Getting back

by William Dietrich

  By early afternoon, even Amaya was ready to call a halt. They stood on one of the tallest dunes yet, a fifty-foot-high drumlin, and felt like shipwrecked sailors adrift on a sea of sand. The desert looked endless.

  "We can't cross this," Amaya admitted. "We don't have enough water."

  "Maybe Ico was right," Daniel speculated. "It does seem to get drier, not wetter, the farther east we go. Maybe Outback Adventure lied to us about that too."

  "No, it gets better near the coast," Raven said. "They told me."

  "Why do you believe anything they say?"

  "Because they've made a better world than this one."

  "Come on, Raven. Were you really happy there?"

  "Happiness is a luxury. I was… useful."

  "Well, survival isn't a luxury," Ethan said. "The plain truth is that we really don't know anything. Nothing useful. That's what's going to kill us. The plain truth is that, essentially, we're lost."

  "So what do we do?" Daniel asked. "Go back to the road? To go where?" He thumped the transmitter; they'd taken turns carrying it like a baby. "We need to go that way if you want to use this."

  Raven was looking back westward uneasily, a growing wind from that direction blowing back the fan of her hair. The horizon was hazy, the place they'd come from losing all distinction. "Maybe our decision has been made for us."

  The others turned. "Rugard?" Amaya asked anxiously.

  "No." Raven pointed at the dark cloud swelling there. "Where we need to go right now is off this crest to some kind of shelter."

  "Shelter? From what?"

  "From that." They looked to where she was pointing and realized it was difficult to tell where the land stopped and the sky began. "I think a sandstorm is coming."

  The storm rose over them like a rust-colored cliff, its edge a shadowing overhang. The highest tendrils of dust sprinted ahead of the main wall of sand like out-runners, pushed by hot winds up high. The fugitives sprinted over the dunes back the way they'd come, retracing their own footprints until they reached a rocky ledge a half kilometer away that erupted through the dunes like an exposed root. The sandstone had no cave or hollow but did offer a rib of stability among the soughing sands. Something to anchor to! They skidded down to its base, shed their packs, and crouched, waiting.

  The sky got darker and darker. "And we paid to come here," Ethan said.

  "I didn't," Raven replied.

  The tempest curled over them like a breaking wave and then broke with dark fury. Its shriek ended all conversation, filling their ears with a kind of rasping static. The sand stung like needles and blotted out their sight. They hugged the broken rock and each other, wincing at the abrasion and struggling for breath. Their clothes snapped like flags. While their hollow offered some shelter, the fold of ground also confused the wind so that sand blasted at them from all directions, swirling and pricking. More sand sluiced off the crest of the outcrop, raining down on them like a dry shower. Periodically they struggled upward, pulling their packs with them, to avoid being drifted in by the blowing grains. The adventurers gagged for breath through rags hastily tied around their heads like makeshift bandannas. It felt like they were suffocating in an eerie red twilight. No inch of them was free of grit.

  Then the worst of the onslaught was over almost as suddenly as it had come. The wind dropped abruptly as the front of the storm blew on. The sand fell out but the air remained filled with lighter dust, a swirling orange fog. Shakily they stood and untangled themselves, heaving off accumulated sand with a twist of their backs. The dark mass of the storm swept eastward, the desert behind it seeming to smoke. They were left looking like clay statues, coated from hair to boot.

  Ethan spat, trying to clear his mouth of grit. "I want my money back, Raven."

  The others laughed.

  "I want every red cent. With interest."

  "It's a small price to come alive," Amaya replied for her, shaking herself like a dog. "Though I wish it would buy me a shower."

  "Don't say that!" Daniel warned. "You'll bring the damn floods back."

  "I'd say we're about due for a forest fire," Ethan corrected, glancing about with mock trepidation. "Not to mention locusts, earthquakes, tornadoes, and a tsunami wave. Let me check the itinerary." He pretended to thumb through a brochure.

  "I can't believe people really lived here," Raven said. "Heat, flies, dust. See, this is what I'm talking about, Daniel. This is the alternative. United Corporations is big and impersonal and bureaucratic and routine, but it also saves us from squalor. It's understandable to be romantic about the outdoors, sure, but this is the reality."

  "No it isn't," he spat, trying to clear his mouth of dust. "This is no more representative of wilderness than a slum is of civilization. This desert is the reality you sent people to, but Australians didn't live here. They lived… somewhere else. So could we."

  "Not comfortably!"

  "Spiritually. Contentedly. Earnestly."

  "We're redheads, Raven!" Amaya shouted to interrupt the arguing, swirling her hair so a plume of dust shot off it. "Outback chic!"

  "Hey!" The others put their arms up against the flying grit. Amaya twirled away from them, dancing along the rock wall and narrowly dodging an unstable dribble of sand that drained downward. It was a relief to get away from those two! She came to a corner, laughing giddily as she rounded it, and then stopped as if she'd hit a glass wall.

  "Okay, glamour girl!" Daniel called. "Which way now?"

  Slowly, Amaya backed up and lifted her arm to point past the corner of the cliff. Her voice was quiet, but it carried clearly in the dryness of the now-still air. "Let's ask him."

  The newcomer was as shrouded in dust as they were. He strode along the base of the outcrop in long, skidding strides that sent his tattered range coat flapping. The stranger had fled to the outcrop for shelter as they had, Daniel realized, and was as surprised as they were at this meeting. But not intimidated. Their huddled manner reassured him and he marched ahead, his cracked lips widening in gritty welcome.

  "Now look what the wind blew in!" He looked at them with bright dark eyes from beneath a greasy bush hat. "Some of the good ones, I'd venture. G'day to the mud people, then!"

  "Do you recognize him?" Daniel asked Ethan quietly.

  "No. I don't think he's with the Warden."

  The man squinted at Ethan. "I'm not with anybody, mate! Though I'm wondering where the likes of you are coming from, that always wants to be with me! For a long time, nothing. Then people here, people there. I spies on more than ever spy on me. Christ! Bloody crowded, it's getting. I come out here to get away from them all, and still I meet you!"

  "We drop out of the sky," Ethan said dryly.

  "Well, you brought a lot of dirt with you this time, didn't you!" the man replied, squinting up at an atmosphere still brown from dust.

  "Who are you?" Raven asked.

  He considered. "Why Oliver, I think. Who are you?"

  "My name is Raven."

  "Oliver is what I remember. Though to a pretty lady like yourself, just Ollie, I suppose. I'm the proprietor."

  "The what?"

  "The owner! The inheritor! This land is mine, by right of first possession! So don't get any ideas, now! I don't care how damn many of you there are!"

  Daniel glanced at Ethan. This one had been in the sun too long.

  Amaya was looking thoughtful. "You didn't come with Outback Adventure, did you… Ollie?"

  "Outback what?"

  "And you're not a convict, either. Not a moral-impaired."

  He straightened himself up. "As straight as a ruler, missy. I believe in the law."

  "So, where did you come from?"

  He looked impatient. "Now that's what your kind never understands. I didn't come from nowhere. I'm just here. On walkabout, you see."

  "Walkabout?"

  "The aborigines did it," Raven said quietly. "Sort of like a native American spirit quest. Go out alone into the wilderness to wander and survive and find a spirit.
Magic."

  "Like the old prophets," said Daniel.

  "Like us," said Ethan.

  "No, not like you," Oliver objected. "You're no abo, I can tell. Me, I've got some of the blood. I can hear the old ones when the wind blows. Heard 'em just now."

  "How long have you been on walkabout, Oliver?" Raven asked.

  He shrugged. "All my life."

  "Do you remember the time before the Dying? Before the plague? When there were cars? Buildings? Other people?"

  He looked troubled. "I dream it, sometimes. That's what I look for, missy. Not that I've ever found it."

  "Great God," Ethan whispered. "He's a damned survivor. Somehow, he's immune."

  Raven nodded at Oliver encouragingly. "And have you ever looked to the east? Ever looked where the sun comes up?"

  He turned to look in that direction, his eyes bright in dark hollows under the dust like the mask of a raccoon, his stubble beard gritty, his body overclothed in the vagrant manner of someone who had no other way of carrying his belongings. "A bit. No different than here."

  Their spirits sank.

  "Unless you go to the wet part. Hard walking, some of that. Too many trees."

  Raven brightened. "You've been there?"

  "Oh yes. I've been everywhere. Have to, when you're the only one."

  "Could you take us there?" She pointed.

  "What? Across the sand? Are you crazy, missy?"

  She looked confused.

  "This is the bloody desert, right? No water here. We'd die, we go out there." He looked at them as if they were daft.

  "Where then?" she asked in despair.

  "Up to the mountains, the way I was going," he said impatiently. "Then east. You can find water up there along the ranges."

  Their smiles cracked their dust-covered faces in an eruption of hope. "Ollie, we're lost," Raven said carefully. "Can you show us the way to the mountains? Show us how to get east?"

  "East!" He considered a moment, scratching his beard. "Why east? Of course, then again, why not? I could go that way I suppose. What's east, I wonder?" He squinted at them. "Eh? What in the devil makes it so important to go that way?"

  "Our home, Ollie. We're lost, and we want to get home."

  "Home! Ah, well. That's what I'm looking for too."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They turned north, following the sinuous line of the dunes. The walking was easier now that they could march along the sandy crests, and their guide, however strange, boosted their spirits. Oliver pointed out the occasional track of an insect or lizard across the sand that suggested the dunes were not quite as sterile as they seemed. Still, when the sand gave way to a more familiar hard and arid plain, rocky and thorny and spotted with stunted trees and shrubs, the adventurers greeted the transition with relief. Here, at least, was something green.

  A day later they began to cross stony ridges running east to west, a change in topography that broke the Outback's monotonous flatness. They could visually measure progress! As Oliver had promised, springs were easier to find at the base of these outcrops. Finally they came to a more imposing ridge about a thousand feet high. The range was the worn, polished nub of once-great mountains, the surviving sedimentary layers sculpted into battlements so shiny that they seemed to sweat. Touch confirmed the rock was as dry as old enamel, however. The adventurers began following the base of the range, camping in gaps where intermittent floods had cut passageways as direct and level as a highway. These canyons were shaded by gum and acacia trees.

  Without quite realizing it, the group fell into a new rhythm. During the first couple of weeks in Australia, Daniel's whole body had been sore from unfamiliar exertion. The ground had been hard and lumpy, his neck had bent at unfamiliar angles in sleep, his feet constantly ached and his muscles had stiffened. Now the miles seemed routine to a body that had become leaner and harder. The adventurers had far less gear than when they'd arrived in Australia and were more comfortable despite that, or perhaps because of it. Their load was lighter and their tasks simpler. The ground had become a familiar bed, and the open sky a familiar roof. Bird calls, a fold of land, the march of insects, or a change in vegetation could all, they'd learned, direct them to water.

  Alert and more familiar in their surroundings, they found the daily search for food to be easier as well. Fruit-bearing plants had become recognizable, and their skill as hunters was growing. Oliver proved an apt teacher. Sometimes he would disappear for a day or two and reappear with game, but at other times he would take one of the party with him and patiently point out animal sign, demonstrate a quiet stalking, or bring down prey with a well-aimed throwing stick or rock. He taught his new companions to follow the tracks of the sluggish blue-tongued lizard- an easy kill- and to recognize wild onion, bush cucumber, and pigweed seed. Oliver carried nothing but what he wore, picking up and discarding sticks, rocks, or scrap to use as tools when he needed. He seemed not only to understand animals but to be half animal himself, and his wild, casual freedom struck the others as both enviable and disturbing. Is this what they could become?

  With the absence of seasonings, their mouths were becoming sensitive to a more subtle palate. They found they could take more pleasure in the dribble of a fruit's juice, the smoky energy of cooked meat, or the chewy nuttiness of roasted seeds. They never had enough to feast- they'd gotten used to, in fact, a daily rhythm of hunger pangs before the evening meal, something almost entirely unfamiliar in their lives back home- but they were finding enough food to live on and keep moving. After a rain they hunted for yalka bulbs, roasting them to release their nutty flavor. They dreamed of richer foods, of course- sugar! — but subsisted on what they had.

  Raven, who had expected to escape this experience and who instead had been forced to share it, remained stiff with the others. She was both the potential means to escape and a representative of the system that had stuck them in Australia, and their feelings toward her were confused. She was angry at Daniel for making a hard situation more difficult by losing the activator, worrying aloud that Rugard could still hunt them down before they could get back. Yet she also seemed to adapt to the wild with relative ease, suggesting her attitude in the tunnels had not been entirely an act. She was not squeamish about killing and cleaning game, displayed endurance, and had an emotional resiliency that warded off despair. Daniel tried to joke about their plight one evening.

  "I've had to check into hell, throw away the activator, and walk a thousand miles to get another date with you, Raven. You seem to be doing quite well." He was watching her skin and cook a rabbit, the smoke and roasting meat mingling with the scent of eucalyptus. He felt strangely content. The convicts had been left behind, tomorrow was simply tomorrow, and life was no longer a set of deadlines and meetings and pressures. Did she feel what he felt?

  She looked at him skeptically. "When I told you I was a cheap date, this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

  "It isn't so bad though, is it? Isn't this the kind of freedom we talked about in the tunnels?"

  She sat back on her haunches, using a forearm to brush her hair out of her eyes. "I never said it was bad. That's why I wasn't very guilty about sending people here. But this is a fantasy land, Daniel. This is recess. Our little party has hundreds of square miles to live on because we're the only people here, but Australia can't work for the rest of the planet. The only thing that can work for so many billions of people is obedience. The only thing that can work is United Corporations." She looked out across the dusky desert. "It's best that most people never see this. It would only confuse them."

  "But don't you feel the rightness of this? For the first time I feel like I'm in a place where I belong. Humans were born in country like this. The savanna."

  "Exactly. You do, and I don't. Normal people don't. I miss my machines. I miss my security."

  "Even if it deadens the spirit?"

  "Poverty and strife and fear are even more deadening. I told you, we came from different experiences. The companies took me
in as a child, after my father died and my mother broke down. They schooled me, trained me, and finally convinced me I had to help sustain what they stood for. And I wanted to! I'm not blind, Daniel. I'm not immune to the beauty of this place. I'm not unconscious of the fate of some of the exiles. I just don't see this as a realistic option. And I don't appreciate your sticking me here by throwing the activator at Ico."

  "As we didn't appreciate being sent here without the full truth."

  She shrugged. "Okay. We're even. So don't try to get me to endorse what you volunteered for and I didn't. Camping is fun only if you get to go home at the end."

  She wouldn't look at him as they ate their rabbit. He glanced at Amaya and she looked away from him too. Well, he couldn't blame her for that.

  Still, his optimistic mood wouldn't leave him.

  "I like this," Daniel tried again with Ethan the next day as they trudged along.

  The other man glanced around, wondering what he was talking about.

  "I like being here and just going," Daniel continued. "The simplicity of it."

  "Mindless?"

  "Fulfilling. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do but not trying to do any more. Like an animal. I'm content, I mean."

  "You're going someplace. Animals don't do that."

  "Migratory ones do. Humans must have started like this, wandering out of Africa until we wandered all over the earth. Nomads. Drifters. It's why this seems right, I think."

  "Except eventually humans settled down," said Ethan. "They got hungry, and had kids, and invented agriculture. Then came civilization."

  "With tyranny and war."

  "And medicine and art."

  Daniel smiled. "That's why men are torn, I think. Between settling down and moving on. There's this yin and yang in our brain that comes from all of human history. The nomad versus the farmer. But what if farming was a wrong turn? What if that's the underlying story of Genesis: how people turned away from the Garden of the natural world to the temptation of our artificial one? The Tree of Knowledge?"