William Dietrich - Getting back

He saw her form ahead like a slim phantom, disappearing in the shadow of an overhang and then rematerializing as a silhouette along the crest of the ridge. Rocks skittered out from the feet of both of them and she heard him once and turned. But she didn't stop and didn't call, just kept moving upward, as elusive as hope.

The sky was a vast blue bowl, its color deepening with approaching night. Australia lay around them in a shadowy panorama, its reds having faded to cobalt. There were no lights, no roads, no memory of civilization. It was the dawn of time. The crest of the ridge was a dragon's back, a series of short pinnacles like the plates of a dinosaur. For a moment he thought he'd missed her in the shadow of one, or that to avoid him she'd doubled back and slipped down to camp. But then he saw her ahead at the uppermost peak, alone under the first stars.

She was sitting hunched, knees pulled up to her chest, on a shelf of time-smoothed rock that was slick but dry and still radiating heat from the day's sun. A full moon was cresting the horizon. It was orange and huge, an autumn lantern, and it threw enough warm light to illuminate the profile of her body and the architecture of her face. Her features had the same polished fineness of the rock, immaculate and tan, her eyes large and dark as she looked sorrowfully out across the grass and scrub plain. Her back was bent, the pattern of her spine visible against the tightness of her tattered cotton shirt, and her breasts swelled where they were pushed against her thighs, her slim arms holding her knees. Her black hair was tied with the scrap of a leather shoelace to fall toward her waist. A withered flower she'd picked earlier in the day was still tucked into the knot. She was the most beautiful creature Daniel had ever seen, a nemesis who was vulnerable, lonely.

She heard his footsteps behind her. "Go away."

He ignored that, kneeling at her back.

"Please, just leave me alone," she said wearily. "It's too hard."

He touched her shoulders.

She stiffened. "Daniel, just let it be!"

He ignored her protests. He held her by her shoulders and bent to kiss her rigid cheek, wet with tears. Then her neck, and then he let his lips drift up to her ear. "Amaya's right. I think I do love you, Raven," he whispered.

"Daniel…" she groaned.

"I'm sorry I haven't said it. I was angry, because it's true I came to Australia because of you. But not because you tricked me. That's what I've been thinking about, and what I've had to admit to myself. It was because you were the one thing in life I could decide I wanted, after a lifetime of not knowing what to want. So I came to the Outback on a million to one shot that I'd find you and somehow break through to you- that I could somehow convince you to love me like I love you."

He kissed her cheek and then her neck, again, and again, descending to her shoulder.

She remained rigid. "You can't. You can't convince me."

He stopped, and took a breath, determined now. "I came because there was something in you that hit me with instant recognition when I met you, some part of you that I recognized in myself. I knew you, Raven. Or I'm going to know you. In some past life or some future one. That's what I thought way back in the city. I couldn't forget you. The only reason I haven't been able to forgive you is because I couldn't forgive myself. I couldn't forgive wasting so much of my life, going after the wrong things. I blamed you for me. But when I climb up these rocks and look out at the wilderness in all its timeless size and beauty, I realize how conceited such unforgiveness is. We're both so microscopic. We counted for nothing at United Corporations and we count for nothing here. We're nothing- except to each other. To each other, we count for everything."

He reached up to touch her face and turn her to him, her eyes wet, bending to kiss her fully on the lips.

And then she thrust him away. "No. Don't do this to me."

"Raven…"

"I count for something, Daniel. I count in that world because I believe in it. You're a dangerous man, Daniel Dyson, dangerous to them and dangerous to me. So I'm going to leave you here, abandon you in Australia, while I go back and let them decide what your fate should be."

"They put you here. They don't deserve your loyalty!"

"And I don't deserve yours. Please don't complicate things with this love of yours. Because I don't need it. I don't need it from anyone."

"You know you do…"

She rolled away from him and kneeled, looking at him intently. "Look. I need you to help get me out from under the Cone. Do that first. Do that for me. And then I'll decide where to go, or what to do, or how to live my life. Then, and only then, when I have a true choice, am I going to decide my why."

As the land grew more hospitable, the fugitives began to encounter ruins that seemed both reassuring and disturbing. The decaying structures proved that humans had lived here, and presumably could again. They also warned of the impermanence of existence. People had not just lived here, but lived in comfort, with machines and full pantries and regular mail. Now they were gone, their memories weeded over.

The dented and holed aluminum blades of a windmill came first, peeping from the brush near the crumbling remains of its wooden tower. The steel water tank it had once fed was ruptured and sinking into dirt that was the same red color as its corrosion. When Raven touched the metal, it flaked like scorched paper. Five miles farther on they came across the shell of a cattle station, the roof of the ranch house long since ripped off by clawing winds and its walls sagging inward with the graceful weariness of old wood. The weathered gray of the wreck was spotted by scraps of plastic and metal and glass: a disintegrating metal wash tub, a faded plastic shampoo bottle, a broken frame with no picture. There was rusting metal machinery, a garden long dead, and brush-snarled lengths of old plastic pipe, purchased for an irrigation project the plague had not allowed to be completed.

"It's funny how fast things go in a bit more than a quarter century," Daniel remarked. "People still lived here when I was born, and now everything they did has sunk into the desert."

"It's interesting how much stuff remains," countered Ethan. "Metal that doesn't have to be mined, plastic that doesn't have to be refined. It's like a rummage sale. There must be huge amounts of salvage in the old cities."

"You're thinking of treasure hunting?"

"I'm thinking how fast a group of people could rebuild things, given the kind of junk that's in a place like this. I mean if we had to stay here. Here we are at one farm and we've got enough to make better hunting weapons, containers- even lumber to make a cabin if we wanted it."

"Yes, lots to take," Oliver said. "Old things everywhere. But so are the spirits of the old ones. The Australians! Everywhere, even here. Can't you hear them?" He cocked his head to listen to the wind. "This is their place, not ours. So it's bad luck to take anything from a place like this, mate. Bad, bad luck. We shouldn't camp here either. They'd come to us, in the night. We have to walk farther on, into the bush."

"You believe in ghosts, Oliver?" Daniel asked.

"I don't have to believe. I see them all the time. The dead people, killed by new things. Killed by this stuff here." He kicked at the machinery. "I sleep away. I sleep where they don't come."

"See them?"

"They're here, if you know how to look."

"I agree," Amaya said, as she looked around. "This old station gives me the creeps. I feel like it's infectious."

"It's just a ranch," Raven said.

"It's a bunch of sad memories," Amaya said. "United Corporations should document and memorialize this, not hide it by sealing off the continent. This was genetic tinkering gone too far. Ordinary people should see this."