Starship Home (7 page)

It seemed to last longer this time. It seemed to stretch forever. The pounding in their temples drowned out everything except a far sound which they each, finally, in the agony of the Leap, realized was the blending of their five voices screaming.

For the ship herself screamed. It had never been like this. In her strength she had leapt through space and time, light as swansdown, soared like a skylark, sung her way through the folds and interstices of Time, swum like a dolphin in its river and leapt clear into blazing starlight once more. This time was like walking on old slow feet across redhot coals.

She was with them, her people, with them on the screen, and the screen showed the agony that tore at her mind. She saw the faces of her people stretch and contort as they howled in agony and then…

They were out. It was finished.

They lay sobbing on their couches, their faces pale as morning ashes. They tried to find breath, and then gave up the attempt. They lay panting.

The Wyzen was concerned for them. The Wyzen was not touched by the Leap in the way humans were, perhaps because her brain was small, and specialized for empathy and for the sensory perceptions that her kind used in hunting for fruit in the forests of their native planet.

The Wyzen lived to eat and to empathize with the emotions of sentient beings. The Leap itself did not touch her, but the pain of the people on the starship did. Now she sat alongside Zoe, licking her face, trying to bring her back to full consciousness.

‘Thank you Wyzen, that’ll be fine now,’ Zoe moaned, gently pushing the Wyzen away.

The Wyzen hopped down and moved to Zachary and pushed her whiskery face lovingly into his. ‘This is no time to get amorous, Meg, the kids are watching,’ Zachary said.

‘You’ll keep,’ moaned Meg.

‘Never have I had such a crossing as that. Yon Leap hath damaged me full sore.’

Zachary had never felt this bad. There was one morning after a night in a pearling lugger between Australia and New Guinea, a night which had involved a near-lethal mixture of overproof rum and kava, but even that had not been this bad. ‘At least we’re not dead,’ he said. ‘Dead must feel a whole lot better than this.’

Then Harold sat up. ‘Hey, that wasn’t so bad,’ he said. ‘Bit of a headache, felt a little nauseous there for a while, but not bad. That flash of light, Guinevere, I’ve had that each time, is that standard for the experience?’

Zachary lifted his head from the couch and looked at Harold through eyes which felt the size and consistency of softly-poached eggs in which the yolks had broken. ‘Kill him, Guinevere. Hit him with a ray gun or something.’

Zoe was now standing and stretching. ‘Wow, that wasn’t too good for a while,’ she said, ‘and then, I don’t know, it was kind of fun.’

Meg remarked, in a subdued shriek, the sort of shriek with which a werewolf of gentle breeding might welcome the rising of the full moon, ‘Why are they not suffering! I want them to suffer!’

Zoe looked concerned. ‘Are you two still feeling a little off-color?’

‘Their flesh is younger,’ Guinevere explained to Meg. ‘More sound than yours.’

Meg fell back on her couch. ‘That’s all I needed to hear. When I die, put me out the airlock before I rot, okay?’ She turned over on her couch and buried her head her arms. The Wyzen, realizing that here was a sentient creature in need of comfort, trotted over to her and licked her ear, which was the only part of her face exposed. Meg jerked upright. ‘And get that filthy animal away from me!’

The Wyzen retreated from the sentient being who had so rapidly turned into a dangerous beast of prey. The way it was looking at her reminded her of the omnivorous Kreklins which hunted Wyzens in the forests of her native planet. She retreated behind Zoe, getting the nice feral human between her and the one who was like a Kreklin.

Harold was now at the central console, looking up at Guinevere on the main screen. ‘Where are we, Guinevere?’ Her face disappeared, and the screen revealed a view of the Earth from space.

‘Is that our Earth?’ asked Zoe.

‘Of course it’s our Earth, don’t you ever see the satellite pictures on television?’

‘So maybe there are look-alikes.’

‘Look-alikes with continents shaped like Africa?’ It was sometimes hard for Harold to credit the degrees of ignorance other people displayed. ‘Could you search the radio and television transmissions for me, Guinevere?’

Zachary crept over and collapsed on another couch near Harold’s. ‘What you doing, kid?’

‘I want to find out what’s going on. Whether the Slarn raid was just local to South Australia.’

‘That was a pretty big fleet we saw up there when Guinevere was screening war movies.’

‘We just need to get as much information as we…’

‘Nothing is being broadcast,’ Guinevere said. ‘No transmissions.’

‘Maybe the Slarn just took all the satellites out. You remember? The morning of the attack? The weather and communications satellites were out?’ Harold said hopefully.

Zachary shook his head. ‘There’d still be radio. Guinevere, could we take a closer look?’ The Earth grew larger in the screen. ‘Closer.’

‘You won’t see much from space. The only human artifact that can be seen from space is the Great Wall of China.’

‘Wrong, Harold. We should be seeing contrails. Condensation trails from jet aircraft.’

‘I happen to know what contrails are.’

‘And we’re not seeing them. There are no planes flying.’

Harold now looked at Zachary with barely concealed surprise. ‘That was, uh … that was very intelligent of you, Zachary.’

‘Why thank you, Harold.’

‘I mean, nothing personal, but I just didn’t think a bus driver…’

Zachary looked hard at Harold and Harold shut up. He seemed to get that look a lot from adults and it always meant he was just about to get shouted at. He had learned a lot of very interesting words in this way.

‘Why don’t you dig yourself in a little deeper, Harold,’ Zoe said sweetly, but Zachary was now looking at the screen again. ‘Guinevere,’ he said, ‘how many people were the Slarn actually intending to take?’

‘All.’

‘All the people? All the people on Earth?’ Zachary could not remember how many people there were on Earth, but he seemed to remember a television documentary he had once switched away from to the football, and it had said about seven billion. ‘That’s a lot of people!’

‘The Slarn used every ship in the fleet.’

‘There’s no one down there? No one at all?’

‘Two in every hundred, left for to breed.’ Guinevere paused and added, ‘‘twas a slaving raid. Did’st thou not know this?’

‘Well, your Galactic slaving raids, they don’t come round very often. You know? I mean, this is the first one in my lifetime.’

‘The Galaxy is wide,’ Guinevere told him. ‘There is always a market for slaves … to colonize new worlds … for breeding stock … soldiers … always a market.’

‘So all our people are going to get sold,’ Harold said in a small, bleak voice.

‘I suppose it’d sound tacky if I said I wished I could be there to see my father sold,’ Zachary said.

‘It sounds absolutely tacky,’ Meg groaned from her couch. ‘If you want my honest opinion.’

‘I won’t say it then.’

Harold had been thinking. ‘Two percent of people left. You can see why planes wouldn’t be flying, why no one’d be broadcasting.’ He looked at Zoe, then Meg. ‘I mean, we know where my family are, but maybe they didn’t take your people, Zoe or yours, Meg.’ He looked at the main screen. ‘Guinevere, can you get us down there? Down to the road where you picked us up?’

‘Aye,’ she said, ‘but get ye to your couches all. I took sore damage on the Leap, and landfall may be a rough one.’

Cattle looked up at the pale blue dome of the cloudless sky. They could hear a muttering sound, like distant thunder. On the far side of the creek, a group of kangaroos cropped at the brown grass. First one, then another, then all of them lifted their heads, looked around, and hopped away on their strong rear legs.

Under the trees of the forest, it was cooler, but the blended smells of exotic pine and native eucalypt told of summer heat. There was a child in the forest, a 10-year-old girl, her face tanned and her hair bleached white by the sun. The child’s name was Maze, and she was both afraid and interested. The dreams which had come each night for the past month had today become waking dreams and she knew they were to do with the muttering in the sky.

That is how the dreams had always begun. With the blue sky, and the mutter of thunder, and Maze by herself in the cool of the forest and…

There!

Terror!

The vast shape appearing from nowhere as trees exploded from its path, making room for the giant stepped pyramid as it settled to the earth with a terrible roaring and crunching of wood and stone! Maze, in hiding, stared at the iron castle which had suddenly appeared in the forest and she knew she had seen its like before, in the sacred paintings on the walls of Our Mother’s hut.

Within the starship’s bridge, Harold, Zoe, Zachary and Meg got off their couches and approached the main screen. It came alive, showing them the forest outside.

‘Where’s this, Guinevere?’ Harold said.

‘Where ye came from.’

‘You must have us mixed up with someone else. We were in the bus? The metal wagon? It was going along a road, with paddocks either side? Flat grass country with wire fences?’

‘This is where ye were.’

Zachary tried to be diplomatic. ‘Guinevere, what Harold’s trying to say is that maybe you forgot just where you found us?’

‘Zachary, I cannot forget. The place is scribed in my memory. ‘tis here the road ran, the farms were, ‘tis here I took ye and your iron wagon within me.’

They looked at each other in silence. Zoe spoke first. ‘Maybe we should go out. Take a look around.’

The enormous metallic stepped pyramid in the forest had formed its own clearing when it appeared. Trees had literally been blown aside, rocks vaporized, so that there was now a cleared area around the starship. In the lowest step of the starship, a hatchway opened, and a ramp slid out. Down the ramp came Zoe and Harold, followed by Zachary and Meg. They walked as far as the trees, and then turned and looked back at the starship.

‘A pyramid,’ said Zoe.

‘I had no idea of the size…’ said Zachary.

‘A ziggurat, a stepped pyramid,’ said Meg. ‘In the Middle East … Central America … the homes of the gods.’

‘What are you saying?’ Zachary was looking at her oddly.

‘I’m saying the ziggurats and pyramids might’ve been built to look like starships. Guinevere said the Slarn have been to Earth many times before.’

‘But … pyramids are kinda smoothed off and pointy, aren’t they? I had a girlfriend, and her mother was an old-style hippie and used to sit under one to meditate.’

Meg shook her head. ‘The oldest Egyptian ones are stepped. And the ziggurats of the Middle East, and the Central American pyramids … they all rise in steps. They look like the starship. But built in stone or mud brick. They were where the gods lived. Where you … sacrificed … where you gave your crops … your people.’

‘Guinevere?’ yelled Harold.

‘I hear thee, Hal. And what cranky Meg doth say … ‘tis so. ‘twas long before my time, but I am told ‘tis so.’

In silence, they looked at the giant starship, and then in silence looked around. Finally Zachary spoke. ‘I got to tell you Guinevere, this isn’t where you picked us up. It’s got to be much farther out of town, in a National Park maybe…’

‘Nay.’

‘I think, really, that Zachary’s correct…’

‘Thy thinks change nothing, Zoe. We are where I say we are.’

Another silence, and then, ‘Okay let’s explore around a bit,’ said Zachary, and turned toward the forest, trying to take the lead, but was beaten to it by Zoe, who forged ahead of him.

Crouching in the forest, the child Maze watched them pass, her hand on the hilt of the sheathed knife she wore in her belt. The belt cinched clothes of animal skins and hand-loomed cloth, and her pale hair was held in place with a leather headband. As she followed them, her moccasins made scarcely a sound on the leaf litter of the forest floor.

Harold, Zoe, Meg and Zachary moved on through the forest, followed by the strange young girl.

The undergrowth had thinned out and they were now moving through primary forest. Tall gum trees, some of them as much as six feet through the trunk, towered above them, their peeling trunks smooth of side branches for their first thirty feet. Beneath the trees, the forest floor was littered with leaves and dead branches, and covered with what Meg recognized as a mixture of native and exotic grasses. There were signs that a fire had come through this part of the forest in the past year. Many of the trees were blackened at the base, with vivid green shoots now appearing through the charred surfaces. The loudest sound was the droning of cicadas, varied occasionally by the cry of a big black and white currawong, the hacking laugh of the kookaburra, and the shrieks of some black cockatoos who had found a big pine tree and were tearing apart the green pine cones in order to get at the pine nuts inside them.

They were passing under this pine tree, a radiata or Monterey, a Californian interloper in this mostly native eucalypt forest, when Harold made the first disconcerting discovery. As they passed beneath the tree, smelling the sharp piney scent of it, they could hear a crunching sound above them as the black cockatoos tore at the pine cones with their strong hooked beaks; shredded chips of the green cones were filtering down through the branches onto them. Then one of the cockatoos dropped a whole cone. They heard it crashing down through the branches toward them and they ran and Harold stumbled and fell.

He sat up, rubbing his shin, and then he saw what he had fallen over. It was a lump of reinforced concrete.

He stared at it. The reinforced concrete seemed to have been thrust up by the action of the old pine tree’s knotted roots. Kneeling, he started tearing away the grass, and soon found more reinforced concrete beneath a shallow covering of earth.

The others had stopped, and were looking back at him. ‘Come on Harold!’ yelled Zoe.

‘No, look!’

Reluctantly they walked back toward him, all the while keeping wary eyes on the activity of the black cockatoos above their heads. By the time they reached him, Harold had uncovered more reinforced concrete. ‘It’s reinforced concrete.’

‘So it’s reinforced concrete, so what?’ Zoe could not see the point Harold was trying to make.

‘But there’s more of it here. This whole area used to be under reinforced concrete.’ He moved away from the pine tree, and picked up a dead branch, and used it as a digging stick, scraping back the covering of earth and decayed leaves and pine needles to reveal the concrete surface.

‘So the whole area used to be under reinforced concrete.’

Meg was looking uneasily at the pine tree. ‘We’ve got pine trees this big at home. They’re eighty years old at least.’ She looked around at the gum trees. ‘The oldest of the gums could be about the same age. A little older perhaps.’

‘So they put reinforced concrete down here about a hundred years ago,’ said Zoe, then paused. ‘They didn’t have it, did they? They didn’t have reinforced concrete a hundred years ago?’

‘It’s as if there used to be a road here.’

‘Hey I thought we were supposed to be exploring,’ Zachary said, and moved on. ‘It’s probably an old World War Two installation or something.’ Meg followed him, leaving Harold and Zoe standing looking at each other.

When Meg caught up with Zachary she said: ‘World War Two? You really believe that?’

‘I don’t know, I just…’

‘You had me convinced me there for a moment.’

‘I just don’t want the kids getting spooked…’ He stopped in his tracks. ‘I think I’m getting spooked.’

For lying in the grass in front of them was a big plastic advertising standard from a gas station. Most of it was embedded in the soil beneath the roots of a big gum tree. The tree had grown on top of it. Zachary was looking up at the big tree when Harold and Zoe caught up with them. They looked from the gas station sign to the old tree. Without speaking Zachary moved on.

It was some minutes later they saw the rock. It was an unusual rock, shaped roughly like a big armchair. The three locals recognized it. Meg and Zoe and Harold all knew that rock and when they saw it, and they stopped and stared, because the last time they had seen it, it was at the side of the road leading to Dalrymple Ponds village. Now it stood in open forest land, surrounded by trees. Harold was first to speak. ‘My home’s five minutes walk from here.’ He looked at Zachary, whose face was a living question mark. ‘This rock. You must’ve passed it driving the school bus. Well, I’ve walked past it every day of my life. Home’s that way.’ And he pointed and began walking. After a moment the others followed.

The chimney was what they saw first, the brick chimney, blackened on its outside by fire. Some of the walls still stood, but most had crumbled to grass-covered heaps. The modern grafted roses had been burned back to their briar stumps, and had suckered so that briar roses now scrambled over what remained of the house. Various imperishable things had survived. A bathtub, pipes, ceramic tiles, but the house that Harold had left only a week before on his way to school was now an ancient ruin.

Harold came running toward it through the trees, running home as he thought, and then he stopped. Home was no longer there. Slowly he approached the ruins as the others followed at a distance. He climbed over the piles of brick and tile and entered what had so short a time ago been his family’s home. He looked around, and then located what had once been his room, the computer room his mother had insisted on calling his bedroom.

He heard the others coming up behind him but he did not look back at them. ‘This is it?’ It was Zachary’s voice. Harold nodded without looking at him. ‘No mistake?’ Harold shook his head. He felt that time had stopped, he felt that he was in a slow motion dream. His squatted down on his heels, his arms crossed on his chest, holding his arms to stop them from shaking, and Zoe dropped to one knee beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Just a bushfire, Harold. We got burned out once…’

He looked around, and her words trailed away, for they could both see that all this had not happened in a few days. Harold looked at the ground in front of him. Recent rain had eroded the soil, and protruding from it was a plastic toy. Harold tugged the toy from the soil, and started cleaning it off.

‘How long have we been away?’ he asked. He was looking at the plastic toy in his hands. It was a science fiction character model, a little “alien”. He shrugged Zoe’s comforting arm from his shoulders and stood up, and looked around, seeing bushland where there should have been five acres of lawn. ‘When is this?’ he said, ‘when are we?’

They all looked around in silence. All they could hear was the droning of the cicadas, and the distant shriek of a black cockatoo.

Meanwhile, unseen by them, the child Maze watched from behind a tree.