Starship Home (15 page)

Zoe, Harold and Zachary were all getting very tired of running at the end of a rope. ‘I’m beginning to think,’ Harold panted, as they ran along after the horses, ‘that Mr Quayle was a humanitarian.’

‘Who’s Mr Quayle?’ asked Zachary.

‘Sports master at school,’ Harold wheezed as the dust from the horses’ hooves filled his throat.

‘Good pain!’ Harold and Zoe chanted together.

‘That was his motto,’ said Zoe.

‘But he never towed us along on ropes,’ said Harold.

‘Because he never thought of it,’ said Zoe.

‘Stop talking!’ shouted Ulf, on the principle that prisoners who talked were plotting escape or worse.

Ulf was riding in the lead with the Don and Father John. Behind them rode the 14-year-old Troll whom Guinevere had thought might be a page or young squire. In fact he was Rocky Costello, son of the exiled Spider The Nameless, and adopted son and squire to his uncle, Don Robert. It was Rocky who held the end of the rope to which Zoe, Harold and Zachary were attached. Both leading and following the main party there were mounted detachments of Troll men-at-arms.

As they came into the clearing, those who had not yet seen the starship sat back in their saddles and gaped at her size. The Don and Father John slowly crossed themselves, and the Don said to his chaplain, ‘What devil’s house is this?’

‘No house, my lord, but a Slarn starship,’ said the priest, who had seen drawings of such things in the library of his order’s mother house.

‘So are these Slarn?’ asked the Don, waving a hand in the direction of Harold, Zoe and Zachary.

Father John shook his head. The Don was already assessing the starship. He was not afraid of it. Buildings, starships, they did not frighten him. He dismounted and approached the starship. ‘How do I talk to it?’ he asked Ulf.

‘Just talk. The woman talks back.’

‘Who am I talking to?’ the Don asked the starship.

‘I am the Lady Guinevere.’

‘All right Lady Guinevere, I want to come in.’

Zachary winked at the others. Some chance this Don had of getting Guinevere to open up!

‘Who art thou?’

‘I am the Don Robert Costello, lord of Damplepon, enforcer and arbiter of the High Law, scourge of the ungodly. And I want in!’

If Guinevere had a weakness it was for high-handed, sword-swinging, hard-riding arrogant aristocrats with beaky noses, curly black hair, well-formed calves and fine manners. A nun she might have been, but that had not dimmed her appreciation of a touch of class, a bit of style in the male. The Don was like the men that she had grown up among, he was like her father and her brothers and their friends.

So when the Don put the proposition to her in that fashion, she almost purred with nostalgia. ‘Oh my lord I do love thy style,’ she said. ‘I have not met thy like for nigh 600 years. I prithee enter.’

‘Now listen, Guinevere,’ Zachary began, but the hatch of the starship was already sliding back and the ramp was coming down.

Don Robert turned in the saddle. ‘Ulf, Father John, the prisoners, with me. The rest of you secure the area.’

‘Please? My lord?’ Marlowe was desperate to get inside the starship.

‘Very well, Marlowe, you may join us.’ The Don, with generations of arrogance behind him, was already strolling up the ramp and into the starship.

When they reached the bridge, the Don looked around. Inside himself, he was slightly awed, but on the outside an observer would have thought that he had been on the bridge of a starship every day of his life. Ulf on the other hand was looking slightly uneasy. Ask Ulf to scale a siege ladder with his sword between his teeth and boiling oil raining down around him, or charge the burning gateway of a citadel, fight his way home through odds of ten to one, and he was your man, but anything that in any way suggested the supernatural had him shaking in his boots. ‘I don’t like this Don, it’s wizard’s work. A simple service of exorcism, please Father…’

‘Welcome,’ said Guinevere, appearing on the screen.

‘Tell her to come out from behind the window,’ pleaded Ulf.

‘That I cannot do, my lord,’ she said, and smiled at Ulf in such a sweet way that he began to lose his sense of trepidation. ‘Now good my lords, sit ye down, and shall we talk of family trees, and coats of arms, and joustings for fair ladies’ hands, and desperate battles ‘gainst all odds, and courts of love and suchlike merry things?’

‘Later,’ said the Don. ‘What I want to talk about right now is what all this is doing on my turf.’

‘Look, your royal highness,’ Zachary said, ‘we’re just stuck here for a little while. We’ve got some engine trouble with the starship, and once we’re up and running again, we’ll be off, no trouble, but in the meantime we’re actually contributing something to your kingdom.’

The Don looked at him with hooded eyes. Zachary did not like the look. It was a very calm look. Zachary had never had anyone look at him to measure him for a coffin but he imagined that it would be rather like the way the Don was looking at him now.

‘Ahm,’ said Zachary, ‘what I mean is my lord, that we’re doing things for your people. We’re the good guys. We’ve even started a school in the village.’

‘You’ve started a what in the what?’ the Don asked sharply.

‘A school? In the village? Teaching the Foresters to read and write? Now would we do that if we meant any harm?’

The Don turned on Ulf in fury. ‘Why didn’t I know this? What do I pay spies for?
A school?
’

‘What’s wrong with starting a school?’ said Zachary.

‘Universal literacy is the key to economic advancement,’ said Harold.

‘I thought everyone wanted schools,’ said Zoe.

‘You people are either crazy or working for my enemies,’ the Don said. ‘Which is it? Did the King of Vic put you up to this? The Sullivans? Who?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ Harold said.

‘Teaching peasants to read and write. You claim you don’t understand what teaching peasants to read and write means? I tell you what it means, it means the end of civilization as we know it!’

‘I think this guy may be a neo-conservative,’ Zachary said.

Marlowe spoke. ‘If you slay them or send them into exile, my lord,’ he said, ‘I can promise to take this starship off your turf.’

The Don pondered those choices for a few seconds and then shook his head. He did not want any complications or delays. ‘Cut their bonds, Ulf. They’re an infection. They, the demon dwelling, all have to go at once.’

As Ulf cut Harold and Zoe and Zachary free of the cords binding their hands behind their backs, the Don said: ‘The school stops now. You three and this devil house get off my turf by this time tomorrow.’

‘How?’ Zachary asked.

‘The same way you got here.’

‘Look,’ said Harold, ‘we understand your feelings, and maybe we were out of line on the school thing, but we can’t actually physically move the ship at the moment…’

The Don shook his head. ‘You’re out of here by this time tomorrow, or…’ he made a throat-slitting gesture. ‘Say if you understand,’

‘We understand,’ Zoe said quickly before Harold and Zachary could argue any more with a man who, she thought, might decide to slit their throats right now if he got any more backchat.

‘Nice meeting you Lady Guinevere,’ said the Don, and walked out, followed by Ulf and Father John.

Marlowe lingered for a moment. ‘I’ll intercede for you. I’ll save your lives. If I can come with you to the stars.’

They stared at him, not understanding fully what he meant.

‘The Don means what he says,’ Marlowe said. ‘Without my help you’ll be dead by this time tomorrow. I’ll intercede and buy you time. In return, you take me with you to the stars.’

‘It’s a deal,’ Zachary said.

Marlowe nodded, and followed the Don’s party out.

‘What do you mean “it’s a deal”?’ Zoe said. ‘Who is that guy, what do we know about him?’

‘Good move, Zach,’ said Harold. ‘This way we stay alive long enough to betray him.’

Zoe looked at Zachary. ‘Is that what you meant to achieve? What Machiavelli Junior here’s suggesting?’

‘How do I know what I meant?’ Zachary answered. ‘I only just heard what I said.’

That night when Meg got home from teaching school in the village, she was bursting to tell them how things had gone. The village girls were like dry sponges for information. They were picking up the alphabet, she had them up to four times table, she was feeling happy and successful. Then they told her about the Don.

‘All in all,’ Zachary said, ‘I think we’d better close down the school. As a gesture.’

‘The gesture’s ideologically unsound,’ Meg answered, biting down hard on a carrot. ‘I’ve got some very bright girls in that class. Little Maze particularly, she’s a teacher’s dream. Sometimes it’s as if she can read my mind.’

‘Maze can in fact read your mind,’ Zoe said.

‘You know what I mean.’

Harold was eating an apple. ‘I’m not sure I want to go back to eating ships’ biscuits and that blue stuff,’ he said through a mouthful of apple.

‘I don’t want to seem to be the wimp here, ’ Zachary put in, ‘but this Don character’s a little insecure, you know? A little unstable? On the subject of schools and civilization-as-he-knows-it and that kind of thing?’

‘Classic paranoid patriarchal reaction,’ Meg said dismissively. ‘All fascists are the same, they’re threatened by change.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re threatened by change. The threat is death. That’s what the actual threat is, and I don’t want us losing sight of that.’

‘He can’t mean it.’

‘You haven’t met him. He means it.’

‘You’re saying he’d kill us to stop us from teaching little girls how to read and write? You’re saying he’s some kind of paranoid sociopath?’

Zachary sighed. He was not getting through. ‘I’m saying he means what he says, which is that he’ll kill us to preserve his idea of civilization. Not an uncommon point of view in our own time.’

‘I can’t believe that,’ said Meg.

At this point the conversation was put on the back burner because it was then that the klaxon started hooting, and the Slarn battle language began its beeping, and on the bulkhead behind them a hatch slid back revealing what they were soon to learn was a timing mechanism, and on the loudspeakers a Slarn voice began speaking.

‘Quizlart tammeranu, quizlart tammeranu, quortrin slarp je simkarn! Quizlart tammeranu, quortrin slarp je simkarn!’ said the voice.

They had turned in their couches and were all looking at the open hatch on the rear wall and the device which its opening had revealed. It was a horizontal bar, black for most of its length, then becoming red at the right-hand end. A pointer was at the far left of the black bar, which was divided by white lines into what they later found to be 40 sections.

‘Translation please Guinevere!’ yelled Harold over the continually repeated Slarn message.

‘Translation is “self-destruct enabled, self-destruct enabled, 40 days and counting. Self-destruct enabled, 40 days and counting”.’

‘And what’s that mean?’ Harold asked.

‘The Slarn fear greatly that their ships will fall into the hands of savage tribes who might use them to great harm. After three days landfall on a planet, self-destruct is enabled. After 40 days the ship returneth to the dust from which it came.’

Zachary looked at Guinevere’s image on the screen. ‘This business about returning to the dust, does that mean you just fall apart or…?’

‘Or explode?’ asked Harold.

‘Explode,’ Guinevere answered.

‘And how big an explosion would that be, Guinevere?’ Harold was finding this very interesting.

‘twill make a hole in the Earth 20 leagues across,’ Guinevere replied.

‘Twenty leagues?’ said Meg. ‘Sixty miles? That’s not a hole that’s a…’

‘Crater,’ Harold said. ‘Like the ones on the Moon. Can we stop the self-destruct program?’

‘Only by lifting to the stars again.’

Harold nodded. ‘So the self-destruct’s gravity-operated. We’ve got to mend you and take you off-planet to stop it. And we’ve got to do it in…?’

‘Forty days,’ said Guinevere. ‘Thou hast only 40 days.’

‘That’s the clock?’ Harold pointed to the black bar on the rear wall of the bridge.

‘Aye.’

They all moved to the timing device and stared at it.

‘Forty days and counting,’ Zoe said.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Zachary told her. ‘The Don might cut our throats tomorrow and save us the wait.’

Then Zoe suddenly realized the full import of the situation and she swung round and looked at the main screen, where Guinevere’s image stood watching them. ‘Guinevere? It’s
you
we’re talking about. It’s not some hunk of metal that’s going to blow up in 40 days, it’s a human being, it’s you.’

‘Aye. ‘tis me.’

‘That means you’d … you’d die.’

‘I’ve faced good Brother Death full many a time, Zoe. He’s an old acquaintance, nay, an old friend of mine.’

‘You can’t die!’

‘That I can. I’ve outlived my allotted span many times over. If I die, I die, and that’s an end to it.’

Zoe looked at her. ‘That’s all right for you. Maybe you’ve come to terms with death, but we can’t stand by and watch you die without doing anything. You understand that?’

‘I understand.’

‘There’s the people in the district too,’ said Meg. ‘If there’s going to be crater sixty miles across, then they’re going to die too.’

‘So what do we do?’ Zoe asked, nodding. Her sister Helena and little Maze were now at the forefront of her mind. If the self-destruct were allowed to proceed to its conclusion, they would die too.

‘I need food and rest. The rest is forced upon me. The food you must try to garner where ye may find it.’

‘What do you normally eat?’ Zachary said.

‘Beyond the Earth I eat the dust of stars. But here? Take. Read.’

From a slit in the main console extruded a gleaming sheet, about the size of a piece of writing paper. It had the look and consistency of a slightly glossy quality paper, but felt much tougher. The Wyzen grabbed for it, but Harold beat her to it. He saw it was a list of substances and began to read it out loud. ‘Copper, tin, salt, iron, water … gold? Nearly half a pound of gold? Zyglan? What’s Zyglan?’

‘I’ll tell thee when there’s need for you to know. What thou needest to know now is this: all the alchemical substances thou readest thereon I must eat if I’m to heal and fly once more.’

The others had moved in on Harold and were reading the list over his shoulder. Even the Wyzen was pushing in for a look.

‘That’s some treasure hunt,’ Zachary said.

‘Do these things have to be in pure form, Guinevere?’ Harold asked.

‘Wyzen,’ said the Wyzen firmly, in answer.

‘Nay,’ said Guinevere.

‘Okay, let’s go!’ Zoe said, ignoring the fact that night had fallen, and they did not know where to begin.

‘Hold,’ said Guinevere. ‘Before ye start the quest for food for me, ye must warn the people all around.’

They looked at her, knowing that what she said was logical, but feeling reluctant to delay starting on the quest to heal her.

‘If we fail to mend this body, they die with me. I’ll not die with the blood of innocents upon my hands. Ye must warn them all, before ye lift a hand for me.’

They were silent for a moment, then Zoe said: ‘She’s right. We have to warn them.’