William Dietrich - Getting back

He heard her bootsteps on the broken glass behind him and ignored her. He was tired of trying.

The elevator wouldn't work, of course, so he took the stairs.

Daniel climbed steadily. She followed, two or three flights behind, their echoes a kind of lonely conversation. The paint was flaking and water stains from the failing roof ran down the walls. The structure itself was solid, a web of concrete and steel. How many centuries would it last before sharing the fate of Australia's eroded mountains? Or would someone come back, implode it, and start over?

On a whim he left the stairs on the fourteenth floor. There was no thirteenth, but superstition hadn't saved them. There was a dark hallway, and then a brighter, windowed expanse of office cubicles lit by broken windows. The carpet was rotting, mold grew on the walls, and bird droppings spotted the desks, and yet nothing had really changed. Dark computer screens- this was before the cheaper opti-glasses- were the central shrine on desktops that still bore yellowed or wadded memos, cracked cups, dried pens, and posted corporate guidelines. Everything had been abandoned abruptly. Chest-high beige dividers formed a succession of cubicles. As familiar as Microcore.

This was my life, he thought.

He could hear the light breathing of Raven, resting after their climb of the stairs. She'd come in behind him. "Look familiar?"

"Too much so."

"What we're trying to get back to."

"What I came here to escape from."

"These people were happy, Daniel. They had lives."

"Yes. They did."

He walked past a supervisory desk to a window and looked out over the city. Its rational grid reminded him of the sole of Ethan's boots, a street plan that dated back to the Roman military camp. What do the animals call us, he wondered, we of the right angle and straight line? The rulers, of course. We rule, with rules, from streets and towers of ruled calibration. Until it all goes wrong. Until we bet everything on our own cleverness, and disappear so fast we leave no explanation of the fatal mistake. How many other lost civilizations had succumbed like this one?

"So do you feel nostalgic at all?" she persisted. "Do you feel the pull of society?"

"Of course. My society."

"You mean the pull of your tribe. The pull of the primitive."

He looked down. Some of his followers were coming out from stores, chortling over improbable finds of small appliances and decaying clothing. They'd try on something, or punch the buttons of a powerless machine, and then abandon them in the street. In truth, little that was useful remained.

"The pull of my new friends, Raven. Of people who need people. Not some gigantic institution like this company. Not like United Corporations."

"Daniel, an institution is people. That's all it is."

"No. When it gets too big something happens to it. Like getting too much money, or eating too much food. It can make you sick, mentally and physically. That's what's wrong with United Corporations. The more they envelop, the less they become. Until finally they start decaying and destroying, like this place."

"It was an accident."

"Was it? When it grew out of the total domination they try to achieve, of both man and nature? When does an accident become inevitable?"

She closed her eyes. "When is a mistake just a mistake?"

He looked out across the city. "You could defend a tower like this, I suppose," he mused absently. "From people like Rugard, I mean. But a castle also becomes a trap. When you lock the door you have to have a way back out."

"You're speaking of us in Australia."

"Yes. Like Australia." He turned then and smiled at her, suddenly feeling lightened at this encounter with the ruins. He hadn't been sure of his own reaction and now realized he missed none of this old world. His past held no allure for him, despite all the hardships in this one. "I said I don't blame you for putting me here, Raven."

"And I forgive you for throwing away the activator. The trip has been good for me. I admit it. So why is this so difficult?"

"Why is what so difficult?"

"Us."

"Because… I'm in love with you without even being sure I like you. Because you won't love me."

She sighed, saying nothing.

He watched her carefully. "Ethan wants me to come back with you, you know."

"He does?"

"He wants to give up his place on the rescue plane. He's falling in love with Amaya, and falling in love with Australia. It's beautiful here, far more beautiful than home. He wants to stay and send me in his place. Send me, to tell the world."

"Would you?" She said it cautiously.

"I don't know." He cocked his head, as if this were the first time he'd truly considered it. "I don't know if anyone would listen, or care, even if they knew the truth. I don't know if they'd let me live to tell anyone."

"I wouldn't let them hurt you, Daniel."

"You already did, remember?"

She flushed, and he instantly regretted the retort.

"But that's not why I'm hesitating. I'm unsure because I've come to believe the planet does need a place for misfits like me. It always has."

"You understand that?"

He moved away from the window, walking back into the cubicles. "Not in the way you do. Come here. I want to show you something."

She followed warily as if he were going to shock her with a pile of bones. But there was nothing like that, just a sheet of faded paper pinned to a cubicle wall. He pulled it off and gave it to her. "Your institution."

The paper was so aged it was hard to see. At first she thought it was something abstract, or a painted copy of the aboriginal designs they'd seen on rock walls. Then she realized it was a child's drawing. She squinted, looking closer. There were faint pencil lines on the drawing, forming two words.

For Daddy.

"It's not about economic systems, Raven. It's about the human heart."

She blinked, flustered at this offering from a little girl long dead. The child would have been a woman now, with children of her own, looking ahead to grandchildren. Except she wouldn't.

"It's about letting people be themselves. Letting people be. This child didn't deserve her fate."

"That's not fair." There was a tremble in her voice that she hated. "This city- this girl- might never have even existed without- "

"We have to go outside in order to get into our inside. Because if we don't then all that United Corporations stands for doesn't mean anything. It's just stuff, and disastrous mistakes, and little girls that end up killed by our own plagues in our mania to control our environment. We don't need an Australia as a dumping ground. We need wilderness to save us from ourselves, to remind us what's basic and simple and true."

She squeezed her eyes shut again, the drawing fluttering to the floor. "You have to look at the big picture…"

"That's why I don't know if I can go back with you, Raven. Because my heart doesn't know where it belongs."

She was quiet for a while and then she spoke. Her voice was small. "I'm sorry I can't say I love you. I don't know what I am supposed to say, to make you come back with me. I just want you to."

"Why? I challenge everything you stand for."

"To save the others."

"That's not why."

"I do care for them, you know. I do like them."

"That's not why."

She lowered her eyes. "So I'm not alone."

He stepped close, reaching out to grasp her arms. His grip was firm, his eyes intense as he looked into hers. "Then say you'll stay here with me, Raven. Say you'll give it all up, for me. Say you'll stay in Australia. Say that and maybe it won't matter where I am, so long as I'm with you." And then he bent to kiss her.

She stiffened again, but only for a moment. Then she was kissing him back this time, her lips open, her arms coming around him, her body pressing and then moving against his. He held her roughly, hungrily, his hands roaming to caress.