Getting back

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Australia had changed. The taut harshness of the Outback had given way to the soft contours of rounded hills and thick forest, cut by streams and interspersed by meadows and abandoned pasture. Old farmsteads had become frequent, the rotting and rusting houses half swallowed by eruptions of brambles. Wild cows, horses, pigs, and goats were frequently encountered. Sheep had disappeared, destroyed perhaps by roving packs of wild dogs. And now the first city was glinting on the horizon.

Ethan sat next to Daniel as they rested in the grass of an east-facing slope, studying the abandoned towers. Ragged remnants of the building windows still caught the light of the sun. Somewhere, not too far beyond, must be the sea.

"Daniel, I've decided not to go back," Ethan announced quietly as they let their eyes skip across the overgrown cityscape, searching for any sign of life in the distant ruins.

"What?"

"I've decided it would be better if you returned with Raven. Not me."

"Why?"

"I think you make a better fit."

"It's your seat, Ethan. Your crash, your transmitter, yours by length of exile. We already decided this."

"I don't want to go back." He shook his head, as if puzzled himself. "Not yet, anyway. I miss things, sure, but not enough that I need to get back right now. There's things I'd miss even more here."

"Amaya."

"Yes. And another thing."

"What?"

"This country. I'm falling in love with it too."

They looked out across the rolling hills, blue with haze. Even in the underpopulated areas of the United Corporations world, roads curved, power lines strutted across the contours, and the invisible matrix of property lines and survey markers reminded how the planet had been parceled out. Here, everything was at the beginning again. No one owned anything. Everything still seemed possible.

Daniel sighed. "I'd rather have you go and want to come back. Amaya would be a pretty good guarantee you wouldn't forget us here."

"No, I'm beginning to think I could make a better life here, once we get past the convicts. Not out in the desert, no. But here we have wood and water and livestock and the remnants of a lot of technology. Not to mention land, and room, and freedom. It's beautiful here. In fact, it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The new Australians, like Raven said."

"I've been thinking the same thing."

"There you go then."

"So now we're going to argue about who has to go instead of who has to stay?"

He laughed. "We'd get plenty of volunteers, still. I'm just saying you make the most sense of any of us."

"I can't go back, Ethan. I can't lead this group in a race to the coast and then abandon them."

"You wouldn't be abandoning them, you'd be saving them, or at least giving them a choice of which world they want to live in. And you'd have far more influence over Raven than I would: you two together could get to people in power, maybe. She'd listen to you."

"No she wouldn't. She doesn't want anything to do with me."

"Nonsense. She's haunted by you. You haunt each other."

"Now you sound like Amaya."

"Amaya is smarter than any of us. You know, she'd take you over me, if she could."

"That's crazy."

"No it isn't. And it doesn't worry me. Because this connection between you and Raven is as obvious as gravity and as weird as… love. Not simple attraction so much as entwined destiny, I think. Everyone can see it. And somebody has to go, Daniel. Somebody has to take the story back. If Raven has to be one of them, the next most obvious choice is you. Start thinking about it, please."

"She keeps defending United Corporations."

"She keeps defending herself. Trying to live with herself. She'd love you for accepting her for what she is. And helping her to become what she wants to be."

The city was called Gleneden, and it was one of the New Towns that United Corporations had erected around the globe to rationalize the distribution of its workforce and maximize the efficiency of resource extraction: in this case, minerals in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. They approached the town on the raised deck of an expressway, the pavement littered and cracked but the underlying structure sturdy enough to last for centuries. A few abandoned vehicles sat on the roadway shoulder, their shells rusting through and their glass imploded, the fragments clustered on rotting seats like drifts of diamonds. Trees had grown up to embrace the causeway railings so the bridge deck seemed to float on the forest canopy, and birds sounded an alarm and glided ahead of them in a startled weave, announcing this unexpected reappearance of humans. More flocks exploded off the derelict towers, wheeling in consternation. Then the avian inhabitants settled down and Gleneden was quiet again. In the distance down an empty avenue, a wild dog loped away.

"What if we see bodies?" Iris worried. "I don't want to see bodies."

"I don't think there'll be anything left by this time," Daniel reassured. In truth he was unsure, and uneasy at the thought himself. He didn't want to find buildings of bones.

"I don't think we should go in at all," Raven said.

They ignored her. It was curiosity more than need. They were in too much of a hurry to thoroughly explore or salvage anything in Gleneden, but the roads they were using to get ahead of Rugard led them to the New Town and they'd all quietly wondered how much remained. Or how much had been lost.

As they entered they saw that many stores had been looted and a few buildings had been torched. Yet taken as a whole, very little had been destroyed in the panic that accompanied the plague, and it was only the obvious hollowness of the towers and emptiness of the streets that proved disquieting. Everyone was subdued, morbidly wondering what it must have been like to have a civilization- in all its complexity and anxious energy and optimistic enthusiasm- suddenly snuffed out. Careers, romances, dreams, and regrets: all suddenly gone, rendered insignificant, by the breath of bioengineered plague.

The planned and hastily erected community was a snapshot of early twenty-first-century architecture, its retro style tempered by cost-conscious design and its warmth compromised by the demands of transportation. Human-scale pedestrian malls were backed by car-dictated parking lots, and tower villages were separated from each other by a moat of expressways and empty, overgrown lawns. Faded and streaked billboards and powerless neon announced sales of products that no longer existed. Directional signs pointed with names that were now obsolete. The architecture and layout were as precise as the geometrical design of a computer chip, and just as inhuman. Without people, it was just a collection of boxes. Instead of human skeletons they found automotive ones, the metallic carcasses of cars scattered now like corroding bones. The pavement had cracked and plants had rooted, spreading across the detritus of leaf litter and dust that had accumulated atop the impervious layer. There were vines and scrubby weeds and the buzz of insects, all announcing that the inhabitants of Gleneden were dead.

Daniel realized the desolation was slowly making him angry. "These people were abandoned just like we were," he said. The group had stopped at an intersection, instinctively huddling together.

"Left with no hope at all," Amaya added.

The quiet was gloomy.

Raven looked irritated, as if this journey through a dead city was designed as an affront. "They weren't abandoned, they were quarantined," she corrected. "There was no cure, so it was imperative the plague not jump to another land mass. It wasn't ruthless, it was… necessary." She looked around grimly at the empty office and condominium towers.

The trekkers regarded her with distaste. "And that pragmatism is what you worked to protect," Daniel said.

She bit her lip. "It's cruel to individuals. I don't deny that."

"And now you're one of those individuals. Outcast like we are."

"Yes."

"Think of the souls that were lost here, Raven. The individuals. How long would it take you to write down their names? This place is a sin. A crime."

"Don't you think I see that! But think of the souls that were saved elsewhere by this abandonment, or are saved every day by an economic and political system you think is so heartless." She wasn't going to back down. "Think of the billions that have tolerable lives because of the United Corporations order you call stultifying. This tragedy is an embarrassment, but it doesn't discredit that system, Daniel. It underlines its necessity. This shows how fragile all of human society is, how thin the civilized and technological veneer is that keeps out the darkness. That's what I've worked to protect."

"This wasn't caused by a breakdown of civilization! It was caused by its culmination! How can you defend the scientific arrogance that led to all these deaths?"

"How can you not admit the worth of the scientific and political expertise that has allowed more humans to live today than ever before in history?"

"Raven, this is a mausoleum," Ethan objected. "I mean, come on."

"Because of one accident," she amended with exasperation. "Before that it was a city, with life and laughter, created as part of a system I still feel an allegiance to. Of course this is wrong. All of it. All of Australia. If I get back, I'll be working to expose that. But not the rest. I can't not believe in the rest. I can't give up on the rest. I have to believe in something."

Daniel looked at her sadly.

She wouldn't tolerate his pity. "What do you believe in besides your wilderness nihilism, Daniel? What do you believe in besides running away?"

"I believe in what feels right," he said quietly. "I believe in what we are, instead of what we build." He glanced around. "I believe that United Corporations lost something along the way- not their soul, but our soul, and that we've come to a place like this to get it back. Not this city, but this continent."

"Even if that were true, not everyone can come here."

"Maybe everyone doesn't have to. Maybe it's enough to have the wild for the few who truly need it, and who bring back its spirit to the rest. None of this would be so wrong if they allowed us to get back. It's the keeping us here that's so wrong."

"Now you're going in circles, contradicting yourself, just like in the tunnels. It's your determination to get away from here that makes the lesson of Outback Adventure so right."

Her dogged certainty irritated him. "I'm not- "

"Enough!" Ethan held up his hand. "This is the debate we'll get to have if any of us can get past Rugard and back home. For now we have to keep moving."

"I think we should look around a bit," said Amaya. "Raven and Daniel both have a point, and here in this city we've got both worlds: the technological and the wild. Let's see if there's anything worth taking."

"Don't take!" Oliver exclaimed. "It's bad luck!"

"Just for an hour or two," Amaya said. "It won't hurt."

Some of the trekkers nodded. They were looking speculatively at the stores, wondering what might still be worn or acquired after more than three decades.

"It would be fun to go shopping again," Iris said.

"Fun not to have to pay for anything," Ned added.

"No!" Oliver said. "This is a bad place, a dangerous place. We need to move on! Too many died here, I can hear them."

"We're just looking around a bit," Amaya said. The others nodded. "Why don't you and Angus go ahead and wait for us at the end of town?"

The native Australians reluctantly agreed.

"All right, we meet back here in two hours," Daniel told them. "Be careful in these old buildings!" He looked at one of the towers. "I'm going to go up to one of these rooftops and try to see the ocean."

The office tower was fifteen stories high, modest by the standards of the city they'd come from, boxy and plain. Still, it was imposing after months in the wilderness. Daniel recognized the name at its base from the corporate subsidiaries and institutional advertising elsewhere: Coraco. Industrial mining and development. The security pod in the central lobby was deserted, of course, and its news kiosk was frozen in time. Many of the periodicals had been shredded by rodents for nests, but a few pages of the Gleneden Paradise revealed a yellowed November 19, 2023.

"Illness Spreads," one headline stated. "Massive Relief Effort Promised." Had that been the day of panic? The day of realization that no relief was actually coming, that there was no escape, and that the only alternative was blind flight that became as hopeless as staying? What about the few who'd survived, like Oliver and Angus? He remembered from his college days the dire prediction of what would occur if the bizarre arms races of the twentieth century had ever resulted in nuclear war: "The living would envy the dead."

He heard her bootsteps on the broken glass behind him and ignored her. He was tired of trying.

The elevator wouldn't work, of course, so he took the stairs.

Daniel climbed steadily. She followed, two or three flights behind, their echoes a kind of lonely conversation. The paint was flaking and water stains from the failing roof ran down the walls. The structure itself was solid, a web of concrete and steel. How many centuries would it last before sharing the fate of Australia's eroded mountains? Or would someone come back, implode it, and start over?

On a whim he left the stairs on the fourteenth floor. There was no thirteenth, but superstition hadn't saved them. There was a dark hallway, and then a brighter, windowed expanse of office cubicles lit by broken windows. The carpet was rotting, mold grew on the walls, and bird droppings spotted the desks, and yet nothing had really changed. Dark computer screens- this was before the cheaper opti-glasses- were the central shrine on desktops that still bore yellowed or wadded memos, cracked cups, dried pens, and posted corporate guidelines. Everything had been abandoned abruptly. Chest-high beige dividers formed a succession of cubicles. As familiar as Microcore.

This was my life, he thought.

He could hear the light breathing of Raven, resting after their climb of the stairs. She'd come in behind him. "Look familiar?"

"Too much so."

"What we're trying to get back to."

"What I came here to escape from."

"These people were happy, Daniel. They had lives."

"Yes. They did."

He walked past a supervisory desk to a window and looked out over the city. Its rational grid reminded him of the sole of Ethan's boots, a street plan that dated back to the Roman military camp. What do the animals call us, he wondered, we of the right angle and straight line? The rulers, of course. We rule, with rules, from streets and towers of ruled calibration. Until it all goes wrong. Until we bet everything on our own cleverness, and disappear so fast we leave no explanation of the fatal mistake. How many other lost civilizations had succumbed like this one?

"So do you feel nostalgic at all?" she persisted. "Do you feel the pull of society?"

"Of course. My society."

"You mean the pull of your tribe. The pull of the primitive."

He looked down. Some of his followers were coming out from stores, chortling over improbable finds of small appliances and decaying clothing. They'd try on something, or punch the buttons of a powerless machine, and then abandon them in the street. In truth, little that was useful remained.

"The pull of my new friends, Raven. Of people who need people. Not some gigantic institution like this company. Not like United Corporations."

"Daniel, an institution is people. That's all it is."

"No. When it gets too big something happens to it. Like getting too much money, or eating too much food. It can make you sick, mentally and physically. That's what's wrong with United Corporations. The more they envelop, the less they become. Until finally they start decaying and destroying, like this place."

"It was an accident."

"Was it? When it grew out of the total domination they try to achieve, of both man and nature? When does an accident become inevitable?"

She closed her eyes. "When is a mistake just a mistake?"

He looked out across the city. "You could defend a tower like this, I suppose," he mused absently. "From people like Rugard, I mean. But a castle also becomes a trap. When you lock the door you have to have a way back out."

"You're speaking of us in Australia."

"Yes. Like Australia." He turned then and smiled at her, suddenly feeling lightened at this encounter with the ruins. He hadn't been sure of his own reaction and now realized he missed none of this old world. His past held no allure for him, despite all the hardships in this one. "I said I don't blame you for putting me here, Raven."

"And I forgive you for throwing away the activator. The trip has been good for me. I admit it. So why is this so difficult?"

"Why is what so difficult?"

"Us."

"Because… I'm in love with you without even being sure I like you. Because you won't love me."

She sighed, saying nothing.

He watched her carefully. "Ethan wants me to come back with you, you know."

"He does?"

"He wants to give up his place on the rescue plane. He's falling in love with Amaya, and falling in love with Australia. It's beautiful here, far more beautiful than home. He wants to stay and send me in his place. Send me, to tell the world."

"Would you?" She said it cautiously.

"I don't know." He cocked his head, as if this were the first time he'd truly considered it. "I don't know if anyone would listen, or care, even if they knew the truth. I don't know if they'd let me live to tell anyone."

"I wouldn't let them hurt you, Daniel."

"You already did, remember?"

She flushed, and he instantly regretted the retort.

"But that's not why I'm hesitating. I'm unsure because I've come to believe the planet does need a place for misfits like me. It always has."

"You understand that?"

He moved away from the window, walking back into the cubicles. "Not in the way you do. Come here. I want to show you something."

She followed warily as if he were going to shock her with a pile of bones. But there was nothing like that, just a sheet of faded paper pinned to a cubicle wall. He pulled it off and gave it to her. "Your institution."

The paper was so aged it was hard to see. At first she thought it was something abstract, or a painted copy of the aboriginal designs they'd seen on rock walls. Then she realized it was a child's drawing. She squinted, looking closer. There were faint pencil lines on the drawing, forming two words.

For Daddy.

"It's not about economic systems, Raven. It's about the human heart."

She blinked, flustered at this offering from a little girl long dead. The child would have been a woman now, with children of her own, looking ahead to grandchildren. Except she wouldn't.

"It's about letting people be themselves. Letting people be. This child didn't deserve her fate."

"That's not fair." There was a tremble in her voice that she hated. "This city- this girl- might never have even existed without- "

"We have to go outside in order to get into our inside. Because if we don't then all that United Corporations stands for doesn't mean anything. It's just stuff, and disastrous mistakes, and little girls that end up killed by our own plagues in our mania to control our environment. We don't need an Australia as a dumping ground. We need wilderness to save us from ourselves, to remind us what's basic and simple and true."

She squeezed her eyes shut again, the drawing fluttering to the floor. "You have to look at the big picture…"

"That's why I don't know if I can go back with you, Raven. Because my heart doesn't know where it belongs."

She was quiet for a while and then she spoke. Her voice was small. "I'm sorry I can't say I love you. I don't know what I am supposed to say, to make you come back with me. I just want you to."

"Why? I challenge everything you stand for."

"To save the others."

"That's not why."

"I do care for them, you know. I do like them."

"That's not why."

She lowered her eyes. "So I'm not alone."

He stepped close, reaching out to grasp her arms. His grip was firm, his eyes intense as he looked into hers. "Then say you'll stay here with me, Raven. Say you'll give it all up, for me. Say you'll stay in Australia. Say that and maybe it won't matter where I am, so long as I'm with you." And then he bent to kiss her.

She stiffened again, but only for a moment. Then she was kissing him back this time, her lips open, her arms coming around him, her body pressing and then moving against his. He held her roughly, hungrily, his hands roaming to caress.

"I do love you, dammit," she admitted fiercely when she broke briefly away. "You know I do! I love all the mixed-up craziness that's in you, all the longing, all the desire. That's been the problem from the beginning!"

"Then it shouldn't matter where we are, should it?"

"No." She sighed and kissed him again. "It shouldn't."

He took her hand and led her back to the musty stairs. Instead of descending, they climbed upward. It took two kicks to break open the door to the roof. Birds flew up, crying, but the couple found a corner away from their nests that was clean and warm, bleached deck boards providing a platform above the vinyl roofing. She knelt with him beside her, looking east. "I wonder when we'll see the ocean."

He reached over her shoulders from behind and began undressing her, watching the garments slide off her brown shoulders and mounding around the swell of her hips. Her nipples were hard, her belly trembling, and he caressed her torso as he kissed her, pulling the luxuriant fall of her dark hair aside to bare her neck. "Say you'll live with me in Australia," he murmured. "Say you'll trade that world for this one."

And with a moan she pulled him down on top of her, making a bed of their clothes on the wooden slats of the deck and promising nothingexcept, that for this moment, they were one.