The Stars Down Under

by Sandra McDonald

  Shark Tooth’s men muttered unhappily among themselves.

  Nam said, “Goddammit.”

  Myell tried hard to breathe through his mouth and not his nose. “It slept here? Lived here?”

  A long, low pallet lay against one wall, along with some baskets from the People’s village and a pile of gnawed-over bones. The bones were too long to be from birds, too thick to be from fragile mammals. In fact, one looked like a human femur—

  Myell lurched outside to the clearing.

  Shark Tooth and his men came out making warding gestures and spitting into the dirt. Nam emerged last and asked, “If it’s not here, where else would it take her?”

  Myell shook his head. “Not to the women’s island. Gayle didn’t know about that.”

  “The Spheres,” Nam said. “Maybe it thinks she can help it get home.”

  Myell tugged on Shark Tooth’s arm, performed more pantomimes, and drew pictures on the ground. Shark Tooth finally seemed to understand, but took them back to the village first for water skins, easy-to-carry food, and farewells.

  Chief Elder, roused from sleep, made a long speech and kissed Myell on the head.

  “Yes, yes,” Nam said impatiently. “Enough of the farewells.”

  The moon was arcing down in the western sky. Myell guessed it was four or five hours until dawn. He hadn’t had much sleep lately, but Nam had probably had even less. Shark Tooth and two of his men led them south along the cliff in reverse of the journey they had made a few days earlier, and far below, waves crashed and drained against rocks. Nam kept himself between Myell and the ocean, insulating him from the view.

  “It’s not so bad anymore,” Myell assured him, though it was a relief when they turned into the jungle.

  The going was slow. The landscape pulsed with nocturnal animals and insects, and occasional screeches, flapping noises, and scuffling left Myell unnerved. He couldn’t help but remember the dead birds swinging in the Roon’s hut, with their tiny claws open and grasping. He and Nam should have torched the place, even if it risked a larger conflagration.

  Myell stopped abruptly, his hands on his knees.

  “What’s wrong?” Nam asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Hold up,” Nam said to Shark Tooth. The Aboriginals stopped hacking through the brush.

  Myell blew out as large a breath as possible and resisted drawing more air in. Yambli believed he could stop the clawed, cruel Roon. Believed it was his destiny. As if one man could possibly do anything against the tide of an alien species that plucked eyes from koalas and offered the dead flesh of its own as a gift.

  Nam said, low and calm, “You’re worrying me, Chief.”

  “It’s nothing,” Myell said, an enormous lie.

  They resumed walking as soon as Myell could make his legs go forward. Sips of water and a steadfast refusal to think further than the next step kept him going until dawn. By then they had reached the floodplain, which stretched gray-red under the lightening sky. The rains had brought more greenery to it, but crossing it would be as difficult as the last time.

  Shark Tooth waved his hands around and gestured toward the trees, and Nam said, “I think we’re stopping for a while.”

  Myell said, “We can’t afford to. The Roon already has a head start.”

  “If it’s gone, it’s gone,” Nam said. “We can rest for a bit.”

  Myell needed no further encouragement. He swallowed down some nuts and dried fruit that Shark Tooth offered, and fell asleep in the shadow of some trees. In his dreams a flock of birds cried out soundlessly, their throats cut open. The frantic fluttering of their wings brought him awake with a jerk, and he squinted at the sun overhead.

  “We’re moving again,” Nam said.

  The hike was miserable, though he was glad that he’d put aside his boots and socks before the cliff dive and Nam had saved them for him. The skirt chafed at his knees until he rolled it higher. Shark Tooth and his men cheerfully slung rocks at lizards and talked among themselves, while Nam plodded steadily forward and Myell tried to keep pace. He drank from his water bottle in moderation, trying to keep from dehydration. Worse was the sunburn spreading on his face and arms and legs.

  “Are we going to march right up to the Spheres?” Myell asked. “It might not give her back without a fight.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out why it took her in the first place,” Nam said.

  Dark gray clouds rose up in the west, thunder and lightning cracking inside them. Myell slapped at bugs on his arms and sipped water and wasn’t surprised when the first cool drops of rain hit his face. They pushed on across the ancient landscape as the water bled down into the dried-out marshlands and sent geese fluttering across the horizon.

  Shark Tooth stopped, gesturing, pointing across the horizon, and Myell saw the Spheres. He was absurdly grateful, despite the danger ahead.

  Nam said, “Tell them to turn back. I don’t want to get anyone killed.”

  Myell tried the best he could, but either his pantomime skills had faded during the hot day or Shark Tooth was being deliberately obtuse.

  “Iiwariniang,” Shark Tooth said, or something like that. “Iwaringdo.”

  Nam also tried to get them to go back, to no avail.

  Myell wiped rain from his face. The drops were coming down faster, harder, and he didn’t like the increasing proximity of the lightning.

  “I’ll go in,” Nam said. “Leave you here with them. See if I can talk to it, see if Gayle’s still alive.”

  “Then it has two hostages,” Myell said.

  “Better idea?”

  “I go in, trade myself for Gayle, send her out. It’s not interested in you, but it likes me.”

  Nam squinted at him. “Not going to happen.”

  “You can’t save both of us, sir.”

  “I can damn well try. Don’t make me give you an order, Chief.”

  Myell held his gaze. “Don’t make me disobey one, Commander.”

  Shark Tooth murmured something, slapped both their arms, and started jogging toward the Mother Sphere. Nam said, “No, wait!” and Myell tried to stop him, but the Aboriginals splashed gleefully through puddles, called and shouted out and made a ruckus, and any chance they might have had of arriving quietly was ruined.

  Not that it mattered much. Gayle came to the archway, waving her hand eagerly. “There you are! Come in out of the rain.”

  The Roon appeared behind her, large and expressionless, but not bearing any kind of weapon. The Aboriginals hovered but didn’t move forward. Nam held Myell back several meters from the archway. Water poured down as the sky darkened even more, but they couldn’t get any more wet.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nam demanded of Gayle.

  “It wanted to come out here,” Gayle said. “We’re beginning to reach real understanding through pictographs. I drew the Spheres, it drew the token. It wants to communicate.”

  “It wants more than that,” Myell said.

  The Roon watched them, silent.

  Gayle grimaced. “It’s an anthropologist, don’t you see? It’s not a soldier or a general or anything other than a scientist stranded here when the system shut down.”

  “You can’t be that blind,” Nam said.

  “You can’t be that obtuse,” she retorted. “It’s alone, without equipment, trapped here for months. The worst that can happen is that we take it to the next station. That’s such a crime? But if we can communicate, if we can establish trust—”

  Something moved in the corner of Myell’s vision. He started to yell, but the second Roon was too damned fast. It rose out of the grass, grabbed Myell, and yanked him close.

  “Chief!” Nam yelled.

  “It won’t hurt him!” Gayle called out. “I think it’s his mate.”

  The Aboriginals made unhappy noises, but they didn’t raise their spears. Nam held out his knife but didn’t approach. Squeezed tight, the claws sharp against his throat, Myell didn’t fight or antagonize it.
He felt himself dragged backward and tried not to stumble. The second Roon pulled him into the dim, dry confines of the Mother Sphere.

  “It’s all right,” Gayle was saying. “They’re just desperate, like us.”

  The two Roon conferred in clicks and whistles. Myell’s breath was going short, his vision dimming, at the pressure on his throat.

  “It’s going to kill me,” he said.

  Gayle motioned to the female. “You need him. Please.”

  The male Roon kept talking, clicks and whistles and shrill little sounds. The female hauled Myell tighter, her breath foul. He didn’t know what they were arguing about. He told himself he’d do the same thing, if he and Jodenny were stuck somewhere for months on end—do anything, desperate, frantic, ruthless, to get home.

  The call of an approaching ouroboros made both Roon fall silent.

  Languid calm enveloped Myell. The next station might be the Roon home world, or it might be another floodplain, or snow planet, or somewhere completely different, but the token was coming …

  Nam and the Aboriginals appeared at the archway. Nam had taken someone’s spear and looked ready to hurl it.

  “They’re not going to kill anyone,” Gayle said. “They want to get home, like we do.”

  “Not with him,” Nam said.

  The ring appeared, solid and beautiful. The female Roon dragged Myell in, and the male joined them. The male hesitated, then motioned to Gayle and Nam.

  “Don’t,” Myell said, the calm evaporating. “Stay here.”

  “And be stranded?” Nam stepped forward.

  Gayle was already ahead of him. “Not a chance.”

  Shark Tooth raised a hand in farewell. “Jungali,” he said, and the others echoed. Their voices grew louder and more fervent: “Jungali, Jungali, Jungali—”

  The ouroboros whisked them away.

  The yellow light was different than before. Harder, hotter. Something was wrong with it. The next station appeared like a snapshot, no time for Myell to assimilate their surroundings, and then they were swept forward again. Another station materialized. But the light pushed them onward, and the next Sphere was just a blur, and Myell was aware of Nam trying to say something in the milliseconds, of the Roon chittering in alarm. The tattoos on his cheeks burned like acid. Too late he realized that they were a marker, a signal, a trap—

  Then a Sphere unlike any other coalesced and stayed permanent. Myell fell to his knees. He was aware of the Roon clutching each other, Gayle vomiting on herself, Nam gasping for breath.

  Soothing blue light played over them, a beam of some kind, and all the wrong parts within Myell righted themselves, all the wild chemistry in his body realigned.

  “Where the hell are we?” Nam asked.

  Myell focused on the room the ouroboros had left them in—room, not Sphere, large and high-domed with multiple archways leading out of it. The tiled dome glowed a soft, soothing shade of blue. The walls were smooth, curving sandstone, the floor hard dirt. He smelled the faint aroma of flowers in the air. Lilacs.

  “It’s the hub.” Myell rubbed his temples. “The Sphere that controls all the others. End of the line.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “We know this much,” Toledo said, his chair squeaking as he shifted his weight. “They arrived twelve hours ago, coming in from the other side of the sun—Demos Command didn’t pick them up until they were passing Venus. Three of them. Went straight to Earth, took up orbit, haven’t made a peep on any radio frequency. Don’t answer hails. Don’t try to communicate with anyone, it looks like. Haven’t fired any weapons, haven’t sent down any ships. They’re just sitting there. At the same time, instrument-based radar down on Earth has gone crazy. Nothing can fly. Anything with a navigational computer on it has been rendered useless, and that includes land-, ocean-, and satellite-based missiles.”

  Jodenny felt cold all over. “Earth is defenseless?”

  “Even if anyone down there could launch missiles, we’re talking fleas against dinosaurs here,” Toledo said glumly.

  Farber, her vomit bag close at hand, asked, “Why are we still on course for Earth?”

  Toledo shifted again. The chair protested. “Because that’s what the Admiralty ordered.”

  “There’s no place else to go,” Jodenny replied. “It’s a straight, empty run from the drop point to Earth.”

  “We could change course for the asteroid mines or Martian colonies,” Farber said.

  “It’s possible the aliens don’t know they’re out there,” Toledo replied. “No one wants to reveal their presence if that’s true. I’ve heard that any Team Space ships in flight have been ordered to hold position. We’re talking passenger ships on their way to the moon, cargo ships outbound to Mars, the Survey Wing birdies over at Jupiter and Saturn. Even some fox fighters training off Venus. No one’s going anywhere. Except us.”

  Farber leaned closer to the gib, almost blocking Jodenny’s view. “But we don’t have any weapons. Just a handful of birdies.”

  “We have ourselves,” Jodenny murmured. “Thrust and maneuverability, and engines that can be set to overload.”

  Incredulous, Farber said, “What can we do? Ram them? With a ship full of civilians?”

  “If it comes to that,” Jodenny said grimly.

  The ships on the deskgib continued their orbit of Earth. Jodenny watched for a few more hours but didn’t learn any more than she already knew. She forced herself to go off in search of food, anything that would silence the growling in her stomach, but that was a mistake. The galley was full of noise and fear, passengers with nothing else to do but worry.

  “I always believed there were aliens out there,” she heard one man saying. “Just not that they’d come gunning for us.”

  Hullabaloo, Baylou, and Lou Eterno called Jodenny over to their table. Reluctantly she went over with her sandwich and coffee and took the space they made for her.

  “Any news from the bridge?” Hullabaloo asked.

  “Why would I know?” Jodenny asked.

  Baylou gave her a speculative look. “Heard you have friends in high places.”

  Jodenny glanced past him to the wallvid. “Not that high.”

  “I keep telling you. If they meant to wage war, they would have opened fire by now.” Hullabaloo reached past Jodenny for a salt shaker. “Earth would be rubble. We’d all be little charred bits of bone and flesh, drifting through space.”

  So much for eating. Jodenny pushed her food away and said, “No one knows. Don’t start planning for the worst.”

  “What do you think they look like?” Lou asked. “Bug eyes? Furry? We’ve got a betting pool. I think they have two heads.”

  She appreciated his levity. “Never saw one, couldn’t begin to guess—”

  But then her hand jerked, and coffee sloshed over the rim onto her hand. She was barely aware of heat and wetness. She lurched to her feet. She had seen one. Standing in the middle of a destroyed laboratory, an ouroboros encircling its clawed feet, a feather cloak around its scaly shoulders. The thing was maybe as surprised to see her as she was to see it. Around them, the General Quarters klaxon screamed and clanged, and Sam Osherman was saying, “Go! Get out of here!”

  Hullabaloo put his hand on her arm and tried to restrain her. “Ellen? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she mumbled. “Leave me alone.”

  She fled the galley, blindly climbed the nearest ladder, and made it to her cabin without being aware of the actual steps. Once inside, she locked the hatch and slid to the deck with her arms wrapped around her knees. The chemical memory block had dissolved. She could remember everything now, every part of the Yangtze disaster. Her body shook and tears slid down her face and she hugged herself hard, missing Myell so keenly that she couldn’t breathe, wishing he were right there beside her.

  An alien, on the Yangtze. No wonder Team Space had blocked her memory. They hadn’t worried so much about her learning the secrets of the Wondjina Transportation System. They’d been wor
ried about the aliens, about sentient or hostile life somewhere in the network.

  Jodenny slowly peeled herself from the deck. She needed a shower, something to wash off the stench of fear and despair, but settled for curling up on her bunk with Karl. The koala snuggled against her side but she was still cold, very cold, and no robot could ease that chill.

  Fucking aliens. Fucking Team Space, knowing it all along.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Jem, Dianne, all the lost dead of her first ship. She didn’t sleep, not with their faces and voices so present in her thoughts, but awareness of the cabin faded away. When a keening sound cut through the air she thought she was dreaming. She jerked upright and watched, in dulled surprise, as a green ouroboros appeared in the space between her bunk and Farber’s. This one wasn’t shaped like a snake eating its tail, but instead like a crocodile. A large, hungry crocodile with sharp eyes. Knowing eyes.

  Jodenny sat up. Karl rolled aside, yawning, and went back to sleep.

  “No,” Jodenny said to the ring. “I can’t trust you.”

  It spun lazily.

  She said, “You could be a trap.”

  Something small moved within its shadow. A tiny green gecko climbed up the inner rim, reached its summit, and gazed at her with head erect. The entire ouroboros lifted ever so slightly, then descended again.

  Geckos and crocodiles. Totems and gods.

  “Will you take me to Terry?” she asked. The gecko flicked its tail, and the ouroboros brightened like a little green sun.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, and stepped inside.

  * * *

  Nam and Myell put several meters of distance between them and the Roon.

  “Keep away from them, Doctor,” Nam said.

  “Stop being ridiculous.” Gayle wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “They need our assistance.”

  The two aliens stopped comforting each other and took an interest in their surroundings. The room had multiple archways, but no signs or maps indicated where they might lead. The dome, several hundred meters above, was as distant as the sky. The glowing walls were soothing, the air cool and fresh. The ouroboros didn’t move on, but remained resting on the dirt floor.