That's what I've worked to protect.'
'This wasn't caused by a breakdown of civilization! It was caused by its culmination! How can you defend the scientific arrogance that led to all these deaths?'
'How can you not admit the worth of the scientific and political expertise that has allowed more humans to live today than ever before in history?'
'Raven, this is a mausoleum,' Ethan objected. 'I mean, come on.'
'Because of one accident,' she amended with exasperation. 'Before that it was a city, with life and laughter, created as part of a system I still feel an allegiance to. Of course this is wrong. All of it. All of Australia. If I get back, I'll be working to expose that. But not the rest. I can't not believe in the rest. I can't give up on the rest. I have to believe in something.'
Daniel looked at her sadly.
She wouldn't tolerate his pity. 'What do you believe in besides your wilderness nihilism, Daniel? What do you believe in besides running away?'
'I believe in what feels right,' he said quietly. 'I believe in what we are, instead of what we build.' He glanced around. 'I believe that United Corporations lost something along the way- not their soul, but our soul, and that we've come to a place like this to get it back. Not this city, but this continent.'
'Even if that were true, not everyone can come here.'
'Maybe everyone doesn't have to. Maybe it's enough to have the wild for the few who truly need it, and who bring back its spirit to the rest. None of this would be so wrong if they allowed us to get back. It's the keeping us here that's so wrong.'
'Now you're going in circles, contradicting yourself, just like in the tunnels. It's your determination to get away from here that makes the lesson of Outback Adventure so right.'
Her dogged certainty irritated him. 'I'm not- '
'Enough!' Ethan held up his hand. 'This is the debate we'll get to have if any of us can get past Rugard and back home. For now we have to keep moving.'
'I think we should look around a bit,' said Amaya. 'Raven and Daniel both have a point, and here in this city we've got both worlds: the technological and the wild. Let's see if there's anything worth taking.'
'Don't take!' Oliver exclaimed. 'It's bad luck!'
'Just for an hour or two,' Amaya said. 'It won't hurt.'
Some of the trekkers nodded. They were looking speculatively at the stores, wondering what might still be worn or acquired after more than three decades.
'It would be fun to go shopping again,' Iris said.
'Fun not to have to pay for anything,' Ned added.
'No!' Oliver said. 'This is a bad place, a dangerous place. We need to move on! Too many died here, I can hear them.'
'We're just looking around a bit,' Amaya said. The others nodded. 'Why don't you and Angus go ahead and wait for us at the end of town?'
The native Australians reluctantly agreed.
'All right, we meet back here in two hours,' Daniel told them. 'Be careful in these old buildings!' He looked at one of the towers. 'I'm going to go up to one of these rooftops and try to see the ocean.'
The office tower was fifteen stories high, modest by the standards of the city they'd come from, boxy and plain. Still, it was imposing after months in the wilderness. Daniel recognized the name at its base from the corporate subsidiaries and institutional advertising elsewhere: Coraco. Industrial mining and development. The security pod in the central lobby was deserted, of course, and its news kiosk was frozen in time. Many of the periodicals had been shredded by rodents for nests, but a few pages of the Gleneden Paradise revealed a yellowed November 19, 2023.
'Illness Spreads,' one headline stated. 'Massive Relief Effort Promised.' Had that been the day of panic? The day of realization that no relief was actually coming, that there was no escape, and that the only alternative was blind flight that became as hopeless as staying? What about the few who'd survived, like Oliver and Angus? He remembered from his college days the dire prediction of what would occur if the bizarre arms races of the twentieth century had ever resulted in nuclear war: 'The living would envy the dead.'
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.'
