Getting Back (27 page)

"Should work?" Ico asked.

"That's what they told me," she said defensively.

"And that must have been what the pilot was talking about when he gave me the activator," Ethan said. "That if we didn't have it, we'd have to walk to the beach."

"Listen, Daniel, this is insane," Ico pleaded. "We can't let these two run off with our help and then be stranded here, taking our chances in the wild. Who cares if the transmitter will work by itself? They know we'll never make it across the remaining desert! One of us should go on that plane with Raven to make sure she'll bring somebody back for us: somebody back here."

"You want to wait with the morally impaired?"

"Better than dying of thirst on her itinerary for us. I'm sorry, but she's lied to you from the minute you met her. If she wants our help, one of us gets to go."

"Who?" Daniel asked.

"Not you. You can't be objective about her. Frankly, it should be me. I understand the system now, I'm a good talker, and I won't be taken in by a bunch of United Corporations bullshit."

"You?"

"I've seen through them from the beginning. And I'll see through them at home."

"No," said Amaya. "You're not the right person, Ico. No offense, but you rub people the wrong way."

"We need a revolutionary, not a glad-hander!"

"We need someone who will be listened to. You'll sound too abrasive. Too extreme. Too… nutty."

"I'm the only sane person here!"

"I'm sorry. I just don't trust you to do this."

He threw up his hands. "Okay, you then. Not just these two, who somehow find us in the desert and have been using us ever since. They're going to leave us in the lurch, I know it."

"No I'm not," said Ethan. "I came here like you, Ico. I'm as angry about it as you are. I forced Raven to agree to take me back if she wanted to be shown that plane."

Ico ignored him. "How about it, Amaya? Women and children first."

"No! That's silly." She looked hesitant. "I… I want to finish trying to sort out my life here." Her look ended at Daniel as she said that. Raven would be gone again. "Ethan's one of us. He's been here longer than any of us. He's the one who was in the crash with the transmitter. United Corporations can't object to taking him back after he helped Raven. And he can talk for all of us, even the convicts. He makes the most sense by far."

"Yes," said Daniel. "Ethan's the logical one."

"Tucker, for God's sake…"

The big man shrugged. "I don't know if any of this is going to work, but I came to walk across Australia. I say Ethan too. This way the four of us stick together. All for one, one for all."

Ico looked around the group. "In Purgatory."

Daniel shrugged. They were set, the decision made.

"Fine, great." Ico sighed. "Let's go break into the house of Napoleon fruitcake up the hill there, and then run out into the desert."

"Ico, I'm sorry I can't take you all right now," Raven said. "It's the only way."

"That's what you say."

The four men were roused at dawn and marched to work on the reservoir. The community needed more water and was excavating a basin at the base of a cliff. Daniel would have preferred to have stayed in camp to make final plans with the women, but he knew such malingering would only arouse suspicion. All he could hope was that Raven's crazy plan to steal the transmitter could work, and that in the confusion of preparing for the night's festival, Amaya could succeed in foraging supplies for their escape.

Amaya told him at breakfast not to worry. "The women are friendly, most of them. We're a minority here, so they tell me where things are. I've also got another idea."

"What's that?"

"It's a surprise. Something Raven and I are cooking up."

There was a sullen mood to the group of men detailed to dig the sand pit, the hardest and dirtiest of Erehwon's current projects. "Welcome to the Warden's shit detail," one muttered. The digging team, equipped with crude tools of wood and hammered scrap metal, was an amalgam of freshly arrived convicts and impressed adventurers, as well as the stupid, slow, and those who'd drawn Rugard's ire. Accordingly, the pace of excavation was desultory. "I'm supposed to be excited about building my own prison?" one grizzled moral-impaired, a chronic petty thief, complained to Daniel. "It feels like I'm digging my own grave. I don't want a reservoir. I want out of here."

"So go," Daniel said.

"And die in the desert."

"So quit."

"One man tried that. The Warden made the rest of us drink his blood from the bowl of his skull. He said we needed to bond if morale was so poor."

The work on the west-facing impoundment was tolerable until mid-morning, when the sun cleared the cliffs and began beating into the pit. Then the temperature began to soar. The men took a two-hour break at midday but the enclosure was even hotter afterward, everyone coated in sweat and dust and tormented by flies. By mid-afternoon, Ico did little more than lean on his shovel, depressed and exhausted, staring blankly out at the pan of surrounding desert with his thoughts far away.

"You okay, Washington?" Tucker asked him at one point.

"No, Tucker, I'm not okay."

"Can I get you something, man? Some water?"

He waved him off. "Leave me alone. I'm trying to figure out a way to get okay."

They broke off work with the sun dipping toward the horizon, the cliff face still throwing off waves of heat. The sky remained cloudless, the air parched. It was difficult to imagine the pit and its surrounding dike collecting anything but heat.

Back at the main compound, they got a skin of water to drink and wash and then slumped tiredly, waiting for the gathering at dark. The community would party hard and sleep it off the next day. As the stars popped out, Raven found them.

"I worked on the transmitter to confirm it's in his storehouse and pleaded the need to scrounge more parts," she whispered. "A rope is hidden at the base of the monolith. We'll all go to the party to allay suspicion and then you guys will have to slip away. If you can steal it, we meet at two A.M. at the boulders. If anything goes wrong, you four pretend I tricked you into all this."

"That won't take much pretending," Ico said.

She looked at him impatiently. "Ico, I didn't put you here."

"I'm just skeptical about who's going to get me out."

"Let him be," Daniel said wearily. "He's cranky. We're exhausted. Concentrate your thinking on going."

They dozed, and ate, and after dinner Daniel went in search of Amaya. He found her down by the stables, carrying a bag of something up toward the canyon where the women had been assigned. "Need any help?"

"No, it's not heavy. Besides, it's for the surprise."

He wrinkled his nose. "A pretty fragrant one, I take it."

"You'll see. Didn't Ico call me the devil's prospector?"

"Something like that." His look became serious. "How about the supplies?"

"Enough to get us started. We'll be living off the land again."

"Can we do it?"

"We have to. Wasn't that the point from the beginning?"

He nodded and then frowned, gathering his thoughts for what he was about to say. "Amaya, before we make our move tonight I want you to think about your options. I admire your courage for being willing to stay in Australia but I want you to reconsider. I think Ethan would step aside if you wanted to leave on the rescue plane with Raven. Australia is pretty tough, and I don't know how this Rugard is going to react when we steal his means of escape. He might try to run us down in the desert."

"I know."

"It's just going to be hard. And dangerous."

She nodded. "I know. But I'm really not all that anxious to get back, Daniel, despite all the bad luck. Something is happening in my life."

"I worry about you with all these men."

She laughed. "What a ratio! I should be looking forward to all these men!"

"You know what I mean. These guys are convicts, most of them. The shrinks couldn't straighten them out. All I'm saying is… this may be your last chance."

"To escape, you mean, despite what Raven promises."

"Yes."

She nodded, more serious. "I know. But I've thought about it. I've been thinking about it ever since we woke up in Australia, not just since Raven told us about the transmitter. Sometimes I feel I belong, and sometimes it scares me to death. But to go back now would be to give up on myself. I'm feeling new things here, seeing new things, thinking new thoughts. Back home it's just… noise. So thank you, I'm staying."

"All right. I thought that's what you'd say." He looked at her with a tilt to his head. "You're what Raven pretended to be, I think."

"I think Raven pretended to be what she wants to be. She's just not there yet."

He shook his head. "I don't understand her."

"She doesn't understand herself."

He looked at her quizzically. "Are we going to stay friends?"

"I hope so."

"I mean after Raven's gone. You're a special woman, Amaya. A good woman."

"And you're a good man. But I've seen how you look at her. It's not the way you look at me."

His expression was guilty.

She smiled. "Not yet, anyway." And then his eyes followed her as she walked jauntily away.

If Rugard Sloan thought he was about to leave Australia, he gave no hint of it in his meandering harangue to the crowd of two hundred that gathered in the clearing that night. He introduced the latest arrivals, crowed about the community's achievements, and gave dire warnings about the consequences of insubordination or shirking. "The sons of bitches in the real world sent us here to rot!" he shouted in hoarse reminder to the assembly. "Every day we survive here, every day we prevail here, we're spitting in their faces!" They roared their approval at that, and he grinned viciously. "We spit at them! And someday we'll pay them back! But meantime I love you people, and what we've built here! So it's time to take a night off and… party!" The crowd whooped.

A makeshift band of drummers and wooden flutists started a pounding, hooting beat, and some of the assembly began to awkwardly dance in the sand. Fermented plant juice was passed out, forgivably awful because it was so fiery. A bonfire roared in the night. Daniel studied the cliff face above Rugard's cabin. It was dark, a slab against the stars.

The Warden worked the crowd and then came up to Raven. "Why isn't it working yet?" he growled quietly.

"I'm almost there."

He grasped her hand that held a cup and tipped it forcefully toward the sand. His grip was like a vise. "I don't want you drinking tonight. I want you up at the cabin later, with me, getting that transmitter to work. The compound will be hungover and half-conscious tomorrow. We can't take all of them, so it would be a good time to slip away without saying goodbye. Understand?"

"You're willing to leave these people you love?"

"I'm willing to leave my own mother to get out of this dung hole."

"I'll come to you later."

"You'd better. I'm watching you, bitch. Don't think about leaving without me."

"Relax, Warden." She smiled tightly, her wrist twisted. "We're working together, remember?"

He looked at her intently, his gray eyes like hollows. "Don't fuck with me." Then he dropped her arm and moved away.

Her group danced, to be seen. Except for Raven, they pretended to drink, to be seen. And then Daniel, Tucker, and Ethan slipped quietly away into the dark, one by one, even as the noise of the celebration grew. Sparks wafted up to dance amid the stars. Raven and Amaya drifted through the crowd, laughingly fending off advances and keeping an eye on the hill to Rugard's cabin.

Sometime after midnight the women met in the shadows, wary and tense. "I can't find Ico," Raven reported. "I haven't seen him for an hour."

"I don't think he's one for parties," Amaya said. "He told me he was getting more supplies before going to watch Rugard's door. You should have seen his pack when we started. He brought everything."

"I haven't seen the Warden, either."

"He's hanging on a new concubine. Drina looked furious."

Raven looked out into the dark, feeling her sore wrist. "Ico wants to get back very badly, doesn't he?"

"I think he's angry. He wants revenge."

"I hope he's not so angry he does something foolish. Did you move the supplies away from the boulder cluster, like I told you?"

"Yes, but I don't understand why."

"And try making what I suggested?"

"Yes. I don't know if it will work."

"Good. Hopefully none of it is necessary. I'm going to get the activator. We'll meet the men with the transmitter and slip away."

"Then why the precautions?"

"Because it may be more difficult to get out of Erehwon than I would like."

The monolith that formed the sheer cliff at the rear of Rugard's cabin was more a steep slope on its opposite side, its rock the texture of sandpaper. A watercourse that funneled periodic thundershowers down the face of the rock had made enough of a crease in the formation to give Daniel, Ethan, and Tucker a desperate chance of scaling it. They shouldered the ropes that Raven had liberated from a compound warehouse and then started their climb at a dead run, sprinting up the rock's lowest slope with a momentum that took them to a pool in a fold of rock thirty feet above the surrounding sand. They clung to its rim.

"You okay?" Daniel asked the others.

Tucker looked around at the bare stone. "No snakes so far."

"I don't think a flea could cling to this dildo," Ethan said, looking upward at the pale formation rising like a horn. "How the hell are we going to get up this, Daniel?"