Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

  “Something wrong here,” mutters Fox. He bangs his godgem with his fist. “Sometimes images get jumbled and they overlap.”

  Mara is struggling to read the muddled text reel.

  BEATLES HELP! CRUISE MISSILE ATTACK

  Fox ducks as the missile zips toward his head, then he stands up, embarrassed, and mutters into his godbox. The images collapse and vanish and the room feels strange, as if reality has gone flat. Mara stares at the emptiness, then turns to Fox.

  “Well? What on Earth was that all about?”

  “It’s about the past,” Fox declares. “It’s about infecting the present with the past and—with luck—changing the future.”

  Fox jumps up and prowls the room, his eyes fixed on some vivid vision that Mara can’t see.

  “I’m going to create a virus,” he announces. “A ghost virus so powerful it will crash New Mungo out of the Noos, disable all the functions of the city—doors, lights, electrics, security, the lot. Then you can escape.”

  THE NUX

  A window of time, that’s all she’ll have. And when that window slams shut, her chance to escape will be gone. But the virus will hit like a tidal wave, Fox promises.

  For the last few days they have burrowed away in Fox’s apartment, working out their plan, grabbing snatches of sleep whenever exhaustion grounds them to a halt. Now he explains how it will work, using a handful of colored glass pebbles from some kind of board game that sits on the floor. He scatters the pebbles all over the floor.

  “Imagine these pebbles are godgems all over the Noos, all over the Earth. I pick any old godgem, a random selection from all around the world.” He grabs one at random, then another and another. “Then I put a germ in the machine, a ghost germ. Now that godgem becomes a zombie—it contains one of my living-dead lumens. The godgem still works as normal but it’s a carrier for my ghost virus. The rooks are always on antivirus Noos raids, but the beauty of this one is it’s almost impossible to spot—because it takes the form of a ghost. I program all the zombie godgems to pass on the virus every time they connect with another godgem. The ghost virus spreads fast, but nobody knows it’s there. Not yet. I’ll give it time to spread far and wide, into godgems all around the Noos. In just hours it’ll infect thousands, in a day it could have infected a million. Then…”

  Fox grins. “Then I turn the ghosts live and call them all back home. In they’ll come, crashing downline—and hit the city in a colossal tidal wave!”

  They stare into each other’s eyes. Mara really hasn’t a clue what he’s going on about but she believes in him now; she trusts him with her life. If anyone can tackle the incredible technology of the New World, it’s Fox.

  “Cyberflood,” he whispers. “Total systems wipeout. Once the system is crashed, the security systems are all down too. That breakdown is your chance to find the slaves and get them out of the city and onto the ships. Harbor security and the city gates will be disabled too.”

  Mara nods, frowning in concentration. “But the slaves—how do I find them? I need to find out where Gorbals and Wing are so that I can make sure I get them on a ship. And what about the ships? Fox, how on Earth do I navigate a ship?”

  Once again Mara feels overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what they are trying to do.

  “The ships are preprogrammed,” says Fox. “We can work out something there. But the slaves—that’s stumped me so far.” His brow wrinkles in thought. “The slaves aren’t on the central identi-disk system, I’m sure. We’ve searched and searched and there’s nothing. But I expected the whole slave labor situation would be top secret. We could try and hack into the rooks’ system—I’m sure they operate in a hidden pocket of cyberspace, some black hole outside of the Noos—but it’ll all be encrypted and it could take ages to break through. That’s if we could. And they’re sure to be able to track intruders into their system. No, our best bet is …” he grins, “to use my connections. We need to go up to the Nux.”

  “The Nux?”

  “That’s where the City Fathers have their private chambers. And it’s where the Grand Father of All—my grandpa—lives and works. There might be something there that will tell us where the slaves are. If not—well, I’ll just have to find some way to break into the rooks’ system …”

  Fear grips Mara’s heart.

  “Fox,” she asks breathlessly. “Can I—can I meet Caledon?”

  “Do you want to?” he asks curiously.

  And despite her fear, Mara knows that she does. Just to see.

  The Nux is hidden away in the very heart of the city.

  Fox takes her hand and leads her past a phalanx of city guards—they stand aside at a mere nod from him—up to the very top of a coil of stairs that winds up through a vertical tunnel shaft. When at last they reach the top, Mara’s head is spinning. She looks around at the cavernous chambers and is disoriented.

  And suddenly doubts that it’s all real. She has an instinct that the grandeur of the Nux is an illusion, that she might actually be standing in an ordinary-sized hall and the apparent vastness is one big trick, a magic of mirror and light. The Nux is right above the cybercath’s lofty dome—a ceiling that could itself be a mirror-trick designed to hide the existence of these secret chambers.

  Before she can voice these thoughts to Fox, he puts out an arm and presses a red crystal button on a wall. Mara has walked right past it. “It’s David,” he announces to the red button. “I’d like to see my grandfather.”

  “Why are there no City Mothers or Grand Mothers of All?” Mara suddenly wonders.

  “Well, there are a few. My grandmother was one. It’s just—they’re just called fathers because …” Fox trails off. “Well, I’m not sure why. I never thought about it before.”

  Suddenly the wall parts like a metal curtain and a figure passes through the gap. He walks slowly toward them with a stiff, aged step. Mara’s body tenses as the Grand Father of All stands in front of her.

  She can’t breathe, can’t seem to raise her eyes to his face. A jumble of emotions rush through her—fear, anger, but also undeniable curiosity and awe for someone who could dream up a whole New World, and make that dream come true.

  Caledon puts a kindly hand on his grandson’s shoulder. The skin of his hand is like the pulped, lumpy paper Gorbals rescues from the netherworld waters.

  “Grandpa, I’d like you to meet Mara,” says Fox.

  The Grand Father of All turns to her.

  Caledon says nothing and with his silence he forces Mara to look at him. She feels dizzy with fright. And she shivers, unnerved, as if the chambers of the Nux have suddenly filled with ghosts. Remember, the ghosts seem to say. Remember what happened to the world. Remember what this man did. Remember Candleriggs…

  Mara remembers as she looks into the eyes of the Grand Father of All. And something in him flinches. He looks away.

  “Mara’s an ace runner,” Fox is proudly telling his grandfather. “A real wizzer. One of the best.”

  Caledon smiles graciously and they follow him through into his private chamber. As she snatches glances at the old man, Mara is struck by how Candleriggs is so much more gnarled and ancient-looking than he is. But of course Caledon hasn’t lived the last sixty years or so clinging to a storm-tossed tree in a drowned world.

  Mara is suffused with rage at this gracious old man. But she must keep a clear, cool head and hide her feelings. Now, as she watches Caledon smile and chat with his grandson, she sees something tragic in the map of fine lines that etch his face and the ruins of dreams in his watery eyes. She sees the tremble in his papery hands and the slow, defeated movements of an old man who knows he’s running out of time in the world.

  He is so much less than Mara expected. And he seems much more fragile than tough old Candleriggs.

  With a jolt, Mara sees the logo that is embroidered over the breast of his silver-gray clothing, right next to his heart. It’s the same one that the city guards wear, yet, for the first time, she realizes exactly what it is.<
br />
  Suddenly she wants to get out of here, now, away from this old man and the torment of his past. But it’s Caledon who gets to his feet first.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Mara. I have a meeting with the City Fathers,” he smiles as he pulls a gray cloak around him.

  They walk with Caledon back through the chambers of the Nux and part from him at the top of the vertical tunnel of spiraling stairs. As Mara watches him retreat deep inside the Nux, she sees the same graceful logo embroidered on the back of his cloak.

  “What’s the flower logo for?” she asks Fox, though she’s almost sure she knows.

  “The lily?” Fox climbs back up the coil of stairs he has just pretended to descend, in case his grandfather looked back. “It’s the logo he gave to the New World. He wants to project the image of a white lily onto the moon—it’ll be the first step in the New World’s colonization of space.”

  The flutter of Caledon’s cloak disappears within the great chambers and the Grand Father of All is gone. She should hate him, but at this moment Mara feels unutterably sad as she thinks of Caledon and Candleriggs—the lily he threw away, yet still keeps close to his heart, whose namesake he wants to shine from the moon.

  EARTH’S GREATEST ENGINEER

  Back outside his grandfather’s chamber, Fox stops beside the red crystal button and requests entry again.

  “Won’t security be suspicious that we’re back?” asks Mara nervously.

  “It’s just an electronic door guard,” he smiles. “Voice activated. I can always say I left something behind.”

  The wall parts and they enter. Fox walks through his grandfather’s chamber and double-checks an adjoining room. He nods.

  “Right, we’ve got a couple of hours at the max.” He sits down at an ancient screen computer and switches it on. “This is where he hoards all his work ideas and files. Maybe we’ll find some kind of a clue here that’ll tell us where your friends are. Now let’s see.”

  Mara is astonished. “The great brain behind the New World uses one of those old things? Caledon’s a screenager?”

  “I know,” Fox laughs. “It’s embarrassing.”

  While Fox works his way at primitive speed through the computer files, looking for information on building projects and slave labor, Mara wanders around the room. It has the same kind of clinical luxury as Fox’s apartment, but with nothing personal or out of place to give her any clues about Caledon, the man.

  “Check his bedroom,” Fox suggests. “He often works in there too.”

  Mara goes through to the adjoining room—and gasps. She seems to be standing in a room from another world. An old, lost, drowned world.

  So there’s no past in the New World? Well, this room is straight out of the past. It might have been transplanted from the old university in the netherworld. It couldn’t be more at odds with the rest of New Mungo. A hefty, stained oak table is strewn with books and papers. Bookcases line the walls, crammed with ancient books on nature and the animal world; a world that’s all but vanished. Their dusty scent fills the air. Mara picks up a book lying on the table and reads its title—Nature, Earth’s Greatest Engineer.

  A cracked leather armchair sits facing two maps that hang on the wall. One shows Earth as it must have been a hundred years ago, before the drowning. Mara stares at it. The top of the world is ice, crusting a great basin of sea. But encircling the Arctic basin is land—vast stretches of ice lands and small, scattered islands. Most will be drowned now, like her own. But maybe not all. Mara peers closer—yes, there’s the vast expanse of white with long ranges of snowy peaks that is Greenland, and the mountainous boreal forests of Alaska and Northern Canada where, she hopes, the Athapaskans have survived. Mara’s heart lifts. There is land. The question is, can they reach it?

  The other map shows the world as it is now—at least, how a Grand Father of All sees it: as an empire of sky cities scattered all across the Earth. The New World has divided the planet into seven oceans: Eurosea, Indisea, Chinasea, Afrisea, Hispanasea, Amerisea, and Austrasea. There is no evidence on this map of Greenland or the Arctic. Am I wrong? Mara wonders. Do they no longer exist or is it just that the New World sees nothing beyond its own empire? She suspects the latter because, looking at the old map of the world, there must be other high lands still left on Earth. Mara compares the maps. The mountain ranges are clearly marked on the old one—the Himalayas, the European Alps, the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, and more. None of them are shown on the New World map. No, she decides, the New World has no eyes for anything outside itself.

  Papers are scattered untidily across Caledon’s table and she has to brush them clear of little pink fragments before she can study them. The whole table is covered in these spongy crumbs. Mara picks up a thin wooden stick with a dark point and a squashy pink blob on the other end. She scribbles on the paper with the dark end then rubs the pink bit on the scribble it makes. The scribble disappears, like magic.

  Excellent.

  Now she spots a pile of blueprints and sketches. Mara flicks through them, pattern upon pattern inspired and adapted from nature—worm tunnels, a termite ventilation system, lots of web, honeycomb, hive, and antlike structural designs. They seem to be ideas for a huge variety of work projects. She pauses at a schedule for the Eastern Sea Bridge extension plan. The date of the project launch catches her eye. Date of commencement: late August 2100. Right now. Exactly when Gorbals and Wing were taken.

  Quickly, Mara checks through all the other bits of paper but those designs are still in the planning stages.

  “Fox!” she cries, her heart in her mouth. “I think I’ve got something.”

  It’s the simplest thing. All she has to do is fold the paper map of the Eastern Sea Bridge plan into a tiny square and put it in the toe of her shoe. No gadgets or machinery necessary when you want to view it later. And Mara couldn’t resist sneaking out some sheets of paper and one of the pink-tipped scribblers. It stuck down the side of her shoe.

  “That’s a rare antique you’ve got in your shoe,” Fox comments as they leave. He doesn’t miss a thing. “And half a tree stuffed inside your top.”

  “What is?” Mara pretends innocence, though she’s clasping sheets of paper tight against her stomach in case they fall out. “Well, I couldn’t help it. What are those little wand things? They’re brilliant. Why did people stop using them?”

  “Pencils? I think they ran out of trees to make pencils and paper in the years just before the Meta,” says Fox. “Even the rubber erasers on the ends are made from trees. From the bits of info I’ve stumbled across on the Weave I’ve gathered that the worldwide extinction of the trees was one of the things that contributed to the floods.”

  “That’s what the Treenesters say,” nods Mara, remembering Gorbals’s horror of tree crime. “Yet Caledon has his own private supply of all this extinct stuff.”

  “He’s the Grand Father of All. He can have anything he likes. Someone, somehow, gets him whatever he wants.”

  “Well, he can’t have my friends for his slaves,” snaps Mara. She’s exhausted and scared. It’s just beginning to dawn on her that the rescue plan is, for the first time, looking as if it really might be possible. More than possible. Fox is such a hot Noosrunner, he understands the details of the New World system so well and has access to all kinds of secret information. She would never have managed on her own, but now, with Fox’s help, the plan is coming together, thick and fast.

  Almost too fast, thinks Mara, as she tries to gather her courage for what lies ahead.

  “Now for the ships,” says Fox. “We’ll try to work out a navigation chart from your book on Greenland and I’ll put it on disk. Then the ship will more or less sail itself—at least it should.”

  “What about the other ships?” says Mara. “We’ll need more than one. I don’t know how many slaves I’ll find, and there are all the refugees in the boat camp. That’s a lot of people. We might need a whole fleet of ships.”

  Fox groans. “All I can do
is make a batch of disks and somehow you’ll have to issue instructions to someone on each ship.”

  Mara frowns. Once the city is in breakdown there will be chaos. There won’t be time for her to stand around issuing detailed instructions; everyone will have to run for their lives. And how will refugees and slaves in that kind of panic manage to work out how to make a shimmery disk navigate a great ship? The plan won’t work unless people know what to do once they reach the ships.

  Back in Fox’s apartment, Mara flings herself down on the floor and kicks off her tight shoes. She brings out the bundle of paper and the pencil she has stolen from Caledon’s private chambers then digs in her bag for the bone-handled dagger and the small black lump of meteorite. With a frown of deep concentration she begins sharpening the stone blade against the hard surface of the oldest material on Earth.

  After a while she throws down the dagger and grins brightly at Fox.

  “I’ve got it!” she exclaims. “I’ll use the pencil and paper to write out instructions for each disk with all the details of the plan included—then people will know exactly what to do!”

  THIS IS IT

  Almost time.

  Mara watches the seconds flash by on the cybercath clock. Each second feels like a minute; these final minutes are endless. When at long last the hour flashes she lets go of the breath she’s been holding and is dizzy with the sudden surge of oxygen and adrenalin.

  This is it.

  Now there’s nothing she can do to stop it even if she wanted to. All she can do is be ready. At this very moment Fox is starting to scatter the ghost virus all over the Noos. Soon New Mungo will crash right out of Noospace.

  “Mara!”

  She jumps as Dol taps her on the shoulder. Jumps again when she sees Tony Rex right beside her.

  “Hey, we never get together these days. You’re always with David, aren’t you?” Dol grins at Tony and hugs her whining purple puffball pet. “You two must be in a romance situation—don’t deny it.”