With the added numbers their pace had slowed. Sometimes the group would camp two or three days to give time to hunt, treat skins, cook more ambitious meals, sleep, heal blisters, repair clothes, and socialize. The delay worried Raven, who feared the Warden might still be doggedly following, but Daniel believed they'd left the convicts far behind. How could they be found again in this immensity? The party did encounter a small gang of other wandering convicts one afternoon, but the predators fled from the sight of their greater numbers. The experience boosted their confidence. Surely they were safe! And they needed the rest from the relentless walking. It gave people time to bond. The dire nature of their predicament seemed to push people instinctively to friendship, flirtation, commitment, and experimentation. As a result the group bubbled, sparked, and occasionally boiled over with sexual chemistry as partners tried each other and then split back apart.
"It's like a cross between a soap opera and the Oregon Trail," Daniel concluded one night to Ethan. "This is so different than what I expected Australia would be, back when I planned to trek with just three friends."
"If we find many more companions we're going to have to start calling you the Warden," Ethan replied. There was no formal leader but the new recruits deferred to the direction of the initial group and its promise of having the magic to call for help. Unexpectedly, Daniel found himself making more and more of the decisions. There was something about him people responded to, even Ethan. As if he knew what to do. Even Raven noticed it. She said he was becoming more like her.
"God, I hope not," Daniel now said of the Warden jibe. "But that's a problem with bigger numbers, isn't it? Rules."
"We've got enough people now to make a real community on the coast while we wait for whatever." Ethan let his finger wave vaguely at the sky. "But it does pose organizational problems. I told you we were naturals for civilization."
"Can't we do better this time?"
"That's the test, isn't it?" Ethan stirred the coals of the fire, his voice low. "What will we do different when we do settle down to wait? How will we make decisions?"
"I don't know," Daniel said. "I just want to let people keep a sense of identity, instead of only identifying with their company or agency- or our new tribe."
"Maybe there's room here to do that."
"At least we seem to have eluded the convicts. I can't believe Rugard would still be following. Maybe he never left Erehwon."
"Or, if he did, we're going to break clear of the Cone so soon that his pursuit will become academic." Ethan glanced around. "I hope." They hadn't told the newcomers about the Warden, and didn't want to. They didn't want Rugard to become a new bogeyman, seeming to hide behind every tree.
"We've been meandering for months. I don't think we could find ourselves."
"Not unless he knows something we don't."
The convict had been nicknamed Wrench for the things he did to people's arms and legs when they didn't meet their obligations on time. Here in the Outback, his size had won him leadership of one of Rugard's scouting parties. As such he was drowsing in the shade of a ridge-crest eucalyptus, lazy but mentally restless. He'd thought it lunacy when the Warden had ordered them to chase the Outback marks across the desert, and greater lunacy when that smart-mouthed toad called Ico had led the Expedition of Recovery off on highways that seemed to go in the wrong direction. Even assuming the fugitives weren't already dead- birds pecking out their eyes five hundred kilometers back- what chance did they have of intercepting them on the other side of Australia? But Ico the Psycho, a nickname he'd inevitably been tagged with (his shrill protests assuring it would stick) had insisted that he could lead the Warden's men to a point ahead of the fugitives. Ico had predicted that terrain and old roadways might push them in this direction, toward a pass in what his dog-eared, oft-ridiculed map called the Great Dividing Range of Australia. The convicts believed the little bastard not because they thought he was really right, but because there was nothing else to believe.
Actually the journey hadn't been too bad. They'd found some wanderers to rob, shortening their own necessary search for food, and some women to forcibly enlist into what Rugard had jokingly dubbed their Cohort of Joy. They'd found wild cows and pigs and goats to hunt as they went east, whole rivers of clean water, and plague-emptied buildings to sleep in. The truth was, Ico the Psycho had brought them to a far nicer place than they'd come from, and whether they found the transmitter or not, Wrench wasn't about to go back to Rugard's desert dungeon. Screw that! Life was better here.
But unless he wanted to run off on his own, Wrench still had to humor the Warden by keeping watch for the fugitives. It was an easy, brainless job, but so far it had also been a futile one. The convict wished his boss would just give it up and enjoy this greener paradise, but Rugard had become steadily more obsessed with the transmitter, not less, turning ever more irritable and vicious. So Wrench had been posted here for a week, waiting for the bitch and her boyfriends to show up. He was bored beyond belief.
Except that Ico's suggestion did have a core of sense. There was a pass through the mountains that led down to a big lake, with a river canyon below the lake. The only easy way across the water was on the crest of the old dam that had created the reservoir. Anyone passing through came here, to the dam, and here Wrench would wait. And wait. And wait. Until the Warden tired of the game and called them in.
"Wrench! Somebody coming!"
He groaned. "If they're not carrying a damned communications satellite on their back, let them pass." The convicts had already robbed and killed two nitwits who'd stumbled this way. He was tired of it. Let the next ones go by.
"No, this is a big group! A regular army!"
Rivals? Cursing, he rolled upright to look, squinting at a group switchbacking down a hillside toward the dam. No army, but quite a few traveling together. Why? It was peculiar, and didn't match the four they were looking for. Then he looked harder.
"That one there," he muttered, pointing. "That's the woman, isn't it?" A slim, dark-haired woman strode steadily in the midst of the group. Raven, her name was.
"Where'd they get all those other people?"
"Or where did they get her?"
"She doesn't look like a captive. And I think I recognize some of the others."
Wrench wondered if the scouts on the other side of the canyon wall had stayed awake. "Didn't expect this many, but damn! Signal the others! It looks like Ico the Psycho was right after all." He grinned, wondering if he'd get some kind of reward. "We got 'em."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The dam was the most substantive relic of Australian civilization that Daniel's group had seen yet, and it was intact. The reservoir it had created was full, water lapping near the lip of the dam, and a small falls poured over the spillway gates at its middle. The wedge of concrete was of moderate size, its crest two hundred yards long and its downstream face thirty feet high. At its middle was a notch thirty yards long where the dam elevation dropped half the height of a man to a set of rusted spillway gates. It was here the reservoir water slid to the river below.
Before the plague the spillway gates were routinely opened and closed to control reservoir depth, electricity generation, and the flow of the river downstream. Disuse and rust had frozen them shut, corrosion eating into the steel to allow a spray of leakage around the gate edges. The reservoir had risen enough to top the old gates, the outlet water looking orange where it ran down the old steel. Bridging this sheet of water was an old wooden catwalk, connecting one end of the dam's concrete crest to the other. The dam and its catwalk made a bridge across the waterway, its top wide enough for Daniel's group to begin filing over two by two.