The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (56 page)

Nugan became aware of the men and made an appreciative sound unbecoming in a middle-aged matron past child-bearing years. These men wore only G-strings and they were
men
. Not big men but
shapely, muscular and very male.
Or am I so accustomed to Starfarer crew that any change rings a festival bell? Nugan, behave!

The man ordered forward came warily and stopped a safe arm’s length from her, sniffing. Nugan examined him.
If I were, even looked, twenty years younger
. . . He spoke suddenly in a
resentful, blaming tone. The words were strange (of course they must be) yet hauntingly familiar; she thought that part of the sentence was “dam-dam she!”

She kept quiet. Best to observe and wait. The whole party, led by Madam In Black, came across the pasture. They stopped in front of her, fanning out in silent inspection. The men smelled mildly
of sweat, but that was almost a pleasure; after thirty years of propinquity,
Starfarer
’s living quarters stank of sweat.

Madam In Black said something in a voice of authority that seemed part of her. It sounded a little like “Oo’re yah?” – interrogative with a clipped note to it; the old
front-of-the-mouth Australian vowels had vanished in the gulf of years. It should mean, by association,
Who are you?
but in this age might be a generalised,
Where are you from?
, even,
What are you doing here?

Nugan played the oldest game in language lesson, tapping her chest and saying, “Nugan. I – Nugan.”

Madam In Black nodded and tapped her own breast. “Ay TupMa.”

“Tupma?”

“Dit – Tup-Ma, Yah Nuggorn?”

“Nugan.”

The woman repeated, “Nugan,” with a fair approximation of the old vowels and followed with, “Wurriya arta?”

Nugan made a guess at vowel drift and consonant elision and came up with,
Where are you out of?
meaning, Where do you come from?

They must know, she thought, that something new is in the sky. A ship a kilometre long has been circling for weeks with the sun glittering on it at dawn and twilight. They can’t have lost
all contact with the past; there must be stories of the bare bones of history.

She pointed upwards and said, “From the starship.”

The woman nodded as if the statement made perfect sense and said, “Stair-boot.”

Nugan found herself fighting sudden tears.
Home, home, HOME has not forgotten us
. Until this moment she had not known what Earth meant to her, swimming in the depths of her shipbound
mind. “Yes, stair-boot. We say starship.”

The woman repeated, hesitantly, “Stairsheep?” She tried again, reaching for the accent, “Starship! I say it right?”

“Yes, you say it
properly
.”

The woman repeated, “Prupperly. Ta for that. It is old-speak. I read some of that but not speak – only small bit.”

So not everything had been lost. There were those who had rescued and preserved the past. Nugan said, “You are quite good.”

Tup-Ma blushed with obvious pleasure. “Now we go.” She waved towards the banana grove.

“I can’t.” A demonstration was needed. Nugan struggled upright, put the injured foot to the ground and tried for a convincing limp. That proved easy; the pain made her gasp and
she sat down hard.

“Ah! You bump!”

“Indeed I bump.” She unshackled the right boot and broke the seals before fascinated eyes and withdrew a swelling foot.

“We carry.”

We
meant two husky males with wrists clasped under her, carrying her through the grove to a large wooden shed where more near-naked men worked at vats and tables. They sat on a table and
brought cold water (
How do they cool it? Ice? Doubtful
) and a thick yellow grease which quite miraculously eased the pain somewhat
(A native pharmacopoeia?)
and stout, unbleached
bandages to swathe her foot tightly.

She saw that in other parts of the shed the banana flesh was being mashed into long wooden moulds. Then it was fed into glass cylinders whose ends were capped, again with glass, after a pinch of
some noisome-looking fungus was added. (
Preservative? Bacteriophage? Why not?
) A preserving industry, featuring glass rather than metal; such details helped to place the culture.

Tup-Ma called, “Lukey!” and the man came forward to be given a long instruction in which the word
Stair-boot
figured often. He nodded and left the shed at a trot.

“Lukey go – goes – to tell Libary. We carry you there.”

“Who is Libary?”

The woman thought and finally produced, “Skuller. Old word, I think.”

“Scholar? Books? Learning?”

“Yes, yes, books. Scho-lar. Ta.” Ta? Of course – thank you. Fancy the child’s word persisting.

“You will eat, please?”

Nugan said quickly, “No, thank you. I have this.” She dug out a concentrate pack and swallowed one tablet before the uncomprehending Tup-Ma. She dared not risk local food before
setting up the test kit, enzymes and once-harmless proteins could change so much. They brought a litter padded like a mattress and laid her on it. Four pleasantly husky men carried it smoothly,
waist-high, swinging gently along a broad path towards low hills, one of which was crowned by a surprisingly large building from which smoke plumes issued.

“Tup-Ma goodbyes you.”

“Goodbye, Tup-Ma. And ta.”

It was a stone building, even larger than it had seemed. But that was no real wonder; the medieval stone masons had built cathedrals far more ornate than this squared-off
warehouse of a building. It was weathered dirty grey but was probably yellow sandstone, of which there had been quarries in Victoria. Sandstone is easily cut and shaped even with soft iron
tools.

There were windows, but the glass seemed not to be of high quality, and a small doorway before which the bearers set down the litter. A thin man of indeterminate middle age stood there, brown
eyes examining her from a dark, clean shaven face. He wore a loose shirt, wide-cut, ballooning shorts and sandals, and he smiled brilliantly at her. He was a full-blooded Aborigine.

He said, “Welcome to the Library, Starwoman,” with unexceptionable pronunciation though the accent was of the present century.

She sat up. “The language still lives.”

He shook his head. “It is a dead language but scholars speak it, as many of yours spoke Latin. Or did that predate your time? There are many uncertainties.”

“Yes, Latin was dead. My name is Nugan.”

“I am Libary.”

“Library?”

“If you would be pedantic, but the people call me Libary. It is both name and title. I preside.” His choice of words, hovering between old-fashioned and donnish, made her feel like a
child before a tutor, yet he seemed affable.

He gave an order in the modern idiom and the bearers carried her inside. She gathered an impression of stone walls a metre thick, pierced by sequent doors which formed a temperature lock. The
moist heat outside was balanced by an equally hot but dry atmosphere inside. She made the connection at once, having a student’s reverence for books. The smoke she had seen was given off by a
low-temperature furnace stoked to keep the interior air dry and at a reasonably even temperature. This was more than a scholars’ library; it was the past, preserved by those who knew its
value.

She was carried past open doorways, catching glimpses of bound volumes behind glass, of a room full of hanging maps and once of a white man at a lectern, touching his book with gloved hands.

She was set down on a couch in a rather bare room furnished mainly by a desk of brilliantly polished wood which carried several jars of coloured inks, pens which she thought had split nibs and a
pile of thick, greyish paper. (
Unbleached paper? Pollution free? A psychic prohibition from old time?
)

The light came through windows, but there were oil lamps available with shining parabolic reflectors. And smoke marks on the ceiling. Electricity slept still.

The carriers filed out. Libary sat himself behind the desk. “We have much to say to each other.”

Nugan marvelled, “You speak so easily. Do you use the old English all the time?”

“There are several hundred scholars in Libary. Most speak the old tongue. We practise continually.”

“In order to read the old books?”

“That, yes.” He smiled in a fashion frankly conspirational. “Also it allows private discussion in the presence of the uninstructed.”

Politics, no doubt – the eternal game that has never slept in all of history. “In front of Tup-Ma, perhaps?”

“A few technical expressions serve to thwart her understanding. But the Tup-Ma is no woman’s fool.”

“
The
Tup-Ma? I thought it was her name.”

“Her title. Literally, Top Mother. As you would have expressed it, Mother Superior.”

“A nun!”

Libary shrugged. “She has no cloister and the world is her convent. Call her priest rather than a nun.”

“She has authority?”

“She has great authority.” He looked suddenly quizzical. “She is very wise. She sent you to me before you should fall into error.”

“Error? You mean, like sin?”

“That also, but I speak of social error. It would be easy. Yours was a day of free thinking and irresponsible doing in a world that could not learn discipline for living. This Australian
world is a religious matriarchy. It is fragile when ideas can shatter and dangerous when the women make hard decisions.”

It sounded like too many dangers to evaluate at once. Patriarchy and equality she could deal with – in theory – but matriarchy was an unknown quantity in history. He had given his
warning and waited silently on her response.

She pretended judiciousness. “That is interesting.” He waited, smiling faintly. She said, to gain time, “I would like to remove this travel suit. It is hot.”

He nodded, stood, turned away.

“Oh, I’m fully dressed under it. You may watch.”

He turned back to her and she pressed the release. The suit split at the seams and crumpled round her feet. She stepped out, removed the gloves with their concealed armament and revealed herself
in close-cut shirt and trousers and soft slippers. The damaged ankle hurt less than she had feared.

Libary was impressed but not amazed. “One must expect ingenious invention.” He felt the crumpled suit fabric. “Fragile.”

She took a small knife from her breast pocket and slit the material, which closed up seamlessly behind the blade. Libary said, “Beyond our capability.”

“We could demonstrate – ”

“No doubt.” His interruption was abrupt, uncivil. “There is little we need.” He changed direction. “I think Nugan is of Koori derivation.”

“Possibly from Noongoon or Nungar or some such. You might know better than I.”

His dark face flashed a smile. “I don’t soak up old tribal knowledge while the tribes themselves preserve it in their enclaves.”

“Enclaves?”

“We value variety of culture.” He hesitated, then added, “Under the matriarchal aegis which covers all.”

“All the world.”

“Most of it.”

That raised questions. “You communicate with the whole world? From space we detected no radio, no electronic signals at all.”

“Wires on poles and radiating towers, as in the books? Their time has not come yet.”

A queer way of phrasing it. “But you hinted at global communication, even global culture.”

“The means are simple. Long ago the world was drawn together by trading vessels; so it is today. Ours are very fast; we use catamaran designs of great efficiency, copied from your books.
The past does not offer much but there are simple things we take – things we can make and handle by simple means.” He indicated the suit. “A self-healing cloth would require art
beyond our talent.”

“We could show – ” But could they? Quantum chemistry was involved and electro-molecular physics and power generation . . . Simple products were not at all simple.

Libary said, “We would not understand your showing. Among your millions of books, few are of use. Most are unintelligible because of the day of simple explanation was already past in your
era. We strain to comprehend what you would find plain texts, and we fail. Chemistry, physics – those disciplines of complex numeration and incomprehensible signs and arbitrary terms –
are beyond our understanding.”

She began to realise that unintegrated piles of precious but mysterious books are not knowledge.

He said, suddenly harsh, “Understanding will come at its own assimilable pace. You can offer us nothing.”

“Surely . . .”

“Nothing! You destroyed a world because you could not control your greed for a thing you called progress but which was no more than a snapping up of all that came to hand or to mind. You
destroyed yourselves by inability to control your breeding. You did not ever cry
Hold!
for a decade or a century to unravel the noose of a self-strangling culture. You have nothing to teach.
You knew little that mattered when sheer existence was at stake.”

Nugan sat still, controlling anger.
You don’t know how we fought to stem the tides of population and consumption and pollution; how each success brought with it a welter of unforeseen
disasters; how impossible it was to coordinate a world riven by colour, nationality, political creed, religious belief and economic strata
.

Because she had been reared to consult intelligence rather than emotion, she stopped thought in mid-tirade.
Oh, you are right. These were the impossible troubles brought by greed and
irresponsible use of a finite world. We begged our own downfall. Yet
. . .

“I think,” she said, “you speak with the insolence of a lucky survival. You exist only because we did. Tell me how your virtue saved mankind.”

Libary bowed his head slightly in apology. “I regret anger and implied contempt.” His eyes met hers again. “But I will not pretend humility. We rebuilt the race. In which year
did you leave Earth?”

“In twenty-one eighty-nine. Why?”

“In the last decades before the crumbling. How to express it succinctly? Your world was administered by power groups behind national boundaries, few ruling many, pretending to a mystery
termed
democracy
but ruling by decree. Do I read the history rightly?”