Everything he knew was useless now.
There was a cold clarity to that realization, a crystallization of hopelessness that in its own odd way was bracing. It was the first coherent thought to penetrate Ethan Flint's panic in some time. He acknowledged, with an acceptance that was calming, that he was probably doomed.
The cries of pursuit were growing closer. The heave of Ethan's chest and pounding of his heart had quieted enough to hear the sound drifting across the desert, its harsh rasping reminding him of the caw of crows. He'd grown up with the urban birds, watching them multiply on songbird eggs until they flew across the endless rooftops like plumes of smoke, and they spoke in a language hard and aggrieved. It was a relative of that sound the fugitive heard now: human calls that were shrill, excited, and without remorse. It was a yipping designed to induce fear and at first Flint's brain had screamed the need to think so urgently that it drowned out every other thought. Now his peril was being more rationally- more grimly- absorbed. He was being hunted, but why? By whom?
The day had climaxed into an oven of punishing heat, the air so dry that Ethan seemed hardly to sweat. He understood this was an illusion. He was parched and rapidly dehydrating, despite his knowledge of how dangerous such a condition could be. There was so much he'd memorized before coming to the desert: the proper salt balance, his necessary caloric intake, the dimensions of a solar still, or how to splint a bone or identify an edible plant or make fire with a lens. He'd sought to be an aboriginal engineer, a wilderness technician. A lot of good it was doing him now! The plane crashed, his friends dead, his carefully chosen gear a growing deadweight. And now this unexpected pursuit. When running for your life you don't have much time to index-search the precepts of Wilderness Comfort on disk, he observed wryly. His peril would be funny if it wasn't so damned frightening.
Perhaps it was a bad dream. Certainly Australia seemed unreal. The sand was too red, the sky too blue, the desert brush a vivid, improbable green. Like a children's coloring book. The landscape shimmered and danced, its insubstantiality matching his sense of being trapped in a nightmare. But the pain was real. His head ached and every attempt to rest gave the flies a chance to find him again. Their buzz was as tireless as the sun.
The impossibility of his situation seemed so enormous that he had difficulty processing its logic. He was a sheeter, slang for a computer engineer who matrixed corporate spreadsheets into four-dimensional game theory, and his whole life was built on mathematics. He was an artist of the rational, his boss had praised him. A wizard, a master, a lord of the logarithms. Ethan had swaggered through code like Daniel-fucking-Boone. It was all worth squat right now, a fact that seemed cruelly unfair. Shouldn't all his work, all his education, and all his technological expertise give him some kind of edge? No. Of course not. Cops, credentials, resumes, diplomas: thousands of miles away. And he'd asked for this! Paid a small fortune to do it! Enormously funny, really. A tremendous joke on him. Clearly something had gone monstrously wrong- so nonsensically and outrageously wrong that he thirsted not just for water but retribution. Oh, what rank incompetence this confirmed among the bastards who'd sent him here! What lies they'd told by not telling him enough! If he got home he'd…
What?
Somebody would listen, wouldn't they?
If he got home.
Ethan glanced back. His glimpse of his pursuers produced an instinctive shock of fear. There was an animal wildness about them, a shedding of restraint, that was as unbound and tangled as their hair. He was so disoriented! Drugged for the flight, awakened in wreckage, the harried pilot who unstrapped him displaying none of the cool aplomb he'd come to expect. The aviator had punched out, parachuted down, and moved in anxious jerks, desperate to get away from the wreckage that smoked like a beacon. The plane had broken into two parts, the forward section with his dead friends skidding to the far side of a low rise. Ethan had wanted to go there but the pilot refused. "You don't want to see your friends."
Instead the rattled aviator had unscrewed a tail panel and unbolted an orange-colored electronic box, cursing as he struggled with the tools. Then he brusquely jammed the added weight into Ethan's already-stuffed pack. "This is what's going to keep us from having to walk to the beach," the man had explained gruffly. "If I can get the rest. Wait here." Ethan waited as the pilot trotted toward the nose, and when he'd become bored sitting in the heat and sand and finally trudged up the rise, thinking he was hallucinating a curious murmur of voices, he'd seen a swarm of scavengers who looked like urban groundlings. They'd pinned the pilot against the blackened fuselage like a trapped rabbit, their movements quick, their tone mocking, and their skin brown and hard as bark. "Get back!" they'd howled at the pilot. So Flint had run before he'd fully realized he was running, confused by the impression of faded synthetics and wooden spears, wire decorations and ragged hair, a melding of Stone Age and Information Age: 21st Century Huns.
Now he could hear their crowing. Getting closer. Drawing near.
The address in Daniel's city was in the tower of an anonymous skyscraper cluster forty minutes away by tube. Discreet lettering in the lobby announced the firm's presence on the thirty-third floor. The elevator opened to reveal a number of nondescript small offices: a title company, a financial newsletter, a laser-lift skin clinic. The tour agency door was solid wood, plain, and locked. "Outback Adventure," a tiny sign read in letters slipped into the kind of bracket that could accommodate a rapid turnover of tenants. He glanced at the ceiling. A vid-snake was watching him.
Daniel hesitated, then knocked.
Silence.
He looked at his watch; on time. He tried the knob but it didn't budge. He knocked again. Nothing.
Dammit, it wasn't lunch, but there was no sound from the other side. He eyed the keypad lock and punched some numbers at random without effect, quickly becoming bored. "Hello?" Finally he retreated across the hallway and slid down the wall, sitting expectedly on the floor. He'd wait for the bastards.
With that there was a buzz, a click, and the door swung quietly open. He stood awkwardly and walked over, poking his head through. The inside revealed a small waiting area with ugly plastic molded chairs, a desk, and a pretty receptionist. She smiled. "Close the door behind you."
He stepped through and the door clicked shut.
"Your appointment?"
"To see Mr. Coyle," he said grumpily. "My name is Daniel Dyson."
"Please have a seat, Mr. Dyson." She gestured at the plastic chairs. "I'll inform Mr. Coyle."
"You didn't answer my knock."
"Yes we did. Eventually." She regarded him with quiet amusement.
"You don't want clients to come in?"
"Eight percent of our applicants are turned away by that door and that's for their own good. They wouldn't do well with Outback Adventure, would they?"
He sat while she announced his arrival. The chairs were as uncomfortable as they looked. The brochures on the table featured the same wilderness couple he'd seen on his video wall. There were pictures of empty desert, red-rocked gorges, and bounding kangaroos. The text was spare. "Like primitive life itself, this is a journey with no schedule, no itinerary, and no set destination- except self-realization."
A Zen thing, maybe.
There was a buzz and she looked up at him again, smiling. "Your counselor will see you now." He went through another solid wooden door.
The man who met Daniel reminded him a bit of the brochure Ninja, but without the knives. Elliott Coyle was dark-haired, tanned, and dressed in a charcoal sport coat over a black silk crew shirt and dark pants. He wore black Dura-Flex slippers. A silver pin on his lapel was the only bright point to catch the eye. It showed a kangaroo. That would be something, Daniel thought, to see a wild kangaroo.
There are thousands of them- hundreds of thousands- where you're going." Coyle had followed Daniel's eye.
"How do you know I'm going?"
"I've read your profile, Daniel. You belong there."
"You have a profile?"
"The screening questionnaire, a background check. We don't send just anyone on Outback Adventure. It's too expensive for both of us. So we try to guess- an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless- who truly belongs there. The information we have on you is very promising."
"I'll bet it includes my annual salary, if that's my fee."
Coyle smiled. "Touche."
"Secret passwords, locked doors. Your company doesn't make sense."
He nodded. "You want to know more, of course, which is why I'm here." He stuck out his hand. "Elliott Coyle." The handshake was firm and brisk. "I'm your assigned counselor, the man whose job it is to convince you the experience is worthwhile, to help decide if we should give each other a try, and then guide you through preparation if we come to agreement. I feel it's safe to say that what I'm offering- what we're offering- will change your life."
"Who is 'we,' exactly?"
"Outback Adventure is a travel consultant that contracts with the umbrella governing arm of United Corporations. We have exclusive excursion rights to offer wilderness experiences in Australia."
"And Australia is quarantined. Off-limits. Dangerous, last I heard."
"It was. To keep management of the continent controllable, we haven't advertised its change in status. Instead we screen candidates to find the few who can realistically take advantage of what we have to offer. You're in a select group, Daniel."
"So how did you find me?"
"You found us, remember? That's the first requirement. Friends tend to tell like-minded friends. We keep a low profile to discourage the casually curious. We register as an export company. If we didn't take such steps, the screening would become unwieldy. The idea would intrigue more people than you might think."
"So how do I fit?"
"You're also the right age, the right fitness, the right… temperament. We think. The only one who can really answer that is you."
Daniel wanted to digest this for a moment. "If I go, do I get Cave Girl?" he deflected. He solemnly held up a brochure.
Coyle laughed again. "I wouldn't mind time in the Outback with her myself! Alas, she's an actress, Daniel. We're offering wilderness, not Club Pleasure. You'll have to find your own companionship, if you want it." He winked.
"You've got to make a better pitch than that, Mr. Coyle. Especially for a year's god-damned salary. Anyone who would pay that is crazy enough to go."
Coyle nodded. "Absolutely right. So why don't you sit back and let me give you the spiel? Then you make up your own mind. No pressure, no sweat. I think you'll be intrigued, at the very least."
The chairs were far more comfortable than the plastic of the waiting room. Daniel sank in one and donned headgear for the presentation, adjusting the fit and sound. A desert panorama opened up again, gloriously empty. The sky was a brilliant blue, dried clear of haze. The sand was a vibrant red. Coyle walked into view. Daniel knew he was simply giving his pitch in front of a blank screen and was being projected onto the head-vid presentation, but the combination was effective. It was as if the two were together in Australia.
"Every school child knows the tragic story of the Australian continent," Coyle began. The scene changed to rangeland being eaten to stubble by hundreds of browsing rabbits. "A virus concocted to control the nation's feral browsers unfortunately mutated and jumped to humans. While Australia was effectively quarantined before the infection could spread, both the targeted animals and most of the continent's human inhabitants, except for a handful of refugees, were wiped out. This was a key factor in passage of the Genetic Engineering Reform Act, of course. Meanwhile, this catastrophe was considered so threatening to the world population at large that the continent was quarantined. The refugees were interned on the Seychelles islands. Australia was permanently blockaded to prevent salvage companies or treasure hunters from landing and running the risk of contracting and spreading the disease. To further discourage such illegal access, all detailed maps, coordinates and geographic information detailing the continent were purged from world databases. To the extent possible, Australia was put out of sight, out of mind, as an emergency measure of public safety. Until now! Because United Corporations turns problems into solutions. Because United Corporations believes that everyone can win, all the time." Daniel saw a picture of smiling backpackers winding down a palm-shaded desert canyon. The water pool next to them was turquoise.
"The solution Australia represented was an answer to the problem of wilderness," Coyle went on, now seeming to lean against a palm tree. "The public's desire for natural preserves had first been accommodated during the population explosion of the Twentieth Century. Scenic areas of valuable land were deliberately set aside in countries such as the United States and Canada to satisfy the demands of individualists who wanted to experience the outdoors." The head-vid panned a group of dirty, happy hikers eating lunch along a mountain trail. Then the view lifted to show an alpine meadow and cascading glaciers. The scenery was breathtaking.
"Despite such political generosity on the part of the national forerunners to United Corporations, none of these land seizures truly replicated wilderness. All were relatively small, quickly became crowded, and were crisscrossed with trails. They were surveyed, mapped, and offered rescue if something went wrong." There were scenes of horrid overcrowding at the rim of the Grand Canyon, in a Yosemite parking lot, at a Yellowstone geyser. Long chains of recreationists wound along trails that had been trampled into trenches or mud bogs. Scraps of litter blew across an eroded clearing. A mountain lake was shown posted for pollution.
"The environmental extremists of the late Twentieth Century,"-there was old tape footage of demonstrating greens- "demanded more. They proposed gigantic new wildernesses"-a map showed green stains growing like amoebae on western and northern North America- "so vast that people could literally get lost in them. But there was no room for more. Humanity needed resources to achieve our quality of life." Daniel was transported to a shopping mall, where happy families strolled with packages under their arms. He grinned sardonically. He'd never seen a family that happy.
"Until, that is, Virus 03.1 struck Australia. Unfortunate tragedy has presented the world with an island as big as the United States but emptier of people than Antarctica. How dangerous would Australia remain? United Corporations' board members"-there was a picture of familiar faces meeting at the U.C. board table, the men and women looking handsome and wise- "turned to science for more answers." Daniel saw hazard-suited investigators fanning out across the landscape like cautious moonwalkers. "These experts concluded Australia no longer has plague." The scientists had gathered back by their aircraft and were pushing their hoods back to grin in relief. The scene dissolved to one in a laboratory, zeroing in on a white-coated scientist perched on a stool and looking like a favorite grandfather. "Virus 03.1 died with its human carriers," the scientist assured Daniel with a smile. "It's as extinct as smallpox and AIDS." Then Coyle was back, posed now in front of the New York headquarters of United Corporations. "It was then that U.C. saw a win-win solution."
The scene changed once more to abandoned, derelict cities, empty mine pits, and drought-stunted grazing land. "Australia had always been underpopulated, dry, thin. The first European explorers, the Dutch, didn't even want it. Asian traders visited only to obtain dried sea slugs sold in China as an aphrodisiac. Even after the English came, they found mostly desert and arid savanna. Meanwhile, environmental extremists continued to raise objections to some of the world's most promising and necessary development projects. Accordingly, United Corporations saw opportunity where everyone else saw disaster. Our leaders quietly proposed a compromise. We will preserve in its wilderness state this entire continent, they offered, in return for environmental compromise on other key issues. Greens will get a natural preserve of unprecedented size so long as they abstain from unreasonable obstructionism elsewhere. And to show our good faith, the most vociferous, vocal, skeptical, and committed environmentalists are invited to be the first to test themselves against the challenge of Outback Adventure!" Daniel saw a group of young, ruddy-looking adventurers waving goodbye from an aircraft. He thought he recognized a couple of the faces from news shows. The agreement must have worked, he realized, because environmental protest had indeed become muted.
"This achievement was deliberately unpublicized, the news organizations of United Corporations recognizing that controversy is worthwhile only when it is the servant of consensus. Publicity would only invite tragedy. Australia would continue to be reported as unsafe to discourage thrill-seekers, looters, or relatives of the dead wanting to make reckless pilgrimage. The naval and satellite patrol of Australia's coastal waters would be maintained."
"The board deliberately decided to maintain the continent in permanent, purposeful decay. The panic and rioting that broke out during the plague had already damaged Australia's urban areas, and since then rot and rust have done much more. The continent's cities are deteriorating ruins and its roads are crumbled and drifted over. More importantly, most of Australia's interior was empty of people even before the plague, and today little sign can be found that humans ever ventured there. The island has reverted to a wilderness of sand, broken concrete, and scrap metal, a wilderness so absolute in its isolation that its like is found nowhere else on Earth. Electronic databases, books, maps, films, tapes, and television shows on Australia have been systematically pruned. This fosters the decay not just of the nation's physical infrastructure but its informational infrastructure as well. True wilderness is not just the absence of the human footprint, it is the absence of human knowledge. To the degree possible, United Corporations has achieved both." Coyle had a look of solemn satisfaction.
"Today, then, Australia is a place of purposeful mystery, a deliberate step back in time, a mythic place, an Eden. And now the licensed consulting firm of Outback Adventure has been hired to screen a chosen few to experience the challenge of true wilderness exploration and personal self-discovery." Background music began to swell as the couple of the brochures walked into the glory of a desert sunset, hand in hand. "These are people who are not satisfied with the everyday, people who have advanced beyond mere recreation, people who feel compelled to challenge the unknown. Those who graduate from Outback Adventure form the most select fraternity in the world!" As the head-vid reached its climax, Australia dissolved to show Mr. Bandoleer transformed into a ruggedly handsome captain of industry who walked like a lord across his factory floor, his industrial robots bowing like nodding oil pumps. His female companion was shown as the bride in a costly cathedral wedding and then as an executive moving into a high-rise corner office with a stunning view of the city. "These are today's hardened heroes…" There was a final picture of green mountains climbing to snowy peaks, and then a dissolve.
Daniel removed his headgear, somewhat dazzled from the images of Australia's vastness. He was also visibly skeptical.
"So. What did you think?"
"A bit heavy-handed at the end there, Elliott."
His counselor, who was now sitting across from him, shrugged disarmingly. "You found the script a little corny? So do I. But there's truth in that corn, Daniel."
"I don't understand why I haven't heard more about this before. I mean, an entire continent? For wilderness recreation? And then you don't tell anyone about it?"
"To publicize it is to spoil it. We don't want the refugee community lobbying to go back; they have new lives now. We don't want pilgrims or mourners or looters. And United Corporations didn't set this up to make big money, or post big numbers. We did it to satisfy the craving for adventure among a select few, some of them frankly troubled, with the idea that this might help both them and society. Win-win! That this was the very best way to use the new Australia."
Daniel shifted uncomfortably. "How so?"
"Be honest with yourself, Daniel. Are you fulfilling your full potential at Microcore? Are you doing everything you could do for United Corporations? Our superiors look at people like yourself and they wonder. He's bright. He thinks for himself. But he also has trouble fitting in. So. We can leave him at a Level 31 job and let him stop growing, becoming dead wood. Or we might find something that pushes him to the limit, that tests just what he is capable of, and thus which grooms him for future leadership in U.C. society. Outback Adventure is meant to be a transforming experience. Those allowed to go are an elite."
"But keeping it a secret…"
"To publicize the opportunity is to cheapen it. The next thing you know there'd be cyber underground guidebooks, secret maps, and so much speculation that the journey would contain as much surprise as Planet Disney."
Daniel nodded slowly, intrigued despite his doubts. "So who can go?"
"Ah. You're beginning to realize how rare this offer is. The answer to your question, of course, is the fit. The smart. The committed. The daring. And the dissatisfied. The ones to whom ordinary life is for some reason not enough. The oddballs, the misfits. Do you recognize yourself yet?"
Daniel said nothing.
"You go only with what you can carry on your back. Maps are prohibited. So is any weapon beyond a knife. You can take electronic devices, but only receivers: take your solar-cell TV, if you must, but leave your satellite phone at home. Our promise is that if you go, you won't know exactly where on the continent you are. Or precisely where you're going. Or how long it will take. You'll be as blind as Columbus, as bold as Magellan. No other adventure company offers such realistic challenge. We guarantee it!"
"A year's salary for that?"
"Listen to me. Everest is old, routine. You know that. The Sahara has become a holiday junket. Both Poles have resort hotels. Every river has been rafted and every reef has been dived. There's only one place of mystery left on Earth: Outback Adventure's Australia. That's what the money is for, Daniel: the ultimate challenge of the ultimate wilderness. You bet it costs dearly! You have to want it so bad you can taste it! Because that's the only kind of person who can make it there."
He took a breath. He could taste it. "How does it work?"