William Dietrich - Getting back

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.