Starship Home

by Morphett, Tony

  ‘Well, your Galactic slaving raids, they don’t come round very often. You know? I mean, this is the first one in my lifetime.’

  ‘The Galaxy is wide,’ Guinevere told him. ‘There is always a market for slaves … to colonize new worlds … for breeding stock … soldiers … always a market.’

  ‘So all our people are going to get sold,’ Harold said in a small, bleak voice.

  ‘I suppose it’d sound tacky if I said I wished I could be there to see my father sold,’ Zachary said.

  ‘It sounds absolutely tacky,’ Meg groaned from her couch. ‘If you want my honest opinion.’

  ‘I won’t say it then.’

  Harold had been thinking. ‘Two percent of people left. You can see why planes wouldn’t be flying, why no one’d be broadcasting.’ He looked at Zoe, then Meg. ‘I mean, we know where my family are, but maybe they didn’t take your people, Zoe or yours, Meg.’ He looked at the main screen. ‘Guinevere, can you get us down there? Down to the road where you picked us up?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘but get ye to your couches all. I took sore damage on the Leap, and landfall may be a rough one.’

  18: LANDFALL

  Cattle looked up at the pale blue dome of the cloudless sky. They could hear a muttering sound, like distant thunder. On the far side of the creek, a group of kangaroos cropped at the brown grass. First one, then another, then all of them lifted their heads, looked around, and hopped away on their strong rear legs.

  Under the trees of the forest, it was cooler, but the blended smells of exotic pine and native eucalypt told of summer heat. There was a child in the forest, a 10-year-old girl, her face tanned and her hair bleached white by the sun. The child’s name was Maze, and she was both afraid and interested. The dreams which had come each night for the past month had today become waking dreams and she knew they were to do with the muttering in the sky.

  That is how the dreams had always begun. With the blue sky, and the mutter of thunder, and Maze by herself in the cool of the forest and…

  There!

  Terror!

  The vast shape appearing from nowhere as trees exploded from its path, making room for the giant stepped pyramid as it settled to the earth with a terrible roaring and crunching of wood and stone! Maze, in hiding, stared at the iron castle which had suddenly appeared in the forest and she knew she had seen its like before, in the sacred paintings on the walls of Our Mother’s hut.

  Within the starship’s bridge, Harold, Zoe, Zachary and Meg got off their couches and approached the main screen. It came alive, showing them the forest outside.

  ‘Where’s this, Guinevere?’ Harold said.

  ‘Where ye came from.’

  ‘You must have us mixed up with someone else. We were in the bus? The metal wagon? It was going along a road, with paddocks either side? Flat grass country with wire fences?’

  ‘This is where ye were.’

  Zachary tried to be diplomatic. ‘Guinevere, what Harold’s trying to say is that maybe you forgot just where you found us?’

  ‘Zachary, I cannot forget. The place is scribed in my memory. ‘tis here the road ran, the farms were, ‘tis here I took ye and your iron wagon within me.’

  They looked at each other in silence. Zoe spoke first. ‘Maybe we should go out. Take a look around.’

  The enormous metallic stepped pyramid in the forest had formed its own clearing when it appeared. Trees had literally been blown aside, rocks vaporized, so that there was now a cleared area around the starship. In the lowest step of the starship, a hatchway opened, and a ramp slid out. Down the ramp came Zoe and Harold, followed by Zachary and Meg. They walked as far as the trees, and then turned and looked back at the starship.

  ‘A pyramid,’ said Zoe.

  ‘I had no idea of the size…’ said Zachary.

  ‘A ziggurat, a stepped pyramid,’ said Meg. ‘In the Middle East … Central America … the homes of the gods.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Zachary was looking at her oddly.

  ‘I’m saying the ziggurats and pyramids might’ve been built to look like starships. Guinevere said the Slarn have been to Earth many times before.’

  ‘But … pyramids are kinda smoothed off and pointy, aren’t they? I had a girlfriend, and her mother was an old-style hippie and used to sit under one to meditate.’

  Meg shook her head. ‘The oldest Egyptian ones are stepped. And the ziggurats of the Middle East, and the Central American pyramids … they all rise in steps. They look like the starship. But built in stone or mud brick. They were where the gods lived. Where you … sacrificed … where you gave your crops … your people.’

  ‘Guinevere?’ yelled Harold.

  ‘I hear thee, Hal. And what cranky Meg doth say … ‘tis so. ‘twas long before my time, but I am told ‘tis so.’

  In silence, they looked at the giant starship, and then in silence looked around. Finally Zachary spoke. ‘I got to tell you Guinevere, this isn’t where you picked us up. It’s got to be much farther out of town, in a National Park maybe…’

  ‘Nay.’

  ‘I think, really, that Zachary’s correct…’

  ‘Thy thinks change nothing, Zoe. We are where I say we are.’

  Another silence, and then, ‘Okay let’s explore around a bit,’ said Zachary, and turned toward the forest, trying to take the lead, but was beaten to it by Zoe, who forged ahead of him.

  Crouching in the forest, the child Maze watched them pass, her hand on the hilt of the sheathed knife she wore in her belt. The belt cinched clothes of animal skins and hand-loomed cloth, and her pale hair was held in place with a leather headband. As she followed them, her moccasins made scarcely a sound on the leaf litter of the forest floor.

  Harold, Zoe, Meg and Zachary moved on through the forest, followed by the strange young girl.

  19: WHEN ARE WE?

  The undergrowth had thinned out and they were now moving through primary forest. Tall gum trees, some of them as much as six feet through the trunk, towered above them, their peeling trunks smooth of side branches for their first thirty feet. Beneath the trees, the forest floor was littered with leaves and dead branches, and covered with what Meg recognized as a mixture of native and exotic grasses. There were signs that a fire had come through this part of the forest in the past year. Many of the trees were blackened at the base, with vivid green shoots now appearing through the charred surfaces. The loudest sound was the droning of cicadas, varied occasionally by the cry of a big black and white currawong, the hacking laugh of the kookaburra, and the shrieks of some black cockatoos who had found a big pine tree and were tearing apart the green pine cones in order to get at the pine nuts inside them.

  They were passing under this pine tree, a radiata or Monterey, a Californian interloper in this mostly native eucalypt forest, when Harold made the first disconcerting discovery. As they passed beneath the tree, smelling the sharp piney scent of it, they could hear a crunching sound above them as the black cockatoos tore at the pine cones with their strong hooked beaks; shredded chips of the green cones were filtering down through the branches onto them. Then one of the cockatoos dropped a whole cone. They heard it crashing down through the branches toward them and they ran and Harold stumbled and fell.

  He sat up, rubbing his shin, and then he saw what he had fallen over. It was a lump of reinforced concrete.

  He stared at it. The reinforced concrete seemed to have been thrust up by the action of the old pine tree’s knotted roots. Kneeling, he started tearing away the grass, and soon found more reinforced concrete beneath a shallow covering of earth.

  The others had stopped, and were looking back at him. ‘Come on Harold!’ yelled Zoe.

  ‘No, look!’

  Reluctantly they walked back toward him, all the while keeping wary eyes on the activity of the black cockatoos above their heads. By the time they reached him, Harold had uncovered more reinforced concrete. ‘It’s reinforced concrete.’

  ‘So it’s reinforced co
ncrete, so what?’ Zoe could not see the point Harold was trying to make.

  ‘But there’s more of it here. This whole area used to be under reinforced concrete.’ He moved away from the pine tree, and picked up a dead branch, and used it as a digging stick, scraping back the covering of earth and decayed leaves and pine needles to reveal the concrete surface.

  ‘So the whole area used to be under reinforced concrete.’

  Meg was looking uneasily at the pine tree. ‘We’ve got pine trees this big at home. They’re eighty years old at least.’ She looked around at the gum trees. ‘The oldest of the gums could be about the same age. A little older perhaps.’

  ‘So they put reinforced concrete down here about a hundred years ago,’ said Zoe, then paused. ‘They didn’t have it, did they? They didn’t have reinforced concrete a hundred years ago?’

  ‘It’s as if there used to be a road here.’

  ‘Hey I thought we were supposed to be exploring,’ Zachary said, and moved on. ‘It’s probably an old World War Two installation or something.’ Meg followed him, leaving Harold and Zoe standing looking at each other.

  When Meg caught up with Zachary she said: ‘World War Two? You really believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just…’

  ‘You had me convinced me there for a moment.’

  ‘I just don’t want the kids getting spooked…’ He stopped in his tracks. ‘I think I’m getting spooked.’

  For lying in the grass in front of them was a big plastic advertising standard from a gas station. Most of it was embedded in the soil beneath the roots of a big gum tree. The tree had grown on top of it. Zachary was looking up at the big tree when Harold and Zoe caught up with them. They looked from the gas station sign to the old tree. Without speaking Zachary moved on.

  It was some minutes later they saw the rock. It was an unusual rock, shaped roughly like a big armchair. The three locals recognized it. Meg and Zoe and Harold all knew that rock and when they saw it, and they stopped and stared, because the last time they had seen it, it was at the side of the road leading to Dalrymple Ponds village. Now it stood in open forest land, surrounded by trees. Harold was first to speak. ‘My home’s five minutes walk from here.’ He looked at Zachary, whose face was a living question mark. ‘This rock. You must’ve passed it driving the school bus. Well, I’ve walked past it every day of my life. Home’s that way.’ And he pointed and began walking. After a moment the others followed.

  The chimney was what they saw first, the brick chimney, blackened on its outside by fire. Some of the walls still stood, but most had crumbled to grass-covered heaps. The modern grafted roses had been burned back to their briar stumps, and had suckered so that briar roses now scrambled over what remained of the house. Various imperishable things had survived. A bathtub, pipes, ceramic tiles, but the house that Harold had left only a week before on his way to school was now an ancient ruin.

  Harold came running toward it through the trees, running home as he thought, and then he stopped. Home was no longer there. Slowly he approached the ruins as the others followed at a distance. He climbed over the piles of brick and tile and entered what had so short a time ago been his family’s home. He looked around, and then located what had once been his room, the computer room his mother had insisted on calling his bedroom.

  He heard the others coming up behind him but he did not look back at them. ‘This is it?’ It was Zachary’s voice. Harold nodded without looking at him. ‘No mistake?’ Harold shook his head. He felt that time had stopped, he felt that he was in a slow motion dream. His squatted down on his heels, his arms crossed on his chest, holding his arms to stop them from shaking, and Zoe dropped to one knee beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Just a bushfire, Harold. We got burned out once…’

  He looked around, and her words trailed away, for they could both see that all this had not happened in a few days. Harold looked at the ground in front of him. Recent rain had eroded the soil, and protruding from it was a plastic toy. Harold tugged the toy from the soil, and started cleaning it off.

  ‘How long have we been away?’ he asked. He was looking at the plastic toy in his hands. It was a science fiction character model, a little “alien”. He shrugged Zoe’s comforting arm from his shoulders and stood up, and looked around, seeing bushland where there should have been five acres of lawn. ‘When is this?’ he said, ‘when are we?’

  They all looked around in silence. All they could hear was the droning of the cicadas, and the distant shriek of a black cockatoo.

  Meanwhile, unseen by them, the child Maze watched from behind a tree.

  20: SKULLS

  Meg was watching the other three as they moved about the ruins of the Lewin family house. She knew there was no more to be done here, and that discussion was not going to help. ‘I think it’s time,’ she said in her clear carrying teacher’s voice, ‘that we all walked down to the village and talked to someone in authority. They’ll be able to tell us exactly what’s going on, don’t you think?’ She had their attention. Now it was up to her to get them moving. She began to walk toward the village.

  ‘This way, Miss.’

  Zoe’s voice stopped Meg, and she turned to see Zoe waving an arm in a direction 90 degrees off the direction she had been taking. Making a wide, face-saving detour, she joined the others. ‘Just didn’t want to break my heels,’ she said.

  The child Maze now followed the strangers through the open forest. They seemed to be heading for Oldtown, the Looter’s village. Perhaps they were a new kind of Looter themselves. She followed to find out.

  The shallow depression which marked the old road which had once gone past Harold’s home joined in with a wider depression which Harold and Zoe realized was where the highway ought to be. This did not seem to have occurred to Meg, because as they moved between the lichen-covered walls of the cutting the Department of Main Roads had recently done to pass the highway through the top of the ridge, she said: ‘They built a by-pass a few years ago. This’ll be the old road no one uses any more.’

  Harold and Zoe looked at each other and did not challenge Meg’s statement. They were not sure whether she believed it herself, or was simply trying to keep their spirits up.

  Then Zoe saw the hoof prints in the wet earth at the side of the old highway. ‘Horses,’ she said.

  ‘Everyone round here keeps horses,’ Meg replied, forcing the pace.

  In the village, the sound of cicadas was partially drowned by the sound of a piece of twisted galvanized iron sawing on itself in the breeze. It was a lonely sound. The village was deserted. No people walked its streets, no people used its shops, or its car park, or drank from its water fountain. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy rules. What human energy does not keep nailed up, falls down. What human hands do not keep bright, rusts. What energy does not go into preserving, decays. In the village, entropy ruled.

  They came into the village along what remained of the highway. As they saw the main street, all of Meg’s carefully developed defences crumbled. ‘We’ve taken the wrong track,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ Harold and Zoe said it simultaneously.

  ‘That’s Ryan’s store,’ Zoe said, pointing at the ruined shopfront.

  ‘And there’s the bubbler,’ Harold said pointing at the drinking fountain.

  Meg’s defences came back in a rush. ‘I was in the village last Saturday, and this cannot be the village.’ She got out her mobile phone and started dialing. ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this business right now.”

  ‘Who are you dialing?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘Emergency,’ Meg answered, then looked at her phone’s screen. ‘No signal. Anyone else got a mobile on them?’

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Harold.

  ‘I insist that everybody try dialing Emergency!’

  ‘The reason it’s no use,’ said Harold, ‘is because that’s the mobile phone tower.’ He was pointing at a tall metal structure, covered in vines.

>   Meg lost it. ‘For once don’t argue and just do it!’ she shrieked.

  The other three drew their mobiles and dutifully dialed Emergency and then shook their heads. No signal.

  ‘Just because we can’t get a signal, that doesn’t make this Dalrymple Ponds village,’ said Meg. ‘For a start, Dalrymple Ponds doesn’t have a statue in it.’ She was pointing along the street toward a statue, standing on a plinth in the middle of the village. It was a bronze statue, and depicted a man, his left foot resting against a bronze tree stump, his left hand holding a surveyor’s map case. His blank bronze eyes stared along the street. Around the base of the statue were piled round white objects, slightly smaller than basketballs.

  As they got closer they realized what the statue was. ‘Colonel Light?’ Zachary said, his face a picture of amazement. ‘He’s supposed to be in the parklands looking out over Adelaide!’ The discovery turned their tension into laughter. That the statue of Adelaide’s founder should suddenly turn up in Dalrymple Ponds suddenly seemed very funny.

  Then their laughter froze on their lips. They were now close enough to identify the white objects piled about the base of the statue.

  They were human skulls. The sun reflected off their whiteness, darkening the eye sockets which glared out at the intruders. Zachary walked up to the statue, and stared down at the pile of human skulls. They stared back. He turned to the others. ‘My suggestion is,’ he said, ‘that we now get the hell out of here.’

  Meg shook her head. ‘We have to tell the police about this.’

  They all knew where the Dalrymple Ponds police station was. It was just up the street. They looked at it. Its windows were broken and stared darkly at them like the eye sockets of the skulls. Its sign hung vertically, attached only at one end. They looked back at each other, and ‘The hell out of here,’ repeated Zachary, and herded the others back the way they had come.

  21: WELCOME TO THE DARK AGES