The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “Ha!” Darling said triumphantly.

  Speed said, “That was just good luck.”

  “I’m cold,” Ammy said, from the crook of Myell’s arm.

  Myell moved forward, Ammy still clinging to him, and then stopped short at the sight in front of him.

  The Painted Child was the most beautiful Sphere he had ever seen. The colors on it—aquamarine, coral, red like rubies—glowed beneath twin ceiling-mounted spotlights. Scaffolding that had been mounted along its far side was now half collapsed, and was hanging off like a floppy metal arm. There was no sign of damage to the Child, which gave Myell hope.

  But most of the Sphere was submerged in the middle of this underground lake of limestone columns, and there was no sign of the Child’s arched entrance.

  Cappaletto let out a low whistle.

  “That’s what you wanted to see,” Darling said. She hauled herself up on a rickety formation of broken catwalks and sat on a sloped patch of grating while Speed and Nelson climbed over her. She kicked her feet into the water and threw Myell a challenging look. “Still think you can make it work?”

  “Yes,” he said. He hoped he sounded confident.

  Cappaletto hooked one arm around the catwalk and hung off it with Bell still tight in his arms. “Where exactly does it go?”

  “Right here,” Darling said. “More or less.”

  Myell said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not the where, it’s the when,” Darling replied. “This here’s a Wondjina Sphere that transports you into the past. If the Roon get it, they’ll be able to go into Australia’s history and kill everyone and everything. See? That’s why we have to destroy it.”

  Myell’s hip was beginning to hurt under Ammy’s weight. His legs were cold, and he was desperately keeping an ear out for any sign the Roon were on their way.

  “You did destroy it,” he told Darling. “In the permanent timeline. Now it’s time to use it for an escape.”

  Cappaletto asked, “You believe her? That this thing is a window into the past?”

  “You don’t believe in time travel?” Myell asked.

  “When you do it, it’s different,” Cappaletto said.

  “Maybe.” He’d suspected rings could transport travelers to different eras long before he became prisoner of his own personal ouroboros. Why should only the blue ring travel in time? “What year does it go to, Ensign?”

  Darling kicked more circles in the water. “That’s the unreliable part. One trip through, you might end up in 1830. Another, you’re in 1862. Or 1870. Or 1800. You don’t want to go to 1800, though. It’s pretty brutal, Dad said. The point is, it goes all over the place. No rhyme or reason anyone could ever figure out. It could change several times a day, or stay the same for a week. Every trip was a surprise.”

  Several thoughts competed for Myell’s attention. It was possible he could direct the Painted Child in a more specific way than the Australian scientists ever had, but he couldn’t be sure. It was also possible Homer had indeed broken the ring permanently, though maybe he’d used futuristic technology or a Wondjina trick to disable it until Myell could arrive and activate it. Myell wasn’t sure it was advisable to take the children through to the wilds of nineteenth-century Australia, but he didn’t think trying to take them and Cappaletto through the blue ring was a good plan either. Besides, the ring wasn’t due for hours, and the Roon must be in the base by now.

  Ammy coughed against Myell’s skin. “I’m really cold.”

  “I know.” He rubbed circles on her back. “Tom, here, take her.”

  Cappaletto took Ammy on his free hip. “You going in there?”

  “Yeah. To see if it’s even passable.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Darling said.

  “No.”

  She slid off the catwalk. “You don’t know where the entrance is.”

  The water quickly deepened. Myell shivered at the coldness of it as he was forced to start paddling to stay afloat. He was wary of underwater hazards that might snag or cut into his legs—not only the stalagmites, but discarded equipment benches or cabinets, more collapsed scaffolding, poles or pipes or consoles. Something soft and sinewy slid by his leg and he nearly gulped in water.

  “Anything live down here?” he asked.

  Darling swam forward confidently. “Crocodiles, you mean? Nah. Maybe snakes.”

  It was only a dozen meters or so to the Painted Child. Darling felt along the Sphere’s exterior, judging, measuring. She unhooked a flashlight from her belt and switched it on. “The opening’s right about down here,” she said. “You good at holding your breath?”

  “Good enough,” Myell said.

  Darling gave him a wide grin and submerged.

  Myell followed her. The water was clear and he had no trouble seeing the beam from Darling’s light as she scissor-kicked downward. The anxiety in his chest ratcheted up another step. He’d been right to worry about equipment—the floor below was littered with discarded machinery and what looked like a small birdie of some kind. An airship, maybe, good for short-distance hops. All those scientists and all this equipment, and they’d never been able to accomplish their goals with the Painted Child. Perhaps his were equally doomed as well.

  It was a relief to see the arch ahead. Three confident kicks inside it, Darling was already ascending again. Myell followed. He broke the surface and saw the dome a good five meters overhead. Luckily, the air didn’t smell bad. He did some rough calculations about enclosed spaces and suffocation. This wasn’t a spaceship, but the principles were the same. Even with eight people treading water and putting out carbon dioxide, they should be safe enough until the Child’s ring came.

  If the ring came.

  “So what now?” Darling asked, treading water.

  “We wait,” Myell said. “See if it works.”

  The cold water was leaching heat from him, but it wasn’t so cold that he had to worry about hypothermia for any of them. He could only hope that the flooding wouldn’t prevent the ring system from recognizing him as an authorized traveler, or, depending on Homer’s fiddling, as Jungali.

  “When Homer came through, did anyone try to stop him?” Myell asked. “Find out what he was doing with a pregnant woman in tow?”

  Darling thought about it. “I’m not sure. I was just a kid. I think he told my dad that he was working for Team Space.”

  “He’s not. And if you ever see him again, you should be very careful. He’s dangerous.”

  And my son, he almost said. But he left that part out.

  The low, muted, watery sound of the ouroboros cut through the air.

  Myell couldn’t help a relieved smile. “It’s coming.”

  He and Darling swam underwater, resurfaced outside the Painted Child, and called to the others to join them. Nelson and Speed immediately jumped into the water. Cappaletto had both Ammy and Bell to carry, and it was obvious he wouldn’t be able to swim with both children clinging to him.

  “Gimme,” Speed said, reaching for Bell. “She’s my sister, not yours.”

  Cappaletto said, “No, take this one. She’s easier.”

  Myell started back, intent on helping them, but a loud rumble from somewhere in the base above them made him stop and tread water. More rumbles followed—explosions muffled by rock and metal that made the lake around them slosh in response. He turned to Darling.

  “You weren’t supposed to blow anything up!”

  “I didn’t!” she protested. “They must have tripped the bombs by accident.”

  The explosions faded. Myell’s fears of the domed ceiling caving in on them faded. Cappaletto said, “Not too bad, then,” as he swam steadily toward the Painted Child with Bell clinging to his back.

  Then a side wall collapsed. An enormous amount of water gushed into the cavern and crashed into the catwalk where the kids had recently been sitting. The unleashed torrent smashed aside the flimsy metal as it poured into the lake. More water punched through another section, angry and
destructive and roaring like an old-fashioned freight train. The gush sent Nelson smashing into Speed, who immediately sank with Ammy still clutched to his neck.

  Myell swam forward as fast as he could. It had been a long time—too long—since he’d done speed laps in the swimming pool on the Aral Sea, but his muscles remembered their form and panic supplied more than enough energy. He grabbed Nelson by one arm, yanked him out of swirling new currents, and propelled him toward Darling, who was yelling orders. Speed and Ammy had surfaced, both spluttering and choking, and Myell reached the little girl next. He grabbed her in a lifeguard’s hold while reaching out for Speed.

  “Come on! Swim this way!” he ordered.

  Speed shouted, “Where’s Bell? Where is she?”

  Cappaletto still had her, but both were in trouble. The smashing river had pushed them several dozen meters away from the remains of the catwalk and was tugging them toward the far end of the cavern, where archways marked other chambers. Bell was limp in Cappaletto’s arms, maybe dead, but he wasn’t letting go of her.

  “Bell!” Speed yelled. He elbowed Myell in the face and tried to swim that way. “Save her!”

  Myell’s mouth filled with blood from the hard smack of Speed’s elbow against his teeth. He spat out some, grabbed the kid by the scruff of his shirt and held him back. “You can’t help them! Here, take Ammy! Get inside before the ring leaves!”

  “Let me go!”

  “I’ll get them!” Myell promised.

  Darling had come their way. To Speed she said, “You can’t swim that far and you know it. It’s no use to her if you drown yourself. Come on.”

  The roof started to make a heavy groaning noise. If it collapsed and smashed the Painted Child, none of them would survive. Darling, Ammy, and Speed made it to the submerged arch before the first rocks started to fall. Myell wasn’t so lucky. He was several meters away from Cappaletto and Bell when a boulder the size of a laser cannon smashed into the lake beside him. Another slab of rock, this one the size of a flit, hissed down and sent waves of water flying into the air.

  “Go back!” Cappaletto yelled, struggling to stay afloat. “Get out of here!”

  “You can make it!”

  More rocks hailed down. The lights flickered and half of them died, leaving the chamber in enormous shadows with some weak yellow illumination. Another portion of underground river had tunneled through the rock high above and was showering down like a waterfall. The shock and cold of it all had Myell’s legs and arms tingling, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “Come on!” he shouted to Cappaletto. “Move your ass!”

  Cappaletto might have raised his hand to give him an obscene gesture—it was hard to say with the whole cavern shuddering and shaking and roaring in its death throes around them. One last bit of defiance would have been in keeping with his character. But Myell couldn’t be sure. A fist-sized piece of million-year-old rock missiled down from the loose ceiling and smacked Myell on the side of the head. The cavern exploded in pain and darkness around him. He never saw Cappaletto again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jodenny sat perfectly still in Lady Scott’s parlor. Her hands were gripping the pads of the armchair and her dress felt like a wardrobe of lead keeping her pinned in place. The house, the street, and the two men in the room had gone utterly silent, as if the whole world were contemplating the death of Terry Myell.

  “I’m sorry,” Cohen said, from where he stood by the window. His voice was as distant as his gaze. “That’s the last we saw of them. Chief Cappaletto drowning with my sister in his arms, and your husband knocked unconscious.”

  Osherman had an unlit cigar in his hand. He wouldn’t light it around junior, but he looked mightily tempted. Jodenny herself wished for a large glass full of whiskey or Scotch, anything that would burn and numb at the same time.

  “Then what happened?” she asked.

  “Cassandra made me go into the Sphere,” Cohen said. “I kicked and fought her all the way, but even then, she was stronger than me. The Child’s ring brought us to the caves in 1825. I tried to go back, but the ouroboros wouldn’t come. It never worked again. We were all alone in the middle of nowhere. Stranded with no money or help.”

  Jodenny felt a dim new appreciation of Darling. It was an incredible accomplishment—not just surviving, but thriving in the fledgling colony given their disadvantages.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.

  Cohen looked down at his shoes. “I was all she had in the world, and I let her down.”

  Osherman rose, found the whiskey, and brought back the bottle along with two glasses.

  “Give me some,” she said.

  “The baby,” Osherman replied.

  “Give me some before I smash the bottle over your head,” she said, trying not to think of the rock that had slammed into Myell’s skull.

  He got another glass.

  Jodenny drank only a sip or two. Not only because of junior, but because she didn’t want to lose the questions still rattling around in her head. It seemed like it had been days since they’d skipped out on Lady Darling’s funeral Mass and come here, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour. Lady Scott and Professor Wallace would no doubt soon return, and this wasn’t a story for their ears.

  “I knew Darling lied to me,” she said. “She told me Terry brought her and the others here through the blue ring, but it doesn’t go that far. Supposedly he can’t travel earlier than his own date of birth.”

  Osherman scowled. “She told you?”

  “And you didn’t,” Jodenny said, with a little spite.

  “I didn’t . . .” he started, but then trailed off. Whatever he did or did not do, he wasn’t willing to finish the sentence.

  Jodenny fixed her gaze on Cohen. “Why did she lie about that?”

  “I think she didn’t want to tell you about the Painted Child,” Cohen said, after a moment of thought. “Not until she knew you better. She’s always been fearful someone would discover it out there. Especially since the gold strike.”

  “You said it doesn’t work,” Jodenny said.

  “Not for us,” Cohen admitted.

  “I want to see it,” Jodenny said.

  Osherman immediately rose to his feet. “No.”

  She gave him her sweetest, most insincere smile. “No?”

  “Do you know what a hundred miles of wilderness is like?” Osherman snapped. “When the road runs out, you have to go on horseback. When the horses can’t go any farther, you’ve got to walk your way in. Through the jungle out there. Past the poisonous snakes and bandits and more dangers than you can count. Even if you weren’t pregnant, I wouldn’t let you do it.”

  Jodenny said, “Let me? You think you can stop me?”

  He pointed a finger at her belly. “I think Junior can stop you. Because that’s Myell’s child and all it would take is one fall on slippery rock to kill her. Is that worth it? Just so you can go out there and see where he died?”

  “He’s not dead,” she said firmly.

  Cohen raised an eyebrow.

  Osherman’s chest heaved from the exertion of shouting. “How do you know?”

  “Because I held his dead body on Burringurrah, and still he came back to me,” she said. “If you haven’t noticed, my husband is extraordinarily hard to kill. I won’t believe it until I see his corpse again, and even then I’ll always have hope.”

  She no doubt sounded crazy to them. She sounded crazy to her own ears.

  “The gods favor him,” Cohen murmured.

  “It’s not a favor to him,” Jodenny said.

  “You can’t,” Osherman said. He made an obvious attempt to calm himself down. “Jo, it’s not physically possible. You’re eight and half months pregnant. Just to get out there you’re talking about carriages, horses, hiking through swamps, and climbing up and down cliffs. Even assuming you get there safely and without going into labor, you’ll have to crawl through limestone caves on your hands and kn
ees. How are you going to do all that?”

  Jodenny didn’t answer.

  Silence in the room.

  Cohen cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, sounding embarrassed, “I have an airship.”

  Cohen’s home was a tidy brick cottage near the piers at Miller’s Point. He lived alone with six cats that he’d named after Shakespearean heroines: Juliet, Ophelia, Viola, and three more whose names Jodenny didn’t catch. She was too busy staring at the airship, which looked like a toy version of a Team Space birdie. There were only three seats under the tinted canopy. The ship was dented and the hull had discolored over the years, but the engine ports looked in good order and Cohen claimed that it was entirely airworthy.

  “You fly it around Sydney and no one’s ever noticed?” Osherman said, cranky and skeptical.

  “It’s got cammie shielding technology,” Cohen said. “Makes it invisible. And it’s very quiet.”

  “Wait,” Jodenny said. “How did it get here?”

  “It was in the Painted Child when we came through,” Cohen said. “Submerged in the water, at the bottom. It came with us through the ring. But the fuel cells were depleted. It’s taken me all these years to devise a solar power generator and recharge them. And the engine card was broken. Took me ten years just to get it working again.”

  He held up a slim silver card. Jodenny recognized it as the same kind that were used to authorize birdies to launch.

  “How long would it take to get to the Jenolan Caves?” Jodenny asked.

  “About fifteen minutes,” Cohen said.

  “You goddamned bastard,” Osherman said.

  The next thing Jodenny knew, Osherman had his hands around Cohen’s neck and had backed him into the wall of the little cottage. She said, “Sam, stop!”

  “You had this ship,” Osherman said, through gritted teeth. “You had it and you didn’t tell Cassandra. Jodenny nearly died on the trip here! All of us could have died. And you had this fucking ship.”

  Cohen’s eyes went wide with terror as he tried to free Osherman’s hands. “Cassandra knew I had it! She helped! But we just got the card fixed,” he wheezed out. “Two weeks ago. I swear.”