Starship Home (23 page)

‘Let the record show that Zachary said it was a “yes”,’ said Meg.

Zoe looked around the group. ‘So tomorrow we do it, okay?’

The agreement was silent, but agreement it was.

As light was fading, Marlowe moved through the forest, checking every few paces that he was not being followed. For Marlowe was heading toward his real home. There had been times in the past when he had not seen it for years on end, but always he had returned, and said the word of power, and re-entered the world of his childhood, the world of his dreamed-of future.

He came to a place where rocks were piled on each other as if thrown down by a giant hand, and he skirted the rock pile, and slid down the path the water took around the rocks when it rained. On the downward slope, under the rockpile, was the mouth of a cave, where water dripped and mosses grew, and ferns, and all smelled of damp vegetation, and the rich scents of mud and decay. Here the roof of the cave was still blackened by the fires which countless generations of Aborigines had burned here, camping in order to meet and to feast on the migrating water birds which came to the nearby swamps each year.

Marlowe moved into the darkness of the rear of the cave until he could go no further. He was facing a wall of rock, pitted by wind and water, and here he called the word that he alone knew: ‘Ha-bra-kadah!’ As the echo of the word faded, the wall of rock before which Marlowe stood turned on a pivot, revealing darkness beyond. Marlowe walked boldly into the darkness, and the wall turned again and closed behind him. It was as if he had never been in the cave at all.

Marlowe now stood in the darkness, shut within the heart of the earth but unafraid, for this was home, the home he had shared with his father many years before. He stood for a moment, breathing in the strange mixture of scents: the background smell of the woodsmoke which perfumed his own skin and clothes, the damp lingering smell of fern and moss from the cave, and the normal smells of home itself, bacon and lamp oil, cold metal and plastics. He moved, reaching out for the tinderbox he kept on a shelf to the right of the door. With steel and flint he struck a spark into finely shredded dry bark, and blew a flame, then from that flame lit a stub of candle, and from the candle lit an oil lamp.

As the light grew, Marlowe could see more of the familiar surroundings, and he was reminded once more of why he had felt so at home when he had entered the starship, and walked its corridors, and gone onto its bridge. For the same people who had made the starship had made this place. It was Slarn. Here were the smooth consoles, the screens, the telltales. But no one sat at the consoles, and the screens were blank and the dead eyes of the telltales told nothing. The Slarn base had lain dormant for decades. Even so, it had been used. There were oil lamps on the consoles, and tanned animal skins lay piled on one of the couches. Dried and smoked meats hung from hooks driven into the living rock of the ceiling, and from similar hooks driven into the rock walls hung clothing of all kinds, Forester handlooms, Troll leathers, a set of ragged clothes such as worn by the Looters in the painting on the wall of Our Mother’s hut, and other clothing as well, including, strangest of all, a suit of Slarn armor.

The range of clothing was so varied that a stranger seeing it might have taken it for a theatrical wardrobe, which, indeed, in a sense, it was, for Marlowe the Wanderer in his time had travelled much, and had had many names, and passed as a native son among many peoples.

On one of the consoles was a Victorian-era toilet set of water-jug and bowl, which Marlowe had found in a long-abandoned 20th century antique shop. Now Marlowe poured water from the jug into the bowl and began to wash his face. Before doing so, he removed his wraparound shades, closing his eyes against the water. Now he straightened, and reached for a cloth with which to wipe his face dry. As he drew the cloth down over his face he opened his eyes. One was fabricated from metal, and as Marlowe turned into the lamplight, his metal eye caught the light and blazed red. He now moved to the pole from which the clothing hung and began to undress. Beneath his Forester clothes, Marlowe, well into middle-age, was still physically hard, with long sinewy muscles criss-crossing his big-boned frame.

He dressed again in loose hand-loomed trousers and shirt. A leather jerkin went over the shirt, and a belt cinched it at the waist. The trousers tucked into soft leather boots, and a black cloak covered all. Now Marlowe moved to a mirror on the wall, and tied a black patch to cover his metal eye. Then he took a knife, and carved himself some bacon from one of the flitches hanging from the ceiling, and, while eating it, he picked up a wooden staff which leant in one corner. The staff was closely and intricately carved with the images of snakes, and frogs, and cats, insects and lizards, vines and flowers which twined and twisted and almost seemed to live in the dark grain of the wood.

Marlowe now extinguished the lamp, and in the sudden darkness turned to the door of the dormant Slarn base, and said the word of power: ‘Ha-bra-kadah!’ and the stone wall pivoted, and he walked out into the fading light of evening.

A full moon was shining down on Oldtown by the time Marlowe walked along its deserted main street.
Looters’ Moon
, thought Marlowe with a tight smile as he strode toward the dark figure of Colonel Light’s statue. When he reached the statue he paused, and looked up into its face. He knew whom the statue represented, he knew what Colonel Light had done, but he knew it in the way that a Dark Age Briton might have known the name and history of a statue of a Roman emperor. He would have known the name, and the legend, and the stories of a lost civilization, but for the ancient Briton as for Marlowe, the legions had left and life must still go on.

Driven into the ground on either side of the statue were two posts each ten feet tall and the thickness of a man’s thigh. The posts were decorated with ropes of straw and garlands of flowers and around their bases were piled bundles of thick twigs. When Marlowe saw the decorated posts with the wood piled around their bases, he knew that the people he was seeking were already here. He looked up at the full moon again, and nodded to it as if to an old friend, and then he turned and walked toward the largest building in Oldtown, the building which had once been the village library.

In what was once the main room of the library, people sat in a ring. In the middle of the circle were steaming bowls of what looked like stewed meat, and at the focus of the ring of people sat a man.

Think of a face. Think of an old face. Think of a face so old in evil that this evil has become its very nature. Think of your nightmares. Think of the nightmare you dare not remember. Think of the nightmare you dare not even dream. Think of the face behind that nightmare. The man at the focal point of the ring of people sitting in the old library had that face. The face was tattooed all over, the blue lines of the tattoos crawling out of the wrinkles into the firelight and then crawling down into the wrinkles again. Sparse white hair sprouted in patches from the tanned and tattooed skull. More white hair grew from the ancient ears. The man was so old that even his beard had fallen away in patches. Below the age-purpled lips, the beard was made yellow with what was dripping from his mouth, for the face was engaged in eating.

The strong but skeletal fingers of the old man’s left hand scooped boiled bone and grey fragmenting flesh from a common bowl and thrust it between the purple lips, and the fat and juice ran down the chin and through the beard and onto the rags he wore.

He was the Eldest. He was the Eldest in name and in fact and as he looked around his Looter pack, the Eldest felt some pride in that.
Too old to be eaten
, he thought with a wry satisfaction, he who had eaten so many others, both from the Human Race and from other tribes and clans.
Too old to be eaten
, he thought again and chuckled. The Eldest’s chuckle brought worried glances from the Looters sitting closest to him. The glances stole down to what lay on the ground before the Eldest. It was his sacrificial knife. Ninety years before, the knife had been a sickle used for cutting weeds in a suburban garden. Since then it had lost its wooden handle, and its blade had been loved and adorned, and plated with gold, and rehandled with a human thighbone into which, scrimshaw fashion, had been etched designs of scarlet and black. Parrot feathers hung from it in bunches. It was a thing of evil beauty.

The Looters’ eyes moved to this knife when the Eldest chuckled, for sometimes when the Eldest laughed it was because he was about to use this symbol of his office, and sometimes he would use it on those nearest to him.

The Looters themselves ranged in age from young children to men and women in middle years. All were tattooed in geometric patterns, all were dressed in rags, and all wore film stars’ ransoms in gold about their necks and arms. Suddenly they knew they were not alone. A tall black-cloaked figure had entered the old library, and was leaning on an intricately carved wooden staff, staring at them.

Marlowe had found the people he had come looking for.

The Eldest smiled a gap-toothed smile of welcome. It was a welcoming smile such as few people would not have run screaming from. Marlowe returned the smile and advanced.

‘Brother Marlowe,’ the Eldest was saying in a voice which hissed like a kettle and creaked like an unoiled hinge, ‘so long it is, Brother Marlowe, so long since we met.’

‘So long indeed, Eldest, so long.’

The Eldest pushed the Looter on his right hand away from him to make space for Marlowe. ‘Share our meal, Brother Marlowe, share our life.’

Marlowe sat cross-legged in the space cleared for him, and reached into the common bowl with his left hand and scooped cooked meat from it, and ate.

The Eldest nodded, decorum had been satisfied, and now he looked around the Looter pack. ‘Brother Marlowe loves wisdom, little children. Paid an eye for wisdom, did Brother Marlowe, one sweet little juicy eye.’ The Eldest laughed then and the pack went on eating as, through the ruined roof, the Looters’ Moon shone down on them.

The same moon shone down on the stepped pyramid of the starship in the forest clearing. The hatch opened, and Zachary came out with a pail of garbage and the spade from the tool kit of the school bus. It was his turn to bury the garbage. As he stepped into the clearing, he heard the cough of a jaguar in the forest, and decided to bury the garbage close to the ship.

Though what the hell,
he thought.
Getting eaten tonight, I could be just beating the rush.

The starship crew had set out soon after first light had brightened into dawn, armed with Slarnstaffs and carrying their food for the day in what Zachary called “Slarn general issue packs”. The forest sparkled and smelled freshly washed from the light rain which had fallen just before dawn, and even coming across the freshly killed remains of a kangaroo did not diminish their general optimism. They were all experiencing that rising of the spirits which comes from being committed to a course of action. There were no other options open to them, they were doing what they thought was the right thing at the first possible opportunity and, human as they were, the knowledge that they were carrying very hefty firepower in the form of four Slarnstaffs enhanced that general feeling of wellbeing.

They reached the village, or Oldtown as the Foresters called it, almost too soon. They had been enjoying the walk in, but arriving there made it all too real again. They had to get into this place, cut up a real statue, and carry back as much of it as they could to the ship. Then they had to go on making trips until they had gotten all of it back to Guinevere. Even if each of them could carry 50 pound packs of the bronze, and Zachary doubted this, they were looking at ten trips minimum. Zachary secretly believed that it was going to be more like 20 sorties to the village by the time they had the operation finished, and this at a time when the Foresters claimed there could be cannibals in residence. He was figuring on two or three days very hard slog at the absolute minimum, providing that they did not strike resistance. But first things came first, and the first thing about any assignment was to stay alive long enough to do it.

So when they got to the village, he made the party take cover while they watched the main street for ten minutes measured by Harold’s all-purpose watch. Nothing moved. They began to feel slightly foolish. Zachary was interested in two posts, standing one each side of the statue and he quietly asked the others if they had been there when they had come to the village on their first day,. There was disagreement about this. So much had happened since that first day, their memories of it were quite hazy. Meg was not sure, Zoe was positive that they had been there, and Zachary, unfamiliar with the village in their own time, could not for the life of him remember, but said he had a bad feeling about the posts. They looked out of place, he said.

To this, Zoe replied that the reason why she thought they had been there on the first day was that they looked exactly right, and balanced the positioning of the statue. Harold said that was just her artistic sense and had no basis in fact, and Meg then had to stop the ensuing fight. After they had lain there for ten minutes, Zachary sniffed the air, and asked everyone what they could smell. They could all smell wood smoke, but wood smoke seemed to be one of the most common smells in this era. Everyone and everything seemed to smell of it. Then Zoe said she could smell cooking, and when pressed for more detail said it smelled like pork stew, at which point Harold said she was a greedy guts and that they were wasting time and they should get on with it, and Meg had to stop the fight again. Zachary took one more look at the posts, and got his bad feeling back, but decided that they had better make a start.

Moving out of cover, they jogged down the more intact side of the street in the long morning shade of the surviving buildings, sometimes emerging into sunlight briefly as they came opposite a vacant lot where a building had burned down or collapsed. Zachary took point, followed by Harold and Zoe, with Meg trailing, watching their rear.

The only sounds were their footfalls in the dust, and their breathing, the dragging scrape of a loose piece of galvanized iron moved by the breeze, the calling of currawongs and parrots and the distant screeches of feuding white cockatoos in the encroaching forest. They were opposite the statue now, and they could see the straw ropes and fresh flower garlands on the posts and what seemed to be bundles of firewood at their bases. Zachary’s bad feeling about the posts increased. Whether the posts had been there or not, he surely would have remembered the decorations. Someone had been here since their first visit. He looked at the garlands of flowers. He could smell them from where he was in the shade of the derelict general store. Their scent of roses and jasmine overlaid the smells of wood smoke and dust. The starship crew were all looking at them, all smelling them, all getting the same message from them.
Danger.

Zachary knew if they did not move soon they would not move at all, so he slapped his Slarnstaff and snapped out the word ‘go!’ with more assurance than he felt and they moved out into the sunlight and to the statue. Now, all the previous attempts at concealment felt a bit silly. After all, they were about to drop about a ton of bronze off a pedestal and cut it up, but Zachary knew it had been worthwhile. Feeling silly was better than just strolling in and getting ambushed. Surely, he thought, if there was anyone around they would have seen them by now.

What he did not realize was that Looters, like teenagers and vampires, were night people. They went to bed late and slept late, and just after dawn was not a time when they were likely to be up and around.

From one of the Slarn general issue packs, Zachary took a length of rope he had found in one of the Starship’s storerooms. He took one end of the rope and made a running noose, and tossed and dropped the noose over the head of Colonel Light. He did the same thing two more times, so that now the Colonel had three ropes around his neck.

Harold, Zoe and Meg now put their Slarnstaffs to one side and took the three ropes’ ends, and stood by to stabilize the statue as Zachary cut it down. Zachary turned his Slarnstaff to flame, and then adjusted it to produce a cutting flame. He then started to cut Colonel Light off at the ankles. He felt bad about this. He had once had a very romantic experience on a park bench in the very shadow of this statue when it had stood in the parklands of North Adelaide. To think that he should now be cutting it up to feed to a sick starship wounded his delicate sensibilities, or at least that was what he was telling himself.

The cutting flame of Zachary’s Slarnstaff was making short work of the first of Colonel Light’s ankles. He was through and starting on the second. Now he just had to separate the bronze leg from the bronze tree stump, and when that was done they should see some action. Then it happened in a rush. The statue leaned, and then started to fall. The ropes simply could not hold it. The statue crashed to the ground with a resounding clang and crump and thump, like three automobile accidents happening all at once and it was this noise that woke the Looters.

Marlowe had been awake since first light had crept through the gaps in the ruined roof and driven the darkness into the corners of the old library. He had been pondering the right way of proceeding to enlist the help of the Looters who were all around him, lying in heaps, bunched together for warmth, in a ring about the ash-covered coals of the fire.

The Eldest was closest to the fire, and on each side of him slept a young Looter woman whose honor it was to keep warm their leader’s ancient body each night. Then the statue fell down in the street outside. The terrible crash brought Marlowe to his feet, and snapped the Looters awake. The Eldest was on his feet in an instant, snatching up his sacrificial knife, and it was he and Marlowe who led the rush outside.

The Eldest stopped for a moment when he saw what was happening. There, fifty yards up the street, Dark One was lying on his face, and a man with a stick which spewed fire was trying to burn him. Another man and two women had ropes around Dark One’s neck and were clearly trying to strangle him. To the Eldest this was a mystery. After all, Dark One had made all that was, and controlled all that was. This being so, why had Dark One allowed these foods to desecrate his image? This must be for a reason, and the only reason the Eldest could see was that Dark One was testing him.

‘Sacrilege!’ screamed the Eldest and, lifting his sacrificial knife above his head, he led the rush toward the infidels. The Starship crew looked up and saw a group of raggedly dressed people rushing toward them from the vicinity of the old Municipal library. They were screaming and shouting, and the one who seemed to be their leader was waving some kind of a sickle.

Zoe, Meg and Harold scrambled for their Slarnstaffs as Zachary lifted his, and set it to stun. It all took too long. Given a minute of time, they could have stunned all of their attackers. As it was they had less than ten seconds. In that ten seconds they learned one of the great lessons of exploration: firepower only works against technological primitives if you get a chance to use it. A foul-smelling human wave rolled over the Starship crew. A few Looters fell to stun blasts from the Slarnstaffs, but enough got through to do the job ten times over.

Harold heard Marlowe yelling ‘Keep them alive, don’t kill them, I have to know what they’re doing!’ and then a blow to his head brought unconsciousness. The last thing he heard were dozens of voices chanting ‘Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!’ and then he heard no more. Zoe, Meg and Zachary were still conscious as the Looters bound their hands behind their backs, and they saw the leader, the one who looked as if he came from their worst nightmare, crouching over the fallen statue, talking to it, saying: ‘Poor Dark One, did they hurt you? Feed them to you Dark One, all best bits for Dark One, mmm, pretty Dark One?’ And then he rose to his feet, and his head went back, and his white-glazed eyes looked up to the sky and he shouted: ‘Dark One speaks in my brain! Dark One says! Feed me blood!’

Zachary, felt the time had come for negotiation, and said, ‘Couldn’t we discuss this? Like civilized people?’ but his words were drowned out by the stamping feet of the dancing Looters and their chant of ‘Eat! Eat! Eat!’ Marlowe was moving swiftly toward the Eldest.
Who is this guy?
Zachary thought,
Keeps turning up and whenever he turns up there’s trouble especially for Zachary Owens and I’m getting very tired of it.
Zachary could see Marlowe talking to the leader of what he rightly took to be the Looters, but he could not hear what was being said.

Marlowe was talking quietly and rapidly to the Eldest. ‘It’s important you don’t kill them yet. I need to know why they wanted the statue.’

To the Eldest, the answer was obvious. ‘Steal god, get power. Steal Dark One get Dark One power.’

‘I’ve got to talk to them.’

‘Dark One speaks in my brain! Dark One says! Feed me blood!’

Marlowe suddenly turned, his black cloak flowing out about him, his hands clapping once, twice, and three times, and then fire leapt from the outstretched fingertips of each hand. Everything stilled, the Looters stood staring at him, and under the terrible gaze of his one unmasked eye they dropped their gaze, and looked at the ground. ‘Look up!’ Marlowe’s voice boomed, and hesitantly the Looters looked up at him. Slowly Marlowe reached up to the patch which covered his metal eye, and then swiftly ripped the patch away. The metal eye glared at the Looters. ‘Your Eldest has told you how I paid one eye for wisdom,’ Marlowe’s voice rang out, ‘but he didn’t tell you, for he didn’t know, that Dark One has given me a new eye.’ He pointed to the metal orb, and as it rolled in its socket, flickering, red, seeming to look at each Looter in turn, they moaned, and wept and fell down to avoid its terrible gaze. ‘Dark One’s eye, given to me to watch for him. He watches you through this eye now!’

‘He says in my head,’ the Eldest reiterated, but now with a weakening resolve, ‘feed me blood.’

‘Later,’ said Marlowe. ‘He says Marlowe talk to them first. Talk to the blasphemers alone.’

‘Good idea!’ said Zachary. ‘Good one!’