William Dietrich - Getting back

"Why are you even here, Raven?"

"I had a mission. I wanted to see."

"No you didn't."

"It's for the best, Daniel. It's always for the best: I believe in them. It's all I have to believe in. I was going soft and getting confused, and so by checking the pilot's fate and getting the electronics I'd prove myself and either be confirmed in my mission or abandon it. I'm being tested, just like you. The problem is, you've turned a test into torture. We're more than a thousand miles from where we need to be."

"Are we?"

Raven looked at him with exasperation. "Yes. It's a long walk to the beach."

"What if this is where we need to be?"

"What do you mean?" Amaya asked.

"What if we don't get back, ever? Could we make a life here? Find meaning here?"

"In that lunatic's prison?" Raven scoffed.

"No, not there. Not even here, exactly. But in Australia. There have to be more habitable places than this on the continent, if people truly lived here. What if we could find one of them and start over?"

"Haven't you had enough privation and savagery yet?"

"There have to be ruins we could use for salvage. New adventurers arriving with needed skills. Maybe we could turn the tables on United Corporations and stay by choice, creating a new colony as radical as America was, or the old Australia. It could be the utopia they pretended they were sending us to. We'd start over, but we wouldn't make the mistakes they made. Lives would have more meaning. We'd always be asking why, instead of how much."

"Stay in this wilderness?"

"Stay for what I came for. To truly live life."

She looked at him in wonder. "You've gone insane, haven't you? You didn't throw the activator away, you thrust it away. You've burned our ships so we can't turn back, like Cortes in Mexico. You haven't learned a thing by coming here."

"I've learned to keep asking why. You're the one who taught me that."

Raven looked hopelessly out across the desert. "I don't think I see what you seem to see out here."

"Now you'll have time to."

She took that as a challenge. "No I won't. And by the time we get to the coast you'll be begging to come back with me."

"Great," Ethan muttered, watching the two of them.

"I said he'll be begging, Ethan. I didn't say I'd take him." For the first time she allowed a slight smile. "He's unreliable."

"Unpredictable." He looked at her wryly. He was mad as hell, but he still wanted her. The talking had helped, somehow.

"Co-dependent," Amaya corrected.

It was true. As frustrated as they were with each other, they were forcibly linked and shared a simple goal: to get to the coast. Everything else could be set aside, perhaps.

"Beg you to take me back?" Now Daniel grinned. "And give up this?" He gestured toward their bed of sand. "I don't think so."

They slept.

At the end of the third day they came to the road.

It was a ribbon of broken asphalt, vegetation erupting from its cracked surface like green pimples. Its course was broken entirely in places by washouts or drifting dunes. Such disrepair meant the highway was impassable to any vehicle short of a tractor, but it was still a startling piece of linear regularity, running north and south as far as they could see. The Australians had come this way! In roaring trailer trucks or whispering solar cars. There would be towns on such a road- empty and ghostly, yes, but still the ruins of communitiesand maybe water. There might be faded signs, rusted wrecks, fallen ropes of copper wire and fiber optic cable sheathed in rubber: a junkyard of delights. It was funny how fabulous and yet foreign such detritus sounded after weeks in the wilderness. The technological litter of a lost world! The fugitives paused a minute, dazed by the familiar paved firmness beneath their boots, a goanna lizard lazily sunning itself on the radiant macadam a hundred yards away. Here was a path to somewhere.

"We'd better not use it," Raven said.

"Why not?" Ethan asked. After stone and sand, the highway looked marvelously easy. And the idea of looking for useful scraps of technology appealed to him.

"Because if they come after the transmitter this road would be the most obvious place to look."

"We'd make better time on the road."

"They'd make better time too."

"Besides, it goes the wrong way," Amaya said. "North and south. If an edge to the Cone exists, it should be east. The country is supposed to get better that way."

"It's gotten worse," Ethan said.

"Maybe that's because we haven't really come that far," she countered. "A few hundred miles, at best. It takes a while to see a difference on foot."

Ethan looked morosely out at the desert. "I hope you're right."

"At least we can use the road like a river to throw off pursuit," said Daniel. "Water erases scents a bloodhound can follow and pavement erases footprints. Let's follow it a ways until we find a rocky area and then strike east. That should discourage anyone from following."

They did as he suggested, walking north two miles until they came to a stony ridge that led east. They left the road there, taking care not to make any mark. After three miles on the ridge they dropped into an adjacent gully and dug successfully for water, then pushed on. Within hours the road had faded in memory like a mirage.

The gully petered out so they kept walking east across undulating sand. Their pace was less anxious now. Reaching the road had become some kind of psychological milestone, relaxing their fear of recapture by confirming they were getting someplace. The highway seemed likely to confuse Rugard if he ever bothered to come this far, and it was clear they'd outpaced him. It also promised that there were more remnants of civilized Australia somewhere ahead. Still, they walked into the night again to put as many miles behind them as possible before finally camping. Measurement again! Daniel thought. Because they'd met other humans. Their camp was dark and cheerless. There were no tents and no stoves now. They had no wood for a fire and dared not light one anyway. Instead they ate a few more mouthfuls of cold food and collapsed into sleep.

Daniel woke to find himself cuddled tightly against Raven. Instinctively, they'd crept together in the chill of the night. His chin was on her hair, and his cock embarrassingly hard against the small of her back. The instinct startled him. Gently, he sidled his hips away from her and she shifted, blinked, and slowly came awake.

If she'd noticed his unconscious state, she gave no sign. She glanced sleepily over her shoulder at him, as if bemused, and then got up quickly and moved away to prepare for the day's journey.

Amaya had cuddled into Ethan.

They ate quickly, chattering a bit more now, their mood still tense but improved by their distance from Erehwon. At least they were alive, and the transmitter that remained gave them purpose. Maybe the worst was behind them. Everyone was still tired, but the exhaustion of the first day of their escape had slowly been pushed back. In a few more days they would look for an oasis to stop for complete recuperation. Meanwhile they were still pushing hard due east, as near as they could judge it.

Their higher spirits didn't last long. The walking became progressively tougher. The domination of sand was mounting, and they realized they were entering utter desert: not just arid scrubland, but the edge of a sea of sandy dunes, red and sinuous. Each dune ran north and south as far as the eye could see and crest followed crest in a succession to the eastern horizon. It was like looking across an ocher ocean. Walking became increasingly laborious because level ground had disappeared. They trudged up the face of dunes that seemed twice as high as they really were because of the tendency to slip backward, gained the crest, and then slid awkwardly down the other side. Any breeze was absent in the hot hollows. Vegetation had disappeared and water seemed never to have fallen. Their boots, clothes, nostrils, and mouths were all irritated by sand.