Getting back

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was suddenly cold despite the fire. Ethan had voiced a suspicion that had been nagging ever since Ico Washington's paranoid theorizing.

"The adventure is supposed to be permanent," Ethan said. "United Corporations thinks we'll be happier down here."

They looked at him with a combination of fear and disbelief.

"Some get back," Raven said.

Ethan glanced at her. "Maybe."

There was quiet as the newcomers absorbed this revelation. Elliott Coyle had said he'd gotten back, Daniel remembered. Elliott Coyle had promised an Exodus Port. "I thought the whole point was to find the way home," he said to Raven.

"The point is to let you realize this is your home."

"You knew this and you came down here? You knew this and you didn't tell me?"

She was silent.

"We didn't know any more than you," Ethan said. "The convicts told us."

"What convicts?"

"The morally impaired who can't be rehabilitated are exiled to Australia. They're ruled by one of their own."

"This Warden is a criminal?"

"You're a criminal, Daniel. A voluntary one."

"This makes not a bit of sense," Ico said. "Except that we saw some shave-headed goons being herded onto a transport when we departed."

"There you go."

"It's supposed to be for everyone's good," Raven explained. "A new colony, like the British made in Australia. To give people like yourselves- ourselves- an outlet for our energies. In the old days there was a frontier, or a war. Now, there's… this."

"We didn't volunteer to be pioneers," Ico said.

"But you did, in a way."

"No," Amaya said. "It's just an adventure trek. A vacation, though an unusual one. We hike to Exodus- "

"There is no Exodus, is there?" Daniel said heavily.

Her voice was flat. "No. Not exactly." There was something more she wasn't saying.

"You knew this and you came here?" Ico was incredulous.

"The people who come here don't know it, obviously," she replied.

"She hasn't told you half of it," Ethan added bitterly. "You thought you were going to a kind of wilderness heaven, right? In actuality, they duped you into volunteering for hell."

You may end up in a place even less to your liking, Harriet Lundeen had said to Daniel once. Could the gorgon have known? Heard dark rumors? Or only wished what others had made true? "I still don't understand," he said thickly, even though he felt with a growing sense of dread that he did.

"It's so obvious it's comic," Ethan said. "They maroon us by giving us what we want."

"What we want is to get back home," Amaya said.

"That's the joke. You are home. There is no getting back. Or rather, you've already gotten back. You wanted to come here."

Tucker shook his head slowly.

"Look," Ethan said. "Did you really think they were going to give a whole continent to a handful of urbanites to work out our angst? Come on! Don't you know the history of Australia? It began as a penal colony, right? It was settled by British convicts. This continent was a safety valve to relieve the pressure of inequities in the motherland. The hard-core murderers went to the gallows but the petty thieves, the political rebels, and the urban poor came here. What could be more logical, after the plague, than to use an empty Australia as a penal colony again?"

"But we're not convicts," Amaya objected.

Ethan laughed at her. "You're dissatisfied. That's become a secret crime."

"But we approached them," Daniel said. "I couldn't even find Outback Adventure without help. How would they know…"

"Right. You approached them. Proof of guilt."

"And things like your reprimand," Raven added. "Your troubles at work."

"But how would they know about that?"

"Daniel, don't be naive." She sounded impatient, as if she was having to explain something to someone particularly slow. "They know everything. They listen to everything. They talk to people like Luther Cox and Luther talks to them. Once they got everyone onto the Internet, nothing was private anymore. Your life wasn't locked in your head and your desk drawer, it was spewed in electronic bytes across a global network. They told you it was encrypted but spying became child's play. You spied to find me, right? They know us better than we know ourselves, from our electronic droppings. Why was the government so enthusiastic about the Information Highway? It was another way to watch and control."

He stared into the campfire, not liking being played the fool.

Amaya was looking from Raven to Daniel, considering all this carefully. "Yet the person who told Daniel about Outback Adventure was… you."

Raven shrugged with dismissal. "That happens all the time, I think. People like us seek each other out, inform each other of the possibility, and even sign up together. We betray each other. They count on it."

"Who is this 'they'?" Ico asked.

"United Corporations. They ensure stability by putting potential troublemakers down here."

"Troublemakers?"

"Unhappy people. Misfits. Malcontents. Independent thinkers."

"That's a crime?"

"Not by statute, but the system works on… conformity. You know that. I think they try to get everyone on the same track. The young adults they don't succeed with go… here. You all selected yourselves. You all had a dozen chances to back out."

"Our punishment is getting the life we asked for," Ethan added. "The irony, the humor of it, is quite sublime."

"Yeah, I'm really laughing." Tucker's look was grim. "So you two are what? Fleeing from these moral-impaireds?"

"Not exactly," Raven said. "We think we may have a chance- an outside chance- to really get back." She looked at Ethan for confirmation.

"Raven says the transport that crashed when I arrived should have been equipped with some kind of transponder, or transmitter. Something to signal for help. We came out from the Warden's little colony to look for it. Now, I guess, you're going to look too. I didn't think we needed you, but she wasn't willing to let you…"

"How did you know about this transmitter?" Amaya asked slowly.

"I worked in aviation for a while," Raven said. "It's a guess. A hope. But it's worth pursuing if I ever want to get home."

"Avionics?"

"Yes… electronics, communications, that kind of thing. After stumbling onto Erehwon I met Ethan and he told me about his crash. It got me thinking."

"We're near the wreck?" Daniel asked.

"Pretty close. We'll try to find it tomorrow. So I think we should stop talking about this until then. Believe me, I know how confusing this is. Let's deal with it when you have some hope."

He felt dazed. He'd found her, and might even be marooned with her. Or not. He stood and moved off toward his bedroll in the darkness to think.

Amaya quietly approached Raven as the group broke up. "You don't seem as bitter as Ethan," she observed.

"I just admit that I chose to come here."

"You don't seem to be as shocked as us."

Raven looked at her evenly. "I've had more time to think about it."

"Think about our betrayal."

"I'm just a person who takes life as it comes. So should you." Then she moved away.

The next morning the group split in two. Amaya, remote and lost in thought, elected to stay at Car Camp to nurse Tucker. Daniel and Ico, however, decided to accompany Raven and Ethan to find the remains of the transport.

"We're nuts if we let that bitch move out of our sight," Ico muttered to Daniel as they set off. "There's something more she isn't telling us. You're so pussy-blind you can't see it, but I don't trust that siren to tell night from day."

"I hardly even know her, Ico."

"Yeah, right. She seems to know you down to the color of your shorts."

They walked northwestward, Ethan leading the way and happy to be free of the burden of pulling Tucker. He was back on their primary mission but still treated the newcomers as if they were unwanted, or as if there was some unspoken rivalry. He kept an emotional distance.

The pair had fled eastward from Erehwon, Raven explained as they walked, and the community would assume they were trying to cross the desert to get to the coast on their own. Members of the Warden's group deserted periodically, despite warnings of the trip's futility. Once out of sight of the compound, however, Raven and Ethan had circled back west toward Flint's crash site, stumbling on Daniel's party in the process. She seemed troubled by that coincidence.

"So what exactly are we looking for out here?" Ico tried to clarify.

"An emergency beacon," Raven said. "Something on the transport to call for help. All aircraft have one."

"Why wasn't it triggered in the crash?"

"We don't know," Ethan said. "The Warden took some kind of transmitter but it doesn't work. Nothing electronic seems to work here."

"So we're looking for something that does," she said.

"Why would it work?"

"That's technical."

He looked at her with dissatisfaction. "Then what?"

"We call for help."

"It would still operate after all this time?" Daniel asked.

"If it's standard, the batteries should last for a year."

"You never told me you worked in aviation."

"I never told you a lot of things."

They walked on in silence. Finally Daniel addressed Ethan. "What exactly happened to you?"

"I was coming here for the typical wilderness experience," he explained. "My transport crashed. I woke up still strapped to the bunk, half the plane gone, and everyone but the pilot dead. He unbuckled me, told me to wait, and went to the forward part of the wreckage I couldn't even see to get something. Then these strange people showed up- it was the Warden's convicts- and I ran. I fell, blacked out, came to. The pilot was missing. I think he told them they could get back if they caught me, but they couldn't. They let me live afterward because it was clear I didn't know a damn thing- or that if I did, I couldn't let it slip if I was dead. So the Warden took me back to Erehwon. There's a mix of convicts and refugee trekkers there, all of us confused. I thought I was stuck here forever until Raven came along."

Daniel glanced at the woman who had intrigued him. She seemed to have discovered a way out of this exile when everyone else had failed. Interesting.

With Ethan recognizing the country with increasing confidence, they found the transport by noon. It was in two pieces. There was the intact tail where Ethan had survived, its metal frame glinting in the heat. Then a stretch of unmarked desert where the nose section had skipped ahead over a rise, followed by a sand furrow still seeded with debris. At its end was the burned-out hulk of the forward section of the aircraft, the fuselage ripped open to the sky.

Ethan hung back. "Some of my friends might still be in there."

"Yuck," Ico whispered.

It wasn't the possibility of bodies that made Daniel reluctant to approach the forward fuselage. Rather, the derelict machine made clear just how completely cut off from civilization they now were. Somewhere in the sky above, satellites orbited. Somewhere across the heat-glazed horizon the sea broke, and out there ships ran and jets flew toward populated shores. But all that was across a gulf as impassable as the abyss between the stars, and instead of reassuring him of the reality of civilization, this burnt husk confirmed how far he was from it.

"It's not a sight to inspire confidence," he said.

"Where one transport came, another might follow," Raven countered. "Come on, this is the way home."

The group went cautiously forward. Despite Ethan's uneasiness, whatever corpses the transport had contained were long gone, disposed by scavengers and decay. One cockpit seat had disappeared where the pilot had ejected. The other remained, the instrument panel stained dark with what might have been the co-pilot's blood. It was the panel itself that interested Raven.

"See the empty place that held an instrument?" she said. "That must be what the pilot came back for: a transmitter."

"Which the Warden took and which doesn't work," Daniel summarized.

"Yes. So now we look at the tail."

It was a pillaged stub, some of its metal panels stripped for salvage and its seats uprooted. The absence of fire had saved Ethan's life and made that part of the wreckage valuable for salvage. Raven crawled into the rearmost recess and hunted, then backed out. "The other instrument I'm looking for is gone too," she reported. "There's a hole where it's been removed."

"Great," said Ico.

"No, that's good. It fits my guess. I think the pilot gave it to Ethan."

"How do you know that?"

"The pilot gave me something for safekeeping before we separated," Ethan said. "I was pretty groggy, but I knew he was anxious to get some other component and leave. He told me that what he was stuffing in my pack would keep us from having to walk to the beach, but I didn't understand what he meant."

"So what happened?"

"He left and the convicts came, drawn by the smoke I suppose," Ethan said. "And he was screaming, and I was running for my life and trying to lighten my load…"

"You threw it away."

"I didn't know what it was. I resented having to carry it."

"He threw the damn thing away," Ico repeated to Daniel. "Unbelievable."

"You'd better hope so," Ethan said with irritation, "or the Warden would already have taken the only way out of here."

Daniel looked out the oval opening of the sheared-off tail at the desert. "What if we can't find it?"

"That's not an option," Ethan said.

They came back out. "I'm looking for a box smaller than a shoe box," Raven told them.

"Oh good," Ico said, glancing around. "That will stick out."

Ethan pointed to some sandstone hills on the horizon. "I ran that way and threw things into a ravine. We'll have to search there."

As they hiked toward the hills, Flint's memory of the place began to come back to him. Here he'd left a GPS and range finder, he pointed, both long since pirated and scrapped by the Erehwon group to make metal tools. Farther on… yes, he'd come this way, he thought. The ravine looked familiar, as did the crest of the ridge. The convicts had found and looted his pack near here. But the useless box which he'd never mentioned to the Warden… it could have been dropped anywhere.

"All right, we'll spread out and search the ravine," Raven said. "Meet by that pink rock by dusk. Ethan, where did you fall from?"

"That way," he pointed.

"I'm going to look up there. The rest of you try here." The men slid down loose scree into the brushy gully.

It was stifling hot. Flies found Daniel, there was no water, and he searched in a fog of depression so thick that it was difficult to even function. This is what his life had come down to: searching a hot desert for a metal box to get back to a place he'd been desperate to flee from just two weeks before. What would he do if he did get back? He could no longer imagine a future.

Hours went by with no sign of a human artifact. He drifted down the ravine from the other two men, looking as much for shade as for an electronic black box. He suspected that Ico, skeptical of the whole story, was already napping.

Then, while sitting despondently beneath a gum tree and studying a sandy bottom raked by intermittent water as artfully as a Japanese garden, he realized their mistake. The floods! In the months since Ethan's crash there must have been enough rain to carry things downhill. Or downstream. It was the hunt for their supplies all over again! The box was heavy, no doubt, more like a rock than a log. Still, streams had the power to move entire boulders when running high. Think like an animal, Raven had told him. Now he had to think like a rock. How far could a flood push it? Where in the stream course would it come to rest?

He quickly walked a mile down the ravine bottom, seeing nothing, and then turned to return upstream more slowly and carefully, probing the center of the sandy basins where the heaviest debris would collect. He found rocks all right, and even at one point some dampness signaling water close to the surface. But a transmitter? He worried its weight would have carried it beneath a covering layer of sand.

What saved him in the end was that the box was orange, its battered surface flecked with scratches revealing a black undercoating like a speckled egg. The beacon was jammed under a larger boulder, sand sucked away from it by the current. Could such a thing still work?

The metal was hot to the touch so he wrapped it in his shirt like a baby, carrying it upstream. Ethan and Ico were waiting at the pink rock, looking hot, sticky, and depressed, and so he shielded it behind his back until he came up to them. Then he held it out.

"Here it is," he announced. "Phone home."

Ethan looked at it warily. "That's it?"

"I'm asking you."

He looked at it dubiously. "I can hardly remember." He peered closer, inspecting the switch and socket ports. The memory of it was coming back to him now- his familiar world of electronics seemed an eternity away! — but how much did he want his new companions to know? "I guess so."

"Good grief," Ico said. "Well, let's go find Raven. She must be upstream."

There was no stream of course, just the sandy bed and a bottom of heat. It ended in a cul-de-sac of cliffs with a litter of boulders at their base. Raven was in the shade of one, looking drained.

"We found it," Ethan called. "Maybe."

She didn't look up.

"You don't seem very excited," Ico observed.

She looked up at him morosely, clearly disturbed. "I found him."

Ico walked past her into a cluster of boulders, the others following. The rocks formed a kind of nest with an open-roofed room in their middle.

"Ouch," Ico breathed.

A cross hung on the rocks, except a moment's inspection revealed the cross was really a man, or had been a man, arms outstretched where he'd been pinioned, and now almost black and desiccated by the sun. Dried flesh pulled back from screaming teeth. Eyes gone. Stained strips of clothes and leathered flesh.

There was a glint on one finger. Daniel stepped forward. "Academy ring."

"So we've found your pilot," Ico said.

Ethan was looking at the figure in dismay. "I didn't know the Warden did this. They told me the pilot was missing and… I didn't ask. My God, the man could have helped us! It's insane."

"This Warden of yours must have really been pissed off."

Raven had come in behind them, looking upward. The rocks radiated heat like an oven. She looked not so much horrified as depressed.

"I guess we want to steer clear of the morally impaired, right?" Ico said to her. "Good thing we're getting out of here."

She looked at him sadly. "There's something I haven't told you."