Getting Back (14 page)

"Damn, I'm tired," Tucker said.

"We'll sleep on the plane," Daniel assured him.

They got a breakfast of stale donuts and instant coffee while they waited for the jet to be readied. "They spare no expense," Ico observed.

"We're getting to see a place few people have ever visited," Amaya replied, as if to justify the unceremonious send-off.

"What, Australia? Or this dump?"

Daniel wondered if Raven had come through here. He found himself thinking about her with almost irritating frequency, like a worry he couldn't put behind him. Had she gone to the Outback? Was there a chance they'd meet there? What would she think of him if they did?

"Okay, form up! Bring your gear!" It was time. The ramp personnel waving them through were in red jumpsuits.

"Is this where we return?" Tucker asked one of them.

The man shook his head.

"Where then?"

"Beats me, buddy. I'd lobby to come back through Hawaii."

Their gear was searched, and a probe found data wafers in Daniel's bush hat. They went into a computer for scanning, and any mentioning Australia were deleted.

"It's just history!" he protested. "Background!"

"It might contain geographic detail. You were told that was cheating, Dyson."

"You didn't even read it!"

"Didn't have to. Besides, you don't need history where you're going."

Ico lost a compass that had a comm-phone slyly built in. "It's a compass, dammit!"

"With a radio. Looks like you're going to tell direction by the sun, sport."

"I want a receipt for that!"

The worker set the instrument on a metal counter, picked up a hammer, and swung. There was an expensive crack. "Don't need one. You can have it back. Next!"

"Fucking storm troopers."

"Next!"

Tucker and Amaya were clean.

They shuffled out onto the dark tarmac, bent under their gear. A line formed as the leading adventurers shrugged off their packs and disappeared aboard. As he waited for his turn, Daniel glanced idly around one more time and saw an electro-bus with no lights hum up to another freight dock. A line of men shuffled off it, heads bowed, shoulders stooped, barely visible in the dark. They wore the same jumpsuits as the ramp workers, he saw, but their scalps were shaved and there was the glint of something silver on their necks. Were the jumpsuits red or…

"Ico, look. I think those might be convicts."

His companion glanced that way. "Bullshit."

"No, really. Look at their necks. Those might be stun collars. I read about them. It's designed to jolt if they try to run away. I thought that crude stuff had been rendered obsolete by treatment, but there they are." Daniel had never seen a convicted criminal outside of video and holographic shows. He was fascinated.

"Hmm." Ico considered. "If those are moral-impaireds, why aren't they in a clinic? What are they doing here?"

"Getting a ride to rehab, I'd guess. They must have just been convicted."

Ico looked from the convicts to the men in jumpsuits who were processing the departure of the Outback Adventurers. "Look at our own goons," he nodded. "For all we know, the guys frisking us are rehabs. More nickel shaving by Outback Adventure. No wonder the food is swill."

"You might remember the cuisine more fondly after days surviving on ant balls," Amaya reminded.

"Whose balls?"

"Balls of ants, collected on a stick."

He laughed. "You can tell me about it, Chiu. I brought Solar Chow."

"Looks like you got enough to feed us all." She eyed the massive pack Ico was bent under. "How are you going to carry all that?"

"On my back, sweetheart."

"How heavy is it?"

"Seventy-five well-chosen pounds to keep me not just alive but comfortable. Don't worry, I'll still leave you in the dust."

"Really? Okay, wise guy: first one to camp. I win, you cook me your chow. You win- "

"It ain't a bet, sweetheart. This food's for me."

"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…"

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."