Adventure Read online

  Adventure

  Paul J. McAuley

  Jackaroo series

  First published in Fast Forward 2, ISBN 978-1-59102-692-1, edited September 2008 by Lou Anders.

  When he was thirty-two, Ian Brown’s dream came true: he won a ticket in the emigration lottery, a place in one of the arks to the colony world First Foot. He was a civil servant, a systems analyst working in the Ministry of Resource Allocation. His parents and his brother had died during the war; he shared a rented flat in Peckham with two of his colleagues; he had no steady girlfriend, no ties. He handed in his notice at the ministry, converted his modest savings into Euros, packed as much as he could into the 1.3 cubic metre baggage allowance, sold or gave away the rest of his clothes and possessions, and early one wet October morning presented himself at the shuttle terminal at Heathrow.

  Eighteen days later he was in Port of Plenty, on the west coast of First Foot’s only continent. It was eleven years after the Jackaroo had made contact with the survivors of the Third World War and given them a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the rest of the solar system. Port of Plenty received a thousand new immigrants each week. Apartment buildings and malls were rising along the coast amongst a tangle of freeways. Hectares of umbrella pine forest and Boxbuilder ruins were being razed each week to make way for industrial parks and warehouses.

  Ian found a job in the supply and subcontract division of one of the multinational construction companies, making good use of the skill set he’d acquired in the ministry. Soon afterwards, he married a woman he’d met on the ark. Belinda was American. Five years older than him, pale and pretty, brittle as bone china. They rented a condominium in one of the apartment buildings near Phoenix Beach, and after two years had scraped together enough for a down payment on a ranch house in Prospect Hills. They could barely afford to cover the mortgage and taxes the first few years, but then Ian was promoted and things became a little easier. They celebrated with a vacation in one of the luxury resorts in the Phantom Archipelago.

  Somehow, seven years had passed since Ian had won his ticket. By this time, they knew that Belinda could not have children. Although they sometimes talked of adoption or using a host mother, nothing came of it. She began to suffer from migranes so skull-crushing that no combination of drugs did much to alleviate them, so she quit her job to work as a part-time consultant. Mostly she sat by their little pool in the backyard, reading magazines and talking to her friends on the phone.

  Because of his wife’s migraines, Ian moved into the spare bedroom. He began to dream of the western deserts. The wild places he had never visited. He spent hours on the Internet, looking at maps and photographs, at static cameras that showed views of the City of the Dead. So quiet out there, under the big red sun. Just wind and sand. Stands of cactus trees silhouetted against apocalyptic sunsets. The fleets of low tombs left by the Ghost Keepers.

  Although money was tight that year, Belinda insisted on a proper vacation: a week at Mammoth Lakes. She divided her time between the slots and the spas, and didn’t come with Ian when he took a tour around the monumental ruins of the Spire of the Clouds. It rose out of the middle of the largest of the lakes like a giant, half-melted version of the Eiffel Tower. On pontoons built around its base, tourists took each other’s pictures, bought souvenirs, queued for hours to spend a few minutes in the submerged tube that had been run through the so-called Vaults of the Fisher Kings, where an automated guide spotlighted various parts of the great carved mural and told lies about what they meant.

  A week after the end of the vacation, Ian came home from work and found that Belinda had moved out. She called him that evening and explained that she needed to find herself before it was too late, and hung up when he asked if she had been having an affair. The next morning, as he was backing his Lexus out of the drive, a clerk from the office of Belinda’s lawyer served him with a petition for divorce.

  Ian sat in his car at the junction with the feeder road to the freeway until cars behind him began to sound their horns. He turned right instead of left, and soon found himself driving west along a salt-white road as wide as the Thames at Tower Bridge. Built of self-renewing ceramic matrix a hundred thousand years ago, it was part of the huge network that laced the western edge of the continent. Ian drove all day across a coastal plain patched with huge fields. Maize. Wheat. Hectares of polytunnels, gleaming like phantom lakes. Water towers like Martian fighting machines. Irrigation sprays pumping rainbows into the air. He stopped that night in a motel at the edge of a little town, and drove on the next day through umbrella pine forest that gave out as the land climbed to the sere slopes of the Mountains of the Moon, through a pass into the desert beyond.

  In a crossroads town at the eastern edge of the City of the Dead, he purchased supplies at the general store, ticking items off his inventory one by one. He filled the Lexus’s tank and bought a map at a gas station, and drove out into the desert.

  A gravel track ran north through a flat waste of sand and shattered stone and thorny scrub. Silvery clouds of saltbush, clumps of cactus trees, the green oases of hive rat gardens. Ian buzzed down the window and let in a rush of dry, hot air. No sound but the purr of the Lexus’s engine and the crackle of its tires. Bare mountains shimmering at the horizon.

  The first tombs were no more than short stretches of crumbling wall the same dun colour as the landscape. Then clusters of long, low hummocks began to appear here and there. A conical hill like a toy volcano.

  A stop sign standing incongruously in the stony scrub marked the junction with a narrower, unmade track. Ian made the turn. The sun was westering, and he was determined to get as far away from civilisation as possible before nightfall. The Lexus wallowed through ruts like a boat in a rough sea. Stones rattled on the undercarriage. Then the track dipped through a long dry swale between long shelves of rock etched by wind and sand, and the Lexus bellied into a slough of loose sand and stuck. Ian tried reverse with no success, tried to rock the car forward by tapping on the accelerator. The Lexus’s rear wheels spun rooster tails of dust, and the car slithered and shook but made no progress. When he switched off the engine and climbed out he saw that the car was deeply canted, its rear tires half-buried. Out across the desert, a line of tombs cast long shadows. Far beyond, the lower edge of the sun was touching the horizon.

  Ian decided that he could leave the car where it was. He had come here looking for adventure, and here it was. He knew that he was perfectly safe—he could dig the car out tomorrow, hike back to the town if he had to—but for the moment he was off the grid. No one knew where he was. All around was the desert he had craved for so long.

  He kicked off his polished brogues, stripped off his suit pants, pulled on stiff new jeans, and laced up his brand-new hiking boots. Tipped supplies into his day bag and slung it over his shoulder and, carrying his sleeping bag under one arm and his camping stove under the other, set off for the line of tombs.

  All around a vast hush. Only the sizzle of insects in the thorny brush. The smell of baked dust. The fat sun was sinking like a ship, so big that when he looked at one edge he couldn’t see the other. Everything was steeped in red light and black shadow.

  A sudden drumming made his heart jump—a hive rat sentry reared up just a stone’s throw away, staring straight at him. It was the size of a cat, grey and naked, standing upright and drumming with flat hind feet on a stone at the edge of a broad bowl stretching away on either side, a terraced garden sunk in the desert.

  Ian stood stock-still as a freezing jolt of fear passed through him. He’d seen a documentary about hive rats on the Discovery Channel. They had evolved cooperative behaviour and specialised castes, like bees or termites. Workers tended the ga
rdens; sentries watched their perimeters; soldiers armed with fearsome claws and teeth defended them. A segment of the documentary had shown what had happened when a young tigon had strayed into a garden—a tide of quick naked things pouring out of holes, fierce and purposeful and relentless, heads little more than massive jaws that latched onto every segment of the tigon’s body. The tigon thrashing, sinking into sand as workers undermined it, vanishing.

  The sentry’s little black eyes were fixed on him. It jerked up and down as its feet slapped an eccentric tattoo. Were there things moving in the shadows under the clumps of sword-leaved plants behind it? Ian began to walk backwards as quickly as he could, and almost at once his feet tangled and he sat down hard. The sentry paused for a moment, then resumed its drumming jig. Shadows seemed to swarm and multiply in the thick growth behind it, and Ian jumped to his feet and took off, and didn’t stop running until he couldn’t run anymore.

  The sun had set by the time he had reached the tombs. Westward, strips of low cirrus cloud glowed neon red; eastward, stars were beginning to appear in the darkening sky. He sat for a little while, trembling, as the jolt of adrenaline worked through his system. Watching shadows deepening all around him with fretful attention. He couldn’t remember if hive rats followed intruders. He didn’t think that they did. In any case, he couldn’t see anything, and the beam of his flashlight revealed only stones and thornbushes, a clump of spiny paddles.

  Too jumpy and restless to sit still for long, he decided to check out the tombs before it got too dark. The first was a long low chamber with sand humped across its floor and a hole in one corner, a shaft cut into naked rock that dropped away beyond the reach of his flashlight. The second was smaller, and smelt of stale urine. Something winking in the beam of his flashlight turned out to be the rim of a Coke can buried in sand. He found a spent condom, names and dates scratched in the sandstone blocks of the walls.

  He told himself that he was still too close to civilisation. Tomorrow, he could dig out the car and drive deeper into the desert. Search the tombs for ancient artifacts. Walk in places where no man had ever walked before.

  He gathered sticks and twigs, built a little hearth out of stones, and lit a fire. He set up his stove and made a pot of coffee and cooked one of his Meals Ready to Eat, beef stew and rice, and began to feel better.

  The fire at his feet pulsed in a faint breeze. A burning twig snapped, kicked up a brief shower of sparks. The lights of the little town he’d passed through prickled at the horizon, only three or four kilometres away. All around him, the dark quiet desert. Above, stars stood in rigid patterns across the sable sky. The luminous milk of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova that Chinese astronomers had seen in A.D. 1054, was splashed across one-quarter of the sky. Sol was about 3500 light-years beyond it: the wormhole network linked only fifteen stars, but it spanned the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy.

  Ian slowly realised that he was happy. Filled with an expansive emotion he hadn’t felt since childhood, the excitement of being alive at this particular intersection of time and space, with worlds to discover and all time stretching ahead. Here, he thought. Here.

  The night was growing cold. He pulled on his new windcheater and built up the fire and hunched over it in his folding stool, watching pale flames flicker and sparks crawl amongst the coals. He sat there for a long time, thoughts moving through his head without catching, until he heard something crackle off in the distance. He listened hard. A regular faint crunching noise moving through the dark, growing nearer.

  He was suddenly standing, the flashlight in his hand, too scared to switch it on, imagining hive rats circling him, closing in. There were other things out here, too, tigons and worse, and he hadn’t thought to buy any kind of weapon at the general store, not even a knife. Then he heard a girl’s light laughter, and his fear melted away as two people emerged into the pulse of the firelight. A boy and a girl pushing trail bikes, smiling at him, telling him they’d seen his car and then his fire, asking him how he was doing.

  The boy was named Lyle; the girl Patty. They were both eighteen, tall and tanned and rangy, wearing shorts and T-shirts despite the cold. The light-enhancing goggles that allowed them to navigate the desert by starlight hung around their necks. They sat leaning against each other on the other side of the fire, big animals glowing with health and vitality, drinking Ian’s coffee from their own tin cups, telling him that they made a living from prospecting in the tombs, ranging far and wide all over the desert.

  “We heard someone had been buying camping gear and wondered if we’d run into you,” Patty said. Despite her cropped hair, she possessed a serene beauty. Her T-shirt was molded to her small breasts, the bumps of her nipples clearly visible. She met Ian’s gaze, and he felt embarrassment heat his face like summer sun. Seeing himself as she must see him, an overweight middle-aged man with thinning hair and a double chin, sad and soft, blurred around the edges.

  “We can help dig you out tomorrow,” Lyle said. “City car like that, you shouldn’t drive off-trail.”

  Ian told them about his encounter with the hive rat sentry, trying to make light of it. Lyle shrugged and said that hive rats this close to town were mostly harmless, told a few stories about the places that he and Patty had seen, the things that they had found. Mostly, they turned up scraps of stuff like rotten circuit board that they could sell because it contained bound pairs of electrons that were used in computers and communications equipment. Then Ian found himself talking about his stale life, his failed marriage.

  “I thought that I was setting out on a grand adventure when I boarded the ark,” he said, “but we can’t escape what we are. It doesn’t matter where I go, I’ll always be a systems analyst…”

  Patty yawned as unselfconsciously as a cat. Lyle said it was late, they should turn in. He and Patty said good night and left Ian by the fire and wandered off to one of the tombs. Ian wondered if they used this spot regularly, if they’d left the litter and scratched the graffiti, but it was an uncharitable thought. They were creatures of the desert, he thought. Perfectly at home in this strange, alien landscape. If only he’d come here when he was much younger, he could have been like them, carefree, carrying everything he owned, ranging far and wide without restriction, uncovering fresh wonders…

  When he woke, the sky was grey, predawn. His sleeping bag was drenched in greasy dew. The fire burned to black char and ash. The mouths of the tombs gaped emptily. All around, stones and bushes hunched into themselves.

  It took him a little while to realise that Lyle’s and Patty’s bikes were missing. He called their names, checked the tombs. They were gone. And when he reached his car, he saw that its four doors were flung wide, and his possessions were scattered about.

  They’d taken most of his food, two of the plastic jerry cans of water, his brand-new lightweight tent, the folding spade, some of his new clothes. He locked the car and set off down the track towards the town. He’d pay for a tow truck to come out and free the car, but he wouldn’t mention the theft. It wasn’t important really. No more than a toll, or a tax. And besides, it wasn’t as if he’d lost anything he needed.

 

 

  Paul J. McAuley, Adventure

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