the sea.
'Daniel, I've decided not to go back,' Ethan announced quietly as they let their eyes skip across the overgrown cityscape, searching for any sign of life in the distant ruins.
'What?'
'I've decided it would be better if you returned with Raven. Not me.'
'Why?'
'I think you make a better fit.'
'It's your seat, Ethan. Your crash, your transmitter, yours by length of exile. We already decided this.'
'I don't want to go back.' He shook his head, as if puzzled himself. 'Not yet, anyway. I miss things, sure, but not enough that I need to get back right now. There's things I'd miss even more here.'
'Amaya.'
'Yes. And another thing.'
'What?'
'This country. I'm falling in love with it too.'
They looked out across the rolling hills, blue with haze. Even in the underpopulated areas of the United Corporations world, roads curved, power lines strutted across the contours, and the invisible matrix of property lines and survey markers reminded how the planet had been parceled out. Here, everything was at the beginning again. No one owned anything. Everything still seemed possible.
Daniel sighed. 'I'd rather have you go and want to come back. Amaya would be a pretty good guarantee you wouldn't forget us here.'
'No, I'm beginning to think I could make a better life here, once we get past the convicts. Not out in the desert, no. But here we have wood and water and livestock and the remnants of a lot of technology. Not to mention land, and room, and freedom. It's beautiful here. In fact, it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The new Australians, like Raven said.'
'I've been thinking the same thing.'
'There you go then.'
'So now we're going to argue about who has to go instead of who has to stay?'
He laughed. 'We'd get plenty of volunteers, still. I'm just saying you make the most sense of any of us.'
'I can't go back, Ethan. I can't lead this group in a race to the coast and then abandon them.'
'You wouldn't be abandoning them, you'd be saving them, or at least giving them a choice of which world they want to live in. And you'd have far more influence over Raven than I would: you two together could get to people in power, maybe. She'd listen to you.'
'No she wouldn't. She doesn't want anything to do with me.'
'Nonsense. She's haunted by you. You haunt each other.'
'Now you sound like Amaya.'
'Amaya is smarter than any of us. You know, she'd take you over me, if she could.'
'That's crazy.'
'No it isn't. And it doesn't worry me. Because this connection between you and Raven is as obvious as gravity and as weird as… love. Not simple attraction so much as entwined destiny, I think. Everyone can see it. And somebody has to go, Daniel. Somebody has to take the story back. If Raven has to be one of them, the next most obvious choice is you. Start thinking about it, please.'
'She keeps defending United Corporations.'
'She keeps defending herself. Trying to live with herself. She'd love you for accepting her for what she is. And helping her to become what she wants to be.'
The city was called Gleneden, and it was one of the New Towns that United Corporations had erected around the globe to rationalize the distribution of its workforce and maximize the efficiency of resource extraction: in this case, minerals in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. They approached the town on the raised deck of an expressway, the pavement littered and cracked but the underlying structure sturdy enough to last for centuries. A few abandoned vehicles sat on the roadway shoulder, their shells rusting through and their glass imploded, the fragments clustered on rotting seats like drifts of diamonds. Trees had grown up to embrace the causeway railings so the bridge deck seemed to float on the forest canopy, and birds sounded an alarm and glided ahead of them in a startled weave, announcing this unexpected reappearance of humans. More flocks exploded off the derelict towers, wheeling in consternation. Then the avian inhabitants settled down and Gleneden was quiet again. In the distance down an empty avenue, a wild dog loped away.
'What if we see bodies?' Iris worried. 'I don't want to see bodies.'
'I don't think there'll be anything left by this time,' Daniel reassured. In truth he was unsure, and uneasy at the thought himself. He didn't want to find buildings of bones.
'I don't think we should go in at all,' Raven said.
They ignored her. It was curiosity more than need. They were in too much of a hurry to thoroughly explore or salvage anything in Gleneden, but the roads they were using to get ahead of Rugard led them to the New Town and they'd all quietly wondered how much remained. Or how much had been lost.
As they entered they saw that many stores had been looted and a few buildings had been torched. Yet taken as a whole, very little had been destroyed in the panic that accompanied the plague, and it was only the obvious hollowness of the towers and emptiness of the streets that proved disquieting. Everyone was subdued, morbidly wondering what it must have been like to have a civilization- in all its complexity and anxious energy and optimistic enthusiasm- suddenly snuffed out. Careers, romances, dreams, and regrets: all suddenly gone, rendered insignificant, by the breath of bioengineered plague.
The planned and hastily erected community was a snapshot of early twenty-first-century architecture, its retro style tempered by cost-conscious design and its warmth compromised by the demands of transportation. Human-scale pedestrian malls were backed by car-dictated parking lots, and tower villages were separated from each other by a moat of expressways and empty, overgrown lawns. Faded and streaked billboards and powerless neon announced sales of products that no longer existed. Directional signs pointed with names that were now obsolete. The architecture and layout were as precise as the geometrical design of a computer chip, and just as inhuman. Without people, it was just a collection of boxes. Instead of human skeletons they found automotive ones, the metallic carcasses of cars scattered now like corroding bones. The pavement had cracked and plants had rooted, spreading across the detritus of leaf litter and dust that had accumulated atop the impervious layer. There were vines and scrubby weeds and the buzz of insects, all announcing that the inhabitants of Gleneden were dead.
Daniel realized the desolation was slowly making him angry. 'These people were abandoned just like we were,' he said. The group had stopped at an intersection, instinctively huddling together.
'Left with no hope at all,' Amaya added.
The quiet was gloomy.
Raven looked irritated, as if this journey through a dead city was designed as an affront. 'They weren't abandoned, they were quarantined,' she corrected. 'There was no cure, so it was imperative the plague not jump to another land mass. It wasn't ruthless, it was… necessary.' She looked around grimly at the empty office and condominium towers.
The trekkers regarded her with distaste. 'And that pragmatism is what you worked to protect,' Daniel said.
She bit her lip. 'It's cruel to individuals. I don't deny that.'
'And now you're one of those individuals. Outcast like we are.'
'Yes.'
'Think of the souls that were lost here, Raven. The individuals. How long would it take you to write down their names? This place is a sin. A crime.'
'Don't you think I see that! But think of the souls that were saved elsewhere by this abandonment, or are saved every day by an economic and political system you think is so heartless.' She wasn't going to back down. 'Think of the billions that have tolerable lives because of the United Corporations order you call stultifying. This tragedy is an embarrassment, but it doesn't discredit that system, Daniel. It underlines its necessity. This shows how fragile all of human society is, how thin the civilized and technological veneer is that keeps out the darkness.
