The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “Not us,” Myell said. “Me. To make an appeal.”

  “To save Homer?” she asked skeptically.

  Myell’s voice neutral. “To save mankind. To make the Roon vanish at Kultana. Just like they did on Burringurrah.”

  They tried to leave her behind, of course. Jodenny would have none of it.

  “Besides,” she said. “If you leave me here, Homer might show up. What would I do against him on my own? Me, pregnant and barefoot and helpless.”

  Myell had glanced at her feet. “You’re not barefoot.”

  Osherman added, “You’re hardly helpless.”

  She gave them both a cold smile. “And I’m not staying here, either.”

  The second trek down into the caves went faster than the first trip, for this time they knew the way and had a deadline careening closer with each minute. Jodenny knew she couldn’t afford to slip and fall. Couldn’t afford it for Junior or Myell. She sipped from the canteens they’d brought and let Myell help her over the tricky parts and yelled at herself because they had so far to go, and she was holding them up. She and her stupid fat ungainly body.

  “We’re almost there,” Osherman said, so often she wanted to poke him between the eyes. But the trip was no easier for him, either. His breathing was short, and he kept glancing around at the walls as if expecting them to close in farther.

  Tulip and the men of his tribe had already assembled by the time Jodenny, Osherman, and Myell made it to the Painted Child. The Aboriginals had started a small smoky fire, made markings in the dirt, and painted themselves with ocher. Jodenny wondered if that was how the Aboriginals of Shark Tooth’s tribe had prepared themselves for sacred tests and ceremonies. Those people were separated from these by only a few hundred years. The saved and the almost-destroyed, just a Sphere’s travel apart.

  “What do I have to do?” Myell asked.

  Tulip eyed his shirt.

  Bare to the waist, Myell sat on a rock and let Tulip paint him with symbols. Jodenny itched to do the job herself but she didn’t know the designs and she understood that women’s magic was different from men’s magic, at least to these people, and she couldn’t afford to upset the balance. Osherman watched with obvious impatience, keeping an eye on his pocket watch.

  “How much time?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  The Aboriginals were chanting now. Jodenny didn’t understand a word of it. Myell didn’t either, judging from his expression, but he lifted his head and pinned her with a gaze.

  “Whatever happens, don’t go in there,” he said.

  She knew he meant the Painted Child.

  “Promise me,” Myell said.

  She didn’t recognize her own voice. “I promise.”

  “Don’t let her, Commander,” Myell said to Osherman.

  Osherman’s hand was white-knuckled on his watch. “After all this, you should call me Sam.”

  The Painted Child began to sing.

  Jodenny hadn’t expected that. She whirled in amazement as the colors across its surface began to glow with life. Corals and blues, green like deep summer leaves, yellow like the sun. She’d witnessed the First Egg in all its glory on Burringurrah but this was a more intimate display, filling her with warmth and building excitement.

  Tulip said, “They’re coming.”

  “The gods?” Osherman asked. His voice was higher than normal. “Right now?”

  The torches all around them flickered and died. The Painted Child swirled in Jodenny’s vision. In its rainbow depths she saw more Spheres, spinning around each other in exotic orbits. Junior had gone still in her womb, as if entranced by the vision of something she couldn’t see.

  Tulip pushed Myell toward the archway. “They’re here.”

  Myell turned to Jodenny for one last, desperate kiss.

  “I’ll be back,” he promised.

  Jodenny saw the Painted Child in his eyes. Felt the Painted Child swell inside her heart. Heard a great rushing, like the first winds of the world sweeping out of the core of the earth upward in a great rush.

  The caves dissolved.

  The plains of the Dreamtime stretched around Myell, but it was no Dreamtime he’d ever envisioned. The land was a jagged ocean of blue ice. The sky above was dark and starry, and full of exploding starships. The Confident. The Melbourne. Red and gold bloomed like deadly flowers low on the horizon. The best last hope of mankind died under the Roon onslaught, silent screams rolling across the icy landscape.

  He expected to be alone but Jodenny and Osherman were beside him, bewildered. The men of the Eola, Tulip included, sat in their own circle, unperturbed by the strangeness of their surroundings.

  “This is Kultana?” Osherman asked.

  “One version of it,” Myell said. “An aspect.”

  Before them was an icy blue-white mound twice as large as any human body. A boomerang was jutting out of its side. The boomerang was reddish brown and looked like it was made of stone. Homer, forlorn, sat perched above it.

  “Hello, Gampa,” he said. “Gamsa. Good to see you.”

  Homer was dressed in drab brown clothing. His hair hung in dirty curls around his face, and his knees were drawn to his chest.

  Myell said, “Wind-not-sea. That’s your name.”

  “Once,” Homer said.

  Above their heads, Team Space and ACF starships continued to explode. Myell couldn’t see bodies in the void, but it wasn’t hard to imagine them floating in burned bits and pieces, char, limbs, dust. Admiral Nam was in that wreckage, as were Laura Ling and Chief Ovadia, and most of the chiefs who had welcomed him into the goat locker. The coffee and cake had been a long time ago, but he could almost taste chocolate on his teeth.

  “They die,” Homer said, his shoulders hunched. He tilted his head to the sky of destruction. “Over and over again. Everyone always dies. And I always watch.”

  Jodenny pressed herself against Myell’s side. She was watching Homer with an expression on her face that said he wasn’t trustworthy, maybe wasn’t sane. But Myell already knew that.

  Osherman said, “Can we stop it?”

  “Nothing changes,” Homer said.

  “You don’t care about saving that fleet,” Myell said. “You don’t care about humanity. You just want to save yourself from the fate you earned.”

  Jodenny said, “What do you mean?”

  Myell looked away.

  She pressed her hand against his arm, and Osherman said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “Look at what he’s sitting on,” Myell said.

  Jodenny took in a sharp breath. Osherman took a step forward.

  “Is that . . .?” Osherman started.

  The icy clue mound was a corpse. Oversized, clearly not human. Ossified and merging into the landscape in a slow eventual decay.

  “Yes,” Myell said. “It’s Jungali. He killed his father. He killed me.”

  The red explosions in the sky faded to dark. No ships were left to destroy. The Roon fleet would be gathering up its prisoners now, and shipping them off to slow deaths in miserable mines.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Homer said, from atop Jungali’s corpse. “I came here to meet him, nothing more. But he wouldn’t share. None of them would.”

  Jodenny’s hand tightened around Myell’s. “None of who?”

  “The Wondjina. They’re here.” Myell scanned not the sky but instead the horizon, where blue and white clouds began to rush forward over the sea of ice. “They’ve always been here. Watching. Helping. Whenever mankind is in danger, they’re there. It’s where he knew he could find Jungali.”

  Osherman snorted. “Helping. What help were they? If they wanted to help, they would have sent the Roon away from this ambush, just like Jungali did at Burringurrah.”

  Myell touched the boomerang. It was cold beneath his fingers. It felt like something pulled out of his own chest, unearthed and carved away and turned into a weapon.

  “They care,” he said. “They cared enough to buil
d the Seven Sisters for mankind. To recruit the Nogomain, who looked after us as long as they could. Jungali was the last of the Nogomain. And Homer killed him.”

  “He wouldn’t share,” Homer repeated. “He wouldn’t give me what I wanted.”

  “What did you want?” Myell asked.

  “Everything,” Homer said softly.

  Jodenny squeezed Myell’s hand. He looked at her, at the odd sense of concentration on her face. Her lips were tight and she was breathing through her mouth.

  He would have known what that face meant even without the Digital Duola in his head.

  The storms on the horizon built skyward but came no closer.

  Homer’s face hardened with memory. “They imprisoned me here with nothing to do but count the stars in the sky and the cracks in the ice. No companionship or compassion. No conversation. No surcease. Only the hope that if I found you, and got you to come here of your own volition—if you agreed to sacrifice yourself again—then I would be freed. For that they changed time.”

  “Garanwa’s station,” Myell said. “You’re the one.”

  “But you wouldn’t do it,” Homer said bitterly. “Only if it concerned her. Only if you could save her.”

  Myell took a protective step in front of Jodenny.

  Osherman asked, “He sent you the blue ouroboros?”

  “She did,” Homer said.

  Under their feet, embedded in the ice, blue ouroboros rings began to glow. A dozen, then a dozen more. Linked and glowing like lights under a dance hall floor.

  “She who?” Myell asked.

  Homer said, “The goddess of rain and the dead, Kultana. Can’t you see her? She’s in the clouds. She’s staring at us.”

  More blue rings illuminated themselves under the ice, stretching from horizon to horizon.

  “They forbid me to tell you the true story. Forbid me to bring you here myself. Every minute I appeared to you, I had to spend another de cade on this ice. Every time I manifested with enough strength to touch someone, a hundred years. For saving you both—”

  He pointed to Jodenny and Osherman.

  “—a thousand years of isolation,” Homer said. “But it was worth it, now that you’re here. You can become Jungali again, Gampa. As a god, you can stop this battle. The gods can’t resurrect themselves, but they can change history.”

  Above them, the stars reset. The Team Space and ACF fleet reassembled into silver points of light. The Roon fleet approached, gold and deadly.

  Jodenny said to Myell, “Don’t you even think about it. You’re not sacrificing yourself again. Do you hear me?”

  Beneath his fingers, the boomerang began to tremble.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Jodenny decided that of all the things in the world she hated most, contractions rated very high on the list. Her whole uterus rose up in spasm and she gripped Myell’s hand tightly. He gave her a worried look. She tried to look reassuring but delivery was moving along much faster than it should. She didn’t know how much longer she could stay on her feet, and had fleeting visions of Junior just sliding right out of her and crashing onto the icy blue ground.

  But at the top of her most-hated list was the fear that Myell was believing Homer’s threats and allegations. That maybe guilt was festering inside him for failures as a father—which was ridiculous. That her husband was about to sacrifice himself in a noble gesture to save the universe.

  Over her dead body, she vowed.

  The blue-gray clouds boiled on the horizon. Above their heads, though, the sky was a backdrop of darkness and stars, and the first ships began to explode again. Jodenny couldn’t bear to watch.

  “So what now?” Osherman asked. “We stand here and watch Team Space and the ACF get destroyed over and over again?”

  Homer only had eyes for Myell. “You know what you have to do, Gampa. Father.”

  Myell pulled the boomerang from Jungali’s corpse. One end broke off, leaving a jagged sharp edge. “No. That’s my answer.”

  Jodenny saw the storms pause, as if watching.

  Homer’s expression collapsed. “You can’t say no.”

  “You can always say no.” Myell held the boomerang aloft. “Even to the gods. We’ll find another way to save mankind. But it won’t be here and now.”

  Jodenny felt her womb spasm again, a ridiculous pain that shot through her hips and up her spine. Despite herself, she cried out. This time the wetness streaming between her legs wasn’t urine at all. She started to go to her knees. Myell was forced to drop the boomerang in order to support her.

  Homer lunged for the boomerang but Osherman grabbed it first.

  “I’ll take that,” Osherman said, and there was something wild in his voice.

  Too late, Jodenny realized his intentions.

  “Sam, no!” she said.

  Osherman had already raised the broken shard. “Someone has to.”

  “You weren’t chosen,” Homer said.

  A shrug in return. “Sometimes you don’t have to be chosen. Sometimes you volunteer.”

  “Stop him,” Jodenny gasped against Myell’s ear.

  Myell moved faster than even Jodenny expected. He and Osherman went down in a tangle of limbs. The ice beneath them cracked and burst inward, dumping them into a blue ring and out of Jodenny’s sight and away, away, away from the here and now of Kultana.

  The shock of breaking ice was nothing compared with the shock of grass beneath Myell’s back, bright sunlight above, gasping onlookers, Osherman’s fist against his face. Locked in struggle, smashing and head butting each other, they rolled across what appeared to be a soccer field, of all places.

  “Someone call Security!” a voice yelled from nearby.

  Jodenny’s voice, stern and commanding, said, “Stop that right now!”

  Myell pulled away from Osherman. His nose hurt and he could taste blood in his mouth. He sat on the grass, heaving for breath, while Osherman coughed into the dirt and gave off a groan.

  “Who the hell are you two?” Jodenny demanded. Her hair hung in a glossy ponytail and she was dressed in a Team Space Academy sports uniform. Behind her, clutching soccer balls, were three members of her team. They all looked incredibly young in Fortune’s bright sun.

  “Just passing through,” Myell said.

  Jodenny picked up the fallen boomerang.

  Osherman pulled himself upright and made an obvious effort to look official. “I’m Commander Osherman, and you need to give me that. It’s not safe.”

  One of her eyebrows rose up. “It’s a broken boomerang. What is this, anyway? Rock? Who makes them out of rock?”

  The blue ring appeared on the grass less than a meter away. Myell was too damned slow to stop Osherman from grabbing the boomerang from Jodenny’s hand and plunging into the ring. But he wasn’t too slow to follow.

  Jodenny was only five or six years old in this eddy. Pigtailed and gaptoothed. Grinning at them both as she held the boomerang in her hands.

  “Can I keep it?” she asked.

  “No,” Myell and Osherman both said at the same time.

  She gazed at them curiously. The lawn of the Simon Street orphanage stretched wide and green around them. “What’s it for?”

  “For traveling in time,” Myell said.

  “For saving the universe.”

  “I’m keeping it,” she said, and ran back toward the main building. “Sister Ann! Sister Ann!”

  “Catch her,” Myell said.

  “I buried you,” Jodenny said. “Right here.”

  She looked a little bit pregnant and a lot scared, holding the fallen boomerang aloft in both hands like a baseball bat. The grassy hillside sloped underneath her feet and down toward the settlement of Providence. Behind her, treetops bowed in the wind and birds sang out in a sudden chorus.

  Osherman pushed Myell off him and rolled aside. “Don’t listen to him. Whatever he says, don’t listen.”

  She stared at him. “You can talk? Since when?”

  “Give me
the boomerang,” Myell said to Jodenny. “He’s going to sacrifice himself with it.”

  Jodenny grimaced. “Why?”

  “Because only the gods can change history,” Osherman said quietly. “And there’s a woman I need to save.”

  The reply made Myell pause. He searched Osherman’s expression, looking for deception or fraud. He saw only grief and longing. Upon reflection, what Osherman wanted to do was no worse or better than what Myell had done for his Jodenny, time and time again.

  This Jodenny shook her head. “I don’t know who to believe.”

  “Kay,” Myell said. “Give it to me. You’ve trusted me before, and you’ll trust me again. I have no other reason to give you but that, and the fact I love you. I will always love you.”

  Osherman looked away.

  She tossed him the boomerang.

  Myell caught it.

  Caught it, and handed it to Osherman.

  Left alone on Kultana with Homer and the men of the Eola, the pain of contractions shooting through her, Jodenny crouched on the ice and groaned. Hands reached for her—Homer, concern on his face.

  “Gamsa, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” she bit out.

  A humming sound filled her ears. Movement caught and blurred at the edge of her vision. She lifted her head, sure she was going to see Myell and Osherman returning to her, but instead it was the Roon in a black feather cloak and tall silver headdress. A silver ouroboros spun around its ankles. It smelled like something that had been dragged out of a musty grave—skin and bones and alien blood all rotting away. It held a silver weapon in one gloved hand.

  Homer stood defiantly between the Flying Doctor and Jodenny.

  “You’re not allowed here,” he said defiantly.

  Its mouth turned into a rictus. “You think you’re the only ones who have gods? Mine are just as powerful as yours. Even stronger, to smash through the flimsy walls of this construct.”

  Jodenny couldn’t bring herself upright, as much as she wanted to. She felt light-headed and had the desperate desire to lie down, but at least the contraction was easing. It was no comfort at all to know that another would return in a few minutes.

  By then, she and Junior might be dead.