Starship Home

by Morphett, Tony

  Father John thought I must learn to think more like a soldier, and then nodded.

  Meg, Zoe, Harold and Zachary rode into the clearing in front of the starship. More accurately, Meg rode, Zoe made a semblance of riding, Harold was beginning to understand that it might one day be possible to do such a thing as riding, and Zachary entered the clearing sitting on a horse. Zachary, who once, it seemed to him a thousand years ago, had told Meg that he could ride a horse, was wishing never to see a horse again. He looked at Meg’s easy seat in the saddle, and moaned and slid down off his mount. ‘I can’t ride like that,’ he said to the horse, ‘how come she can ride like that?’

  ‘Everyone can ride like that,’ Meg said, as she swung from the saddle.

  ‘Everyone who graduated pony club,’ muttered Zachary and limped toward the ramp.

  ‘You’re such an inverted snob,’ Meg said as she followed him.

  ‘Where do we keep the horses?’ said Harold.

  ‘We don’t keep the horses,’ Zachary answered. ‘If I know the Don, he has a policy about horse thieves and that policy probably involves hanging them. The man has a one-track mind.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ Meg said as they disappeared into the ship.

  Harold and Zoe dismounted and left the horses and followed. Zoe was sorry to leave her horse. On the ride home she had gotten very fond of it. She had called it ‘Silver Star’ for the blaze on its forehead and she wished she could have a long friendship with it.

  As they came onto the bridge, Guinevere materialized alongside Meg, and examined her wedding dress. ‘A right beautiful gown, Meg,’ the transparently shimmering image of Guinevere said, ‘thou art quite lovely when attired as a woman. How went the wedding?’

  ‘There wasn’t one.’ Meg looked down at the dress. ‘I’ve got to get out of this thing.’ She grabbed dry clothes from the washing line and walked out.

  Harold was still disposed to argue with Zachary’s decision on the horses. ‘Horses are very valuable in a primitive economy. Think motor cars. They’re a valuable economic resource. If we keep them…’

  Zachary collapsed face down on one of the couches. ‘The Don’ll hang us.’

  ‘He’s going to hang you anyway,’ Harold reasoned. ‘For stealing his bride-to-be. But if we keep the horses as bargaining pieces, maybe we can do a deal.’

  Zachary concentrated very hard. There was something about what Harold had just said that he did not like. ‘How did “hang us” suddenly turn into “hang you” as in “hang Zachary Owens” and not include “hang Harold Lewin”, Harold?’ Zachary asked in a quiet growl.

  Harold shrugged. ‘I just figured that since Zoe and I are kids we wouldn’t be held responsible.’

  ‘I think he’ll probably hang the smartest one among us,’ Zachary said. ‘The priest told me when he was giving me last rites that among the Trolls the more brains the more responsibility.’ He closed his eyes, and smiled maliciously, and pretended to go to sleep.

  ‘That wouldn’t be fair!’ said Harold.

  ‘Are you maybe assuming that you’re the smartest person here, Harold?’ Zoe asked sweetly.

  ‘Well, I… I just think when we get to the bottom line the Don’s going to figure Zachary for our leader and so when they’re hanging him, well … having a few horses to bargain with wouldn’t be such a bad idea.’

  At this moment the main screen came on to reveal Rocky and some Troll men-at-arms rounding up the stolen horses and driving them away.

  ‘There go our bargaining pieces,’ said Harold. He then paused. ‘Oh well, I’d better just get us out of here.’ He reached into a pocket and produced the menu of items Guinevere needed for her healing. He looked at it and turned to Guinevere’s manifestation. ‘You really need this much copper?’

  ‘If I am to fly,’ she answered.

  ‘“Copper”,’ Harold muttered. ‘Copper wiring, copper sheathing, copper roofing…’ then he clicked his fingers triumphantly. ‘Bronze!’ Swiftly he moved to the main console and picked up his science encyclopaedia from where he had left it the night before. He flicked through it, and then he said: ‘Bronze. Statues, statues, statues. The bronze in statues,’ he said to them, ‘is 10 parts copper to one part tin! Some zinc and lead in there as well. So that’s it troops, let’s go, go, go!’

  Zoe bounced her basketball. ‘Go where?’

  ‘Oldtown. The village. You must remember? When we got here, the first day? We tried to find a policeman at the old village and the statue of Colonel Light was there. Well Guinevere needs a lot of copper and there’s a lot of copper in that statue, so we go get the statue and then feed it to her and we’ve made a good start!’

  Zachary looked up from the couch. ‘I do remember that statue, Harold. I also remember what was piled up around the bottom of the statue.’

  ‘Some old bones.’ When Harold got a good idea he was very reluctant to let go of it.

  ‘Not just old bones, Harold. Human skulls. Lots and lots of human skulls. Like the one inside your face, the one you keep your precious A-grade brain in.’

  ‘I don’t think of my own head as having a skull inside it.’

  ‘Yuk!’ said Zoe, ‘that’s creepy!’

  ‘Then it’s about time you did think that way, because,’ said Zachary, sitting up and dropping his legs over the edge of the couch, ‘all the skulls piled up around the statue of Colonel Light once had brains inside them, and fully operating faces on the front of them, and bodies and arms and legs underneath them so they could walk around.’

  ‘If you can think,’ said Harold, and almost left his statement at that but then thought better of it, ‘of a better place to get about a ton of copper in the next 40 days…’

  ‘Thirty seven days,’ said Guinevere.

  ‘Thirty seven days,’ said Harold, ‘and counting. You tell me. Unless you either want to leave Guinevere here alone and head for the hills…’

  ‘Which we are not going to do and anyone who suggests it gets hit very hard,’ said Zoe.

  ‘…or we sit around here waiting to be vaporized along with Guinevere,’ Harold went on, ignoring Zoe’s threats, ‘or we do something to get her the stuff she needs, and the first stuff she needs is about a ton of copper and,’ he said, delivering the capper, ‘a bronze statue which must weigh at least that much just happens to be sitting around in the village a few miles away.’

  ‘Surrounded by human heads,’ said Zachary, and then added quickly, in case someone thought he might be chicken, ‘but basically who cares about that?’ I do, he thought, I care very much about that. ‘But it’s better than getting vaporized, eh troops?’ he said, as the traitor in his mind said, Under some circumstances, particularly circumstances involving headhunters, a fast vaporization might actually be a quite desirable alternative, but he did not tell Zoe and Harold what the traitor inside his head was saying because it seemed exaggerated at the time. Later on, it occurred to him that the traitor in his head might, if anything, have been understating the situation. ‘I wish we hadn’t lost the bus,’ Zachary went on, ‘If we’re dragging that statue back, the bus would’ve come in useful.’

  ‘Maybe the Foresters’ll help,’ Zoe suggested.

  But in that, she was mistaken.

  While Zachary and Harold stood outside Our Mother’s hut in the Foresters’ village, Slarnstaffs at the ready in case the Trolls turned up looking for their Don’s lost bride, Zoe and Meg were in the hut talking to Helena, asking for help, and getting a refusal.

  ‘Helena, please,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Our Mother,’ the ancient woman corrected her. ‘When you ask for Forester help it is not to your sister Helena you are speaking, but to Our Mother.’

  ‘Unless we get Guinevere working again, she’s going to explode. To get her working again we need metals, and this is the best source of copper we can think of.’

  Our Mother considered for a moment, then said: ‘Depending on food gathering we might help you in two weeks. At the dark of the moon.’

&
nbsp; ‘Two weeks is too long,’ said Zoe. ‘We’ve only got 37 days, we can’t lose 14 of them.’

  ‘The moon is full now,’ said Maze, ‘and when the moon is full, we call it Looters’ Moon.’

  ‘“Looters’ Moon”?’ Meg was thinking of what she had heard about the teacher who had preceded her, the one who long ago had been eaten by people called Looters.

  ‘At full moon, the Looters sometimes worship their Dark One in Oldtown,’ Helena said. ‘To them the statue you want is their Dark One’s likeness. So for us, at this time, the place is Forbid.’

  ‘Just who are these Looters?’ Meg asked.

  ‘When the Slarn took the people,’ Our Mother said in her old cracked voice, ‘there were some Remainers who wouldn’t leave the cities, but stayed in them, looting. For years they stayed. Then a leader rose among them and taught them of a new god called Dark One. Dark One wants the blood of people, and the Looters give it to him. He doesn’t want the flesh, so this, the Looters eat.’

  ‘Cannibals.’ Zoe’s voice was tight and low.

  Our Mother nodded. ‘At Looters’ Moon, Oldtown is Forbid. When the moon’s full, Oldtown belongs to Dark One.’

  ‘This Dark One,’ Meg said. ‘What…?’

  Helena answered by pointing to one of the paintings on the wall of her hut. Moving close to it, Meg and Zoe could see by the flickering lamplight that the painting depicted people in ragged clothes, hung with jewellery seemingly made of bones, bowing before a flame-encircled face.

  It was the face of a demon.

  Back at the starship, they went into conference. As they talked, the Wyzen rolled around the floor with the basketball, playing a hunting and chasing game with it. Finally Harold put it to them like this: ‘I don’t see we have any option. Guinevere needs about a ton of copper, she also needs tin, and apparently the zinc and lead’ll help. The statue’s the only way we can pick up this quantity of stuff in a hurry.’

  ‘Maybe we could postpone. Get other things in the meantime.’

  ‘Sorry Zachary,’ Harold said, ‘Guinevere, do I have this correct? You do need the copper first?’

  ‘Aye,’ replied the Ship.

  ‘So we go there in daylight, armed with Slarnstaffs. If these Looters give us any trouble we take them out…’

  ‘Stun them, Harold, or thou shalt not come within these walls again.’

  Harold thought Guinevere was pushing her reluctance to take human life a little far. ‘These are cannibals, Guinevere.’

  ‘Nay, Harold, these are humans.’

  ‘All right. We stun them, take the statue. We can do it.’

  Zoe was intrigued. A Harold whom she had never suspected was in there was coming out. ‘You’re getting very gung-ho, Harold?’

  ‘I want to see my parents again,’ he said crisply. ‘Okay?’

  Zoe nodded her agreement with the plan. ‘We’ve got to save Guinevere. The Foresters and the Trolls won’t move away. Harold’s right. There’s no other option.’

  Zachary groaned inwardly. He had spent his life trying to stay out of trouble and for some reason he always ended in it up to his neck. ‘Guess so. This objection to getting eaten by cannibals. It’s petty.’

  ‘Meg looked at him. ‘Is that a “yes”, Zachary?’

  ‘It’s more like a “how did I ever get into this?”’

  ‘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.

  50: LOOTERS’ MOON

  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.