The Stars Down Under

by Sandra McDonald

  “Great road you’re traveling,” Nam muttered, but didn’t turn back.

  Thirst made itself known, first a niggling tickle, then a strong itch, then the inside of him burning up, drying out. Myell had no canteen or water bottle. He had no way of knowing how far the road would take him, but he was walking with his ancestors now, and there was no turning back.

  He was unsurprised that Nam grew increasingly restless, worried about their trek.

  “Are we going to wait for rain? Manna from heaven?”

  Myell didn’t answer. He had nothing to go by other than the knowledge that this was the right path, that he was trusting the gods. He couldn’t think ahead. But wasn’t that foolishness? Was he so far demented that he couldn’t tell instinct from psychosis?

  “I don’t know,” he said, surrendering again to the song, to the intuition that this was the way it had to be, was always meant to be.

  But it was hot, scorching hot, and he was parched inside and out. The day was cloudy, no rain. The landscape was quiet, just bugs and occasional scurrying animals in the brush, and the wind. He remembered that there were dingoes out here, and snakes, and other things eager to kill, but he told himself that he wasn’t afraid. That everything had been planned for. Not by him, but by someone else.

  Would have been nice, though, to see Jodenny one more time.

  The horizon shimmered and shifted, skeletal trees stretched toward the sky, nothing but the crisscross to guide him, the ancient paths. A lonely land, baked dry, desolate enough to drive a man crazy.

  “I’m not crazy,” he said to Nam.

  Nam was gone. There was no sign of him anywhere on the horizon.

  That was crazy.

  Myell paused, not sure if he should turn back. Had Nam fallen by the wayside? Had he said goodbye? For a moment Myell was sure that Nam had never been there, that he’d been walking this long road from Carnarvon with no companionship other than his own deranged mind.

  In the end, he was alone.

  He walked in the now, the moment, baked in the heat and misery, detached but feeling every jarring step in his bones.

  “What did you expect, that this would be easy?” he heard Captain Kuvik ask.

  Another hallucination. Kuvik was back in Supply School, sitting mired in regulations and invoices, running his command like a ship.

  “There’s more to being Jungali than just putting on the uniform,” Senior Chief Talic added, his shadow keeping pace with Myell on the road.

  Irritated, Myell asked, “What do you know about it?”

  Talic replied, “You haven’t gone through initiation. You haven’t changed. Things that don’t change end up dying. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Leave him alone,” Senior Chief Gooder said. His face creased with an encouraging smile. “Man’s got a job to do.”

  Myell kept walking, listening to the chiefs bicker around him in voices like the wind.

  Darkness finally came, bringing relief after the blistering day. He slumped by the side of the asphalt, unable to trudge even one step farther. He had neither water nor food, only sunburn on his face and blisters on his feet.

  He was lying on his back, no stars overhead because of the haze, when a loud, strange noise came from the highway. Some kind of machine powered by a combustion engine, misfiring, belching noise and chaos. It rolled on the ground instead of a cushion of air. Its headlights were weak but blinding anyway. Maybe it was a Roon scout, scouring the countryside …

  The machine slowed to a stop. Its engine continued to grate and screech and make appalling noise. A man descended from the elevated cab. His outline blocked the light.

  “Australia’s pretty damn big,” Nam said. “I thought we could use some help on your walkabout.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, Nam’s truck couldn’t be turned off for fear that it might never turn on again.

  “Engine’s as old as dirt,” Nam said from the front seat, which was a lopsided collection of springs and torn stuffing. The backseat wasn’t much better. “Fuel’s enough for a couple hundred kilometers, nothing more. Unless we find a gas station. What are the chances of that?”

  Myell was stretched out with a wet cloth over his face. Every jolt of the truck sent shock waves through his aching body.

  “There’s some food in a box back there,” Nam said. “Nothing too tasty, but it’ll do.”

  Myell rummaged through the box halfheartedly and found something that he supposed was jerky. He bit it cautiously, and reached for the bottle of lukewarm water that Nam had tucked under his arm. Though he didn’t remember asking Nam where he’d found the truck, Nam was telling him anyway.

  “One of those roads we passed led to an old sheep station. The man there says it was his grandfather’s place, way back. He’s not much left for the world but he loves the military, said he would have joined up if it weren’t for his wife and kids. It took some negotiating, but he was willing to lend me this truck, and the food and water, in return for an afternoon of swapping sea stories.”

  The truck was faster than traveling by foot, but louder and more grating. The engine was in constant danger of falling out from under the hood. The blowers spewed hot air that stank of grease. Myell managed to sleep a few minutes here, a few minutes there, though he was never completely unaware of the engine noise, of the stench. Part of him was still focused on the crisscross, the songline. When he could no longer see with his inner vision, he sat up and said, “Stop.”

  Nam slowed the vehicle to an obnoxiously loud idle. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve got to turn that way.” Myell pointed off into the darkness.

  Nam had some maps, badly wrinkled pieces of paper that he peered at in the dim light of flashlights. “I thought you didn’t know where we were going.”

  “I don’t. I just know that it’s that way.”

  “Sure of that, are you?”

  “More sure than anything.”

  “We’ll be crossing overland. Rough going, even if we had the best ground vehicle on Earth.”

  Myell said, “We’ll get as far as we can, and walk the rest if need be.”

  Nam gave him a sideways look. “You’re talking much better.”

  Myell squinted at him. Words were indeed coming easier, he realized. His mind felt clearer, as if he were waking up from a long, muddy dream.

  “Broken axle, here we come,” Nam said, and steered the truck off the road.

  The jostling got much worse. The truck didn’t have a prayer of making it across any ravines or gullies, so Nam had to slow down and let the headlights pick out any potential hazards. Myell offered to spell him at the wheel, but Nam insisted that he was fine to drive. Myell stayed with him in the front seat to make sure he didn’t nod off. At oh-two-hundred a low, flat farmhouse appeared, and they got out of the truck to investigate.

  Myell’s legs were cramped from sitting for so long. He gingerly stretched them as they approached the farmhouse. No lights were on. No dogs barked. There was a barn, but its roof had collapsed. Nam knocked, and when no one answered he forced the door open.

  The farmhouse was long since deserted, furniture covered with thick dust. It might have been a nice place, once. Musty curtains shrouded the windows. Photos of children hung in frames on the walls. The children were probably long gone now, maybe moved to the cities, maybe destroyed by the Roon.

  Beyond the living room was a bedroom with striped wallpaper and a ceiling fan. Lying in the bed were two mummified corpses, their limbs entwined. Maybe they’d gone out together in a suicide pact. Maybe they’d taken poison. Or maybe they had been old and sick, and decided to die in their own fashion, their own choice.

  He and Jodenny would never grow old together. He knew that as surely as he knew how to follow a songline, and the hard painful weight of that had lodged under his breastbone.

  Nam had been investigating the kitchen, as if anything edible could be found after so long a time. Now he gazed past Myell at the dead bodies
.

  “We should get back to the truck,” he said.

  They left the dead to their rest and continued east.

  * * *

  The truck groaned and shuddered and went still five hours later. Myell said, “It’s all right. We’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Nam asked, propping open the engine compartment and scowling at the ruined machinery. “You don’t know where we’re going. You don’t know how long until we get there. You don’t know—”

  Myell pointed past Nam’s shoulder. “There.”

  Nam turned.

  The sun was a low ball of fire above the horizon. Its rays slanted on an enormous hunk of ancient earth jutting upward. Myell’s breath tightened in awe as he gazed on it. The rock was the largest he had ever seen, the largest maybe in the entire world, and they still had more than a hundred kilometers to cross before they reached it.

  “Burringurrah,” Myell said. “Garanwa’s home. That’s where we’re going.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Though the need to keep going was like a deep, burning itch, Myell knew that neither he nor Nam could walk all day. They were both exhausted. The truck was like an oven but there were some old cloth tarpaulins folded up in the back, and they rigged those into a makeshift canopy. It wouldn’t hold up under a strong rainstorm, but the chances of rain seemed slim.

  They ate some more of the jerky and stretched out on the ground. Nam had found some more maps and even an old guidebook under the tarps. He thumbed through the pages with a frown on his face.

  “It’s a monocline,” Nam said. “Largest in the entire world.”

  Myell tried hard not to think about Jodenny, so far behind them. Alone, in pain, no one to advocate for her.

  “Three times as old as Uluru,” Nam continued, the book close to his nose. “One point six billion years old.”

  She deserved more. She deserved a husband who would have put her needs first, not gone traipsing off across the outback on a quest to see a giant rock.

  “She’s fine,” Nam said.

  “Reading my mind?” Myell asked.

  “You’ve got a lovesick-puppy look on your face,” Nam said.

  “She’s all alone.”

  “She’s a decorated military officer, broken hip or not. She knows how to take care of herself.”

  Myell turned his face away and hoped Nam was right.

  * * *

  Myell and Nam hadn’t been gone for more than an hour when Dr. Ruiz came into Jodenny’s room wheeling a bone knitter.

  “Came in from Geraldton,” Ruiz said. “Not the best unit, little rusty around the edges, but I think it will do the job.”

  Jodenny hoped he was joking about the rust, but she didn’t dare ask.

  The knitter might have been the most ancient model left in all of Australia, but it did its job well. By midafternoon Jodenny was able to walk with the aid of a cane. She discovered that the clinic was more crowded than she’d thought, more in desperate need, so their persistence in finding the knitter made her even more appreciative. Though she was tired, feeling brittle at the edges, she gave up her bed.

  “You can’t leave,” Ruiz said. “You need a few days’ bed rest or your hip could break apart under the strain.”

  “I have to find my husband,” she said.

  “Send out search teams. He can’t have gone far.”

  She almost smiled. “You don’t know him.”

  Carnarvon wasn’t large enough for a Team Space outpost, but there was a civil defense troop stationed at the firehouse. Jodenny first had to convince them that she was indeed a Team Space lieutenant commander, but once they scanned her dog tags, the leading sergeant, a scared-looking young man named Hamilton, offered command of the unit to her.

  “Our captain’s been on a bender for weeks, can’t be torn from his bottle,” Hamilton explained. “The lieutenant went home to check on his family and didn’t come back. That was three nights ago.”

  Jodenny said, “You’ll have to carry on without them. I’m on a mission. I need a vehicle. Anything that moves.”

  Hamilton looked perplexed. “Nothing like that around here, ma’am.”

  “What about the flits that rescued us from the outback?”

  “One’s broken down, heard it’s a goner. The other went up the coast to help out there. It won’t be back until the end of the week or so. I’d try to reach it for you, but their radio’s broken.”

  Jodenny put her cane aside and commandeered the radio. She tried using a nonemergency frequency to contact Team Space in Perth. But the operators she reached didn’t know much, or didn’t want to help. Some of them sounded drunk. At sunset she finally pushed off the headset. She brooded over a cup of coffee that Hamilton had rounded up for her. It tasted old and gritty, but she needed the caffeine.

  “Maybe you should try the ham radio operators,” Hamilton suggested. “There’s still some old-timers around.”

  “Ham what?” Jodenny asked.

  “Amateur radio operators. Got a language and world of their own. My daddy used to run his radio out of a little shack up near Meekatharra.”

  “I’ll try anything,” she said.

  After several minutes of tinkering with the antiquated equipment, Hamilton was talking to a cheery-sounding man out of Kalbarri. That led to another radio contact out of Southern Cross and, much later, long after midnight, a chat with someone on the outskirts of Perth who promised he knew people in Team Space.

  “I’ll do my best, girl,” he said cheerfully. “But don’t hold your breath.”

  Jodenny rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. Hamilton said, “Best use that cot, Commander. Lie down before you fall down.”

  She obeyed, too tired and aching to argue. She slept until the brightness and heat of the day woke her. She was splashing her face with lukewarm water from a jug when Hamilton came running.

  “There’s a Lieutenant Sweeney calling,” he said.

  Jodenny hurried to the radio. “Mark?”

  The connection wasn’t good, but Sweeney’s voice crackled through. “Ellen Spring?”

  “The same,” Jodenny said, a grin making her lips hurt. “How’d you get there?”

  “Same as you. Damn lifeboat launched before we could stop it.”

  “I’m trying to get out of here. It’s important. Chief Myell and Commander Nam need help.”

  Sweeney sounded frustrated. “I don’t know what I can do. We’re down here in Fremantle.”

  “You have to try,” she said.

  The transmission broke up. Jodenny sat back in the lumpy chair and cursed fate. She could not sit by for another day and do nothing. An old man with a straw hat went by on a bicycle. She imagined herself biking her way through the outback, pedaling until her hip fell apart. Already it was aching like a bad, bad tooth. Maybe she could find a DNGO, strap herself on its back, and make it carry her across the outback.

  But even if she found some kind of transportation, she still had no idea which way Myell and Nam had gone.

  “You said you’ve had sentries on the roads?” Jodenny asked Hamilton.

  “Yes, ma’am. No one gets in or out without being seen.”

  “People want to get in or out?”

  “We’ve had stragglers coming in, people afraid to be on their own.” He scratched at an unhealthy-looking mole on his elbow. “Some other people here, they’re leaving, taking their chances. Figure Perth might be safer if those lizards start landing and blasting away. Good luck to them, right?”

  “Can you check with the sentries, see if any of them remember seeing one or two men leave on foot? Chief Myell, my husband, would be one of them. Commander Nam the other.”

  She described them both, adding that Myell might not be very articulate. Hamilton went off to check with his men. While he was gone, she studied a map of the surrounding region.

  “Bill Gum didn’t see them,” Hamilton said when he got back. “But you could drive a herd of sheep past him and he might not notice. T
ommy Reed said he was awake, but he was probably drunk or passed out. Hilly Dodd saw a fellow head out, followed by another. Could be your men. They were the only ones going north or so.”

  Jodenny traced the map with her finger. “What’s this complex here?”

  Hamilton peered at the spot. “Old NASA tracking station. Gotta neat history, that. They used it back when people were first landing on the moon.”

  “Does it still work?”

  “Not a chance. Just a bunch of scrap metal. People like to shoot up the dishes with rifles and such.” Hamilton leaned over the map. “Mostly that way you’re going to find some abandoned sheep stations, some old tourist traps, a few sacred sites, but nothing worth pissing on these days. If you’ll pardon my language, ma’am.”

  Jodenny didn’t think Myell would head for any of those. “Sacred sites? Sacred Aboriginal sites?”

  “Like that one.” Hamilton gestured to a framed print on the wall.

  “Uluru?” She had noticed the distinctive rock while Hamilton was gone—an enormous and imposing chunk of earth rising up from a flat plain, almost like a mountain with its top half sheared off.

  “That’s not Uluru,” Hamilton said. “That’s Mt. Augustus. The Wadjari locals call it Burringurrah. Not as pretty as Uluru. Not as famous. But bigger and older.”

  Jodenny stood up, snagged her cane, and crossed to the picture. “How far is it?”

  “Oh, a right long distance. Three hundred kilometers or so.”

  “Could a person walk it?”

  “Sure. Die of thirst or heat on the way, most likely.”

  It would be exactly like her husband to attempt an impossible walk under impossible circumstances.

  Hamilton scratched at his mole again. “They say it’s named after an Aboriginal boy from a long time ago. He was supposed to be getting initiated into his tribe, right? Manhood passage, stuff like that. But he ran away. Didn’t want to do it.”

  Jodenny tried not to think about Myell and chief’s initiation. “What happened to him?”