den. There couldn't be a right one. So then I reasoned the transmitter must require another component to penetrate this jamming- an idea I remembered from my aviation work. The beacon only works if a pilot puts two halves together: the transmitter itself, and the activator we just found. I think the body we discovered confirms this idea.'
'How so?' Ethan asked.
'My guess is that the pilot tried to bargain for his life by promising he could signal for help if they could catch you, because you were unwittingly carrying the crucial component- the activator to penetrate this jamming. But when they found you unconscious, you didn't have it. It wasn't even in your pack. Maybe the pilot remained evasive in hopes of finding the activator by himself, later. And the Warden, in an impatient rage, killed him.'
'So now we have to go to this psycho and ask him for the other half?' Ico asked. 'This is the plan you didn't tell us about?'
'Ask. Take. Bargain. Whatever it requires to get back.'
'Great. Whoopee.'
Amaya was looking at Raven skeptically, glancing from her to Daniel. 'You figured this out all by yourself?'
'I'm not promising it will work. It's a chance, that's all.'
'Nobody's that smart, Raven.'
'It's common sense, Amaya.'
'You said you knew avionics. Tell me what a neural-rod stabilizer is.'
Raven looked at her with irritation.
'Tell me what a wing pulse-circuit is.'
'That wasn't my area.'
'You don't know a thing about avionics, do you?'
'I don't have to prove myself to you! You're just jealous of my relationship with Daniel!'
He looked up at that, curious. What relationship?
'You don't know a thing about aviation,' Amaya persisted. 'But you do know a lot about Outback Adventure. You're lying to us, aren't you? Just like you lied to Daniel.'
'I'm trying to help you!'
'Why were you so surprised to find him here? You were the one who told him about Australia.'
'It's a big continent!'
'Why did you save us at all?'
'I'm beginning to wonder that too! Go back out into the damn desert if you don't like my help!'
'Who are you, Raven?'
She was angry. The two women glared at each other.
'Who is Luther Cox?' It was Daniel, interrupting softly.
Raven turned to him impatiently. 'You know who he is. Your supervisor back home.'
'Sure, I know. But how did you know last night? I never mentioned him to you.'
'You must have.' Her eyes flickered away.
'No I didn't.'
'You just don't remember.'
'Amaya's right. You know too much. When we were dying of thirst and you found us, you knew who Ico was, and his relationship to meeven though we haven't talked since I met him. You've always known too much. You recruited me, didn't you, Raven?'
She stared back at him, her expression flat. 'You recruited yourself.'
'What are you talking about?' It was Tucker, sitting up against his propped travois.
'She works for them,' Daniel said, watching her. 'She came on to me and talked wilderness but she was working for them all the time. It's the only thing that makes sense. She's some kind of agent. She found me, and got me interested, and gave me the passwords to get in, even while pretending she didn't want to. It was a seduction, a seduction without sex. She worked with my employer to do it. And now she's still working for them, but doing what? Picking up junk from the Outback?'
They were all watching her now.
'Burying their dead,' Ico guessed.
'Why, Raven?' Daniel asked softly.
She took a breath. 'It's for your own good.'
'Being abandoned out here?'
'For society's good.'
'For your own damn good, I'll bet,' Ico charged. 'How much are they paying you? My God, she's from the kind who put us here! If she's their agent, she deserves to be hung up on the rocks like that pilot!'
'You put you here!' she retorted. 'Think! Weren't you told the dangers? Didn't you have chance after chance to back out? You were the ones who were convinced you could survive here!'
'Until we found an exit. Not forever. Not with a bunch of damned convicts.'
'You'll be here forever if you string me up. Yes, I work for them. And yes, you may despise me. But I'm your only ticket out of here. This rendezvous wasn't planned, but you help me and I'll help you.' She glared at him. 'I've already saved your miserable little life once. I didn't have to do that. I could have just left you in the sand.'
Ico scowled at her. 'You've got the miserable part right.'
'Why?' Daniel repeated, sorrow in his voice. Whys filling his mind like the whys she had challenged him with in the tunnels.
Raven glanced around at all their faces, their confusion and mistrust and looks of betrayal, and sighed. 'United Corporations doesn't despise you people,' she explained wearily. 'They admire you, in a way. But they can't afford you. They're afraid of you. In the old days, society might have had a use: explorers, soldiers, entrepreneurs. But the world's full. Twelve billion people now. You live in the wealthy part and you don't realize how fragile everything is. How on the edge the planet is. If the system fails, if the economy and ecology collapse, billions will die- billions! Survival requires conformity. And because of that, the sideways view isn't an inspiration. It's a threat.'
'That's crazy,' Tucker said. 'What about new ideas?'
'They don't want new ideas. Modifications, updates, yes, but nothing truly revolutionary. Don't you understand? The population has aged. The world has become conservative. The twentieth century was a nightmare of new ideas and it led to war, genocide, terror, and depression. Nobody wants to go back to that. We can't afford to go back to that.'
'Like ancient China,' Daniel recalled. 'Fossilized. It sent out the greatest fleet of discovery in history in the Middle Ages, circumnavigated the Indian Ocean, found nothing superior to the goods back home, and disbanded the ships. It didn't want new ideas either.'
'Which meant it was ultimately exploited by Europeans,' Ico said.
'Except there are no more Europeans,' Raven explained. 'No upstarts, I mean. Everyone on the planet is the same. Same products, same restaurants, same songs, same stories, same ethics. People still cling to the rituals of old traditions, to promote tourism if nothing else, but really it's just one big country now. Or one big company. There are no foreigners anymore. No barbarians. And China lasted longer than anybody: that's the lesson United Corporations takes from history. China endured. United Corporations has to endure. My God, the entire system is built on stability over time: the stocks, the bonds, the revenue streams, the retirement plans. The greatest good for the greatest number.'
'You believe this?' Daniel asked her.
'I know it. I lived it. I'm an ethnic Balkan, Daniel- a Gypsy, in part, by heritage- and in my early world things weren't quite so tidy and constipated and boring as in yours. In the early years of this century we had revolution every thirty minutes, and a new ideology every hour. We had to check each morning to see what our money was worth. My family lost everything- everything! And my father lost his life, dying in the riots. So when U.C. finally began to buy things out, to stabilize the currency, to put an end to the irrational nationalism and ethnic strife that had caused so much destructionwhen United Corporations put the poor back to work- I had hope for the first time in my life. Hope! From the stability you think is dull.'
'Yes, but… this?'
