Getting back

CHAPTER TEN

By design, there was no one to see them off.

There were thirteen pages of rules to replicate wilderness experience: "Condition 27: You will not write or speak about this experience. Condition 63: You will have completed and filed with Outback Adventure a last will and testament. Condition 81: You will have been screened and found free of communicable diseases."

Condition 17 specified an unpredictable departure time. No goodbyes to family or loved ones. No hugs. No weeping. No notice. They came, you went, like a furtive kidnapping. Daniel's call buzzed through at the trailing edge of night. "I'm in the lobby, Daniel," Coyle's voice calmly announced. "It's time for adventure."

He groaned. "Jesus, what time is it?"

"Just before dawn. The favored time for surprise attack."

"All right," he said groggily. "I've just got to pull my stuff together."

"Five minutes."

"Elliott…"

"Five minutes. We told you it would be like this. Cold plunge. The time for second thoughts is over."

Daniel knew the opposite was true. He could still quit, even now. The urgent, disorienting departure was a final test. "I'll be down. Everything's here. Just a couple items I've been debating to take."

"If in doubt, leave it out."

He swung out of bed, dressed without a shower, and grabbed his gear. His last pained decision had been to leave his sleeping bag behind in favor of a lighter, slimmer, tougher bedroll. He needed to move to survive. After another minute's indecision he pocketed the toy action trooper next to his computer. Gordo Firecracker, tough guy amulet. Then he glanced around a last time.

The apartment was already bare. He'd made arrangements for the last of his belongings to be packed and moved into storage. The video wall was a dim gray, his computer cabinet lightless. Now he threw his Microcore identity badge into the trash. "Mona, I'm gonna," he recited. Goodbye to the goddess, goodbye to the gorgon, goodbye to all that. "Raven, I'm… cravin'." Craving what? Sand in his cereal? Blisters on his heels? "Cravin' to find out why."

Coyle saw him into a cab and gave him tickets for a shuttle. A red-eye flight to a coast city, leaving in forty-five minutes. "You'll meet the others for final departure there." The door slammed.

Daniel keyed down the window. "Aren't you going to wish me good luck?"

His counselor was silent a moment. "Luck is just preparation plus opportunity," he finally recited. In the darkness of predawn, Coyle's expression couldn't be seen.

There was a two-hour flight to the final departure point, the two dozen other adventurers scattered at random through the plane, a few sleeping and most just quiet, lost in their own thoughts. At the airport an unmarked bus met them for transport to an industrial airfield. More than a hundred people had assembled there for flights that would scatter them like shot across the continent of Australia. They checked into musty dormitories.

"Barracks," Ico corrected. "Crap left over from the army or something. Unloaded on these guys, or picked up for a song. You'd think for a year's salary they'd give us a last night in a hotel room."

"My guess is it's a last reality check," Daniel said, sitting on a bunk. It creaked, its wire web apparent under the thin mattress. "So we're clear what we're getting into."

"And my guess is that they're a bunch of cheap bastards who know if we're already dumb enough to sign on for 'adventure' that we'll tolerate any fleabag they check us into."

"A small price to come alive," Amaya teased him.

"Yeah, what difference does it make?" Tucker said. "Tomorrow we wake up on the sand."

"It matters if someone snores. You snore, Freidel?"

"I dunno. If I do, I sleep through it like a rock."

"That's a question that would've been useful on the questionnaires," Ico said. " 'Do you snore?' But oh, no, they gotta know what my favorite damn color is."

"What'd you say?"

"Green. The light that says go."

Told they'd leave before dawn again the next day, the four companions decided on a final party in a nearby restaurant, their evening celebration wired with the adrenaline of excitement, a magnum of champagne, and tabs of EcSotica drug. They laughed so hard they finally cried about snarled commutes, dead-end jobs, blank-brained bosses, mortgages on units they hated, and insurance on lives they'd felt were hardly worth keeping. Now it was all going to be gone, poof, and they'd wake up to find themselves in the Outback, life reduced to a hunt for food to eat and water to drink. Simple. Stark. Scary.

"Did you see that guy?" Ico snorted excitedly, spitting a bit of champagne across their table as they talked of hopes and fears. "Came out of their phony last-minute screening positively mystified that he didn't get in. 'Gee, I met all the criteria. Golly, I don't know what the problem was. But at least they turned me on to an executive opportunity at DisneySoft I'm sure is just as exciting…' What crap. They tried to get me to back out too with their song and dance about a good job elsewhere. I didn't fall for the ploy. It's a test, man, a trap. These guys are Machiavellian."

"How can they make any money if they keep turning people away?" Tucker drunkenly wondered.

"By making it hard to get in! Christ, try to keep people out of a nightclub and they'll line up around the block. This idiot will tell his friends he washed out and half of them will sign up to replace him. They're playing us, man. They're reeling us in."

"So aren't you upset at being netted?" Daniel asked.

"Nope." Ico poured another glass. "Because I'm riding the fishing boat to a better place, my man. Because all their bullshit is just a taxi for my mind."

They barely got two hours' sleep before being awakened at three A.M. and electro-bused to the waiting transports. The night was chilly and dark, and a light fog drifted off the harbor. Daniel could see that their craft was marked by a nondescript OA on its fuselage. This jet would take them to some transfer point and then smaller hovers would disperse individuals and small groups, they'd been told. Sleepy and hungover, they shivered gloomily. The freight decks of the aging terminal were shut.

"Damn, I'm tired," Tucker said.

"We'll sleep on the plane," Daniel assured him.

They got a breakfast of stale donuts and instant coffee while they waited for the jet to be readied. "They spare no expense," Ico observed.

"We're getting to see a place few people have ever visited," Amaya replied, as if to justify the unceremonious send-off.

"What, Australia? Or this dump?"

Daniel wondered if Raven had come through here. He found himself thinking about her with almost irritating frequency, like a worry he couldn't put behind him. Had she gone to the Outback? Was there a chance they'd meet there? What would she think of him if they did?

"Okay, form up! Bring your gear!" It was time. The ramp personnel waving them through were in red jumpsuits.

"Is this where we return?" Tucker asked one of them.

The man shook his head.

"Where then?"

"Beats me, buddy. I'd lobby to come back through Hawaii."

Their gear was searched, and a probe found data wafers in Daniel's bush hat. They went into a computer for scanning, and any mentioning Australia were deleted.

"It's just history!" he protested. "Background!"

"It might contain geographic detail. You were told that was cheating, Dyson."

"You didn't even read it!"

"Didn't have to. Besides, you don't need history where you're going."

Ico lost a compass that had a comm-phone slyly built in. "It's a compass, dammit!"

"With a radio. Looks like you're going to tell direction by the sun, sport."

"I want a receipt for that!"

The worker set the instrument on a metal counter, picked up a hammer, and swung. There was an expensive crack. "Don't need one. You can have it back. Next!"

"Fucking storm troopers."

"Next!"

Tucker and Amaya were clean.

They shuffled out onto the dark tarmac, bent under their gear. A line formed as the leading adventurers shrugged off their packs and disappeared aboard. As he waited for his turn, Daniel glanced idly around one more time and saw an electro-bus with no lights hum up to another freight dock. A line of men shuffled off it, heads bowed, shoulders stooped, barely visible in the dark. They wore the same jumpsuits as the ramp workers, he saw, but their scalps were shaved and there was the glint of something silver on their necks. Were the jumpsuits red or…

"Ico, look. I think those might be convicts."

His companion glanced that way. "Bullshit."

"No, really. Look at their necks. Those might be stun collars. I read about them. It's designed to jolt if they try to run away. I thought that crude stuff had been rendered obsolete by treatment, but there they are." Daniel had never seen a convicted criminal outside of video and holographic shows. He was fascinated.

"Hmm." Ico considered. "If those are moral-impaireds, why aren't they in a clinic? What are they doing here?"

"Getting a ride to rehab, I'd guess. They must have just been convicted."

Ico looked from the convicts to the men in jumpsuits who were processing the departure of the Outback Adventurers. "Look at our own goons," he nodded. "For all we know, the guys frisking us are rehabs. More nickel shaving by Outback Adventure. No wonder the food is swill."

"You might remember the cuisine more fondly after days surviving on ant balls," Amaya reminded.

"Whose balls?"

"Balls of ants, collected on a stick."

He laughed. "You can tell me about it, Chiu. I brought Solar Chow."

"Looks like you got enough to feed us all." She eyed the massive pack Ico was bent under. "How are you going to carry all that?"

"On my back, sweetheart."

"How heavy is it?"

"Seventy-five well-chosen pounds to keep me not just alive but comfortable. Don't worry, I'll still leave you in the dust."

"Really? Okay, wise guy: first one to camp. I win, you cook me your chow. You win- "

"It ain't a bet, sweetheart. This food's for me."

"Hey, who are those guys?" Daniel asked one of the red jumpsuits. The man looked at the distant shuffling line of convicts he was pointing toward.

"Them? Just the morally impaired."

"Criminals? What are they doing here?"

"Our company has a lot of transport contracts." He laughed. "Be careful you don't get on the wrong one!"

"Hell," another joked, "I think these fools are already on the wrong one."

"A few days in the wilderness and they'll want back on any transport," a third added.

"Enough," their supervisor snapped.

Nervous laughter rippled through the passengers waiting on the tarmac. "Boy, they really know how to put us in the mood, don't they?" said Tucker.

The supervisor suddenly eyed him. "You can still back out."

Tucker thrust out his chin. "No way."

The jumpsuit nodded.

On board the airplane, Ico pushed his way forward. "I want to be up front."

"What does it matter?" Daniel said. "We're going to be put to sleep."

"It matters."

They followed Ico to the front and Daniel lay down in his berth, watching as a med-op strapped him to his bunk. The man tugged hard and the straps went tight. "Preparing me for a lobotomy?" Daniel tried to joke. His heart was beating faster and he realized his nervousness was about to turn to fright. Was he doing the right thing?

"The straps keep you safer in turbulent air." There was a prick as a tube was inserted. "And this dope feels a hell of a lot better than getting a lobe cut out." He felt a warm flush begin in his arm and flood his body. This was it. Next stop, the Outback.

The med-op's face loomed over him, blurry and indistinct. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I can feel it." Daniel felt himself begin to relax.

"What are you hoping to find out in the wilderness, sport?"

He smiled at himself, drifting down into warm fuzz. "I'm chasing a question, I guess."

"A question?"

"Yeah. 'Why?' " He felt himself start to float. "Or a woman."

The attendant chuckled. "There're easier ways to get a date…"