Starship Home

by Morphett, Tony

  And the old woman repeated words of her own, repeated a story she had told many times. ‘When I came to the house,’ she said, ‘it was empty. The next-door neighbors Manoly and Sophie Alexidis had not been taken. They found me. Took me in. I’ve waited. And waited.’ She looked down at Zoe, who was looking up, her eyes still streaming. ‘Too late for tears for me. Too old for tears, sister Zoe.’ She looked up at the others and waved her hand toward the doorway. Maze and Meg, Harold and Zachary backed out into the sunlight, leaving the weeping Zoe crouched by Our Mother, who had once been little Helena. Our Mother put her hand on her sister’s head in a simple act of comfort, knowing that Zoe’s tears could change nothing, while also knowing they were tears which had to be shed.

  32: CRISIS = OPPORTUNITY + DISASTER

  Maze began showing Harold and Meg and Zachary around the village. Very soon they developed a following of village children, neglecting their chores for the moment in the excitement of seeing these strange new people among them. As they approached the blacksmith’s forge, Maze lowered her voice. ‘This here what we see now, smithing, is men’s work. Needs strength, not too much brain.’ She looked sideways at Harold, sensing his reaction before she said the words. ‘We don’t bother men’s pretty heads with too much brain work.’

  The smith, a man in his middle years, bare-chested, sweating in the heat, was hammering out the head of a garden hoe. Above the waist he was massively developed, with great twisted cords of strongly defined muscle working under the skin. However, when he stepped aside to temper the hoe in a tub of water, they noticed that he limped, and as they moved on, they could see that one of his legs was wasted and turned at the knee.

  Polio, Meg thought, poliomyelitis has come back. She had had a great-aunt who had contracted polio before the Salk and Sabin vaccines had been available but she had never seen the signs of the disease on anyone as young as the smith.

  ‘Your smith’s lame?’ Harold asked Maze.

  ‘Had the child fever,’ said Maze, and added. ‘Men who can’t hunt must do other things.’

  ‘A lot of the blacksmith gods were lame,’ Meg said to Harold. ‘Vulcan, Hephaestus, Weland. Maybe that’s why.’ She paused, ‘Although Weland was made lame on purpose by a king who wanted to keep him from running away.’

  ‘King of Vic, he does that,’ Maze said casually. ‘Bad place, Vic.’

  They were approaching the place in the village where the women were weaving and working around the dyepots. ‘Weaving is brainwork so women do that,’ Maze said. ‘Dyeing is science, so that’s womanwork,’ she added.

  Harold reached snapping point. ‘Statistical studies have shown that men and women are at least of equal intelligence.’

  ‘Statistical’s wrong then,’ said Maze.

  ‘I happen to have topped my class every year since I was in kindergarten,’ Harold said, conveniently forgetting that Shani Walker had beaten him in third and fifth class.

  Maze sneered at him. ‘What’s “top-class”? Can you dye yarn, weave cloth, find food, know what plants are poison for enemies, what plants are food for friends?’

  ‘I don’t regard those simple skills as signs of intelligence…’

  Maze grinned at Meg and said, over Harold’s futile arguments, ‘“Top class”! He always talk like this? You let him?’ She turned on Harold. ‘We had a smart man leader before Our Mother. Wanted to fight war. He was Topclass too,’ she said, and made a casual throat-slitting gesture.

  ‘Quit while you’re ahead, kid,’ Zachary said and Harold fell silent. He could not help wondering exactly what had happened to the smart man leader, and by what means the ancient woman in the hut, Zoe’s sister though she might be, had become Our Mother.

  In the hut, Helena was talking to Zoe. ‘You bring crisis with you. Opportunity and disaster combined.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Zoe said.

  ‘A Slarn starship. If the Slarn should find it here … disaster.’

  ‘Do they come here? I mean do they visit? I’d never heard of them before … well, there were people who said they’d seen flying saucers, but no one took any notice of them.’

  ‘Sometimes they visit. Not for long. We hear rumors. A rumor came ten years ago they were in old Europe. France. Marlowe, he went…’ she broke off. ‘Twenty years ago, rumor came down the Murray River they were on the east coast. Thirty years ago, 50 … they come. Never know when. But if they come looking and find that starship… disaster.’

  ‘Opportunity?’

  ‘Ah yes. You have a teacher with you, the woman Meg. Opportunity. If she teaches the reading and writing skills then we’ll feed you.’

  ‘No one reads and writes any more?’

  ‘Not here. I could, but now the eyes … everyone was too busy getting food, learning just how to stay alive. It went.’ She paused. ‘But knowing about things gives you power over them. Power’s locked up in books.’

  ‘So there are still books?’

  ‘Those that weren’t burnt by the Simples.’

  Zoe was looking at Helena in question. ‘Simples?’

  ‘When I was your age…. a few years older. A leader rose up. Said the people had been taken because of pride. That pride came from books. A lot of people listened. They burned a lot of books before it was finished. Before their leader challenged Don Robert’s law.’ She was remembering. Mostly what she was remembering was an armored man on horseback, a man with the face of a dark angel. ‘Don Robert The Beautiful … he gave them the chance to recant, and most did when he showed them their future if they didn’t.’ Her smile was grim, as she remembered. ‘He spared the women and children, and sealed the leaders in a cave. Just as well, there wouldn’t be a book left if he hadn’t.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘All history is. I want my women to read and write. For the clan to live and grow, my women must read and write, and do numbers.’

  A short while later, when Zoe emerged from the hut, she found the others sitting under a tree out of the heat, batting at flies with their hands. She sat down with them.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Meg asked her.

  ‘About Helena?’ Zoe smiled, let her breath out in what passed for a laugh. ‘Just give me ten years to get used to it, uh? I just, ah …’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll come to terms with it but if I think about it…’ She shook her head again. ‘Okay, Our Mother. I still think of Helena as three years old, so I’ll say “Our Mother”. I think she’d really rather we were out of town, right? She’s afraid the Slarn’ll come looking for their ship. But in the meantime, Maze was right, she wants a school started in exchange for food. Basic stuff, reading, writing, arithmetic…’

  ‘Look,’ Meg began and then shrugged. ‘I suppose if I can teach them to read and write, I can’t just walk away from it, can I? I mean reading and writing, you accumulate knowledge … it ends in a polio vaccine, doesn’t it? I’ll do it.’

  33: A VISITOR

  The sun glinted off the dog teeth decorating his wraparound shades as the tall man, his pack on his back, stepped out of the forest into the clearing in front of the starship. He appeared to be in no hurry as he took the pack from his back and set it down on the ground, then faced the starship. ‘Starship?’ he said.

  ‘Knowest the word, dost thou?’ Guinevere said.

  ‘I know many things,’ said Marlowe. ‘I have roamed the world, paid an eye for wisdom and know many things.’

  ‘Thou art a warlock?’

  ‘Does a starship believe in warlocks?’

  ‘I believe there are people who believe they are such.’

  The tall man smiled. ‘And I believe,’ he said, with a dry emphasis, ‘that the people who are travelling aboard you are not Slarn. But thieves.’

  ‘Thou sayest it. Not I.’

  ‘I’ll help you get rid of them. If you’ll take me back to the stars with you.’

  ‘Back to the stars, is it? Back?’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  There was silence, a
nd then, ‘Who art thou?’ asked Guinevere.

  ‘A friend of the Slarn.’ He paused. ‘Test me. See that I speak the truth.’

  ‘Open thy mind to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘‘tis as if a tight-stopped wall were about thy mind.’

  ‘I know what starships can do. Test me.’

  He walked up to blank side of the starship and a small hatch slid open. ‘Put thy hand within.’ Without hesitation, Marlowe placed his hand within the narrow hatch. There were hatches like this all over the skin of the ship. Through them the ship fed on interstellar dust, sampled atmospheres, tested substances, they were the sensory organs of the starship. On one console of the bridge, a screen came to life with an X-ray image of Marlowe’s forearm and hand, and telltales blinked and quivered as his blood was tested, his DNA sampled, his medical and genetic history read. It took only seconds to accomplish.

  There was a sad tone in Guinevere’s voice, as she said, ‘Take out thy hand again.’ Marlowe withdrew his hand from the slot and the small hatch closed. ‘I know thee now, poor wretch that thou art.’

  ‘I’ll help you get rid of the thieves,’ he said and there was a kind of desperation in his voice.

  The desperate edge in his voice was matched by the unshed tears in Guinevere’s as she answered: ‘I know what thou art, and weep for it, but cannot help thee.’

  ‘Please! Take me with you!’

  ‘That I cannot.’

  He half turned away from her in despair, and then his mood suddenly changed and when he turned back it was in fury.

  ‘I’ve revealed myself to you!’

  ‘I can not.’

  ‘You’ll take me. You’ll take me willing or not,’ he said, and as he moved across the clearing, he picked up his heavy pack by one strap, and was still swinging it onto his back as he strode out of sight.

  Back in the village, women had sewn together three wide strips of cream woollen cloth, and now Meg was kneeling on the banner-sized piece of fabric, painting an alphabet on it in Roman letters, both upper and lower case. She wanted her pupils to read books as soon as possible. Cursive writing could wait. As she worked, Zoe, Harold and Zachary helped keep the cloth pulled taut.

  They had been working for some time when Maze approached them from Helena’s hut. She was looking up at the western sky. The sun was well below the treetops and it would soon be dark. As Maze reached them, she said: ‘Near sundown. You must go back to your iron castle or stay here tonight.’

  ‘We’re not afraid of the dark, you know,’ Harold said.

  ‘Not afraid of dark, Topclass? Then you stupid. Animal eat you. Near full moon. Full moon, Looter eat you.’

  ‘Looters?’ Meg asked, ‘the ones who ate your last teacher?’

  ‘Full moon they sacrifice to their Dark One demon-god in Oldtown.’

  Meg put her brush back into the clay pot full of the blend of grease and soot which was making do for paint. ‘Well I think I’ll just go right on home now, all this talk of eating’s making me hungry.’ And she stood up. ‘If we can just get this under cover, Maze…?’

  The sun was dropping fast by the time they were walking along the track. Zachary and Harold were carrying baskets of fruit and vegetables, payment in advance from the villagers for Meg’s future teaching.

  ‘They’re exaggerating,’ Zachary was saying. ‘Primitive people, they always exaggerate. You know, there’s always wild animals around, the people in the next village are always cannibals. I mean if you look at it rationally…’ he was saying as a twig suddenly snapped in the bush behind them.

  They argued later about who it was that led the rush. Zachary claimed it was the women, and the women claimed it was Zachary, and Harold sat on the sidelines trying to work out whether he could get anything for his vote.

  The fact was that, after the twig snapped behind them, they all set what was probably a land speed record from that point on the track to the ramp of the starship. As the hatch opened for them, Zachary said: ‘Just thought I’d lead you all in some aerobics, keep us fit,’ and strode up the ramp waving them to follow. The act did not go down at all well, leading as it did to raucous laughter and allegations of cowardice. ‘I just trust the word of our native allies,’ Zachary said. ‘They’ve been here longer, they know the scene better.’

  ‘Except when they exaggerate,’ said Zoe as they entered the bridge.

  Meg felt the clothes on the line. ‘They’re dry,’ she said to Zoe.

  ‘I could give you mine to wash tonight,’ Harold said to Meg, trying to be helpful.

  She looked at him.

  ‘My clothes?’ he said. ‘To wash?’

  About five minutes later, in the ablutions room, as Zachary and Harold stood side by side washing their clothes, Meg’s eldritch screams of rage and accusation still ringing in their ears, Zachary remarked to Harold: ‘You had to open your big mouth, didn’t you?’

  The Wyzen was there helping, playing with the water. ‘I thought I was being helpful,’ said Harold. The Wyzen splashed his dry Slarn longjohns. ‘Cut it out, Wyzen.’

  ‘Never try to help a woman by asking her to wash your socks. That’s the first law of human survival,’ said Zachary.

  ‘What’s the second law?’

  ‘If you don’t know the first, you won’t live long enough to need the second.’

  Back on the bridge, the two men hung their clothes over the line. Harold did not appear to have wrung his out. They dripped profusely. Zachary was looking toward the main console, where Zoe and Meg, now back in their original clothes, were putting out a cold meal of fruit and bread. ‘See Tarzan?’ Zachary said to Harold, ‘you do the right thing and wash your clothes, Jane fixes dinner for you.’ Zoe and Meg looked at them. ‘That was a joke,’ Zachary said rapidly but far too late. ‘A joke,’ he repeated, somewhat lamely.

  ‘Take your foot out of your mouth and tell Tarzan to wring his clothes out better. The floor’s awash,’ Meg said. ‘And if I’m earning the bread, I’m not cleaning the house.’

  ‘Hear that?’ Zachary asked Harold sharply and winked at him on the side Meg could not see. Then he moved over and looked at the food and smiled his big conman’s smile. ‘That looks absolutely great.’ The Wyzen thought so too. She picked up an apple, sniffed at it, licked it, and bite into it. Then she wrinkled her nose and put down the apple and took a ship’s biscuit instead. ‘It could be worse,’ Zachary told Meg. ‘She could’ve tried all of them.’

  Later that night as they bedded down in the school bus, Zachary produced two apples, flicked one across the aisle to Harold, and started munching on the other himself.

  ‘The way I see it, kid, we got it made,’ said Zachary.

  ‘What?’ Harold was amazed at this reading of the situation. Ninety years from home, all their relatives taken by aliens, stuck in a new dark age full of wild animals and cannibals, and Zachary thought they had it made?

  ‘What do rich guys do when they retire or go on holiday?’ Zachary said. ‘They go hunting and fishing. That makes the rest of our lives a rich guy’s holiday.’

  ‘My idea of a holiday is playing war games, messing round with computers, visiting science museums, and reading about astronomy.’

  ‘I don’t set much store by the stars,’ said Zachary. ‘Being as I’m a Libra near the cusp of Scorpio I just don’t believe in all that stuff.’

  ‘Not astrology, astronomy.’

  ‘Oh.’ Zachary paused. ‘You don’t like it here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well one of us has it made then.’ He looked over at Harold. ‘Hey, come on. Clean air, clean water, clean food, where could you get all that when we came from?’

  ‘Polio? You realize influenza could kill you here? Cholera? Diphtheria? Some of the adults in that village had pock marks. Is smallpox back? I know back in our time they claimed they wiped it out, but were they wrong and is it back again?’

  ‘On the other hand…’

  ‘And who were those guys in armor? The
ones who grabbed me? Who’s this Don guy?’

  ‘Police? Maybe he runs the police force.’

  ‘And the cannibals?’

  ‘It’s going to be okay. Tell him, Guinevere, it’s going to be okay.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Guinevere.

  ‘Would you care to try for something a little more positive than that? Like “of course” or “sure thing”, or even “yes”?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Guinevere, trying out what was to her a novel expression, then ‘perhaps,’ she added.

  On the bridge, Meg and Zoe were on their couches. The dripping of Harold’s clothes had a homelike sound, like water from a leaking roof. ‘Guinevere?’ Zoe said.

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘My sister’s worried the Slarn’ll follow you here.’

  ‘A wise woman.’

  ‘She’d like us to leave. To fix you and get out of here so the Slarn won’t come.’

  ‘There may come a time…’ said Guinevere.

  ‘Can we do that?’ Meg asked. ‘Is it even possible to get you flying again?’

  ‘With much labor. For my healing I need metals, water, charcoal. Even then…’

  ‘If I teach at the village to get food, and the others try and get these things…?’

  ‘I would that I were healed. I’ sooth, I would that I were well again.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to go away,’ Zoe said, ‘I only just found my sister.’

  ‘But we have to try, don’t we?’ asked Meg. ‘Guinevere got us home, we have to try and get her well again don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, said Zoe. ‘Yes of course we do.’

  As the lights faded out, Meg wondered about her motives. Was it Guinevere she wanted to help? Or did she just want to get to somewhere a little less scary? A bit of both, she decided at last. A bit of both.

  34: START OF TERM