Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "Hey, who are those guys?" Daniel asked one of the red jumpsuits. The man looked at the distant shuffling line of convicts he was pointing toward.

  "Them? Just the morally impaired."

  "Criminals? What are they doing here?"

  "Our company has a lot of transport contracts." He laughed. "Be careful you don't get on the wrong one!"

  "Hell," another joked, "I think these fools are already on the wrong one."

  "A few days in the wilderness and they'll want back on any transport," a third added.

  "Enough," their supervisor snapped.

  Nervous laughter rippled through the passengers waiting on the tarmac. "Boy, they really know how to put us in the mood, don't they?" said Tucker.

  The supervisor suddenly eyed him. "You can still back out."

  Tucker thrust out his chin. "No way."

  The jumpsuit nodded.

  On board the airplane, Ico pushed his way forward. "I want to be up front."

  "What does it matter?" Daniel said. "We're going to be put to sleep."

  "It matters."

  They followed Ico to the front and Daniel lay down in his berth, watching as a med-op strapped him to his bunk. The man tugged hard and the straps went tight. "Preparing me for a lobotomy?" Daniel tried to joke. His heart was beating faster and he realized his nervousness was about to turn to fright. Was he doing the right thing?

  "The straps keep you safer in turbulent air." There was a prick as a tube was inserted. "And this dope feels a hell of a lot better than getting a lobe cut out." He felt a warm flush begin in his arm and flood his body. This was it. Next stop, the Outback.

  The med-op's face loomed over him, blurry and indistinct. "You okay?"

  "Yeah. I can feel it." Daniel felt himself begin to relax.

  "What are you hoping to find out in the wilderness, sport?"

  He smiled at himself, drifting down into warm fuzz. "I'm chasing a question, I guess."

  "A question?"

  "Yeah. 'Why?' " He felt himself start to float. "Or a woman."

  The attendant chuckled. "There're easier ways to get a date…"

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Daniel swam up out of a well of drugs and into an instinctively familiar music. The sound was uneven and yet strangely rhythmic, sweet and welcoming. It was bird-song, he dimly realized, a dawn chattering that he'd never heard from his soundproofed apartment in the city. This is what morning is supposed to sound like. He blinked and propped himself up on his elbows, looking fuzzily around. The landscape was alive with birds, flitting from tree to tree. Black ones, green ones. He recognized some from his reading: thornbills, honeyeaters, fairy wrens, crested pigeons. Green mulga parrots, iridescent in their plumage, were as startling in the tropic desert as ice. Even more improbable were the pink cockatoos with a crest of feathers that strutted across the grassy clearing like a troop of chefs on parade.

  He'd made it. He was in Australia.

  The sun was just rising and the light was a wonder. There were white-trunked trees at the border of the clearing- river or ghost gums, he guessed- and they glowed in this dawning perpendicular light like fluorescent tubes, as if lit from within by a life that answered the solar rays. Their dark shadows made an arabesque along the ground. Beyond was a crumbled ridge of red rock, its broken parapets studded with trees and bushes of a strange electric green. The rock was on fire with light, its red an echo of the new sun, and the sky at the crest of the ridge was a deep, well-water blue that framed the dazzle below. All the colors seemed exaggerated, as in a dream, and it occurred to him suddenly that he could still be dreaming, drifting in a drug-induced haze of anticipation. Only the others could confirm reality. He sat up, wincing at his stiffness, and looked for them. Amaya and Tucker still lay as if they were dead. Ico, however, was already sitting up with his back against his pack, looking at Daniel with amusement. He put his fingers to his lips so as not to break the moment and then nodded. The meaning was clear: isn't this great?

  The ground sloped away to some water, shallow pools glimmering in a broad pan of sand. Reeds grew on the fringe of them like a brilliant slash of lime. More birds flitted among the rushes, calling out cries of joy.

  He'd done it. He'd found Eden.

  Slowly Daniel stood and rotated around in dazed confirmation. There was not a house or a vehicle or a contrail in the sky. There was nothing, except the birds and the trees and the smell of sweet water. It was the emptiest, fullest place he'd ever been in, and the realization was both exhilarating and disquieting. There was a peculiar clarity to the air, and it took a while for him to analyze what it was. Not just the lack of haze. No, it was the absence of machine noise. No hum, no drone, no grumble, no tick. No clockwork regularity. Sound instead was uneven, the sharp staccato clicks and rustlings of insects and small reptiles and flitting birds seeming jazzlike in its evolved disharmony: a riff, an improvisation. There was a welcome to such discordance but also a somewhat disturbing anarchy to it, an irregularity he wasn't yet accustomed to. He realized suddenly how the aboriginal drumming and chanting that he'd always found dull must have seemed utterly revolutionary to early man: chants and songs that were repetitive, mathematical, predictable, reassuring: an answer to the drumbeat of their own hearts. Order, to combat the dissidence of unruly nature.

  As the sun climbed and the light grew flatter and more intense, the other two began to stir. While he waited, Daniel took his bearings. The clearing was a logical drop point, he observed: open, and close to water. He wondered if Outback Adventure had used it before. The area seemed so untouched that it felt like they were the first humans to ever be here, that Australia's long human history had never existed. Perhaps they were the first, since the plague. Coyle had explained that adventurers were set down in widely dispersed places, since the company had an entire continent to choose from. The idea was exhilarating. In the city, every place he stepped had been trod a thousand times before. Here his footfall might be primary. He was Adam! Deliberately isolated so that each group achieved the independence and self-reliance it was seeking. There could be no second thoughts about waiting here at the drop-off point for a ride back home. The transport wouldn't return no matter what happened. The time to back out was gone.

  The finality of it was delicious, but so daunting he momentarily felt he was looking over a precipice into a chasm too deep to see bottom.

  Amaya stirred, small and pretty in her sleepiness, and slowly sat up, looking around with dawning delight. "It's beautiful!" she cried, rubbing her eyes. "I feel like my brain's made of cotton from those sedatives but my God, the light! It's like a painting! Better than I dreamed!"

  Tucker groaned and began to move as well. His eyelids fluttered. For a moment a look of fear crossed his face, and then he relaxed. He remembered.

  Ico stretched, stood, and glanced around more appraisingly. "We're out of the cage," he pronounced.

  "I still feel hungover from those chemicals," Daniel told him. "How about you?"

  He looked sly. "I'm sleepy, but not from any damn witches' brew cooked up by Outback Adventure. I stayed awake and listened to some of the cockpit chatter."

  "Stayed awake?"

  "I told you I don't trust the bastards. I've got some friends in what you might call 'the medicinal trade.' There are things you can get that counter the normal sedative cocktail. I took some before we boarded and it fought the drugs. It was a little hairy- my heart raced for a time while I was trying to play possum- but it worked. I kept listening for hours until I got so damned tired and bored I just fell asleep naturally."

  Tucker shook his head. "You're one paranoid dude, you know that?"

  "I just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into, so I could scream bloody hell if I didn't end up liking it."

  "And do you like it?"

  Ico looked around. "So far."

  "Where are we, master spy?" Daniel asked.

  He looked sheepish. "Australia." There was a long pause. "I
didn't pick up any coordinates. It was kind of hard to follow the airline bullshit. They seemed to have code words."

  "Great. Did you learn anything?"

  He winked. "The co-pilot is screwing an attendant. They talked about that for a while."

  The others laughed. "Good job, Sherlock," Tucker said.

  The eavesdropper grinned. "At least I tried. We hairless apes need information to survive. Right?"

  "Which we don't have," Daniel said.

  "Well," Ico added, "I know where we aren't."

  "Kansas?" asked Tucker.

  "No, where we're supposed to be." He enjoyed their mystification. "Since I was awake anyway, I had a little fun at the transfer point. They tied tags to us like corpses to sort us out. I had a minute to shift them while we waited on gurneys in the dark. We've been put where one quartet was supposed to be and they've been put in our place. Funny, no?"

  "You switched our destination?" Amaya asked. "Why?"

  "We don't know where we are. But now they don't either." He bent back his head to shout to the sky. "You lost your luggage, you arrogant bastards!" Some of the birds flew up in alarm.

  Daniel shook his head. "You're crazy, you know that?"

  "Damn right I'm crazy. Why else would I be here?"

  There was some befuddled silence as the others digested what Ico had done. It shouldn't matter, should it? "So," Daniel said, "we don't know where we are or exactly where we have to go. Should we talk some strategy?"

  "Australia generally gets wetter the farther east you go," Amaya recited, remembering the geography they'd been briefed on. "The desert looks pretty dry beyond the trees of this oasis. Judging from that, I'd say we have a long ways to go."

  "That's good," Tucker said. "I came for a long ways."

  "Let's be pessimistic," Daniel said. "Say a thousand straight-line miles to the coast, and we average fifteen a day."

  "But only ten in a straight line," Amaya amended.

  "Yeah, okay. So that's a hundred days. A bit over three months. We can do that, right?"

  "I don't know if we can move even that fast," Tucker cautioned. "Eventually we have to look for food, water. Finding our way…"

  "We should allow for injuries and rest," Amaya said. "And some R and R."

  "We should allow for the possibility they set us down ten miles from the west coast and we have to walk across the whole bloody continent, which is as big as the United States," said Ico.

  "Which is exactly the puzzle we asked for, right?" added Tucker.

  "We know the most important thing," Daniel said. "We have to walk toward that rising sun. Exodus Port is on the east coast."

  "And maybe we do know more," Ico added.

  Tucker grinned. "Uh-oh, here it comes. He heard something after all."

  "No. But I wasn't content with being spoon-fed by Outback Adventure, either. As far as I was concerned, they were the first challenge, with their 'we'll tell you this but not that' bullshit. So I did a little research outside the envelope."

  "And?" Amaya asked.

  "I bought a map."

  "What! How?"

  "You can get all kinds of stuff on the black market."

  "They didn't confiscate it?"

  "Not unless they unsewed my sleeping bag." He bent to his pack. "I put it in my lining."

  Tucker was shaking his head. "You're something else, you know that, Washington? What you did is against the rules. What you did does defeat the purpose."

  Ico was using a penknife to cut a small slit in his sleeping bag. "It defeats their purpose, which is to have us wandering around the desert like morons. My purpose is to prove I can beat the system and think for myself." He brought out a folded paper. "We're at war, people. With nature, with Outback Adventure, and with time. I intend to win." He unfolded the map. "Ta-da!"

  "It doesn't matter," Daniel dismissed.

  "Here, see?" Ico held it up proudly.

  "It's useless, Ico."

  He looked irritated. "What do you mean?"

  "Show me on that map where we are."

  "We're going to figure out where we are. With landmarks."

  "Show me where we're going."

  "Give me time, Dyson."

  "Even if we had a clue where we are on your map, we don't know if it's fake or real. It could lead us astray as easily as take us where we need to go. It's a complete waste of time and money." He didn't like the fact that Ico had brought a map without telling them. Or eavesdropped. Or switched their drop-off point. It was an arrogant little stunt.

  "Daniel…" Amaya mediated.

  "Maybe," Ico said. "Or it just may save your ass." He was defiant. "I checked my supplier out. I believe this is real. And I'm trying to play the game by my rules."

  "No you're not. You're trying to cheat. I want to beat them fairly, by finding our own way."

  "You want to jump through their hoops. Good doggie."

  "I think you should have stayed home if you need a damn road atlas…"

  "Boys! Please!" Amaya looked like an exasperated schoolteacher. "Is this some kind of testosterone thing, or what?"

  "It's a philosophical discussion," Daniel said.

  "About ends and means," Ico added.

  "Well, this boy thinks we ought to stop talking and start walking," Tucker said. "You two can argue along the way. About a hundred paces behind Amaya and me, please."

  Ico sighed and shrugged. "Okay, I'll tuck the map away for now. You'll be asking for it later. In the meantime, which way, Mister Let's-Do-It-The-Hard-Way?"

  Daniel pointed toward the rising sun. "That way."

  Before they set out they filtered and drank water from the pools until they were satiated, trying to flush the last of the sleep chemicals from their systems. Then they filled all the water containers they had. With several weeks of food on their backs, they agreed, water posed their biggest challenge. They had to find it every two to three days, at most. Then, that goal established, they started east, following the base of a rocky ridge that led roughly in that direction. The walking was neither particularly difficult nor easy. There was little soil, the ground instead dominated by sand, clay, rocks, and a dry, clumpy grass that pricked at them when they brushed it, forcing a meandering course between its tufts. "Spinifex," Amaya identified. It was necessary to watch constantly where one stepped, but the route was fairly level and it was not hard to make progress in an easterly direction and keep oriented.

  As delighted as they were to finally be in Australia, Daniel thought, it was satisfying to begin making progress across it. Ahead was their simple new goal, behind a confirmation of how far they'd come. Progress! A mile already. He knew he shouldn't be counting steps, but the habit of setting a schedule, measuring miles, and listing goals was impossible to break. They were not accustomed to wander.

  The air had the same astonishing clarity of the videos they'd seen, with no atmospheric haze to soften what seemed a hard, angular land. The few clouds that had been present at dawn disappeared, leaving a blank blue sky of steadily increasing heat. As the sun rose and the shadows shrank, every grain of sand and waxy leaf seemed picked out in detail. In this light there was no mystery about the kind of place they had come to. It was brittle, thin, challenging.

  "This is real in-your-face kind of country," Tucker called it.

  As if to make his description literal, the flies came as the morning warmed, swarming in numbers beyond the experience of any in the quartet. The insects didn't bite but they orbited the adventurers' heads with a persistence that soon grew annoying. They buzzed into ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, seeking human fluids, and were kept at bay only with a tiresome flapping of the arm.

  "Lord Almighty," Tucker complained. "I don't remember being told about these."

  "I read about them," Amaya said. "The joke is that your waving arm was the Australian salute. Some claim the Europeans brought them. They're a curse, for despoiling the land."

  "I just got here. They should go curse someone else."

  A hot
breeze kept the bugs at bay for a while but any stillness brought them back. "A thousand miles with these guys?" Ico panted.

  "There's about thirty that have landed on that house you're carrying on your back," Tucker said. "Not that you'd feel the difference."

  "It's your lunch, Freidel. Buzzing wilderness protein."

  "Seriously, man. How can you expect to carry all that?"

  "Flies?"

  "No. Half an outdoor store."

  "This pack is going to keep me not only alive, my good Tucker, but comfortable. It's a hell of a long walk to the beach and I'm not going to be miserable the whole time."

  "You just need to keep up, that's all."

  "I am keeping up, big guy. In fact, if I don't run you into the ground, I'll give you my coffeemaker." He nodded. "To carry."

  The intensity of the southern sun soon became apparent. Much of Australia was as close to the equator as Mexico, and the solar radiation was more powerful than what the four were accustomed to. They stopped frequently to make adjustments. With the coolness of dawn swiftly evaporating, jackets came off and sunscreen came on. They donned wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses. Ico dug into his pack and brought out a fine mesh bag stuffed with food. He emptied the containers into other pockets in his pack and slipped the bag over his hat and head, pulling the drawstring around his throat. "Voila!" he announced. "No flies!"

  "But you can't see what we came for," Amaya objected.

  "I can see a hell of a lot better through this mesh than with flies in my eyes."

  Tucker grinned. "Wait until he needs a drink of water."

  Sure enough, when Ico loosened the net to drink, flies found their way inside the opening and began feasting on his sweat. He swatted angrily but the insects couldn't find their way back out. "Damn!" Finally he furiously pulled the bag and hat off his head and shook them to rid himself of the bugs. More insects whined around his head. "I don't believe this!" The others laughed.

  He glared, then looked thoughtfully at the invention balled in his hand. "Don't worry, I've got a tube in this hardware store on my back. Next time I'll use it as a straw. I'll get it right." He jerked the net back on.