The Stars Down Under

by Sandra McDonald

The crowd hissed at him, their tongues between their teeth. Gayle said, “You shouldn’t have done that, Chief,” and Nam made a disapproving sound.

  “I won’t do it,” Myell told Shark Tooth.

  The boy with the basket produced a second gecko, and Shark Tooth handed it by the tail to the Bunyip. The Bunyip swept it high into the air and dangled it over its cavernous mouth. The crowd murmured in anticipation. Myell’s stomach twisted.

  The gecko dropped into the Bunyip’s mouth.

  The crowd cheered.

  The Bunyip held one clawed hand high in triumph.

  “If that was the first test,” Gayle said, “you failed.”

  Chief Elder spoke again. Shark Tooth smiled and repeated the instructions. The Bunyip bowed its head and began stripping off its helmet, cloak, and boots. Myell watched dumbly until Shark Tooth poked his arm and tugged at his clothes.

  “Oh, come on,” he protested. “Naked?”

  “We won’t look,” Nam promised.

  He told himself that stripping bare in this seaside village in front of total strangers wasn’t so bad. No worse, surely, than the communal showers in Team Space barracks. But he could feel the hotness in his face as he left his uniform, boots, and underwear in the sand. A quick glance at the Bunyip proved that it too had external genitalia. Myell didn’t want to know more than that.

  Shark Tooth motioned to two young girls, who brought forth more ocher. Additional designs were painted on his back and stomach. He stood still, trying to ignore their close presence and bare breasts and the tickle of their fingers. He took several deep breaths and thought about supply regulations. About Senior Chief Talic’s sequencing lecture. The bonfire was a blaze of heat and light in the corner of his vision.

  “How you doing there, Chief?” Nam asked.

  “Fine, sir.”

  After the body painting was done, Shark Tooth led Myell and the Bunyip to an enormous tree that towered over the clearing. The trunk was smooth wood with thick knobs and dozens of branches. The branches arced off in crazy curves, heavy with fronds and vines. Myell could hear birds or small animals moving in its dark depths—snakes, maybe, or owls, or even monkeys. He tilted his head back and saw a few stars through the thick cover.

  Shark Tooth spoke and motioned.

  The Bunyip grabbed the lowest branch and started climbing.

  “Good thing you’re not afraid of heights,” Nam said.

  Myell swore under his breath. Eating geckos. Stripped naked. And now he was supposed to climb a tree, bare-assed without even a flashlight?

  “I want hazard pay,” Myell told Nam. He reached up for the branch and hoisted himself up. “A lot of it.”

  The climbing wasn’t hard, actually. The branches were closely spaced and thick enough to support his weight. The darkness hampered him, though, and the ropy vines were slippery. The Bunyip, already a few meters above him, didn’t seem to be having the same problems. It climbed swiftly, making clicking noises as its claws dug into the wood. If this contest depended on being the swiftest, Myell was probably going to lose.

  Without warning the Bunyip made a grunting noise and stopped. Myell immediately halted. He peered upward but couldn’t see much. He shifted against the trunk and brushed his right hand across a large, leathery frond. Almost immediately his skin began to burn as if seared by drops of acid.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. A stinging tree. Jodenny had been victim to a stinging bush during their trip out of Warramala. In the starlight his palm was already turning pink. He jammed his hand under his left armpit, but the burning eased only a little.

  The Bunyip made another noise and began climbing again. Myell followed, being extraordinarily careful not to touch anything but the bark. As the fronds grew thicker and closer he had to shimmy his bare shoulders sideways, or pull his long legs close. Despite the cool air, sweat broke out on his back and neck. Far down below he could see Shark Tooth holding up a burning torch. Red light playing off Nam’s concerned face.

  “How’s it going?” Nam shouted up.

  “I hate this tree.” He didn’t actually mean it. Then, suddenly, he did. The tree seemed alive—not in the botanical sense, but instead as a sentient, menacing being that didn’t want supply chiefs climbing its branches. Animosity rolled out of it in waves like tiny gnats. The muddy green smell of it intensified, became acrid. The vines writhed in an unnatural breeze. Myell hoped it hated the Bunyip as well, that the hostility wasn’t personal.

  The Bunyip slowed down as it too tried to climb close to the trunk without touching the offending fronds. Its bulk and size worked against it. Within a few minutes, Myell found himself close to its scaly heels. He didn’t particularly want to pass it, and didn’t get the chance. When the Bunyip saw him it smashed its leg down and hit Myell’s shoulder, trying to dislodge him.

  “Hey!” Myell shouted. He teetered off balance, grabbed at the nearest branch, felt a stinging race across his left thigh. “Shit.”

  “Chief?” Nam called up.

  Myell gritted his teeth. His hand still hurt, but not as badly as the welt rising on his leg. He clung to the trunk and shivered. “Nothing. Son of a bitch.”

  The Bunyip made a sound like a huffing. Myell couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was laughing at him. Asshole. Then the laughing choked off in a yelp. The alien lost its balance, crashed down past some branches, and then dropped like deadweight past Myell. Sickening cracking noises followed it down to a heavy, thumping landing on the ground.

  Nam yelled, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know!” Myell replied. “Is it dead?”

  Soft velvety rain began to fall against Myell’s shoulders. He glanced up, startled, but the stars still shone over the tree’s height. The raindrops landed on his skin and began to scurry with tiny tickling legs.

  “Oh—” he started, and then shut his mouth, his eyes, against an army of tree spiders. He buried his nose against the crook of his arm and clung desperately to the trunk. The tiny creatures raced across him like the scratching of a million little fingernails. He could feel them crawling between his legs, down his flanks, trying to squirm into him—

  He nearly began screaming then, and would surely have lost his balance if not for the sense of the tree changing its mind about him. It murmured words that made no sense and reached long sinuous vines toward him. Gently the vines brushed the offending creatures aside. With his eyes closed he saw no such thing, but after a moment the scratching faded and disappeared, leaving him naked but unmolested.

  Thank you, he thought. No answer came in the darkness. The tree’s presence had faded, and maybe had never really been there at all.

  “Chief!” Nam sounded frantic. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Nothing,” he forced out. “I’m coming down.”

  He descended as quickly as he could, earning stinging welts on the soles of his feet and his ass. He dropped from the lowest branch to the ground and huddled there, shaking, as the sizzle blazed across his nerves. When something cool and wet touched his leg he looked up and saw Shark Tooth with a bowl full of creamy pale salve.

  Nam crouched down low beside him, a hand on Myell’s shoulders. “What the hell happened?”

  “Tell you later,” Myell said. “More of that stuff, please. Where’s the alien?”

  “Over there,” Gayle said.

  He gazed at the Bunyip, which was far from dead. It was pacing an area near the tree, obviously agitated at having fallen. One of the village women tried to offer it salve for its wounds, but it brushed her off.

  “So much for that,” Nam said. “Hopefully that’s the last of this nonsense.”

  But there was one more challenge to go.

  * * *

  “No,” Myell said. “Not in a million years.”

  The hour was very late. A moon hung over the ocean, silvery red and distant. It cast a long wide path on the water, and the waves looked full of blood.

  Chief Elder spoke again. The Bunyip gazed across the ocean
with its teeth showing. Myell, dressed once more in his uniform but not his boots, tried not to stare at the rounded bay below, the rocky islands and mounts and shadowed places. The ocean crashed ashore, hammered sand against rocks, and drained away with a cascade of roars. Death lay down there, death in the most gruesome fashion, and he had to breathe hard to keep from panicking.

  Gayle said, “It’s really not that far down.”

  “I’m not diving off a cliff,” Myell said with absolute certainty.

  Chief Elder spoke a few harsh words. Shark Tooth motioned to his warriors, who seized Gayle and put spears to her throat.

  “No,” Myell repeated, speaking directly to Chief Elder. “I can’t. I’ll swallow a gecko. I’ll go back up that fucking tree. But I’m not diving into that ocean.”

  “I’m a very valuable scientist,” Gayle said to the warriors. “You really don’t want to hurt me—”

  She was marched back toward the main part of the village. Nam, who hadn’t been touched, gazed steadily at Myell.

  “I can’t order you to do it,” he said.

  “And I’m not going to,” Myell said, tired and sore and still hurting despite Shark Tooth’s medicine. “Find someone else.”

  He limped off to a little frond tepee near the cliff’s edge. The Bunyip had its own shelter, ten or so meters away. Separate lines of well-wishers had formed to bring gifts and offerings, and through word gestures ask for benedictions.

  Nam had been allowed to sit with Myell. The shelter was ceremonial, wouldn’t hold up under a good storm, but at least it diverted some of the cool ocean breeze.

  “How are the burns?” Nam asked.

  “Not so bad.”

  Myell accepted a string of shells from a pretty young girl. She bowed her head and he reluctantly touched it. She moved to the Bunyip’s line, apparently eager to get its blessing as well. “You’re a good swimmer,” Nam said.

  “I’m okay,” Myell said. In pools. In ponds. In bodies of water that didn’t have large deadly creatures circling in their depths. He gave Nam a sideways look. “That’s in my file? That I’m a good swimmer?”

  “It says you’re not so bad.”

  Another villager approached Myell, carrying a jug of what smelled like wine. Jungle hooch. Myell took a swallow, felt it burn its way into his chest, and passed it to Nam.

  Nam drank a healthy gulp, his eyes going wide.

  “Enough of that, maybe, and you’ll have no trouble going over the side?” Nam asked.

  Myell stared glumly at his own hands. He couldn’t see the ocean, but its nearby presence lay like an enormous weight on his skull and chest—a heaving, rolling, smashing weight. “If I drink myself unconscious, maybe. Then you can push me over.”

  “I won’t push,” Nam said.

  Back at the bonfire, villagers were dancing in circles and passing around large conch shells. A ritual of some kind. Great party, he supposed. The cliff dives would probably come at dawn, when the gory results would be visible to all.

  “My mother also had a phobia about insects,” Nam said. “Used to turn her shoes over before she put them on, just to make sure nothing had crawled inside while we slept.”

  “We did that on our farm,” Myell said.

  “We lived in the city. In a fifth-floor apartment.”

  Across the divide between them, the Bunyip shooed away the last of its well-wishers and crouched on its hind legs with its face toward the horizon. It closed its eyes and breathed deeply, its chest expanding and contracting.

  Myell suggested, “You could push him over.”

  “Maybe you should get some sleep,” Nam suggested.

  The villagers were settling down now. Some went back to their huts, but others stretched out on the ground in clusters of two or three or more, family units, lovers, grandparents with grandchildren. They stroked one another’s backs and whispered words and gazed up at the sky. The constellations here were unfamiliar, but Myell could figure out his own patterns in the bright, distant stars: a shark, a stingray, a jellyfish. The sky was just a different kind of ocean.

  “You’d do it, wouldn’t you? Jump without hesitation?” Myell asked.

  Nam handed over the wine jug. “This isn’t about me.”

  Myell leaned back. He imagined himself standing at the edge of the cliff, arms stretched overhead, the breeze buffeting him as he peered down into the churning, heaving water that would suck him in and swallow him up. He could swim, yes, but he couldn’t swim in that. And so he would never go home, never hold Jodenny again, never smell her skin and feel her heart thrum under his outstretched palm.

  He tried to sleep, to close his eyes and think of Jodenny, but the ocean roared and hissed nearby, keeping him terrified.

  When the horizon began to brighten he considered fleeing into the jungle. As an alternative he dug around in his vest and came up with a pencil. Unfortunately he had no paper. Nothing at all to write on. He searched the gift pile, hoping for parchment or tree bark or anything at all.

  “All the technology in the universe.” Myell’s voice was hoarse in his own ears. “I’d trade it all for one piece of paper.”

  The horizon started to turn gold. The Bunyip rose from its crouch with fluid ease. Villagers came forward for the final challenge. Shark Tooth came and beckoned Myell to his feet. Myell’s legs felt weak, and he had the appalling urge to find a large rock and crawl under it.

  Nam stood with his fists tensed, but if he had any ideas, he wasn’t sharing them.

  “Will you tell Commander Scott that I thought of her until the end?” Myell asked, appalled at the tremble in his voice. “That I love her?”

  “You’ll tell her yourself,” Nam said fiercely.

  Another joke. Who knew Nam was such a comedian? Because even if he survived the plunge, he wouldn’t survive the water and rocks. Myell went to the cliff’s edge and waited several meters from the Bunyip. He couldn’t look down. The ocean, the damned terrible ocean, spread as far as he could see.

  Chief Elder approached. A dozen drums started beating like thunder.

  “I’ll do it,” Nam said to Chief Elder, stepping forward and barring Myell. “I’m in charge. I’m responsible.”

  Chief Elder made a sharp, quick motion. Warriors grabbed Nam by the arms and pulled him back from the cliff’s edge.

  “Don’t do it, Chief,” Nam ordered. “It’s suicide!”

  The drums beat faster, louder, drowning out reason, demanding action. The sun ascended over the horizon with a blast of light and the villagers began cheering.

  The Bunyip lifted its arms and pitched over the edge.

  Myell couldn’t. He was breathing too hard, his knees were knocking together, his thoughts were fragmenting into tiny shiny pieces that made no sense at all. He was too frightened to make his body move one way or the other—

  But he did it anyway, he dived, dived over the crumbling edge, threw himself into goddamn nothingness, away from the safety of land into a long, frantic fall toward the rocks and froth of the bay below.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “It’s been eighteen hours!” Mr. Zhang said angrily. “How long does it take to fix a valve?”

  Agreement swept through the passengers assembled in the galley. Jodenny, standing near the empty buffet with Farber and Hullabaloo, sensed mutiny in the air. Not true mutiny, not the passengers rising up to unseat the captain and crew, but certainly anger and frustration. She suspected that there would soon be several strongly worded letters of complaint to Team Space.

  Lieutenant Sweeney, who’d been given the thankless task of keeping the passengers updated, rubbed at the side of his head.

  “The Engineering Officer is working as hard as he can,” he said. “The problem is not simply a broken valve. The malfunctioning parts are ones we normally don’t carry spares for, and can’t be manufactured onboard. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work around them. In the meantime, the batteries are supplying all essential services and could do so for months, if need be. I
realize it’s inconvenient, but we’re still going to arrive on time. Engine thrust has nothing to do with speed in the Little Alcheringa.”

  “Is that true?” Hullabaloo asked Jodenny.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “If we can’t thrust and maneuver once we’re back in normal space, Demos Command will send a tug to see us into orbit.”

  Farber said, “No more fancy sandwiches. Nothing too hard about that.”

  Jodenny agreed. True, the Kamchatka was a bit dimmer with only emergency lighting in the passageways and cabins. Showers had been restricted to cold-water dousings only. All entertainment units were offline. The gym was closed, and meals had been reduced to cold rations only. Even the coffee was cold.

  But the ship still had air, gravity, climate control, and comm systems. The trip might be a little inconvenient for the passengers, but certainly not life threatening.

  The same couldn’t be said for the moments just after the lights had gone out, when there’d been a near panic in the Hole in the Wall. Patrons started pushing toward the exits so frantically that some people fell underfoot. Jodenny was shoved from behind, but Hullabaloo caught her arm and kept her from falling. Then he too was pushed, and the air grew hot and claustrophobic, and Jodenny remembered fire and smoke, screams, burning flesh. After a few seconds, battery power switched on. Sharp commands rang out from some of the crew.

  “Keep calm!” Ensign Sadiqi shouted out, climbing to the top of the bar. “Don’t panic!”

  Chief Reed, who was in charge of Jodenny’s lifeboat, likewise yelled out, “It’s all right! Everything’s under control!”

  Jodenny told herself they were fine as long as the GQ didn’t start shrieking. It was useless to deploy lifeboats in the Little Alcheringa. Transit speed depended on mass, and evacuees would die of dehydration or oxygen deprivation long before their lifeboats reached Earth.

  “I need everyone to calm down,” Chief Reed repeated, climbing onto a chair. “Probably a little glitch, the engines will come back on soon.”

  But the engines hadn’t come on soon. Hadn’t come back yet, hence this briefing with many of the passengers crammed into the galley and Lieutenant Sweeney looking as unhappy as everyone else.