William Dietrich - Getting back

"But don't you feel the rightness of this? For the first time I feel like I'm in a place where I belong. Humans were born in country like this. The savanna."

"Exactly. You do, and I don't. Normal people don't. I miss my machines. I miss my security."

"Even if it deadens the spirit?"

"Poverty and strife and fear are even more deadening. I told you, we came from different experiences. The companies took me in as a child, after my father died and my mother broke down. They schooled me, trained me, and finally convinced me I had to help sustain what they stood for. And I wanted to! I'm not blind, Daniel. I'm not immune to the beauty of this place. I'm not unconscious of the fate of some of the exiles. I just don't see this as a realistic option. And I don't appreciate your sticking me here by throwing the activator at Ico."

"As we didn't appreciate being sent here without the full truth."

She shrugged. "Okay. We're even. So don't try to get me to endorse what you volunteered for and I didn't. Camping is fun only if you get to go home at the end."

She wouldn't look at him as they ate their rabbit. He glanced at Amaya and she looked away from him too. Well, he couldn't blame her for that.

Still, his optimistic mood wouldn't leave him.

"I like this," Daniel tried again with Ethan the next day as they trudged along.

The other man glanced around, wondering what he was talking about.

"I like being here and just going," Daniel continued. "The simplicity of it."

"Mindless?"

"Fulfilling. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do but not trying to do any more. Like an animal. I'm content, I mean."

"You're going someplace. Animals don't do that."

"Migratory ones do. Humans must have started like this, wandering out of Africa until we wandered all over the earth. Nomads. Drifters. It's why this seems right, I think."

"Except eventually humans settled down," said Ethan. "They got hungry, and had kids, and invented agriculture. Then came civilization."

"With tyranny and war."

"And medicine and art."

Daniel smiled. "That's why men are torn, I think. Between settling down and moving on. There's this yin and yang in our brain that comes from all of human history. The nomad versus the farmer. But what if farming was a wrong turn? What if that's the underlying story of Genesis: how people turned away from the Garden of the natural world to the temptation of our artificial one? The Tree of Knowledge?"

"If we hadn't bitten the apple there'd be no Genesis, no Bible, and no Gutenberg press to tell us about Eden," Ethan countered. "This isn't us, not really, Daniel. Civilization is. I've changed my mind about being out here. I was a gadget freak, and quite frankly I miss my gadgets. They were my toys. I like logic, regularity, and predictability, and all those things seem in short supply out here. So to me, the challenge isn't surviving without civilization. It's learning from the wild and bringing that experience back to make civilization better."

"You sound like Outback Adventure."

"First we believed everything they told us and then we believed nothing. I'm just wondering if some of what they said is really true, in a deeper sense than they intended."

"So what are you going to do if we get back?"

Ethan sighed. "I don't know. My worry is I'll end up not feeling I fit in either place, or will be on the run as an underground outlaw. Maybe I could make a life here, but not like Oliver. Not like an animal. I'd want to build back some of what I had, and strike a compromise." He looked at Amaya, walking ahead. "Find someone to build with."

The dusty, ragged, and unkempt members of Rugard Sloan's Expedition of Recovery, as he'd grandly decided to call it (although it was more like a lynch mob in mood and moral development), almost tiptoed along the blacktop road in wonder. Pavement! A small thing, but as fervently appreciated in this trackless wilderness as an exercise yard in a prison compound. Here was evidence of past civilization! Of destination! Possibility! Somewhere over the horizon were ruined cities and salvageable luxuries. Somewhere over the horizon was Raven's electronic key to getting out of this whole sorry mess. And because of that, the hardened, bitter inmates of Erehwon ran up and down the skin of asphalt like excited children, clucking over the road as if it were an open gate in a coop of fenced chickens.

The reaction made Rugard slightly uneasy. His followers were angry, yes, for the slaughter in the canyon. They were set on getting back what the bitch had stolen if it meant even the slightest chance of escape from this continental hell: and he'd told them that Raven held the key to getting back. But at Erehwon his rule was the only possibility. In leading them out into the desert, Rugard had made possible the danger that some of them might actually begin to think. He'd have to drive hard to discourage that.

What drove him was not just the desire to break out of this unwalled prison but to revenge himself on the urban smart-asses who had run away. Rugard hated their type, these wealthy urbanites who came here- hated their manner, their unconscious superiority, their naivete, their indignant outrage, their privilege, their whining, and their clumsy helplessness. How well he knew their kind! It mattered little to him that they were stuck in Australia as he was: they were of the same class of arrogant bastards who had imprisoned him. The same class that had held him down all his life: quietly sneering at him, ignoring him, jailing him, always trying to crush him. He was better than they were! Smarter, tougher. Now they'd done it again, humiliating him in his own home, and the possibility they might escape was so maddening he couldn't rest until he hunted them down. Yet Raven and her accomplices had a long head start because of the time it had taken Rugard to assemble supplies, saddle the camels pressed into service to help carry them, sharpen the weapons, and muster resolve. Some of his inmates had balked at following the fugitives at all! The Warden had reacted swiftly, making clear the necessity of fearing him more than they feared the desert. "You can stay with the ants then," he'd growled, burying one of those who hesitated to his scrawny neck and squeezing fruit pulp over his screaming head. Rugard had waited until the insects had eaten out the man's eyes and he'd begged for death, and then ordered him dug up, alive, his head pitted and bleeding with bites. A bandage had been wrapped around the victim's empty sockets and he'd been brought stumbling along, a reminder of the consequences of disobedience or hesitation, infection swelling the man's face like a balloon. The lesson had been salutary, the Warden judged. Still, the thieves were far ahead and the Expedition of Recovery needed help if it was to catch up. They needed an advantage.

Rugard looked with dislike at Ico Washington, kneeling on the pavement with a battered map spread before him. The weasel was oily and obsequious and slyly mocking. No wonder his former superiors had encouraged the little toad to run off to this wasteland! The Warden couldn't wait to get rid of Ico himself. Still, the man was convinced his piece of paper might give them a chance, even though to Rugard it looked like the kind of fantasy chart that fools bought from liars.

"Well? Did they come this way?"

Ico squinted upward. "Obviously we don't know. If I were them I'd stay off the roads to avoid contact with groups like us. But this highway could be the break we need. If we follow it we might be able to get ahead of them."

"The road goes north and south, not east. You said they'd go east."

Ico nodded. "They must, to use the transmitter. But look here. If this map is correct, this road must join an east-running one a few hundred miles north of here. We can make twice the time on graded pavement that they can cross-country, I'll bet. We follow these highways, get ahead of them, and throw out a net near the coast. They'll be lulled into complacency by then. We find them, get the transmitter back, and escape."