Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

Alison reached up and brushed some hair from her face. “So what are you suggesting?” she asked. Eva noted that she did not sound entirely unhappy at this suggestion; Alison must be hating this as much as the rest of them. Eva took a step closer to her.

“Look. We’ve come to the valley now. Why don’t we toss the coin to decide which way to go? Cross it, go back, or head up or down the valley itself? Once we’ve made that decision, we choose the best possible path. We don’t change direction until another path suggests itself.”

Alison sighed. “It’s cutting down options.”

“I know. But we’re exhausted. A good leader knows when to cut her losses and change the plan.”

“I’m not the leader,” insisted Alison, but she smiled a little as she said it.

The coin sent them scrambling down to the floor of the valley. The going was easier than it had been, but still not without difficulties. They slid down earth slopes, clutching at branches to slow themselves, or stumbled down the hill at a half run from trunk to trunk, grabbing at them to stop themselves plunging down too fast. At one point Katie stumbled and slid about thirty meters on her side before finally coming to a halt. Alison screamed; Nicolas and Eva watched how pale her face got. When they came to Katie, she was clutching her arm and crying. There was blood on the tattered arm of her anorak and they now realized why she had not taken it off in the warmth of the morning. Her arm had been more badly injured than they had thought when she had tripped on the broken branch earlier.

“We’ve got to get that seen to,” Nicolas said grimly.

“I’ll be okay,” Katie whimpered.

“If you’re sure.” Alison gazed down the slope. “Not much further.”

“She’s not okay,” Nicolas said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Look,” Eva said, pointing upward, forestalling another argument.

Three airplanes flew overhead, their white contrails forming a triangle high above.

“They’re too high to see us,” Alison said dismissively. She began to scramble downward again.

“We wouldn’t see them if they were stealth planes,” Nicolas said. He looked at Katie. “Do you want a hand?”

“I’ll be okay,” she said, and moved slowly down the hill again.

They scrambled further down. Just as they were nearing the bottom, they came up against a wall of rhododendrons. Tangled brown branches and glossy green leaves choked the bottom of the valley, completely blocking their path.

“We’re trapped,” Nicolas said flatly. “There’s no way through that.”

Katie gazed at the tangled mass of vegetation in silence. Her eyes were filling with tears.

“We’ll never get back up that hill,” Eva whispered.

Alison turned to face them, her face resolute.

“We’ll carry on downwards,” she said. “There’s bound to be a way through.”

They trudged disconsolately downward, feeling thoroughly miserable. The sun had risen high enough to shine in their faces, making them hot and bad-tempered. Tree roots lay hidden beneath the brown debris of the forest floor, tripping them or sending them slipping toward the crowded green bushes below. On the far side of the valley the old pylons they had seen earlier marched downward, too. Eva looked at the cables that looped down and up, down and up as they were passed from arm to arm.

“There’s no end to this,” Nicolas muttered angrily.

Just when they thought the rhododendrons would never end, a path revealed itself.

They stood gasping beside the sudden gap in the glossy green barrier, sweat dripping from their faces and trickling down their backs. Walking along the steep slope was extremely tiring; their water was almost finished.

Nicolas shook his head in resignation. “It’s found us, hasn’t it? It knows where we are.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Alison said stubbornly.

The path was formed by a tall ash tree that had fallen, giving them a walkway over the tangled bushes it had crushed. Katie and Eva glanced at each other, and Katie shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Alison picked her way forward through the cage of broken branches and kicked the trunk.

“It looks natural enough to me. The roots could have been washed away by all the rain we’ve been having lately. Trees fall over all the time.”

“Does it make any difference?” Nicolas asked. “Whether it was an accident or arranged by the Watcher, we have to go that way. What other choice do we have?”

He pushed past Alison and climbed up over the trunk.

The path led them down to a yellow stone road running along the valley floor. Eva slithered to the ground to find Alison and Nicolas already deep in argument.

“It’s been cut. You can see it’s been cut! And recently!” Nicolas shouted.

There was no denying it. The severed base of the tree shone white and smelled of sap. Piles of clean white sawdust lay in the brown mud around the stump.

“So what?” said Alison. “We’re in a forest. They cut down trees all the time.”

“Not individually! And they don’t just leave them to rot. It’s the Watcher. It’s reeling us in.”

He was blushing red with heat and anger, sweat dripping down from his curly red hair, mud cracked and dried on his jeans. He was a mess.

“Fine,” Alison said coldly. “All the more reason to toss the coin. Heads we go up, tails we go down.”

“Why? There’s nothing up there in the hills. We should head down and try and get to civilization. The Watcher already knows where we are.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Katie interjected quietly. She blushed and looked down.

“She’s right,” said Alison. “We can’t give up now. Maybe the Watcher has covered all the bases. There must be a finite number of paths leading away from the Center. Maybe he’s laid signs on all of them, just to dishearten us.”

“No! This is too much. Alison, think! What were you in for? Not being able to face up to the real world. Don’t you see: that’s what you’re doing now. It’s beaten us. Why don’t you admit it?”

“We don’t know that.”

Slowly, deliberately, she pulled the coin from her pocket and spun it in the air. She caught it deftly, smacked it on her wrist, and looked.

“Heads,” she called. “We go up.”

Nicolas shook his head. “No. Not this time.”

“Suit yourself,” Alison said. She turned on her heel and began to march up the loose yellow stone of the road. After watching her walk twenty meters or so, Nicolas turned to face Eva and Katie.

“What about you two?” he said. “You must see that she’s wrong.”

Katie looked down at the ground. “We don’t know that. We agreed before we set out to follow the coin.”

Nicolas stamped his foot petulantly.

“I might have known you’d follow Alison. What about you, Eva? You know I’m right.”

Nicolas was burning red with anger; his face was twitching. Eva suddenly realized that, whether he was right or wrong, she didn’t want to go off on her own with Nicolas.

She shook her head gently. “I’m sorry, Nicolas. Katie is right. We agreed to follow the coin.”

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

He turned and began to stamp down the road in the opposite direction. Katie began to trail up the hill after Alison, who was making good progress with her angry, determined stride.

Eva sighed in resignation, and as she did so an enormous weight dropped from her. A realization was slowly dawning. Here she was, trapped in a long valley, hemmed in by overgrown rhododendron bushes, too hot, thirsty and hungry and with nothing to look forward to but a hard climb up a steep stone road, but…