Starship Home (8 page)

Meg was watching the other three as they moved about the ruins of the Lewin family house. She knew there was no more to be done here, and that discussion was not going to help. ‘I think it’s time,’ she said in her clear carrying teacher’s voice, ‘that we all walked down to the village and talked to someone in authority. They’ll be able to tell us exactly what’s going on, don’t you think?’ She had their attention. Now it was up to her to get them moving. She began to walk toward the village.

‘This way, Miss.’

Zoe’s voice stopped Meg, and she turned to see Zoe waving an arm in a direction 90 degrees off the direction she had been taking. Making a wide, face-saving detour, she joined the others. ‘Just didn’t want to break my heels,’ she said.

The child Maze now followed the strangers through the open forest. They seemed to be heading for Oldtown, the Looter’s village. Perhaps they were a new kind of Looter themselves. She followed to find out.

The shallow depression which marked the old road which had once gone past Harold’s home joined in with a wider depression which Harold and Zoe realized was where the highway ought to be. This did not seem to have occurred to Meg, because as they moved between the lichen-covered walls of the cutting the Department of Main Roads had recently done to pass the highway through the top of the ridge, she said: ‘They built a by-pass a few years ago. This’ll be the old road no one uses any more.’

Harold and Zoe looked at each other and did not challenge Meg’s statement. They were not sure whether she believed it herself, or was simply trying to keep their spirits up.

Then Zoe saw the hoof prints in the wet earth at the side of the old highway. ‘Horses,’ she said.

‘Everyone round here keeps horses,’ Meg replied, forcing the pace.

In the village, the sound of cicadas was partially drowned by the sound of a piece of twisted galvanized iron sawing on itself in the breeze. It was a lonely sound. The village was deserted. No people walked its streets, no people used its shops, or its car park, or drank from its water fountain. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy rules. What human energy does not keep nailed up, falls down. What human hands do not keep bright, rusts. What energy does not go into preserving, decays. In the village, entropy ruled.

They came into the village along what remained of the highway. As they saw the main street, all of Meg’s carefully developed defences crumbled. ‘We’ve taken the wrong track,’ she said.

‘No.’ Harold and Zoe said it simultaneously.

‘That’s Ryan’s store,’ Zoe said, pointing at the ruined shopfront.

‘And there’s the bubbler,’ Harold said pointing at the drinking fountain.

Meg’s defences came back in a rush. ‘I was in the village last Saturday, and this cannot be the village.’ She got out her mobile phone and started dialing. ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this business right now.”

‘Who are you dialing?’ Zoe asked.

‘Emergency,’ Meg answered, then looked at her phone’s screen. ‘No signal. Anyone else got a mobile on them?’

‘It’s no use,’ said Harold.

‘I insist that everybody try dialing Emergency!’

‘The reason it’s no use,’ said Harold, ‘is because that’s the mobile phone tower.’ He was pointing at a tall metal structure, covered in vines.

Meg lost it. ‘For once don’t argue and just do it!’ she shrieked.

The other three drew their mobiles and dutifully dialed Emergency and then shook their heads. No signal.

‘Just because we can’t get a signal, that doesn’t make this Dalrymple Ponds village,’ said Meg. ‘For a start, Dalrymple Ponds doesn’t have a statue in it.’ She was pointing along the street toward a statue, standing on a plinth in the middle of the village. It was a bronze statue, and depicted a man, his left foot resting against a bronze tree stump, his left hand holding a surveyor’s map case. His blank bronze eyes stared along the street. Around the base of the statue were piled round white objects, slightly smaller than basketballs.

As they got closer they realized what the statue was. ‘Colonel Light?’ Zachary said, his face a picture of amazement. ‘He’s supposed to be in the parklands looking out over Adelaide!’ The discovery turned their tension into laughter. That the statue of Adelaide’s founder should suddenly turn up in Dalrymple Ponds suddenly seemed very funny.

Then their laughter froze on their lips. They were now close enough to identify the white objects piled about the base of the statue.

They were human skulls. The sun reflected off their whiteness, darkening the eye sockets which glared out at the intruders. Zachary walked up to the statue, and stared down at the pile of human skulls. They stared back. He turned to the others. ‘My suggestion is,’ he said, ‘that we now get the hell out of here.’

Meg shook her head. ‘We have to tell the police about this.’

They all knew where the Dalrymple Ponds police station was. It was just up the street. They looked at it. Its windows were broken and stared darkly at them like the eye sockets of the skulls. Its sign hung vertically, attached only at one end. They looked back at each other, and ‘The hell out of here,’ repeated Zachary, and herded the others back the way they had come.

They had not gone far when they found themselves running. No one knew who started running first. Perhaps they all started at once. They ran along the old highway, along the old road, past Harold’s home, past the stone shaped like an armchair, and then through the open woodland until they reached the denser scrub which surrounded Guinevere.

As they burst through the scrub and into the clearing, they all felt a sense of homecoming. Each of them, at some point in the run, had become aware of the fear that, on their return, Guinevere might be gone. They were already thinking of the starship as their home.

Bursting into the clearing, they were yelling for Guinevere to open her hatch and let them in. It opened, the ramp slid down and they ran inside. Along the ship’s corridors they ran until they came to the bridge, and there, and only there, they stopped running.

‘Guinevere,’ Harold panted, ‘when are we? How much time’s passed since you picked us up?’

‘For thee? A week.’ The main screen’s picture of the forest outside faded and Guinevere’s face appeared.

‘How much time’s passed on Earth?’

‘Ah,’ said Guinevere.

Meg was instantly angry. ‘“Ah” is not quite the answer we’re looking for here, Guinevere! Harold’s family home, the village, they look as if they’ve been deserted for … for years!’

‘And there’s a road out there, late 20th century reinforced concrete road, it hasn’t been used for 80, a hundred years!’ Zoe yelled.

‘And our mobile phones don’t work!’ Meg added furiously.

‘No social networking, no nothing!” Zoe added.

‘What’s happened, Guinevere?’ Harold asked. ‘Have we been travelling near light speeds or something? Time slowed down for us, kept going at the same speed back here on Earth? Or what?’

‘Not quite,’ said Guinevere. ‘When things are well with me, I can, in the river of Time, tack like a ship, and come out when I will. But with the wounds I had suffered, I had to find safe harbor where and when I could.’

‘Normally you’d adjust your time of arrival?’ Zachary asked, ‘but because of your wounds you couldn’t adjust on this trip?’

‘That is how it was.’

They looked at her for a moment in silence, then Harold asked the question they were all thinking. ‘How far are we in the future?’

‘On Earth, 90 years have passed since you left.’

Zachary found it hard to take in. ‘We’re back in the place where we started? But 90 years in the future? We’re in like the 22
^nd
Century?”

‘‘tis so,’ Guinevere replied. ‘I ask your pardons, all.’

They looked at the other screens, which still showed what was outside the starship. They were looking at the forest where the road had once run.

‘That … that’s the future?’ Meg asked. She had always imagined the future to be the same as the present only more so: taller buildings, sleeker automobiles and planes, healthier people, technology increasing, world without end. But this…

Harold alone knew. He had known since they had returned. He had known since Guinevere had told them that 98% of the Earth’s population had been taken. The only factor he had not made allowance for was the time shift. He said: ‘After the Slarn raid, with only 2% of the people, they couldn’t build cities, or keep them running.’

‘Right,’ said Zachary. ‘Couldn’t repair roads, make gasoline…’

‘Run schools, hospitals…’ Zoe murmured to herself. ‘Anything.’

‘Welcome to the Dark Ages,’ Zachary said.

In the forest outside the starship, the child Maze sat in cover, watching. An iron castle, come to the forest. Our Mother must be told. She stood, and ran toward Damplepon village, where it lay hidden deep in the woods.

Before the Slarn came, there had been noises in the night here. The night noises of those far times had been the distant hum of traffic on the highway, the distant drone of airline flights coming to and from the airport, the barkings of dogs, and the occasional ‘mor-poke’ cry of the mopoke owl. There were still noises in the night here. The night noises now were the howl of wild dog dingo, returned to its ancient hunting grounds, the occasional wire-thin shriek of some living creature fallen victim to a larger animal, the sudden thudding of prey running from a predator. The mopoke still cried in the night, but the planes, the traffic, were gone. There were other sounds now as well, stranger sounds, the sounds of animals not native to Australia, but which, escaped from zoos and safari parks and then breeding, now roamed the bush. The roar of the lion, the cough of the jaguar were now to be heard.

Zoe, Harold, Zachary and Meg had seen the light of their first day back on Earth fade from the screens on the bridge. They had eaten a ship’s meal with the Wyzen, and now were trying to make enough sense of their predicament in order to plan their way out of it.

‘Can we go back?’ Harold was asking. ‘Can we go back in Time, Guinevere, and somehow stop all this from happening?’

‘There is no going back.’

‘If you can go forward in Time, you can go back, surely.’

‘Many there are who have tried. For love, for power, for avarice, they have tried to force the doorways to the past, but none succeed.’

‘Why not?’

‘The Entities … they guard the backward paths. We may not pass there.’

‘Entities?’ Harold was fascinated. ‘What Entities? Who are they?’

‘No one knows. Creatures of great power, dread Angels of the Lord himself, perhaps. I know not.’

Harold pushed it one question further. ‘But we could try?’

‘Nay.’ The word was heavy with such finality that it produced a silence. They looked at the screens showing the dark forest outside.

Finally, Zachary said: ‘So we’re stuck in the future.’ He thought about it. Zachary’s natural reaction to any situation was to think that it would probably turn out okay. While he was alive, he always thought, he was one step ahead of the game. ‘Maybe the future’s great,’ he told the others. ‘I mean, we’re always going into the future anyway, right? One second at a time? This time we just got there a little sooner.’

‘This is what passes for your philosophy?’ Meg asked.

‘Maybe not philosophy. I don’t have things I can’t spell. But maybe the future’s all right. I’ve had good years in the past, maybe this’ll be a good year.’

‘I wouldn’t get carried away,’ Meg said with what she considered to be a superhuman display of patience. ‘This year that we’re in, you’ll recall, is the year where the hobby of the day happens to be decorating statues with dried arrangements of human skulls. In case you’d forgotten.’

‘There’s a down side to everything, Meg.’

‘A down side is certainly one way of putting it.’

‘Maybe not everyone does that. Maybe it’s just a few people who don’t get on with other people, and they…’

‘They express that sentiment by making piles of their enemies’ heads.’

‘Right!’ Zachary said, smiling, pleased to have gotten his point across.

‘We’re going to have to explore,’ Zoe said.

‘I am not going exploring in the Valley of Death as I am now rapidly beginning to think of this place,’ said Meg.

‘Will you kindly stop harping on that?’ Zachary cut in. ‘I’m sorry to say this Meg, but you’ve got a very negative attitude about this whole situation. It’s as if you came to our own time and said “these people have automobile accidents so I’m not going to step outside the house”.’

‘Having car accidents and piling up human skulls are two very different things!’

‘How? I mean, how many skulls were there? Hundred or so? That’s just a blip in the road toll figures.’

‘If you don’t understand the difference, Zachary…’

‘Could be it’s just their way of burying the dead.’

Meg was silent for a moment. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Lots of people do practise burial by exposure, Meg,’ Harold told her. ‘Tibetans, Parsees … it’s like re-cycling, thought by many to be an ecologically sound procedure.’

‘Don’t lecture me, Harold.’ Her lips were getting tighter than guitar strings.

‘Look,’ Zachary said, ‘maybe there are dangerous people out there. Of course there are. There were back in our time, there will be here. There are always dangerous people around. But there’s also always good guys. If we don’t explore we won’t find the good guys.’

‘Good
guys
? Would you like to re-express that in non-sexist language please?’

Sometimes Zachary thought Meg had laser beams instead of eyes. ‘Uh?’ he enquired.

‘“Good guys”. It’s a profoundly sexist expression. What’s wrong with … “good women”?’

‘Okay. If we don’t explore we don’t find the good women.’ Zachary grinned. ‘I’ve always said that, Meg, if you don’t explore, you don’t find the good chicky-babes.’ And he started laughing. This, he realized several seconds too late, was a mistake. Harold started laughing too, which added to the mistake.

Meg looked at Zoe. ‘Is it all right if I kill them?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Zachary said. ‘I apologize. It was, ah crass and insensitive of me, and what’s more ideologically unsound.’

‘Where’d you hear all that?’ Meg did not sound as if she were taking the apology in the way Zachary was trying to make it sound.

‘I had a feminist girlfriend. Womanfriend. Personfriend. Whatever. Once. She explained all that stuff to me shortly before dumping me.’

“Or in the act of dumping you? Just before she told you she never wanted to see you again? That it’d be a cold day in hell if she ever mentioned your name again?’

‘That’s right. That’s very perceptive of you.’ Zachary was genuinely amazed, wondering how Meg could have guessed that all that. ‘Maybe you know her? Maybe she told you?”

‘No,’ said Meg. ‘It’s just a gift.’

Harold cleared his throat. He now knew what they had to do. ‘Okay, here’s my plan.’ The others looked at him. ‘We take the starship up in the air, and we look for centres of civilization.’

Zoe was very impressed. ‘Harold, that’s brilliant.’

‘I could’ve said that,’ said Zachary, who in truth had not actually thought of it. ‘We could go to Paris, New York, Rome, Wagga Wagga…’

‘Wagga Wagga?’

‘That’s where my womanfriend came from.’

‘How about it, Guinevere?’

‘Alas, I cannot lift from here.’

‘But we fixed you up, didn’t we? In space? We mended you, we got here all right…?’ Meg was feeling the hollow sensation in the pit of her stomach that she always got when her car would not start.

‘The journey through the abyss of Time hath wounded me most sore. Till healed, I cannot fly again.’

‘We’re stuck here?’ said Harold. ‘Till you’re healed?’

‘Indeed, ‘tis so,’ Guinevere replied.

They looked at each other. Things seemed to be getting worse by the minute.