Starship Home

by Morphett, Tony

  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 22nd 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.

  22: GROUNDED

  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.

  23: OUR MOTHER

  The hut smelled of wood smoke and the burning fat of the lamp’s wick, of the herbs that hung from the roof, and of the old dog lying by the woman’s feet. The woman was ancient. The skin of her face was tanned and wrinkled into a mask, the color of a carved nut, with glittering agate eyes in it, and white hair so thin it scarcely covered the scalp.

  The ancient woman, draped in skins and hand-loomed cloth, was listening to the child who sat cross-legged before her. Between the child and the open doorway which led onto the night-shrouded verandah, a red line crossed the room. Males did not cross this line into Our Mother’s presence.

  ‘A big castle, Our Mother, all shiny, made of iron. One moment it wasn’t there. Then…’ Maze clapped her hands. ‘There.’

  ‘Big.’ Our Mother’s voice scarcely issued from the sunken ‘O’ of her toothless mouth. ‘How big? Big as this hut?’

  ‘Bigger. Big as hundred huts. It wasn’t there. Then it was. Like that! From nowhere!’

  ‘Then what?’ The agate eyes looked grim.

  ‘A hole opened in its side. People came out.’

  ‘Slarn-demons?’ The old woman gestured at the wall of her hut. There on the bark wall, barely discernible by the flickering light of lamp and fire, were paintings. The paintings covered the walls. They showed stepped pyramids coming from the sky and landing. They showed armored creatures herding humans into the pyramids.

  ‘They weren’t like that. Not Slarn-demons, no. People. With no armor.’

  ‘I have seen a Slarn-demon without armor,’ the ancient woman said, ‘and touched it.’

  Maze shuddered. The story of Our Mother seeing the naked Slarn-demon was legend. ‘And lived,’ Maze said, in the ritual response they all made when Our Mother told the story after funerals or on Lostpeople Eve.

  ‘Yes.’ Our Mother was staring into the fire, lost in memories, lost in thought. Then she looked up to the child Maze. ‘You’ve done well.’

  ‘Thank you Our Mother,’ said Maze.

  ‘Tomorrow, tell the people to beware. Slarn-demons are returned. No one outside the village is to know.’

  ‘Not the Don?’ Maze seemed amazed.

  ‘Not even the Don.’ And the old woman waved the child from her hut, and Maze rose to her feet and bowed low, and moved out. The ancient woman looked into the fire and saw the past. From an eye one would think too ancient for tears coursed a single drop of moisture. ‘Returned,’ she said to herself. ‘Returned.’

  Outside, Maze crossed the verandah of Our Mother’s hut and trotted down the steps. Before her was the village square where markets and weddings and funerals and meetings were held. Beyond the square were the other huts and gardens, hidden from the air by the trees. All the huts were in darkness except for one.

  This hut was hung with human skulls, and fetishes made of bones and sticks and feathers. Within some of the skulls, candles burned. Maze’s way home led her past this hut, but she felt no fear, for it was the hut of her Uncle Marlowe.

  As she ran past the flickering light of the skulls at the doorposts, she chanced a look inside. There sat Uncle Marlowe, dressed in cloth trousers and jerkin with his lion skin slung about his shoulders, the lion’s head covering his head like a helmet. He was writing in one of his books but he must have heard the child pass, for he lifted his face to look out. His eyes were masked by the dark glass of his spektels. The dog teeth surrounding each eyehole glittered in the light of the skull lamp on his table. Behind one of the dark glass eyes, something glittered red. Maze knew what it was. She had seen it unmasked. It was Uncle Marlowe’s Demon Eye. That was what it was that showed red behind the black glass of the spektel. She ran on to the hut where she lived with her mother and father and brothers.

  Our Mother had praised her this night and Maze had felt warm at the praise. When she was Our Mother herself, in her turn, she would use praise to make people feel warm. That way they would wish to please her, and more readily obey. The survival of the Clan could depend on such things.

  24: BEDDING DOWN

  The leopard looked at the starship. She and her cubs had already eaten well, but the strange smell which had come to her on the night breeze had drawn her here. The new thing in the forest smelled strange, and strangeness could mean danger for herself and her cubs. At first, the leopard did not go closer to the new thing. Hind-legged walkers had passed this way, had gone out, and come back. She had smelled the tracks of the hind-legged walkers as she had approached. Now she followed their trail to the edge of the new thing. Here they disappeared. She looked up. Perhaps they had gone up into the trees like the others sometimes did.

  Then the leopard heard something move in the forest and went to investigate. The strange smelling new thing was, for the moment, forgotten.

  On the bridge of the starship, Harold w
as wondering if he would ever get used to the khaki biscuits and blue gruel. Guinevere claimed they provided a perfectly balanced diet, but Harold believed that he would be better off if his diet was varied a little with hot dogs and pizzas and hamburgers. ‘We’ve got to organize food,’ he said to the others.

  ‘Eat it, Harold, ‘tis good for thee,’ Guinevere said.

  Harold looked at Guinevere’s screen balefully and went on munching on the biscuit.

  ‘Clothes,’ said Meg. ‘I can’t go on wearing these clothes.’

  ‘The Slarn must wear clothes,’ Zoe said. ‘Guinevere, do the Slarn wear clothes under their lobster suits?’

  A moment after she spoke, a small hatch opened in the wall behind them and four folded packs thudded out into a hopper. ‘I’m not going to wear insect clothes,’ Meg said, but went with the others to investigate. Zachary unfolded one of the packs, and shook it out. It was a pair of grey longjohns made from a fine woven material which had a slight sheen. He held the longjohns against himself. ‘Fetching, uh?’

  ‘And you and Harold are going to have to find somewhere else to sleep,’ Meg said. ‘I’m not going to go on sharing quarters.’

  It was some time later when Zachary and Harold bedded down in the school bus. They had checked out the Slarn crew’s bunks but found they were just like the pods they had been put into when they were captured, and they both felt reluctant to climb into one again. Harold had then thought of the long seats facing each other in the rear of the school bus. Guinevere had guided them through the corridors up to the hold, this time switching off security beams as they went, explaining to them that she had not done so when they first got out of their pods because they had not been friends at that stage, and she had had no idea of what their intentions might be. Besides, she added, they were treating her like a machine at the time and so she had acted like one.

  So there Harold and Zachary were in the school bus again. The first thing Zachary had done was to check that his guitar was intact, and the first thing Harold had done was to make sure his Encyclopaedia of Science was still there.