They found, with their instruments, that the greenhouse effect had subsided slowly during the centuries, aided by the first wisps of galactic cloud heralding the new ice age, but that the world was still warmer than the interregnal norm. The ozone layer seemed to have healed itself, but the desert areas were still formidably large although the spread of new pasture and forest was heartening.
What they did not see from orbit was the lights of cities by night and this did not greatly surprise them. The world they had left in a desperate search for new habitat, had been an ant heap of ungovernable, unsupportable billions whose numbers were destined to shrink drastically if any were to survive at all. The absence of lights suggested that the population problem had solved itself in grim fashion.
They dropped the ship into a lower orbit just outside the atmosphere and brought in the spy cameras.
There were people down there, all kinds of people. The northern hemisphere was home to nomadic tribes, in numbers like migratory nations; the northern temperate zone had become a corn belt, heavily farmed and guarded by soldiers in dispersed forts, with a few towns and many villages; the equatorial jungles were, no doubt, home to hunter-gatherers but their traces were difficult to see; there were signs of urban communities, probably trading centres, around the seacoasts but no evidence of transport networks or lighting by night and no sounds of electronic transmission. Civilisation had regressed, not unexpectedly.
They chose to inspect Australia first because it was separated from the larger landmasses and because the cameras showed small farming communities and a few townlets. It was decided to send down a Contact Officer to inspect and report back.
The ship could not land. It had been built in space and could live only in space; planetary gravity would have warped its huge but light-bodied structure beyond repair. Exploratory smallcraft could have been despatched, but it was reasoned that a crew of obviously powerful supermen might create an untrusting reserve among the inhabitants, even an unhealthy regard for gods or demons from the sky. A single person, powerfully but unobtrusively armed, would be a suitable ambassador.
They sent a woman, Nugan Johnson, not because she happened to be Australian but because she was a Contact Officer, and it was her rostered turn for duty.
They chose a point in the south of the continent because it was autumn in the hemisphere, and an average daily temperature of twenty-six C would be bearable, and dropped her by tractor beam on the edge of a banana grove owned by Mrs Flighty Jones, who screamed and fled.
2
Flighty, in the English of her day, meant something like scatterbrained. Her name was, in fact, Hallo-Mary (a rough – very rough – descendant of Ave Maria), but she was a creature of fits and starts, so much so that the men at the bottling shed made some fun of her before they were convinced that she had seen something, and called the Little Mother of the Bottles.
“There was I, counting banana bunches for squeeging into baby pap, when it goes hissss-bump behind me.”
“What went hiss-bump?”
“It did.”
“What was it?” Little Mother wondered if the question was unfair to Flighty wits.
“I don’t know.” Having no words, she took refuge in frustrated tears. She had inherited the orchard but not the self-control proper to a proprietary woman.
In front of the men! Little Mother sighed and tried again. “What did it look like? What shape?”
Flighty tried hard. “Like a bag. With legs. And a glass bowl on top. And it bounced. That’s what made the bump. And it made a noise.”
“What sort of noise?”
“Just a noise.” She thought of something else. “You know the pictures on the library wall? In the holy stories part? The ones where the angels go up? Well, like the angels.”
Little Mother knew that the pictures did not represent angels, whatever the congregation were told. Hiding trepidation, she sent the nearest man for Top Mother.
Top Mother came, and listened . . . and said, as though visitations were nothing out of the way, “We will examine the thing that hisses and bumps. The men may come with us in case their strength is needed.” That provided at least a bodyguard.
The men were indeed a muscular lot, and also a superstitious lot, but they were expected to show courage when the women claimed protection. They picked up whatever knives and mashing clubs lay to hand and tried to look grim. Man-to-man was a bloodwarming event but man-to-whatisit had queasy overtones. They agreed with Little Mother’s warning: “There could be danger.”
“There might be greater danger later on if we do not investigate. Lead the way, Hallo-Mary.” A Top Mother did not use nicknames.
Flighty was now thoroughly terrified and no longer sure that she had seen anything, but Top Mother took her arm and pushed her forward. Perhaps it had gone away, perhaps it had bounced up and up . . .
It had not gone anywhere. It had sat down and pushed back its glass bowl and revealed itself, by its cropped hair, as a man.
“A man,” murmured Top Mother, who knew that matriarchy was a historical development and not an evolutionary given. She began to think like the politician which at heart she was. A man from – from outside – could be a social problem.
The men, who were brought up to revere women but often resented them – except during the free-fathering festivals – grinned and winked at each other and wondered what the old girl would do.
The old girl said, “Lukey! Walk up and observe him.”
Lukey started off unwillingly, then noticed that three cows grazed unconcernedly not far from the man in a bag and took heart to cross the patch of pasture at the orchard’s edge.
At a long arm’s length he stood, leaned forward and sniffed. He was forest bred and able to sort out the man in a bag’s scents from the norms about him and, being forest bred, his pheromone sense was better than rudimentary. He came so close that Nugan could have touched him and said, “Just another bloody woman!” The stranger should have been a man, a sex hero!
He called back to Top Mother, “It’s only a woman with her hair cut short.”
They all crowded forward across the pasture. Females were always peaceable – unless you really scratched their pride.
The hiss Flighty had heard had been the bootjets operating to break the force of a too-fast landing by an ineptly handled tractor beam, the bump had been the reality of a contact that wrenched an ankle. Even the bounce was almost real as she hopped for a moment on one leg. The noise was Nugan’s voice through a speaker whose last user had left it tuned to baritone range, a hearty, “Shit! Goddam shit!” before she sat down and became aware of a dumpy figure vanishing among columns of what she remembered vaguely as banana palms. Not much of a start for good PR.
She thought first to strip the boot and bind her ankle, then that she should not be caught minus a boot if the runaway brought unfriendly reinforcements. She did not fear the village primitives; though she carried no identifiable weapons, the thick gloves could spit a variety of deaths through levelled fingers. However, she had never killed a civilised organism and had no wish to do so; her business was to prepare a welcome home.
The scents of the air were strange but pleasant, as the orbital analysis had affirmed; she folded the transparent fishbowl back into its neck slot. She became aware of animals nearby. Cows. She recognised them from pictures though she had been wholly city bred in an era of gigantic cities. They took no notice of her. Fascinated and unafraid, she absorbed a landscape of grass and tiny flowers in the grass, trees and shrubs and a few vaguely familiar crawling and hopping insects. The only strangeness was the spaciousness stretching infinitely on all sides, a thing that the lush Ecological Decks of Starfarer could not mimic, together with the sky like a distant ceiling with wisps of cloud. Might it rain on her? She scarcely remembered rain.
Time passed. It was swelteringly hot but not as hot as autumn in the greenhouse streets.
They came at last, led by a tall woman in a black dress – rather, a rob
e cut to enhance dignity though it was trimmed off at the knees. She wore a white headdress like something starched and folded in the way of the old nursing tradition and held together by a brooch. She was old, perhaps in her sixties, but she had presence and the dress suggested status.
She clutched another woman by the arm, urging her forward, and Nugan recognised the clothing, like grey denim jeans, that fled through the palms. Grey Denim Jeans pointed and planted herself firmly in a determined no-further pose. Madam In Black gestured to the escort and spoke a few words.
Nugan became aware of the men and made an appreciative sound unbecoming in a middle-aged matron past child-bearing years. These men wore only G-strings and they were men. Not big men but shapely, muscular and very male. Or am I so accustomed to Starfarer crew that any change rings a festival bell? Nugan, behave!
The man ordered forward came warily and stopped a safe arm’s length from her, sniffing. Nugan examined him. If I were, even looked, twenty years younger . . . He spoke suddenly in a resentful, blaming tone. The words were strange (of course they must be) yet hauntingly familiar; she thought that part of the sentence was “dam-dam she!”
She kept quiet. Best to observe and wait. The whole party, led by Madam In Black, came across the pasture. They stopped in front of her, fanning out in silent inspection. The men smelled mildly of sweat, but that was almost a pleasure; after thirty years of propinquity, Starfarer’s living quarters stank of sweat.
Madam In Black said something in a voice of authority that seemed part of her. It sounded a little like “Oo’re yah?” – interrogative with a clipped note to it; the old front-of-the-mouth Australian vowels had vanished in the gulf of years. It should mean, by association, Who are you? but in this age might be a generalised, Where are you from?, even, What are you doing here?
Nugan played the oldest game in language lesson, tapping her chest and saying, “Nugan. I – Nugan.”
Madam In Black nodded and tapped her own breast. “Ay TupMa.”
“Tupma?”
“Dit – Tup-Ma, Yah Nuggorn?”
“Nugan.”
The woman repeated, “Nugan,” with a fair approximation of the old vowels and followed with, “Wurriya arta?”
Nugan made a guess at vowel drift and consonant elision and came up with, Where are you out of? meaning, Where do you come from?
They must know, she thought, that something new is in the sky. A ship a kilometre long has been circling for weeks with the sun glittering on it at dawn and twilight. They can’t have lost all contact with the past; there must be stories of the bare bones of history.
She pointed upwards and said, “From the starship.”
The woman nodded as if the statement made perfect sense and said, “Stair-boot.”
Nugan found herself fighting sudden tears. Home, home, HOME has not forgotten us. Until this moment she had not known what Earth meant to her, swimming in the depths of her shipbound mind. “Yes, stair-boot. We say starship.”
The woman repeated, hesitantly, “Stairsheep?” She tried again, reaching for the accent, “Starship! I say it right?”
“Yes, you say it properly.”
The woman repeated, “Prupperly. Ta for that. It is old-speak. I read some of that but not speak – only small bit.”
So not everything had been lost. There were those who had rescued and preserved the past. Nugan said, “You are quite good.”
Tup-Ma blushed with obvious pleasure. “Now we go.” She waved towards the banana grove.
“I can’t.” A demonstration was needed. Nugan struggled upright, put the injured foot to the ground and tried for a convincing limp. That proved easy; the pain made her gasp and she sat down hard.
“Ah! You bump!”
“Indeed I bump.” She unshackled the right boot and broke the seals before fascinated eyes and withdrew a swelling foot.
“We carry.”
We meant two husky males with wrists clasped under her, carrying her through the grove to a large wooden shed where more near-naked men worked at vats and tables. They sat on a table and brought cold water (How do they cool it? Ice? Doubtful) and a thick yellow grease which quite miraculously eased the pain somewhat (A native pharmacopoeia?) and stout, unbleached bandages to swathe her foot tightly.
She saw that in other parts of the shed the banana flesh was being mashed into long wooden moulds. Then it was fed into glass cylinders whose ends were capped, again with glass, after a pinch of some noisome-looking fungus was added. (Preservative? Bacteriophage? Why not?) A preserving industry, featuring glass rather than metal; such details helped to place the culture.
Tup-Ma called, “Lukey!” and the man came forward to be given a long instruction in which the word Stair-boot figured often. He nodded and left the shed at a trot.
“Lukey go – goes – to tell Libary. We carry you there.”
“Who is Libary?”
The woman thought and finally produced, “Skuller. Old word, I think.”
“Scholar? Books? Learning?”
“Yes, yes, books. Scho-lar. Ta.” Ta? Of course – thank you. Fancy the child’s word persisting.
“You will eat, please?”
Nugan said quickly, “No, thank you. I have this.” She dug out a concentrate pack and swallowed one tablet before the uncomprehending Tup-Ma. She dared not risk local food before setting up the test kit, enzymes and once-harmless proteins could change so much. They brought a litter padded like a mattress and laid her on it. Four pleasantly husky men carried it smoothly, waist-high, swinging gently along a broad path towards low hills, one of which was crowned by a surprisingly large building from which smoke plumes issued.
“Tup-Ma goodbyes you.”
“Goodbye, Tup-Ma. And ta.”
3
It was a stone building, even larger than it had seemed. But that was no real wonder; the medieval stone masons had built cathedrals far more ornate than this squared-off warehouse of a building. It was weathered dirty grey but was probably yellow sandstone, of which there had been quarries in Victoria. Sandstone is easily cut and shaped even with soft iron tools.
There were windows, but the glass seemed not to be of high quality, and a small doorway before which the bearers set down the litter. A thin man of indeterminate middle age stood there, brown eyes examining her from a dark, clean shaven face. He wore a loose shirt, wide-cut, ballooning shorts and sandals, and he smiled brilliantly at her. He was a full-blooded Aborigine.
He said, “Welcome to the Library, Starwoman,” with unexceptionable pronunciation though the accent was of the present century.
She sat up. “The language still lives.”
He shook his head. “It is a dead language but scholars speak it, as many of yours spoke Latin. Or did that predate your time? There are many uncertainties.”
“Yes, Latin was dead. My name is Nugan.”
“I am Libary.”
“Library?”
“If you would be pedantic, but the people call me Libary. It is both name and title. I preside.” His choice of words, hovering between old-fashioned and donnish, made her feel like a child before a tutor, yet he seemed affable.
He gave an order in the modern idiom and the bearers carried her inside. She gathered an impression of stone walls a metre thick, pierced by sequent doors which formed a temperature lock. The moist heat outside was balanced by an equally hot but dry atmosphere inside. She made the connection at once, having a student’s reverence for books. The smoke she had seen was given off by a low-temperature furnace stoked to keep the interior air dry and at a reasonably even temperature. This was more than a scholars’ library; it was the past, preserved by those who knew its value.
She was carried past open doorways, catching glimpses of bound volumes behind glass, of a room full of hanging maps and once of a white man at a lectern, touching his book with gloved hands.
She was set down on a couch in a rather bare room furnished mainly by a desk of brilliantly polished wood which carried s
everal jars of coloured inks, pens which she thought had split nibs and a pile of thick, greyish paper. (Unbleached paper? Pollution free? A psychic prohibition from old time?)
The light came through windows, but there were oil lamps available with shining parabolic reflectors. And smoke marks on the ceiling. Electricity slept still.
The carriers filed out. Libary sat himself behind the desk. “We have much to say to each other.”
Nugan marvelled, “You speak so easily. Do you use the old English all the time?”
“There are several hundred scholars in Libary. Most speak the old tongue. We practise continually.”
“In order to read the old books?”
“That, yes.” He smiled in a fashion frankly conspirational. “Also it allows private discussion in the presence of the uninstructed.”
Politics, no doubt – the eternal game that has never slept in all of history. “In front of Tup-Ma, perhaps?”
“A few technical expressions serve to thwart her understanding. But the Tup-Ma is no woman’s fool.”
“The Tup-Ma? I thought it was her name.”
“Her title. Literally, Top Mother. As you would have expressed it, Mother Superior.”
“A nun!”
Libary shrugged. “She has no cloister and the world is her convent. Call her priest rather than a nun.”
“She has authority?”
“She has great authority.” He looked suddenly quizzical. “She is very wise. She sent you to me before you should fall into error.”
“Error? You mean, like sin?”
“That also, but I speak of social error. It would be easy. Yours was a day of free thinking and irresponsible doing in a world that could not learn discipline for living. This Australian world is a religious matriarchy. It is fragile when ideas can shatter and dangerous when the women make hard decisions.”
It sounded like too many dangers to evaluate at once. Patriarchy and equality she could deal with – in theory – but matriarchy was an unknown quantity in history. He had given his warning and waited silently on her response.
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 43