Starship Home

by Morphett, Tony

  STARSHIP HOME

  BY

  TONY MORPHETT

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 MORPHETT AND HUNTER P/L

  REPRESENTED BY: RICK RAFTOS MANAGEMENT

  PO BOX 445 PADDINGTON NSW AUSTRALIA 2010

  PHONE: +612-9281-9622 FAX: +612-9212-7100

  rickraftos@raftos.com.au

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  This story was originally written in the form of screenplays for a television miniseries planned by the South Australian Film Corporation. The miniseries was never made, but the story continued to haunt me until its rebirth in this present form. The author wishes to acknowledge the part played in the development of the project by the late John Morris and by Jock Blair, Peter Gawler and Graeme Koetsveld, all of them staff at the Corporation at that time. For those who may be interested, the original screenplays can be found at www.tonymorphett.com > Bottom Drawer > Miniseries > Starship Home

  DEDICATION

  To my beloved wife Inga Hunter.

  SYNOPSIS

  They were on their way to school when it happened. Harold, the 13-year-old computer nerd, Zoe the 15-year-old sport fanatic, Zachary the drifter whose current temporary job was school bus driver, and Meg Henderson who was born to rule, played polo and taught English and History at Dalrymple Ponds High School, were quietly going to school on a perfectly ordinary day when Slarn slavers arrived from space in a vast armada of starships and abducted 98% of Earth’s population, including Harold, Zoe, Zachary and Meg.

  But the perfectly ordinary day wasn’t over yet. After making a jump through Space-Time, the Slarn fleet came under devastating attack from hostile forces, the starship was damaged and evacuated, and the four mismatched passengers on the school bus found themselves the only people left on board.

  They soon found that the starship was sentient, embodying the mind of a young English woman named Guinevere, born in the time of Henry VIII and abducted by the Slarn on an earlier raid. They persuaded her to return them to Earth but owing to a misjudged leap in Space-Time, the Earth they returned to was 90 years after the mass abduction.

  The loss of population had resulted in a loss of technology: descendants of an outlaw biker gang were now a horse-riding warrior caste, there was a matriarchal society of forest dwellers and there were cannibals in the forests.

  In a race against time, Harold, Zoe, Zachary and Miss Henderson had not only to learn how to survive but also repair the starship with available tools and materials before she exploded and devastated the homeland of their new friends (and enemies).

  1: THE RETURN

  The Starship was going home. Nearly five centuries had passed on Earth since her pilot had been recruited by the Slarn, and now she was going home.

  All her family were dead long since, enriching the soil of Kent in England’s green south-eastern corner.

  She had journeyed far and fast, had moved through the shrieking green of Time itself, had smelled the rotting wealth of the swamps of Girvan’s World, and then smelled that same wealth in flames as she had lifted from the burning planet’s wreck.

  She had fought in battles between the stars, seen and talked with creatures more marvellous than cockatrice and hippogriff.

  In the year 1530 at a time when Henry VIII was King in England, the pilot had entered a religious order of nuns to escape persecution as a witch, for such some named her because of her Talents. She had given herself as a bride to Christ, and then, within a year, been taken by the Slarn for their Starfleet, because these same Talents were of use to them. How much time had passed for the starship? The question had no meaning. She had lost everything except herself.

  And yet, even though matured by experience into wisdom, the starship’s pilot was still like the 20-year-old she had been when taken. She laughed. She sang. She played tricks on her crew. Something there was within her which was still the merry maid of Kent she had once been.

  She sang now, as the vast armada of the Starfleet, every ship which could be mustered, every cruiser, trader, lighter, every mothballed veteran, every salvaged hulk the Slarn could find, moved through Time toward a rendezvous around the Home planet.

  The ship’s pilot sang, for she was going home.

  2: A PERFECTLY ORDINARY DAY

  Adelaide is the capital city of the State of South Australia. Founded in 1837 and named after a King’s wife, it is a more pleasant city than most.

  It has been there for only a blink in time.

  For consider. The city sits on the eastern shore of St Vincent’s gulf, which runs like an arm off the Southern Ocean. This Ocean itself is young.

  Generations of day-dreaming children have sat in classrooms, looking at maps of the world, and pondered the fact that if with a giant hand one could push the continents of the world together like jigsaw pieces, they would fit. Only remove the blue of the oceans and then the red of Australia would fit to the white of Antarctica, and the green of South America and the multi-colored shape of Africa, if brought together, one in each hand, and they would make…

  Gondwanaland.

  Scientists, once day-dreaming school children themselves, confirmed the daydream. Once, not long ago as the Universe measures time, it was all one piece. Then the tectonic plates moved, the Ocean invaded…

  And so Adelaide was founded on the Gulf, an arm of the young Southern Ocean. But only a blink in time ago.

  For more than 40,000 years Australian Aborigines lived there, 1600 generations of them. In summer they moved back into the hills, to avoid the heat. At the end of one such summer they returned to their land, and found it invaded. Europeans, from the other end of the earth, had founded a British Colony complete with a Governor and a Surveyor General and flags and bands and banners and uniforms, and firearms which were there to ensure that all the other things remained there secure.

  Adelaide had arrived, its citizens thought, to stay.

  The Surveyor General, Colonel William Light, son of an English Army officer and a Malayan princess (there are other versions of the story but none so romantic), laid out a city of broad streets and squares and parks, and was honored for his work by the city fathers who put up a bronze statue to him, overlooking the city he had planned.

  This then was the place where that perfectly ordinary day began.

  The morning peakhour traffic was slowly bringing workers into the city.

  Drivetime radio DJs and the serious people who front early morning television shows had all commented on the fact that the latest weather reports were not to hand. There was a problem with the satellites, they said.

  With blank bronze eyes, Colonel Light faced out over the city he had planned. Above him, a pale cloudless sky muttered with a sound like distant thunder. Commuter trains ran, stopped, let people off, took people on. Buses and automobiles fought for territory on the roads. It was a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary city. A day like any other.

  Except that this day, the Slarn were coming.

  3: HAROLD LEWIN

  The Lewin house was part of the new development in Dalrymple Ponds. It was, everyone said, and especially Mr Lewin who was in real estate said, the Way Dalrymple Ponds Was Heading.

  Dalrymple Ponds had once been a long way out of Adelaide, all of 15 miles, but then the coming of the automobile had turned it into a suburb.

  There was still a rear-guard action being fought by the market gardeners. Dalrymple Ponds had always been market gardens for as long as anyone could remember. The reason was the Ponds themselves. They were permanent water. The Ponds had attracted first Chinese market gardeners, then Italians, Greeks, and now Vietnamese.

  Just beyond the Ponds was the African Safari Park, which was really an open range zoo, and then the hills began soon after.

  Harold Lewin’s father said i
t was a Great Place To Bring Up Children As Long As The Council Maintained A Strict Building Code. This meant that he owned some land and some friends of his owned some land, and they were just waiting for it to be rezoned so they could split the land up into half acre blocks and put in kerbing and guttering and sewerage and electricity. Until then the Vietnamese and Greek tenants could grow vegetables on it.

  Harold’s father was not a bad man. He was certainly correct when he said that People Needed Places To Live, and most people would have agreed that his prediction that This Is The Way Dalrymple Ponds Was Going would be fulfilled within the next five years.

  But then, most people in Dalrymple Ponds did not known about the Slarn Confederacy. (They could not be blamed for this. No one on Earth knew about the Slarn Confederacy except Omar Harrison of Guardbridge Nebraska who had been taken prisoner by a Slarn scoutship, interrogated and then released again. Later on, Omar Harrison’s neighbors, by this time late of Guardbridge Nebraska, could not say that they had not been warned, but at the time they thought that Omar had gone nuts or been taking illicit substances.)

  The house Harold Lewin lived in had a wooden frame and brick veneer walls, and a double garage. It stood on a five acre block and had lawn back and front. There was so much lawn that Harold’s father had a mower he could ride on. He rode around mowing the lawn very early in the morning before anyone who wanted to buy or sell real estate was out of bed. In summer when there was daylight saving he would ride around mowing the lawn after the television newscasts finished and before the football.

  Harold never went out in the five acre garden even though Harold’s mother and father had decided to move out to Dalrymple Ponds To Give The Boy Room To Grow.

  The only room Harold wanted to grow in was the room inside his head.

  Harold certainly knew the garden was there. He saw it when he went to school and when he came back, and when he was in the house he could catch glimpses of it outside the windows. But he never actually went into it. Mostly he stayed in his room.

  This room, which his parents called Harold’s Bedroom was not really his bedroom. It was his computer room. There was a bed in his computer room and very often he slept in this bed, but the room was not a bedroom. There was also a wardrobe he pushed clothes into.

  In the mornings, Harold would get up and shower and dress to go to Dalrymple Ponds High. He would pull on his jeans which showed a little too much ankle, and he would pull on a windcheater which showed a little too much wrist.

  Harold was tall for his age, and very thin. Someone once said that it was impossible to be too thin. This point of view was not accepted at Dalrymple Ponds High School. For boys, thin was out, muscles were in. Harold was out.

  This did not worry Harold. It was entirely possible that he had not actually noticed that thin was out at Dalrymple Ponds High School. His mind was busy with other things.

  Mr Quayle, the sport teacher at Dalrymple Ponds High School, the same Mr Quayle whose motto was “good pain”, wanted Harold to be aware that thin was not so good. Harold, Mr Quayle, believed, had the body of a perfect middle distance runner. Mr Quayle wanted Harold to put his perfect middle distance runner’s physique at Mr Quayle’s disposal for only five or six years to help Mr Quayle build the best track and field team Dalrymple Ponds High School had ever seen. Harold fought Mr Quayle’s plan every way he knew how, because Mr Quayle’s plan for his life meant that he would be spending every afternoon running instead of working in his computer room.

  Harold did not know that he was soon to be going to a place and time where a middle distance runner’s physique and a good heart/lung ratio would be the keys to keeping his precious brain alive long enough to be of any use to him. Where he was going there were people who would wish to eat his brain.

  Harold was not to blame for not knowing this. The only person who knew this was Omar Harrison of Guardbridge Nebraska, and no one listened to Crazy Omar any more.

  On this perfectly ordinary morning, Harold was at his keyboard in his computer room, typing in lines of code for a program he was working on, and trying not to hear his mother calling him for breakfast. He had already lost half an hour’s programming time because of spikes in the power supply. The power supply was weird. If he could pretend not to hear his mother for just three more lines…

  The door opened. ‘Harold if you don’t come out for breakfast now I’m going to kill you.’ His mother tended to express herself forcefully. ‘I’ve just got to program three more lines…’ he said, but his mother was like ‘Now, Harold. Your father has to leave for work, he’s driving me nuts because he can’t get a signal on his phone, and I’ve got to leave with him…’

  Rapidly Harold kept typing in the lines as he talked for time. ‘Fine. Sure. Be right there…’

  ‘And you haven’t had breakfast yet.’

  ‘Had a muesli bar.’

  ‘Which in no possible definition of the term is breakfast!’

  He had the lines entered, he was saving. ‘Right!’ he said, standing, everything now back on schedule.

  ‘Is it sport this afternoon? Do you have your gear, I am not going to perjure myself once more to Mr Quayle who simply wants you to reach the age of 14 without turning into a slug…’

  ‘Mr Quayle sucks.’

  ‘Harold! Breakfast! Now!’

  Harold went out past her. ‘He says “good pain”. I mean, that’s the kind of thing a sadist might say. I mean what kind of person says a thing like that?’

  ‘A person who wants you to eat breakfast.’

  The kitchen had pale brown walls and built-in wooden cupboards and when Harold entered it was smelling of toast and coffee and fried bacon and eggs. Music played on the radio. Harold’s father sat at the servery, finishing toast and coffee. ‘You have five minutes,’ he said, not looking up from his phone. He was jabbing at it without result. ‘I can always get a signal in the kitchen,” he was muttering and then he looked up at Harold, suspiciously. ‘Is your computer interfering with my mobile phone signal?’

  ‘No,’ said Harold, already feeling guilty that his computer might have done exactly that, ‘but I was getting these weird spikes in the power supply.’

  His father looked at him. ‘Spikes?’

  ‘Variations in the current. I lost some of the program I was working on.’

  The music on the radio faded and, ‘this is 5DP Dalrymple Ponds, Voice of the Valleys, it’s eight a.m., and this is Pete Wilson with News on the hour…’

  ‘Four minutes 55 seconds,’ said Mr Lewin.

  Mrs Lewin gulped down the last of her rosehip tea and moved out to clean her teeth while Harold threw muesli into a bowl, and poured milk on it and started spooning it into his mouth.

  ‘If you ate more protein you might make the football team,’ said Mr Lewin as the radio DJ went on, ‘Scientists worldwide this morning are still unable to explain the simultaneous failure last night of all communications satellites…’

  ‘I mean I could’ve lost it all over again,’ said Harold, moving to the radio to listen.

  ‘Eat!’ said Harold’s father.

  ‘Shortly after midnight, all weather and communications satellites in orbit about the earth ceased transmitting. We’ll have more on that in our nine o’clock bulletin. In last night’s football, Port 14, 11, 95 points defeated Norwood 10, 14, 74…’

  Harold turned off the radio. His father stared at him in total parent-to-child disbelief. ‘What are you doing? I wanted to hear that.’

  Harold stared at his father in total child-to-parent disbelief. ‘They’re talking about football when the communications satellites are out? It could be a meteorite shower, an unknown comet, anything!’

  Mr Lewin was moving for the radio controls as Mrs Lewin entered. She did not look at Harold, but she said ‘Eat’ anyway on the principle that he would be doing something else.

  ‘It’s probably what killed the dinosaurs, you know,’ Harold went on, ‘meteorite showers can be pretty important!’

&
nbsp; ‘What killed the dinosaurs,’ Mr Lewin said with the pain of a man who has been deprived by an idiot son of his football scores, ‘was not being allowed to hear the football scores!’

  ‘And in golf…’ the radio DJ said, before a disappointed Mr Lewin cut the radio off again.

  ‘Or it could be solar flares. The sun’s going nova maybe and this will be the end of life on Earth,’ Harold said through his muesli.

  ‘I want you in the car in three minutes or I’m leaving without you and you’ll have to walk to the bus stop,’ said his father, ungrateful for the information Harold had just given him.

  4: ZOE POULOS

  The Poulos house was old by Dalrymple Ponds standards, and was weatherboard with an iron roof, which made a drumming sound when it rained. Around the house were sheds, the sheds of a market garden, and these were made entirely of galvanized but unpainted iron. Attached to the wall of one of these sheds was a basketball backboard and hoop.

  A basketball hit the backboard with a thud and dropped neatly down through the hoop. Before it could hit the ground, a dark-haired girl dressed in a tracksuit with a Dalrymple Ponds High School coat of arms stencilled on it moved in on her toes and retrieved, bounced the ball, evaded an imaginary opponent, slipped the ball around behind her back, moved, bounced it three more times and leapt, slammed the ball down through the hoop again, and caught it on its first bounce.

  Zoe Poulos was practising the art she loved best.

  Zoe looked both younger and older than her 15 years. Her hair was tied back into a simple ponytail, revealing a strong face, with the high cheekbones and aquiline nose which were genetic markers of her Greek ancestry. It was the face of a woman, not a girl. But the slender figure was that of a girl not yet grown into full womanhood.

  She was moving away from the goal now, bouncing the ball, practising sidesteps and turns when a small girl came out onto the verandah of the house. A three year old, barefoot, hugging a teddybear with her right arm, the arm anchored to her by the thumb which was in her mouth. Removing the thumb from her mouth, little Helena said: ‘Mum says miss bus.’