Exodus (34 page)

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!”

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.”

“David? Oh, you mean Fo—I mean, David, yes, I mean, no, I mean…”

Mara has got herself in knots. She can't seem to function in the realworld tonight; she's too full of what is happening out in the Noos. But Dol takes her confusion as a
yes and grins again at Tony. He beams a wide smile but his eyes still have an unsettling gleam.

“So, are you going to be hanging around with David tonight or will you manage to tear yourselves from each other's arms and come out with the gang?” Dol asks. Mara can't help noticing that her popularity has suddenly shot up now that she's with Fox. “You must come—Tony's organized a Noos War Game. He's promised
sensational
injuries and
real, extreme
fear. It'll be nux.”

Tony is still smiling that fixed, broad grin yet the indefinable edge in his eyes sends vibrations of fear through Mara's already shattered nerves.

“How on Earth do you manage
extreme
fear, Tony?” she blurts out. “Is it
real
pain,
real
death? If not, well, it's just not sensational enough for me.”

She should have kept her mouth shut but she wants so badly to wipe the smile clear off his face for just a second to see what lies underneath. And she does—for an instant. As Tony's smile slips a fraction, Mara sees something as nasty as necrotty beneath his smarmy exterior and wishes she had left well enough alone.

You don't know who they are. They're trained to look just like any one of us
.

That's what Fox said about the rooks, the secret police.

Now Tony leans close toward her till she can feel his breath on her cheek. “My kind of girl,” he murmurs. “You know I've got my eye on you, Mara.”

Dol giggles but Mara gets up unsteadily, mumbles good night, and quickly exits the cybercath. With trembling fingers she snaps on her zapeedos and begins to head for the Leaning Bridge, where she is to meet Fox for the last time. As she zips along the silver tunnel Mara wishes it could all stop and never happen at all. She wants to snuggle
down with Fox amid the softly undulating walls of his room, rest her aching head against him, and try to blank out all thought of Tony Rex and rooks and the cyberflood and everything else that lies before her.

She wants the world to stop.

But that's not going to happen. The virus will already be live and loose. Cyberflood is on its way, and she can't stop it.

Fox is already there, leaning over the humpbacked bridge, more tousle-headed than ever, gazing into the Looking Pond as if he hadn't a care in the world. Mara feels full of thorns. She is full of pain; she can't believe she will never see him again. They have been together less than a week, but this kind of love cuts quick and deep and keen as a blade.

Mara skates up and bumps to a halt beside him. When he turns toward her, she embeds his face, the way he looks at her now, deep in her mind. She will keep it there forever. For the rest of her days.

“It's begun,” he whispers.

His forehead is damp with sweat. He slips a hot hand into hers. Mara lets out a great sigh and squeezes his hand. They stand together in silence, trying to grasp the enormity of what they have taken on.

“Mara,” he says after a while, and his husky voice shakes with more than just nerves. “I'll never forget you. Never, as long as I live. You've changed everything for me.”

“Fox, I—I…”

She can't find the words she needs. Now that the moment is here she cannot endure it, cannot bear to leave him. The future
must
include him or it will always feel empty. But there's too much to say and so little time. And what could she say now that would change anything?

So she doesn't say a word.

Fox leans heavily upon the bridge.

“Stay. Stay with me,” he whispers, just when she thinks he is never going to speak again. “We could get everyone on the ships, then you could stay and fight with me. I don't want you to go. I've never met anyone like you in my world, and I don't believe I ever will.”