Getting back

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They buried the pilot in the sand, Raven taking care to first remove his ring and the molar filling of identification micro-data that had replaced the dog tag for employees on remote and risky missions. Then the group filed back to Car Camp as the sun sank, walking the last few miles under the stars. They were exhausted, but they were also impatient to learn what Raven had to tell them. She simply suggested she save it until Amaya and the recovering Tucker could hear too. She walked ahead of them as if rehearsing what she would say.

Upon returning they built up the fire.

"What I haven't told you is that we have to go back to Erehwon," Raven began without preamble. "We have to go see the Warden."

"What!" Ethan cried. Clearly, she hadn't told him this.

She nodded, acknowledging his surprise. "You already know ordinary communications don't work in Australia. You know the Warden took a transmitter from the plane- from the pilot- and it didn't work."

"So?" Daniel said. "That's why we found this one."

"Yes. Because the continent must be jammed." She glanced around, gauging their reaction. "Outback Adventure- United Corporationsdoesn't want its clients calling out. You need a special instrument."

"The Cone!" Ico said.

"Hmm?"

He looked excited. "I stayed awake when they shipped us out here and heard the pilot talking about some damned Cone. I thought it was a password, slang, for the continent. But what if it's this zone of jamming?"

"You stayed awake?" Raven asked.

"Damn right I did. My trust only goes so far, and a good thing too. So they fly us into this zone made from… what? A satellite?"

She nodded, watching him. "The question is whether they could do that over an entire continent."

"Strongly enough to confound weak consumer electronics, I'll bet. Maybe strongly enough to defeat ordinary rescue beacons. They used narrow-focus satellite jamming beams in the Taiwanese War."

"That explains why my GPS didn't work," Ethan remembered.

"My stuff too," Ico said. "I thought it was just on the fritz."

Raven nodded. "When I came here and recognized there was no normal exit point, I began to think about alternative ways to signal for help," she explained. "Then I talked to Ethan and he told me about his crash. My theory is that no pilot would fly into this place unless they could expect rescue in the event of disaster, but that United Corporations would want to make sure it wasn't sending rescue craft in after the wrong people, risking a hijack by the morally impaired. The survivor who was signaling had to be someone knowledgeable enough to do something to activate the rescue beacon: a bona fide pilot, in other words. When I heard that the transmitter the convicts had brought back from the crash didn't work, I at first thought they simply must have taken the wrong one. But that made no sense- if they'd stumbled on the right one, U.C. would be sending its rescue crew into the lion's den. There couldn't be a right one. So then I reasoned the transmitter must require another component to penetrate this jamming- an idea I remembered from my aviation work. The beacon only works if a pilot puts two halves together: the transmitter itself, and the activator we just found. I think the body we discovered confirms this idea."

"How so?" Ethan asked.

"My guess is that the pilot tried to bargain for his life by promising he could signal for help if they could catch you, because you were unwittingly carrying the crucial component- the activator to penetrate this jamming. But when they found you unconscious, you didn't have it. It wasn't even in your pack. Maybe the pilot remained evasive in hopes of finding the activator by himself, later. And the Warden, in an impatient rage, killed him."

"So now we have to go to this psycho and ask him for the other half?" Ico asked. "This is the plan you didn't tell us about?"

"Ask. Take. Bargain. Whatever it requires to get back."

"Great. Whoopee."

Amaya was looking at Raven skeptically, glancing from her to Daniel. "You figured this out all by yourself?"

"I'm not promising it will work. It's a chance, that's all."

"Nobody's that smart, Raven."

"It's common sense, Amaya."

"You said you knew avionics. Tell me what a neural-rod stabilizer is."

Raven looked at her with irritation.

"Tell me what a wing pulse-circuit is."

"That wasn't my area."

"You don't know a thing about avionics, do you?"

"I don't have to prove myself to you! You're just jealous of my relationship with Daniel!"

He looked up at that, curious. What relationship?

"You don't know a thing about aviation," Amaya persisted. "But you do know a lot about Outback Adventure. You're lying to us, aren't you? Just like you lied to Daniel."

"I'm trying to help you!"

"Why were you so surprised to find him here? You were the one who told him about Australia."

"It's a big continent!"

"Why did you save us at all?"

"I'm beginning to wonder that too! Go back out into the damn desert if you don't like my help!"

"Who are you, Raven?"

She was angry. The two women glared at each other.

"Who is Luther Cox?" It was Daniel, interrupting softly.

Raven turned to him impatiently. "You know who he is. Your supervisor back home."

"Sure, I know. But how did you know last night? I never mentioned him to you."

"You must have." Her eyes flickered away.

"No I didn't."

"You just don't remember."

"Amaya's right. You know too much. When we were dying of thirst and you found us, you knew who Ico was, and his relationship to meeven though we haven't talked since I met him. You've always known too much. You recruited me, didn't you, Raven?"

She stared back at him, her expression flat. "You recruited yourself."

"What are you talking about?" It was Tucker, sitting up against his propped travois.

"She works for them," Daniel said, watching her. "She came on to me and talked wilderness but she was working for them all the time. It's the only thing that makes sense. She's some kind of agent. She found me, and got me interested, and gave me the passwords to get in, even while pretending she didn't want to. It was a seduction, a seduction without sex. She worked with my employer to do it. And now she's still working for them, but doing what? Picking up junk from the Outback?"

They were all watching her now.

"Burying their dead," Ico guessed.

"Why, Raven?" Daniel asked softly.

She took a breath. "It's for your own good."

"Being abandoned out here?"

"For society's good."

"For your own damn good, I'll bet," Ico charged. "How much are they paying you? My God, she's from the kind who put us here! If she's their agent, she deserves to be hung up on the rocks like that pilot!"

"You put you here!" she retorted. "Think! Weren't you told the dangers? Didn't you have chance after chance to back out? You were the ones who were convinced you could survive here!"

"Until we found an exit. Not forever. Not with a bunch of damned convicts."

"You'll be here forever if you string me up. Yes, I work for them. And yes, you may despise me. But I'm your only ticket out of here. This rendezvous wasn't planned, but you help me and I'll help you." She glared at him. "I've already saved your miserable little life once. I didn't have to do that. I could have just left you in the sand."

Ico scowled at her. "You've got the miserable part right."

"Why?" Daniel repeated, sorrow in his voice. Whys filling his mind like the whys she had challenged him with in the tunnels.

Raven glanced around at all their faces, their confusion and mistrust and looks of betrayal, and sighed. "United Corporations doesn't despise you people," she explained wearily. "They admire you, in a way. But they can't afford you. They're afraid of you. In the old days, society might have had a use: explorers, soldiers, entrepreneurs. But the world's full. Twelve billion people now. You live in the wealthy part and you don't realize how fragile everything is. How on the edge the planet is. If the system fails, if the economy and ecology collapse, billions will die- billions! Survival requires conformity. And because of that, the sideways view isn't an inspiration. It's a threat."

"That's crazy," Tucker said. "What about new ideas?"

"They don't want new ideas. Modifications, updates, yes, but nothing truly revolutionary. Don't you understand? The population has aged. The world has become conservative. The twentieth century was a nightmare of new ideas and it led to war, genocide, terror, and depression. Nobody wants to go back to that. We can't afford to go back to that."

"Like ancient China," Daniel recalled. "Fossilized. It sent out the greatest fleet of discovery in history in the Middle Ages, circumnavigated the Indian Ocean, found nothing superior to the goods back home, and disbanded the ships. It didn't want new ideas either."

"Which meant it was ultimately exploited by Europeans," Ico said.

"Except there are no more Europeans," Raven explained. "No upstarts, I mean. Everyone on the planet is the same. Same products, same restaurants, same songs, same stories, same ethics. People still cling to the rituals of old traditions, to promote tourism if nothing else, but really it's just one big country now. Or one big company. There are no foreigners anymore. No barbarians. And China lasted longer than anybody: that's the lesson United Corporations takes from history. China endured. United Corporations has to endure. My God, the entire system is built on stability over time: the stocks, the bonds, the revenue streams, the retirement plans. The greatest good for the greatest number."

"You believe this?" Daniel asked her.

"I know it. I lived it. I'm an ethnic Balkan, Daniel- a Gypsy, in part, by heritage- and in my early world things weren't quite so tidy and constipated and boring as in yours. In the early years of this century we had revolution every thirty minutes, and a new ideology every hour. We had to check each morning to see what our money was worth. My family lost everything- everything! And my father lost his life, dying in the riots. So when U.C. finally began to buy things out, to stabilize the currency, to put an end to the irrational nationalism and ethnic strife that had caused so much destructionwhen United Corporations put the poor back to work- I had hope for the first time in my life. Hope! From the stability you think is dull."

"Yes, but… this?"

"To protect the greater good they stand for. Sure, I work for them. I believe in them. And now you'd better believe in me."

"But what are you doing here?"

"Cleaning up after Ethan's crash. United Corporations doesn't like to leave anti-jamming devices loose. And the pilot was the son of a prominent family. They wanted to know his fate."

"Are you going to tell them?" Ico asked.

She looked down. "No. He'll have died instantly. Heroically."

"They sent you all the way down here to mop up?"

"For that and for… reeducation."

"For what?"

"A reminder to me of what we're about. What the alternative to a United Corporations world, to a civilized world, is. What kind of people are put down here. They thought I might be having doubts about my job. That I might be going soft."

"Why?"

She looked at him. "Because…" She stopped.

Amaya watched her and Daniel sadly from across the campfire. She knew exactly why Raven DeCarlo had struggled with doubts about her job. She knew exactly why she had decided to save four people she would have been better off leaving for dead. Because of the restless, questioning, kind, and in his own way strong young man she was speaking to. Because her betrayals had finally become personal.

"I just can't believe they put you in the same sector!" Raven finally exclaimed. "They told me I wouldn't see you!"

"That was a mistake," Amaya said quietly. "Ico switched the destination tags. They don't know we're here."

They rested two days at Car Camp, giving Tucker more time to heal. As the venom wore off the big man was gaining back his customary animation and habitual good cheer, and he began hobbling stiffly around the place. "I died and came back, children," he told them. "I had such weird dreams that this place is starting to look downright normal. I came back for a reason, I know it. I came back because there's something I have to do."

Everyone else was wary. The hope represented by the battered box of flaking orange paint had been doused by their distrust of Raven, who remained subdued but not contrite.

"How did you know enough to quiz her on avionics?" Tucker privately asked Amaya.

"I didn't. I just made stuff up. She could have bluffed me."

"You outfoxed her, Amaya."

"Or she wanted to tell."

Only Ico seemed capable of thinking ahead. He showed Raven his stained and battered map, asking her if it was accurate (she said she knew no more about the geography of Australia than he did), and he speculated excitedly about what might happen if they got the beacon to work and a rescue craft came. Would the surprised pilots simply take them back? Or would they have to hijack the aircraft and fly to a refuge?

"The one thing for sure is I'm not staying on the ground here," he promised.

Raven's smile was wan. "Let's see if we can get it to work, first." Somehow, she reminded, they had to get the transmitter from this Warden.

Daniel was simply angry. He'd had real feelings for this woman and she'd led him on like an idiot. Amaya seemed embarrassed for him. Ico looked at him with a smirk. Only Tucker's friendship seemed unchanged: he seemed less panicked by their predicament than the others, expressing no anxiety about getting back. And Raven? She avoided him, looking pained. The damn thing was, though, that sometimes when he looked at her- the tilt of her head, the grace of her body- she still just about took his breath away. Yet how did he know she wasn't lying to him still? He brooded from hurt, telling himself to get over it, to get hold of his emotions.

When Tucker could maintain an ambulatory hobble they set out grimly for Erehwon, a place Ethan said was about three days distant at their slow pace. He led them with assurance even though there was no obvious trail or landmarks that Daniel could see.

"How do you know where you're going?" Amaya asked Ethan, whose brittleness had softened at Raven's revelation. Now he was one of them, against her.

"We're following a songline."

"A what?"

"It's an aboriginal term. They believed the world was created when giant proto-creatures roamed an empty plain, singing into being all the rocks and plants and animals we see today. It's not such a strange idea to me- the new physics contends that matter at its most fundamental is just vibrating strings of energy, a kind of music. That we're made of music, fundamentally. These routes of creation are songlines, and aborigines were assigned to them. It's religious, and somewhat mysterious, but the practical aspect of it is that these lines formed a map, or a pattern, of trails. In a preliterate society you learned your way by singing the features you would encounter as you proceeded. The Warden picked up on this and had the inmates compose ditties to help them find their way when they make treks from Erehwon. 'Turn east toward kangaroo rock, the next good water is half a day's walk. ' That kind of thing."

She smiled. "Is it hard to keep in your head?"

"No harder than the telephone numbers, passwords, entry codes, and Social Security digits I held before. My brain's been emptying of one kind of memory to make room for another."

"And if you get back you'll have to switch again."

"Yes. But I'll have learned I can do both."

"Do you miss all the old numbers?"

"No. But I miss what they represented. When I came here I threw all my gear away and I've been regretting it ever since. We're tool apes. It's our only edge. So until we get out of here I'm trying to use what I can salvage. You've got an eye for that too, like with the sulfur. The purists would let the wilderness kill them, but with balance you can survive."

He showed the group how an old hubcap could be used to collect a tiny pool of morning dew, or how a pit could be lined with salvaged plastic, tented by another piece, and collect atmospheric moisture like a still. As they hiked, he demonstrated how a length of yellowed tubing cupped with cloth could be used to filter drinkable water from a muddy wallow by sucking it like a straw.

"You could use a reed for that too," Daniel said.

"But I don't have to. That's the point."

Daniel plucked a reed. "I don't have to have tubing. And that's the point."

Amaya continued to explore nature. At Raven's direction, she found and unearthed buried frogs in a wash. The hibernating animals, cool to the touch and sluggish from their muddy encasement, had exterior bladders swollen to the size of footballs. "I read about these," Amaya recalled. "They store rainwater in this mouth pouch until the next storm. They haven't digested it, so it's supposed to be no different than water in an animal skin."

"You're going to drink frog vomit?" Ico asked.

"It's not vomit. It's less ingested than milk from a cow's udder." She squeezed and the frog regurgitated the water into her mouth, splashing her face. "Feels good."

"Geez, that's disgusting."

"Not if it saves your life. Raven's right about one thing: the desert is full of water, if we know where to look." Casually, Amaya tossed the torpid animal away.

The others tried it too. Raven laughed at her squirt, the first time they'd heard her do that. Daniel jerked at the sound, remembering before.

"People really did survive here, didn't they?" asked Tucker. "Outback Adventure must have briefed you to survive here a long time."

"Not really," Raven said. "I was intrigued by this idea and did my own research, just so I knew survival was possible. Outback didn't think I'd be here that long."

"Which makes me wonder why you bother, Amaya, if we're about to call a taxi," Ico said. She was stooped over some plants, adding to her inventory.

"Because the taxi isn't here yet."