Better Angels (30 page)

The Wise One paused at the top of the steps, thinking.

“I’m not sure,” Kekchi said, “but the dreaming must always become real.”

As they walked under the edge of the temple’s roof, Jacinta shook her head.

“Maybe what we’re seeing is only a small part of the picture,” Jacinta hazarded as they walked deeper into the temple, its white roof blocking out the darkening sky, for a time at least.

“Yes?”

“Maybe the Allesseh is not only in this galaxy,” she continued, “but also in galaxies throughout this universe, and in universes throughout the plenum. If it is incomplete here, perhaps it is incomplete in all the galaxies and all the universes.”

Kekchi nodded.

“Though in any one time and space we will always be outnumbered,” the old Wise One said, “our allies are still essentially infinite.”

Jacinta stared hard at Kekchi as bolts of lightning speared down around them, shaking the air with thunder in accompaniment to the ground-shaking of the quakes.

“If it comes to that,” she said, “the Allesseh could obliterate us in an instant, here.”

“It won’t,” Kekchi said with a shake of the head, long gray hair wetly flying.

“Why not?”

“It’s still a machine,” the Wise One said. “It needs our dreams. The Allesseh’s dreaming can only become real when it realizes it too is dreaming.”

* * * * * * *

Three-Quarters Starved and Half-Drowned

The escape was Paul’s idea. Conditions in the spirit camp just kept getting worse. As rumors of fighting to the west grew steadily louder and more persistent, the amount and quality of food for the penitents had gone steadily downhill. The scream and sonic boom of jet fighters had grown more common as more sorties were, apparently, being flown with each passing day.

On the ground in camp, however, the amount of physical labor had not changed. In the work gangs, men were dropping more and more frequently from fatigue, hunger and disease. All the penitents were looking skeletal. Even the caloric allotments for the guards seemed to have gone down in recent days.

To Paul the situation for the penitents in camp had grown to look more and more like a race between starvation and liberation—and starvation seemed to be winning, pulling further ahead with each passing day. Only such an intolerable situation could have led him to contemplate an escape as risky as the one that, out of desperation, he devised.

The work gang he was on had been clearing winter debris from a mountain canyon road beside a swift-flowing river. Through a haze of hunger and exhaustion, Paul realized that he had been on this river before—with the woman who had betrayed him to the morals police, Jenn Reynolds. They had gone whitewater rafting in this same stretch of the canyon.

Paul soon saw again the Wayfarers Rafting Company camp, with the same little ichthys Christian-fishy on the sign at the roadside. Paul remembered making a joke to Jenn that he hoped that fish didn’t mean they expected him to swim the rapids. Not the wisest witticism, in hindsight.

The owner of the rafting camp must have some political clout, Paul thought, to have the slave labor of penitents clearing his road and grounds. Especially when full scale civil war was rumored to have broken out against the generals and preacher-politicians of the CSA.

Pausing from his attempts to help Kal Elliot and Al Brewster pry-bar a boulder into the backhoe’s bucket, Paul wondered why the rafting camp was still closed, here in early June. Were the rumors of civil war true? Was that why the place was still in off-season lockup—no customers? Or was it simply that the mountains’ deep snow pack and late spring runoff, unusually high and strong this year, made the river as yet too dangerous to run?

After they had cleared the side road into the Wayfarers rafting camp and cleaned the grounds, the work crews continued up the main road, removing boulders that had tumbled down onto the road surface during the winter and clearing brush from the roadsides for another seven miles further. Before their late lunch break—more break than lunch, these days—Paul sighted the old jeep road that angled off the main road and ran further along the roaring river.

In a rehabbed school bus, the Wayfarers river guides had driven Paul and Jenn and forty others in that day’s rafting party along that road, to the calmer stretch of river where they would all be putting in for their four-hour rafting run. If Paul remembered right, somewhere up that road there stood a big old shed with an array of tools, as well as life-vests, paddles, and rafts for eight rafting groups of six persons each.

During lunch, Paul convinced Kal and Al that they should take a walk with him along the jeep road. Once his two companions had, out of curiosity, agreed, Paul informed Officer Strom that they were going to take a short walk up that road. Glancing at their electronic monitor bracelets and anklets, then at the steep walls of the canyon, Strom waved them on with an admonition to be back by the end of break—fifteen minutes—and not to make him have to come looking for them. The three penitents agreed and started off down the road.

Paul’s immediate plan was to stroll in a leisurely fashion along the river, pry-bar in hand as a walking staff, until a bend in the road and the river took them out of sight of the guards. Seeing the river up close as they walked, however—and noting how much higher, stronger, and faster its flow was now than it had been on that trip all those years ago with Jenn—Paul’s heart misgave him. His resolution to follow through on the plan forming in his mind wavered. Once they were around the bend and out of sight of the guards, however, his resolve strengthened once more.

“We’re going to have to jog from here,” Paul said, beginning to pick up speed. His comrades gave him perplexed looks.

“What are you talking about?” Al asked, jogging weakly along despite himself. Paul noticed that even Al, once a moon-faced, heavy-set gray-haired man, was looking pretty lean and gaunt—and unhealthy too, as if he were keeping himself going only by the sheer force of his will.

“We’re supposed to be taking a break!” Kal said, still walking.

“Do you want to get back to the world,” Paul replied, “or go on starving in camp?”

“You planning on growing wings, or what?” Kal said, jogging tiredly along, trying to catch up.

“Water wings,” Paul said, wishing he’d left the heavy pry-bar behind. “There’s a storage building up ahead here—for that river-rafting camp we cleaned up this morning. Their put-in point is higher up river, near here. The building is full of rafts and paddles and gear.”

Kal glanced over at the river roaring alongside them, not twenty yards away from the edge of the road embankment. When the wind shifted, they could feel the mist from it, or at least thought they could.

“You want to go down that?” Kal asked, incredulous. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Maybe,” Paul said with a shrug as he thumped along over the dirt road, which stood dusty in the high spots and muddy in the low. “It’s got to be better than starving and working ourselves to death in camp, though.”

After half a dozen minutes of running, they came into an area where the canyon widened a good deal. The river channel widened with it, so that the river’s flow, though swift, was clear and not broken by rapids. In a moment more they were standing in front of the storage building, a peeling, white-painted wooden structure, with a large roll-up door in front and a sizable, four-pane glass window in each of the other walls, for light. Those windows apparently hadn’t provided quite enough illumination, for there were also three solar panels—much newer than the building—mounted on the roof.

The three of them ran from window to window until it was clear that all Paul had promised was inside—tools, paddles, life vests, deflated rafts.

“I don’t see an air compressor in there,” Kal said.

“Got to be one,” Paul said, hoping assertion would make it so.

“What about getting inside?” Al said. “We could break out these windows, but I don’t think they’re big enough to pull one of those rafts through, deflated or not—much less an air compressor of any size.”

“We’ll have to try the front door, then,” Paul said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere here, but they probably at least locked the building, during the off season at least.”

They found that the roll-up door in front was secured by a padlock and hasp.

“I knew there had to be some good reason why I dragged this heavy-ass pry bar along,” Paul said as he set about prying the hasp and lock free of the doorframe.

In a moment the door was rolling up before them. Almost immediately, Kal spotted the compressed air unit and hauled it out. It was a solar powered device, so Paul and Al had to rummage around through storage until they found a solar charger and batteries.

“I’ll bet this can be hooked up to the panels on the roof,” Al said, before disappearing from the interior of the building. Paul and Kal continued to haul paddles, life vests, and battered Farmer John wet suits out the door and around to the far side of the building. After that they dragged a deflated raft out as well.

“Pump’s hooked up,” Al said as he helped them drag the raft some last few yards. “Start it up anytime.”

Paul and Kal did so. The pump whirred into life and they began to inflate the big, blue and red six-person raft. Al went into the shed to find a cold chisel and mallet. Paul and Kal put the wetsuits on under their orange coveralls, which concealed the suits nicely. The raft was at a little more than half pressure by the time Al returned

“This should work,” Al said, holding up the mallet and chisel. “The electronic hand and foot leashes they have us locked into are cheap mass production models. Dumb fail-safe circuitry. Just punch holes in the right spots on them and stick them in the water. That should short them out and open them up.”

“What about the alarm?” Paul asked. He remembered that Al Brewster, before becoming a Camp penitent, had been an information tech or electrical engineer of some sort. Brewster and Kal had hit it off because in both their cases the deeper cause of their arrests had been conspiracy theorizing about how the infosphere crash had been fabricated in order to bring the theocrats to power. Paul gathered that Al had come to that conclusion from a different angle—looking at what had happened in the infosphere itself rather than up in the stratosphere or troposphere or wherever it was EMP propagated—but Al’s and Kal’s theories were close enough to support each other, and that was apparently all that mattered.

“The alarm will sound and the locater will continue to function,” Al said, thoughtfully. “Unavoidable, I’m afraid. but if the locater is attached to a bracelet sitting on shore here while we’re zipping off downriver, what’s the difference?”

As if in unexpected sympathetic answer, their electronic hand and foot leashes began to ring and vibrate.

“We’re being buzzed,” Kal said. “Our fifteen minutes must be up. What now?”

“We stow all the life-vests and paddles here with the raft,” he said, shutting off the pump, “then we roll the front door down into place and haul our butts back to the work gang.”

“What?” Al asked, stupefied.

“What are you doing shutting off that pump?” Kal asked, reaching over. “It’s not maxed out—”

Paul grabbed his wrist.

“But we could be out of here right now!” Al said.

“That’s not the plan,” Paul said stonily.

“What plan?” Kal asked. “I thought the plan was to go ride that river until we get away—or it drowns us, whichever comes first.”

“No,” Paul said, stowing gear against the wall of the shed and leaning the raft on top of the lot of it. “The plan is to work until they have us double-time march back to the transport buses at sunset as usual. The three of us take our usual marching ranks near the end of the line, only tonight we break off from the ranks and run down this road, put the raft in and light out downriver.”

“Wait a minute,” Al said. “You mean we’re going to run this river, as high as it is, at night?”

“As much as possible, yes,” Paul said, pulling the roll-up door of the storage building back into place and starting to jog back down the jeep road, toward the main road and the work gang. Kal and Al reluctantly jogged along after him. “If we try to make our break now, during the middle of the day, they’ll just call out the chopper from camp, or wait on the bridges downriver to pick us off, or both. After sunset we at least have a chance. We’re going to be soaked enough by the cold water of that river that our infrared profile will be way down. Night vision scopes will have a tough time picking us up in all that mist and wave action too.”

“Great,” Kal said. “Either we go now and get shot for sure, or we go later and drown without a doubt.”

In two moments more, they practically ran down Officer Strom, who stood before them, machine gun at the ready, safety off.

“I thought I told you not to make me have to come looking for you!” Strom shouted at them. Kal and Paul and Al “sorry! sorry!”ed all around.

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry!” Strom said, double-time marching them back toward the main road. “I already know what a sorry bunch you are. What do you think were you up to back there?”

“Just enjoying the beauty of nature, sir,” Kal said.

Strom frowned, then rolled his eyes slightly and shook his head.

“I’m going to see you really put your back into it this afternoon,” Strom said. “I’m going to see to it that you sweat!”

During the rest of the afternoon, Strom did in fact see them sweat—although, since Paul and Kal were wearing wetsuits under their coveralls, raising a sweat didn’t require much special effort. Paul found the hidden wetsuit uncomfortably chafing and gritty as well, but he could hardly complain to the guards about it.

At last the guards whistled for quitting time. The penitents had covered ten miles of road, but as they began their draggy jog back to the buses they were heartened by the news that their transportation had been mercifully moved to the five-mile halfway point.

Paul and his companions had jogged more than halfway back to the buses, and the sun was nearly at the horizon, when he saw the jeep road that led away to the putting-in point. Glancing around quickly to make sure the guards were setting their usual example by bounding along well ahead of them, Paul nodded to Kal and Al and the three of them disappeared down the jeep road, running with astonishing speed for three middle-aged men who had labored too hard and survived too long on too few calories per day.