Getting back

by William Dietrich

  Getting back

  William Dietrich

  William Dietrich

  Getting back

  PROLOGUE

  Everything he knew was useless now.

  There was a cold clarity to that realization, a crystallization of hopelessness that in its own odd way was bracing. It was the first coherent thought to penetrate Ethan Flint's panic in some time. He acknowledged, with an acceptance that was calming, that he was probably doomed.

  The cries of pursuit were growing closer. The heave of Ethan's chest and pounding of his heart had quieted enough to hear the sound drifting across the desert, its harsh rasping reminding him of the caw of crows. He'd grown up with the urban birds, watching them multiply on songbird eggs until they flew across the endless rooftops like plumes of smoke, and they spoke in a language hard and aggrieved. It was a relative of that sound the fugitive heard now: human calls that were shrill, excited, and without remorse. It was a yipping designed to induce fear and at first Flint's brain had screamed the need to think so urgently that it drowned out every other thought. Now his peril was being more rationally- more grimly- absorbed. He was being hunted, but why? By whom?

  The day had climaxed into an oven of punishing heat, the air so dry that Ethan seemed hardly to sweat. He understood this was an illusion. He was parched and rapidly dehydrating, despite his knowledge of how dangerous such a condition could be. There was so much he'd memorized before coming to the desert: the proper salt balance, his necessary caloric intake, the dimensions of a solar still, or how to splint a bone or identify an edible plant or make fire with a lens. He'd sought to be an aboriginal engineer, a wilderness technician. A lot of good it was doing him now! The plane crashed, his friends dead, his carefully chosen gear a growing deadweight. And now this unexpected pursuit. When running for your life you don't have much time to index-search the precepts of Wilderness Comfort on disk, he observed wryly. His peril would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.

  Perhaps it was a bad dream. Certainly Australia seemed unreal. The sand was too red, the sky too blue, the desert brush a vivid, improbable green. Like a children's coloring book. The landscape shimmered and danced, its insubstantiality matching his sense of being trapped in a nightmare. But the pain was real. His head ached and every attempt to rest gave the flies a chance to find him again. Their buzz was as tireless as the sun.

  The impossibility of his situation seemed so enormous that he had difficulty processing its logic. He was a sheeter, slang for a computer engineer who matrixed corporate spreadsheets into four-dimensional game theory, and his whole life was built on mathematics. He was an artist of the rational, his boss had praised him. A wizard, a master, a lord of the logarithms. Ethan had swaggered through code like Daniel-fucking-Boone. It was all worth squat right now, a fact that seemed cruelly unfair. Shouldn't all his work, all his education, and all his technological expertise give him some kind of edge? No. Of course not. Cops, credentials, resumes, diplomas: thousands of miles away. And he'd asked for this! Paid a small fortune to do it! Enormously funny, really. A tremendous joke on him. Clearly something had gone monstrously wrong- so nonsensically and outrageously wrong that he thirsted for not just water but retribution. Oh, what rank incompetence this confirmed among the bastards who'd sent him here! What lies they'd told by not telling him enough! If he got home he'd…

  What?

  Somebody would listen, wouldn't they?

  If he got home.

  Ethan glanced back. His glimpse of his pursuers produced an instinctive shock of fear. There was an animal wildness about them, a shedding of restraint, that was as unbound and tangled as their hair. He was so disoriented! Drugged for the flight, awakened in wreckage, the harried pilot who unstrapped him displaying none of the cool aplomb he'd come to expect. The aviator had punched out, parachuted down, and moved in anxious jerks, desperate to get away from the wreckage that smoked like a beacon. The plane had broken into two parts, the forward section with his dead friends skidding to the far side of a low rise. Ethan had wanted to go there but the pilot refused. "You don't want to see your friends."

  Instead the rattled aviator had unscrewed a tail panel and unbolted an orange-colored electronic box, cursing as he struggled with the tools. Then he brusquely jammed the added weight into Ethan's already-stuffed pack. "This is what's going to keep us from having to walk to the beach," the man had explained gruffly. "If I can get the rest. Wait here." Ethan waited as the pilot trotted toward the nose, and when he'd become bored sitting in the heat and sand and finally trudged up the rise, thinking he was hallucinating a curious murmur of voices, he'd seen a swarm of scavengers who looked like urban groundlings. They'd pinned the pilot against the blackened fuselage like a trapped rabbit, their movements quick, their tone mocking, and their skin brown and hard as bark. "Get back!" they'd howled at the pilot. So Flint had run before he'd fully realized he was running, confused by the impression of faded synthetics and wooden spears, wire decorations and ragged hair, a melding of Stone Age and Information Age: twenty-first-century Huns.

  Now he could hear their crowing. Getting closer. Drawing near.

  Ethan was so tired. His feet felt made of concrete and he glanced down to check if the sensation was literally true. No, made of clay. The designer swirls of his Orion Supra boots had disappeared beneath a sheath of red dust, the laces ragged already. My, they'd been striking shoes! The urban boutique had been designed to look like one of the lost canyons of the Colorado, its walls sprayed with gunite and its light mimicking the desert sky, painting the rock with a day's rotation every hour. The boots had rested in a cleft beneath reproduced Indian petroglyphs, their sinuous curves caressed by a red beam of laser light emanating from the eye of a robotic eagle. The effect was as artful as a museum display and despite their ludicrous price he'd bought them instantly. The damn things still hurt, however, and they left gridded prints that mimicked the Manhattan street system, a conceit he'd thought cleverly ironic at the time. Now his tracks seemed as obvious as a sidewalk. He had to get out of the dirt and onto bare sandstone, in the approaching hills.

  The thought of shedding the boots did not occur to him.

  He did sling off his pack in a regretful acknowledgment that he was carrying too much, grunting in relief as it thumped down into the dust. Its colors had gone red as well. Time to lighten.

  The task was painful. He'd spent months assembling this gear, web-scanning outdoor advice, downloading lists, and even shopping in person instead of electronically to signal his seriousness. This wasn't a wuss weekend of a guided trek in Patagonia or Nepal, dammit, this was real. The last wilderness! The toughest test left on the face of a fast-shrinking earth! The weeks of preparation had given his life an edge he'd never experienced before. Wilderness! He'd demanded the bottom-line best because it was his friggin' life that was on the line out here, by God, and he paid top dollar for it. Beautiful stuff, virtual jewelry of the outdoors, scratch-resistant, waterproof, shining. Now he had to leave it? Oh, the outrage he'd express if he got home!

  He threw the computerized Global Positioning System out first. A week's wages, and so far it had delivered nothing but static. Baffling.

  The laser range finder worked well enough but it only depressed him to learn how far away the distant hills really were. He abandoned that too. Both were left in open view: maybe such expensive toys would slow his pursuers down.

  After two hundred yards he stopped and considered again.

  The palmtop solar computer went next, its dietary calculations confirming what he already knew- that he was hungry- and its Library of Congress memory cache still entirely untapped. With greater regret he threw out the Symphony-Pod and headphones, the cellular receiver for satellite news, the foil solar oven, and the coffee
grinder with wind-out antenna and stamp-sized TV. Pricey, precious stuff, designed to give his challenging trek a fringe of fun. Now it was metallic junk he'd trade for a liter of water. He sipped the last he had- a half swallow- and heaved on the pack again. Noticeably lighter, he thought bitterly, and none too soon: the faint whoops were drawing closer. He set out again at a half trot, climbing toward the cracked, polished rocks of ancient hills. They shone like cooked meat.

  Despite his anxiety Ethan was slowing, the heat leaching his Health-Plus conditioning. Water was the problem, his throat thick, head light. A burst of effort, a long drink. After that, maybe, he could hide.

  Figures flickered through the scrub below, his discarded gear eliciting caws of triumph. Ethan didn't know if his hunters wanted the gadgets or regarded his droppings as a kind of bleeding. They loped like wolves, burdened with nothing, and he conceded he was still carrying too much. But what more could he afford to lose?

  At a rock overhang he heaved off his pack again. There was little choice but to jettison necessary items and circle back for them later. The tent, the Spider-Fiber hammock, the sleeping bag, the Duraflex cookware, the fuel cannisters, the battery packs. He yanked them out with furious jerks of his arm, angry at the waste. A change of underwear, his camp shoes, his digital recorder. All abandoned, just to get away. How he wished for a gun! But that was against the rules, wasn't it? Everything was against the rules.

  He pulled out the orange-painted metal box the pilot had insisted he carry. Heavy as a shot put, dense as stone. This would get them back? He was a gadget freak but the instrument was unrecognizable. A switch, a button, a few socket ports. He flicked the switch back and forth, punching the button. Nothing. Well, the pilot said it wouldn't work by itself. Ethan hesitated only a moment and then heaved, watching the box kick up a spurt of dust before it tumbled into a ravine. Good riddance.

  Then he started upward again, studying the surrounding hills. All he had to do was outrun them, hide, and come back. He was smarter than they were, right? He'd always been smarter than almost anyone he knew. So what insanity had brought him here in the first place? What was he trying to prove?

  That he could survive, he reminded himself. That he could go into the wilderness by himself, face life at its most fundamental and formidable, and prevail. It would validate his existence as something more than a cog in a global machine.

  Had he been seduced? Drawn into this place by a commercial come-on full of bland reassurances, peppy encouragement, and appeals to his own vanity? Or had he deliberately surrendered his head to his heart in order to break free of the logical prison his career had become, essentially making the decision to come here long before he'd heard of this place? He'd run to a continent that promised respite from contemporary anxieties and monotonous routine, a refuge from the tangled demons of his id. Maybe fear had brought him here. Or some pathetic dream of freedom. Another joke: he wasn't sure himself.

  Ethan realized dimly that he was bleeding. The scrub was thorny and the grass pricked as he pushed through it, like a stuttering stab of electricity. Everything seemed hard and angular here: the rocks, the bushes, the light. As rough-edged as the city but in an entirely different way. Even the dirt was unwelcoming. Alive with ants.

  He'd give anything for a drink of water.

  He sensed more than saw the flicker of movement at the periphery of his vision. It was on the ridge above and disappeared as soon as he registered its presence. Ethan glanced wildly about. The calls had stopped, he realized: was it because his pursuers had fallen back? Or because their net was drawing tighter? He began to trot faster, his breath a saw against his throat.

  There it was again! A silhouette on the crest of the ridge above, running easily, checking his location and then disappearing. Christ, the pursuers were even with his own position! They hadn't slowed to pick over his things at all!

  He had to throw away the last of his old world.

  He staggered as he let the pack slip off his shoulders a final time. It represented everything that was to have kept him alive. Now he swung it in an arc like an Olympic hammer thrower, grunting. The pack lofted out over a canyon and fell, thudding onto a steep dirt slope and skidding into scrub. He took a deep breath. While the loss of his pack left him floating with release, it also made him feel feeble. His armor had been stripped.

  He set off at a dead run.

  Ethan cut downhill, picking up some speed. Running to water! His pores were so dry that his skin stung. Puffs of dust shot up with each heavy thud of his boots, ankles twisting as he fought for balance on loose rocks.

  Another darting blur at the edge of his vision, this time downslope. He frantically cranked his neck to either side. More shapes, pacing him, and he heard the pound of footfalls behind. What did they want, now that he'd shed everything he brought?

  He cut to the left, following a broad ledge. The cliff shielded him from the view of any pursuers above and the drop to his right prevented those below from easily following. If he could just lose the ones behind…

  The urbanite accelerated, his heart pounding, his vision dim. A shrill cry went up, high and warbling, and adrenaline jolted him like an electric prod. They were close! Too close! Faster, faster…

  Ethan was in the air before he realized the ledge had ended. His legs chugged at nothing, his arms flailed. Like a silly cartoon character, he thought morosely as his panic gave way to a black, fundamental regret. Then he fell.

  He hit a slope and tumbled, wondering dimly which bones would snap first. The calm clarity of it, the sober acknowledgment of miscalculation, surprised him. His fear had been replaced with stupid sorrow. What an ass he'd been for coming here!

  Then he hit something hard, spun, and blacked out.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The city filled its vast central basin like a reservoir fills its impoundment, chains of linked town houses lapping at a litter-encrusted shoreline of brown, scabby hills. The hills had been set aside as park a hundred years ago and had slowly strangled into wasteland: neglected, junk-filled, eroded, dangerous. Eruptive urban growth had long since spilled past them and flooded the valleys beyond to bury farmland, swallow rural communities, and engulf remnant woods. This overflow of the urban grid had no final boundary: its horizons were lost in haze, its edges smeared by cancerous growth. The sky was stagnant white, the city gray, and the occasional splashes of architectural color only emphasized the monotony they were painted on. In this dense human colony land was like gold, space currency, and square footage the source of rivalry and aspiration. Houses were bonded like Siamese twins, or stacked like the comb of a hive. Each looked like its neighbor: cramped, clay-colored, straining for a scrap of view. Their yards were patios, scabby greenery enclosed in pots. On the worst days, when the light was flat and the wafer of sun melted at its edges like a seltzer tablet, the city was a hard, ugly place.

  Yet the beast retained the seductive throb of human life. At night its arterials were ribbons of light and its tiled plain of asphalt and plastic roofs was broken by archipelagos of soaring skyscrapers and corporate pyramids. Malls were emporiums of bright commerce and cafes spilled onto sidewalks. Winking hovercraft darted like fireflies and info-lasers stabbed skyward toward satellites. Corporate names crested buildings like proud coxcombs, crowing with a glow of marketed pride. The beacons intended warmth, like the remembered reassurance of the lamp or tavern sign, but- bloated to football field dimensions- they instead drenched their neighborhoods with commercial glare. The sign war extended to the sky, where searchlights cast logos on nighttime haze, lasers flickered to announce openings or bankruptcies, and blimps drifted with holographic tidings. The city's signs were a galaxy of rival artificial suns and the pictures they cast were of an idealized, desired, half-remembered, and romanticized world: glistening beaches, convivial families, green meadows, detached houses. "In the world of United Corporations," read one, "everyone can win, all the time."

  In Quadrant 43, between the St.
Francis and Reagan Expressways, a twenty-first-century pyramid rose from its walled enclosure of plasti-marble plazas, boxed gardens, and black reflecting pools: a glass and metal pointed office building one hundred stories high. Its colored panels and opaque windows shimmered as they chemically changed mood with the time of day: the smoky blue of morning giving way to noon's perky silver, mellowing to a burnished copper as the day waned, and finally darkening to a swallowing black. The windows looked out, but no one could see in. Utility tubes popped from the ground and fed the pyramid's base like placental cords. Inside, Microcore's headquarters had its own shops, its own restaurants, its own banks, its own hydrogen pumps, and its own kiosks. It was a world within a world.

  The chairman sat in her office at the pyramid's summit like an insect queen. Level and location on each of the one hundred floors below were allocated on the basis of rank. At each floor, supervisors occupied offices on the outer rim in a cordon. Within was a maze of cubicles that penned their subordinates, the partitions low enough to ensure that heads could be observed bowed in work.

  This laboring center was a ghostly group. Even dark complexions looked pale from the flush of light that crept out from the edges of the opti-glasses that had replaced computer screens. The workers typed, murmured commands, clicked. The results created flickers of light that played across their temples like an echo of thought. There was little noise above the hum of Muzak, the beep of terminal signals, and the drone of ventilation. It was unseemly to yell, startling to laugh, and easier to communicate electronically. People had become extensions of the wires they were hooked to.

  The chairman rode up and down the inner face of the pyramid in an elevator of smoked glass, hung from an angled track. The privacy enabled her to see the employees of each floor without being seen, the box whispering like a gray ghost. Everyone wondered, of course, what the chairman did when she rode up and down past her thousands of minions. Did she calculate profits, note empty cubicles, play a head-vid, point out a suggested promotion? No one knew. Few below the upper floors had ever seen her. Everyone strove for graduation to those upper floors.