demonstrate a quiet stalking, or bring down prey with a well-aimed throwing stick or rock. He taught his new companions to follow the tracks of the sluggish blue-tongued lizard- an easy kill- and to recognize wild onion, bush cucumber, and pigweed seed. Oliver carried nothing but what he wore, picking up and discarding sticks, rocks, or scrap to use as tools when he needed. He seemed not only to understand animals but to be half animal himself, and his wild, casual freedom struck the others as both enviable and disturbing. Is this what they could become?

With the absence of seasonings, their mouths were becoming sensitive to a more subtle palate. They found they could take more pleasure in the dribble of a fruit's juice, the smoky energy of cooked meat, or the chewy nuttiness of roasted seeds. They never had enough to feast- they'd gotten used to, in fact, a daily rhythm of hunger pangs before the evening meal, something almost entirely unfamiliar in their lives back home- but they were finding enough food to live on and keep moving. After a rain they hunted for yalka bulbs, roasting them to release their nutty flavor. They dreamed of richer foods, of course- sugar!-but subsisted on what they had.

Raven, who had expected to escape this experience and who instead had been forced to share it, remained stiff with the others. She was both the potential means to escape and a representative of the system that had stuck them in Australia, and their feelings toward her were confused. She was angry at Daniel for making a hard situation more difficult by losing the activator, worrying aloud that Rugard could still hunt them down before they could get back. Yet she also seemed to adapt to the wild with relative ease, suggesting her attitude in the tunnels had not been entirely an act. She was not squeamish about killing and cleaning game, displayed endurance, and had an emotional resiliency that warded off despair. Daniel tried to joke about their plight one evening.

"I've had to check into hell, throw away the activator, and walk a thousand miles to get another date with you, Raven. You seem to be doing quite well." He was watching her skin and cook a rabbit, the smoke and roasting meat mingling with the scent of eucalyptus. He felt strangely content. The convicts had been left behind, tomorrow was simply tomorrow, and life was no longer a set of deadlines and meetings and pressures. Did she feel what he felt?

She looked at him skeptically. "When I told you I was a cheap date, this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

"It isn't so bad though, is it? Isn't this the kind of freedom we talked about in the tunnels?"

She sat back on her haunches, using a forearm to brush her hair out of her eyes. "I never said it was bad. That's why I wasn't very guilty about sending people here. But this is a fantasy land, Daniel. This is recess. Our little party has hundreds of square miles to live on because we're the only people here, but Australia can't work for the rest of the planet. The only thing that can work for so many billions of people is obedience. The only thing that can work is United Corporations." She looked out across the dusky desert. "It's best that most people never see this. It would only confuse them."

"But don't you feel the rightness of this? For the first time I feel like I'm in a place where I belong. Humans were born in country like this. The savanna."

"Exactly. You do, and I don't. Normal people don't. I miss my machines. I miss my security."

"Even if it deadens the spirit?"

"Poverty and strife and fear are even more deadening. I told you, we came from different experiences. The companies took me in as a child, after my father died and my mother broke down. They schooled me, trained me, and finally convinced me I had to help sustain what they stood for. And I wanted to! I'm not blind, Daniel. I'm not immune to the beauty of this place. I'm not unconscious of the fate of some of the exiles. I just don't see this as a realistic option. And I don't appreciate your sticking me here by throwing the activator at Ico."

"As we didn't appreciate being sent here without the full truth."

She shrugged. "Okay. We're even. So don't try to get me to endorse what you volunteered for and I didn't. Camping is fun only if you get to go home at the end."

She wouldn't look at him as they ate their rabbit. He glanced at Amaya and she looked away from him too. Well, he couldn't blame her for that.

Still, his optimistic mood wouldn't leave him.

"I like this," Daniel tried again with Ethan the next day as they trudged along.

The other man glanced around, wondering what he was talking about.

"I like being here and just going," Daniel continued. "The simplicity of it."

"Mindless?"

"Fulfilling. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do but not trying to do any more. Like an animal. I'm content, I mean."

"You're going someplace. Animals don't do that."

"Migratory ones do. Humans must have started like this, wandering out of Africa until we wandered all over the earth. Nomads. Drifters. It's why this seems right, I think."

"Except eventually humans settled down," said Ethan. "They got hungry, and had kids, and invented agriculture. Then came civilization."

"With tyranny and war."

"And medicine and art."

Daniel smiled. "That's why men are torn, I think. Between settling down and moving on. There's this yin and yang in our brain that comes from all of human history. The nomad versus the farmer. But what if farming was a wrong turn? What if that's the underlying story of Genesis: how people turned away from the Garden of the natural world to the temptation of our artificial one? The Tree of Knowledge?"

"If we hadn't bitten the apple there'd be no Genesis, no Bible, and no Gutenberg press to tell us about Eden," Ethan countered. "This isn't us, not really, Daniel. Civilization is. I've changed my mind about being out here. I was a gadget freak, and quite frankly I miss my gadgets. They were my toys. I like logic, regularity, and predictability, and all those things seem in short supply out here. So to me, the challenge isn't surviving without civilization. It's learning from the wild and bringing that experience back to make civilization better."

"You sound like Outback Adventure."

"First we believed everything they told us and then we believed nothing. I'm just wondering if some of what they said is really true, in a deeper sense than they intended."

"So what are you going to do if we get back?"

Ethan sighed. "I don't know. My worry is I'll end up not feeling I fit in either place, or will be on the run as an underground outlaw. Maybe I could make a life here, but not like Oliver. Not like an animal. I'd want to build back some of what I had, and strike a compromise." He looked at Amaya, walking ahead. "Find someone to build with."

The dusty, ragged, and unkempt members of Rugard Sloan's Expedition of Recovery, as he'd grandly decided to call it (although it was more like a lynch mob in mood and moral development), almost tiptoed along the blacktop road in wonder. Pavement! A small thing, but as fervently appreciated in this trackless wilderness as an exercise yard in a prison compound. Here was evidence of past civilization! Of destination! Possibility! Somewhere over the horizon were ruined cities and salvageable luxuries. Somewhere over the horizon was Raven's electronic key to getting out of this whole sorry mess. And because of that, the hardened, bitter inmates of Erehwon ran up and down the skin of asphalt like excited children, clucking over the road as if it were an open gate in a coop of fenced chickens.

The reaction made Rugard slightly uneasy. His followers were angry, yes, for the slaughter in the canyon. They were set on getting back what the bitch had stolen if it meant even the slightest chance of escape from this continental hell: and he'd told them that Raven held the key to getting back. But at Erehwon his rule was the only possibility. In leading them out into the desert, Rugard had made possible the danger that some of them might actually begin to think. He'd have to drive hard to discourage that.

What drove him was not just the desire to break out of this unwalled prison but to revenge himself on the urban smart-asses who had run away. Rugard hated their type, these wealthy urbanites who came here- hated their manner, their unconscious superiority, their naivete, their indignant outrage, their privilege, their whining, and their clumsy helplessness. How well he knew their kind! It mattered little to him that they were stuck in Australia as he was: they were of the same class of arrogant bastards who had imprisoned him. The same class that had held him down all his life: quietly sneering at him, ignoring him, jailing him, always trying to crush him. He was better than they were! Smarter, tougher. Now they'd done it again, humiliating him in his own home, and the possibility they might escape was so maddening he couldn't rest until he hunted them down. Yet Raven and her accomplices had a long head start because of the time it had taken Rugard to assemble supplies, saddle the camels pressed into service to help carry them, sharpen the weapons, and muster resolve. Some of his inmates had balked at following the fugitives at all! The Warden had reacted swiftly, making clear the necessity of fearing him more than they feared the desert. "You can stay with the ants then," he'd growled, burying one of those who hesitated to his scrawny neck and squeezing fruit pulp over his screaming head. Rugard had waited until the insects had eaten out the man's eyes and he'd begged for death, and then ordered him dug up, alive, his head pitted and bleeding with bites. A bandage had been wrapped around the victim's empty sockets and he'd been brought stumbling along, a reminder of the consequences of disobedience or hesitation, infection swelling the man's face like a balloon. The lesson had been salutary, the Warden judged. Still, the thieves were far ahead and the Expedition of Recovery needed help if it was to catch up. They needed an advantage.