by Julian Gough
The entry hatch at the back of the tunnelling machine is open, and Colt slides in.
The cabin interior smells of oil, and dust, and metal, and plastic. Colt looks around.
OK.
Working out how you make the thing go is trivial. There are only a few manual controls, all labelled. Most of the decisions on blade angle, and thus speed, are automatic, triggered by the hardness of the rock.
Colt shrugs. Why do they even bother to man these machines any more? They’d be more efficient if they were fully automated. But people like to think they’re necessary, even when they’re just getting in the way. Like Mama letting me help her cook, when I was a kid.
The thought combines with the smells in the cabin – oil, metal, plastic – to set off an avalanche of memories.
Smash.
Egg white all over the counter. A thick, transparent drip sizzles on the hot ring, and in seconds the wobbly, glassy blob goes solid and white. The grabbed bright rubbery yellow yolk slides around, through his fingers, drops to the floor, bursts, and now it’s liquid, like paint. A smell; he looks back at the hot ring; the white turns brown at the edges, black. Oh Colt, she says, oh Colt. Her face. He looks at the floor, at the puddle of broken yolk between his feet, as that huge feeling he can’t understand rises in him. It hurts. Don’t, Mama. But she hasn’t done anything, just looked at him and said his name.
Stop!
It’s the neurons, regrowing, denser. They’re connecting to my memories. Triggering them. Hard to switch them off.
Breathe. Look at what is right in front of you.
Here. Now. This smooth metal, this oily air.
That was it. Like hot cooking oil. That’s what set off the memory.
He breathes, blinks, breathes. The past goes away, but the feeling doesn’t.
Oh Mama, I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry, don’t be sad.
Naomi squeezes into the capsule, behind him.
Colt moves across, to the edge of the black padded chair, and his mother slides in beside him. The space is only designed for one man, but a big man. There is just about room for mother and child.
Colt fires up the engines. The blades come up to speed. Colt extends them; they start to dig in.
The hydraulic rams thunk against the soft stone all around them, and press the machine forward.
The machine pulls itself into the soft grey stone.
It’s incredibly loud in the tight space. Colt looks around, looks down. Only one set of ear protectors, lying at their feet. Colt reaches for them, to give them to Naomi, as Naomi reaches, to give them to Colt.
They grab a bright yellow earpiece each, and push them towards each other so the plastic frame holding them bends.
Like pulling a Christmas cracker in reverse, thinks Naomi, and laughs.
She is glad Colt can’t hear her laughter, that it’s washed away, as it bubbles from her mouth, by the torrents of noise. Through the bones in her head, her laughter doesn’t sound right.
Colt lets go of the ear protectors.
She tries to give them back, but he refuses.
Well, you can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.
She puts the ear protectors on, and studies Colt’s face.
Her son. Concentrating hard. So grown up. He looks very . . . alive.
Colt adjusts the controls, and the nose of the tunnelling machine begins to tilt upwards at a gentle angle, keeps going.
Naomi slips back a little on the slick plastic of the black padded seat. Her sweat.
It’s getting hotter.
What happens if they get stuck? If they run out of fuel, halfway to the surface?
How much air is in here?
Does the machine block the tunnel behind them with broken rock and clay? It must. That rock has to go somewhere.
So, there’s no going back . . .
They’ll either reach the surface, or die.
Across from her, Colt frowns. The temperature is too high. He adjusts the angle of the blades, but that’s not it.
The temperature keeps climbing.
He tries a mechanical slider on the control panel.
Ah, the new fashion for retro controls . . . Supposedly favoured because software interfaces can be bricked by hackers; but Colt suspects it’s just German engineering nostalgia for the tactile, physical machines of the pre-computer era. The slider is unlabelled.
Ridiculous; a patch of dry glue where the label should have been. Crap design. Anything important should be etched into the panel surface.
He pushes the slider forward, sucking in a sharp breath as the vibrating instrument panel sets off the exposed nerves in his hand. Outside, water dribbles from tungsten nozzles to cool the blades.
It should be automatic. Ridiculous. How can you run a machine at optimum efficiency, if the thing hasn’t been designed efficiently? You have to take into account human stupidity. Because it’s a constant.
He reflexively tries to look up the spec for the machine, but of course his helmet is switched off, and nothing happens. His frown deepens.
Naomi looks away. Watching him isn’t helping. But there is nowhere safe to rest her eyes. Everything reminds her of where they are. And the ear protectors aren’t enough to keep out the screaming of the blades.
Oh, Colt’s poor ears . . .
As the crumbling shale becomes a harder kind of rock, a limestone layer, they slow, adjust. There is a bone-shaking thunk, as the hydraulic rams press against the sides of the tunnel, bite in, and then force the machine onward and upward. The whine of the cutting blades in the nose grows harsher, higher, triumphant.
Perhaps the vibration will be calming, she thinks. She rests her head against the wall of the capsule, but the watery, gravelly sludge, grinding past, inches away, is incredibly loud through the bones of her skull. She jerks her head free of the metal, leans back in the padded seat, and closes her eyes for a long time.
They tilt suddenly down, as the scream of the blades leaps even higher in pitch, hard to hear now, hard to bear. ‘What’s that?’
Did he hear her? She shouts again, ‘What’s happening?’ and still Colt doesn’t respond.
OK, no it’s OK, don’t disturb him, he’s busy, but she shouts again anyhow because there is something terrible, nightmarish, primally wrong about shouting at Colt from this close and not being heard, not being answered. ‘What’s that?’
They lurch to a halt.
He pulls a lever down, flicks a switch, pauses; clicks another switch, another, off, off, off. The blades slow, drop in pitch, in volume. Grow quiet.
Stop.
He turns and smiles at her. ‘We broke through.’
96
They fight the rear hatch open.
There’s no way out.
It’s just a dark wall of broken clay and sand.
The junk they’ve just tunnelled through, minced, and piled up behind them.
A little sand trickles, then pours through the open rear hatch, and Naomi thinks, we’re going to drown in sand. She tries to swing the hatch closed, but the rising pile blocks the swing of the door; she pushes harder, the broken shale slips and drops in through the hatch, into the machine behind them, till there’s an abrupt collapse, and suddenly there’s blue sky everywhere.
They scramble out the hatch, the metal surprisingly hot – friction, thinks Colt – and up the broken shale to the surface and stand in the sun, blinking, blinded, stunned.
Where are we?
Colt, reflexively, switches on his helmet, not to go online but just to get at the maps stored in its memory; and, instantly, turns it off again.
No. Anything the helmet does, that tells us where we are, is likely to tell them, too. Can’t risk it sending out some automatic map data request, or a roaming signal to the nearest base station, or just some random, outbound ping. They must be monitoring all requests for data.
All data movement.
The tunnelling machine has broken through the side of a long, narrow, d
ry gulch.
Sheltered.
No sign of the base, the mound through which Naomi entered.
A line of dialogue, from some game he once played. No one is more spied upon than the spy.
No maps, no GPS.
Oh, crap. Lost in crappy crapworld.
The electronic silence is almost overwhelming. Info vacuum. Like being under a glass jar the size of a mountain. All the air pumped out.
He stands blinking, frustrated, in the sunlight, staring down at his shadow.
The only data he’s got.
Hey, wait a minute.
Analyse that.
He turns, looks at the sun. Works out the angle above the horizon.
Checks the time.
Wow. This is easy.
He points. ‘That way.’
Naomi looks where he’s pointing. Looks back down, and along the long, narrow gulch. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘this is heading in the right direction then, pretty much.’
They slip and slide down to the dry, pebbly bed, and begin to walk.
*
They walk for an hour, too fast. Nervous energy. They’re listening for helicopters, trucks, but there’s nothing. The gulch curves away, then back.
Colt’s lips are dry, and he begins to stumble.
Naomi says, ‘I think you need to . . . We need to rest.’
They move into a tight black patch of shade at the foot of a cliff. Flop down on a low pale flat-topped boulder.
Colt bends, picks up a rounded pebble from the dry streambed.
Deep red.
Specked with tiny black dots.
Striped with thin white lines of crystal.
His racing, data-starved mind pulls more and more information out of the pebble, and his picture of it expands, fractal.
Jasper.
High iron content.
Quartz stripes.
Smoothed and polished by the water, tumbling it against other pebbles, grinding it against the fine desert sand.
He moves it closer to his eyes, focuses on the thin lines of quartz running through it, looks into their translucent depths. Frozen evidence of a molten past.
From the crystal size, he can tell how slowly it cooled.
He can see the history of all the geological activity beneath his feet, captured in this pebble. He gets the giddy feeling that it contains all the information he would need to reconstruct the universe, if he could just decrypt it.
‘Colt?’
He slips it into his pocket. Stands. Scans the sky. Where are the helicopters? Where are the drones?
‘We’d better move,’ he says, swaying.
*
When they finally get to the fence, it’s a total anticlimax.
The section that blocks the gulch isn’t electrified.
They don’t even have to climb it. A flash flood has piled bleached branches and construction lumber and plastic barrels up against the fence, like a crude ramp. They just walk up to the top of the sloping pile of debris, and jump over the razor wire, down into loose sand on the far side.
Colt stands up, dusts off his knees, sneezes. Turns to look at the fence.
Bad design. Bad design.
‘They should patrol this regularly,’ he frets. ‘That’s really terrible.’
‘They’re not worried about people getting out,’ says Naomi.
‘Yeah, I know, but still . . .’
Then he hears it.
Naomi looks at him. ‘What?’
Of course, she can’t hear it yet. His hearing is way sharper now.
‘Helicopter,’ he says.
Where can we hide? It must have infrared scopes, zooms, everything.
It might know where they are already. Might be coming straight for them.
The loose sand. How deep?
Colt drops to his knees. Scrapes at the sand.
Good. Loose enough.
Deep enough.
‘We need to bury ourselves, Mama.’ No, wait. Oh, poop. If they dig away the hot surface layer to bury themselves, they’ll leave two fugitive-shaped patches of cool sand above them. Super-visible in infrared.
OK . . . what if I . . .
Colt scoops up sand with his good hand, at furious speed, scattering the top layer of hot sand to reveal the cool sand beneath. He moves about, makes a random pattern, so they won’t be under the only areas of cool sand.
It’s getting closer.
His mother can hear it now, and she starts to dig. The sides slide in.
‘You can’t dig a hole in it,’ says Colt, ‘you have to kind of shuffle your way down, like this.’ And he lies on the hot loose sand, oh God that’s too hot, and wriggles till it gets cooler, and wriggles some more, scoops sand out from under his chest, his hips, with his good hand.
When he’s deep enough, he scoops sand back over himself. A trickle of it pours into Colt’s helmet before he thinks to slam the visor shut with his damaged hand.
Through the bones in his head, through the sand, he can hear his mother digging, wriggling.
They are both covered enough, not perfectly, but enough, and Colt is trying not to sneeze; the sand is over his mouth, but his nose and eyes are clear, mostly clear, he has some sand in one eye and he blinks, it’s scratchy, he has to close his eyes and keep them closed. Stop moving.
They freeze. The helicopter comes in low, a few hundred feet over their heads, and the air in the gorge shudders.
Just off to one side, just outside the restricted area. Patrolling the perimeter? It’s heading south.
It doesn’t even slow down, just continues on the same course, south.
The sound fades in the distance.
How long should they wait? Is it a trap?
He is about to move – the tickle in his nose is becoming overwhelming – when they hear the second helicopter.
A trap . . .
They freeze.
The second helicopter comes towards them. Same direction. Exactly the same course.
Flies by, just off to the side again.
Fades.
A third helicopter . . .
And Colt blows the sand clear of his mouth and laughs. As the third helicopter flies past, off to one side, hidden by the canyon wall, he stands up, the sand streaming off him like the flowing robes in a renaissance painting.
Naomi, her ears under the sand, can vaguely hear him laughing.
He never laughs.
And suddenly Colt’s face is looming over hers, his visor up, and he is gently, lovingly brushing the sand from her mouth, and he is saying, ‘It’s OK, Mama,’ and pushing aside the sand to find her hand, and he is lifting her out of the shallow grave and saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s only the tourist helicopters coming back along the edge of the exclusion zone, from the ghost towns. It’s OK.’
Of course. Like a flock of mechanical geese. They do this every evening. Naomi feels foolish, ashamed.
‘We should keep out of their way,’ says Colt, ‘in case they’ve overheard a security alert. But they’re not out here looking for us.’
No infrared cameras.
No guns.
Three more helicopters fly by, returning from the ghost-towns tours.
Then two stragglers.
Then silence.
‘OK,’ says Colt. ‘Let’s go.’
Colt is already walking.
Naomi follows.
The gulch widens, blurs into more open, eroded land.
Finally they reach the road. The only road. Colt scans it, as Naomi studies his face.
‘This would be the logical place to intercept us,’ he says.
A dot shimmers in the distance. They duck back, and huddle in a gully, behind a mesquite bush. Among the eroded, exposed roots of the bush there’s a dead rattlesnake, dry and stiff as a stick. Green and grey. The last six inches of its tail are flat. The rattle crushed.
Sat tight, defending itself with its rattle, thinks Colt. Crushed by a truck, in the middle of the road. Crawled away to die.
He looks up, through the mesquite, at the shimmering dot getting closer, larger . . .
A white Dodge pickup.
Colt and Naomi look at each other. Without speaking, they agree to let it go.
It swooshes by, swirling up a faint mist of dust, which drifts sideways, and settles on them in the gully. Naomi coughs. Colt reaches into the roots of the dusty bush: carefully picks up the dead snake by the head. So dry. So light.
The eyes are gone, eaten by ants.
Colt stares into the bony, empty sockets.
Hears something, very faint: looks back at the road.
Another dot. Bigger.
A bus.
It gets closer. Old bus.
They look at each other, unsure.
As Colt turns back to look at the bus, he catches a glimpse of something bright green in the heart of the bush.
He cautiously parts the dry brown branches.
The hard, protective bark near the main stem has cracked open to allow a green shoot to emerge.
Colt studies the lines on the dark bark: the way they swerve apart and crack, to let out the pale green shoot. He reaches into the cool, shadowy centre of the bush, strokes the branch with his fingertip. The bark is as rough as a cat’s tongue, and when he gets to the slim shoot, its cool smoothness, the fact that it bends under his finger, is a shock; he pulls his hand away, afraid he’ll snap it off.
Of course, thinks Colt. Its job is to stay strong; but also to crack. Part of its strength is its willingness to break.
It’s a metaphor, thinks Colt, astonished.
You can’t stay rigid, and grow.
His brain makes connection after connection. Recognizes the pattern again and again. It crackles outward through his life. Illuminates things he’s been told by his parents, things he’s read in books, that were just words, words, and now they’re alive.
Like Dad says; You can’t defend your way to victory.
Like Mama says; You can’t protect yourself from the bad stuff, without protecting yourself from the good stuff.
I should have said yes.
You need to protect your core; but you also need to let that core grow.
And when it grows, it will crack open the old you. And those first feelers of the new self, as they thrust out beyond the protective shell, are vulnerable, and they might get damaged, might get eaten, might get hurt. But they have to be allowed to take their chance.
Because if you keep them inside, defend them totally against the world; they will be crushed, not by the world, but by your own defences.