Gunnar and Massad made slow but steady progress through the waist high grassland. There was no way to properly judge distance, but a full day of steady walking, to Gunnar’s thinking, put them at least 20 or 30 miles away from the Andara Colony. Not that it mattered much, no one would be forming a search party to track them down. Their absence would be obvious of course, but Andara wasn’t a prison. Exile, yes, but confinement, no. Distance and geographical ignorance were the only assurance the empire cared about. Gunnar remembered the maps he had seen in the library when he was younger, then winced at the memory of watching them burn. All the books, all that knowledge, devoured in flames at the hands of unwavering tyrants. The radio towers torn down, the power plant turbines slowly grinding to a halt, 150 years of marvelous technological progress, five thousand years of recorded human intelligence, all wiped from existence forever.
Not just here, the whole world was torn apart. The wars had lasted almost a decade, nations devouring each other before turning inward and devouring themselves. But unlike all the wars of bygone centuries his teachers had described, human submission and power were never the goal. This war was against intelligence itself. And it had succeeded. For Gunnar, there were lands across oceans he would never reach, but in time even that knowledge of the wider world would fade into oblivion, replaced once more by the all consuming immediate need to find food, water, and shelter. His thoughts were interrupted by a short gasp from Massad.
“Gunnar, do you see?”
He chuckled at the sound of Massad’s strange accent, pronouncing it “Goo-Nar,” but he could indeed see the terrain begin to descend in front of him, the grasslands slowly fading to rocky ledges and further down the unmistakable meandering slash of a river. “I see, my friend. Another hour or two and we can camp by the river for the night.”
I might have no idea where we are, he thought to himself, but one direction or the other we’ll hopefully run into someone who can tell us.
