Starship Home (27 page)

Zachary had gotten himself under the bus with the alacrity of a person who had a deep and sincere hatred of riding horses and who knew that if he did not stop the fuel leak, then he would be riding a horse sometime in the next hour. Harold joined him under the bus because he had never been allowed under one before. This gave him two reasons to be under there: to get his first look at the underside of a bus; and to give Zachary advice on how to fix it. When they were underneath, there was both good news and bad news: the good news being that the fuel had nearly stopped leaking; the bad news being that the fuel had stopped leaking because everything above the arrow hole had already drained out onto the road. As Zachary saw it, their real good fortune was that the arrow had not struck lower down and lost them even more fuel. It was just a question, Zachary decided, of plugging the hole securely so that fuel did not splash out of it, and then coming out from under the bus smiling and telling comforting lies.

As Harold and Zachary went ahead with stage #1 of this project, the Don was in the bus itself being ministered to by Meg and Zoe, much to the disgust of Ulf and Rocky who, in true Troll fashion, regarded anything less than decapitation as a minor inconvenience. Maze sat watching Zoe and Meg examine the arrow which still transfixed the Don’s forearm. ‘You did archery at school,’ Meg said to Zoe. ‘How do you get arrows out?’

‘We weren’t allowed to aim at each other,’ Zoe said, ‘so the question never arose.’ Maze was vastly amused. ‘Don’t you know about arrows?’ she chortled. ‘Arrows is easy,’ and she stepped in and before anyone could stop her, snapped off the feathered, end of the arrow, grasped the arrowhead and pulled the shaft out through the Don’s arm. The Don’s face did not flicker: he seemed to regard this as a perfectly normal medical procedure. As Maze handed Meg the two bits of broken arrow, she explained, ‘Arrow’s simple. It’s fishing spears are hard.’

‘Oh,’ said Meg. ‘Right.’

‘Fishing spear’s horrible. Gangrene, maggots, yackapoo, uuugh!’ Maze went on.

‘Right!’ said Meg, ‘I understand entirely,’ and she began dressing the Don’s wound as best she could with the contents of the school bus’s first aid kit.

Zachary and Harold climbed out from under the bus. ‘That’s it, kid, that’s the best we can do,’ Zachary said and kicked the bus. ‘You’d think the manufacturers’d do something about arrow-proofing the bodywork. It’s getting so a man can’t take a bus into the future any more.’

Harold asked the question Zachary had been hoping to avoid. ‘Can we get it as far as the coast?’

‘Yeah. Sure,’ said Zachary. ‘No sweat.’ Getting back, though, he thought, that could be a whole ‘nother question, but he kept this thought to himself because it would lead only to a whole lot of other questions, not to mention tears and cries of dismay from the women. In this he was wrong. What it would have led to from the women was not tears and cries of dismay, but a tongue-lashing from Meg and great interest from Zoe, but nevertheless, for better or worse, Zachary decided not to share with the others his pessimism about the fuel supply.

A few minutes later, as Marlowe watched from a sparsely wooded ridgeline, the party set off again, this time with a mounted escort of Ulf and Rocky, each leading a riderless horse, Meg having insisted on the far-from-reluctant Don’s riding with her inside the bus.

While all this was going on, back at the starship, Guinevere was getting progressively more irritated with the Looters. Within an hour of the bus’s departure, the Looters had arrived, set up camp, put their abominable pot on the fire, and had then worshipped Guinevere despite her vehement protests. Each time she ordered them to stop their behavior, the Eldest produced yet another explanation as to why Dark One was rejecting the honors being paid to him. Generally speaking he took the view, possibly derived from some 20th century schools of psychology, that whatever someone said meant exactly the opposite of what the words actually indicated. So that when Guinevere told them to stop their pagan worship of her within ten seconds or be utterly destroyed, the Eldest explained that Dark One meant they should go on worshipping him, on pain of death. The problem was that Guinevere, once the ten seconds had elapsed, could not really bring herself to destroy the Looters utterly, and this gave force to the Eldest’s argument.

As if worshipping her as a heathen goddess were not bad enough, the Looters had decided to make her more beautiful by drawing designs on her in white pipe clay, red ochre and charcoal. For some hours they had worked on any part of her hull within reach, doing both geometrical designs and representational drawings of monsters, each more hideous than the last. These, apparently, were all various manifestations of Dark One, and represented Dark One’s more admirable characteristics, such as anger, lust, hatred, envy, greed and so on. Finally, Guinevere had had enough and spoke to them. ‘What are you Indians doing out there?’ she said. She called them ‘Indians’ even though they were pale- skinned under their tans. Guinevere was a true 16th century Englishwoman and so her private belief was that anyone who was not from 16th century England was an Indian, although she graciously made exceptions to this rule in the cases of her own crew, Maze and the Don.

The Looters were still getting used to the astounding fact that Dark One in his new form addressed them in a woman’s voice. It seemed unnatural and there had already been several heated discussions, ending on one occasion in bloodied noses and split scalps, as to whether Dark One had in fact changed gender. Now, when Guinevere spoke to them, they stopped what they were doing and fell on their faces, which was their way of greeting any new and unusual situation. The Looters lived not only in darkness, they lived in fear; they lived in a world in which Dark One could become manifest in any shape, and death in its most hideous forms awaited anyone not ready to worship him and sacrifice to him in whatever shape he chose to employ. The Eldest alone remained standing, and lifting his sacrificial knife he cried: ‘What we doing, Dark One? We making Dark One beautiful!’ Guinevere extended one of her vision rods and looked at the paintings on the hull. She had seen such paintings before, in Books of Hours and illuminated sections of the Bible, and in stained glass windows. These paintings had been of the demons who would supervise the sufferings of the damned in Hell. She did not care to have such things painted on her hull. ‘The Indian warlock saith that he maketh me beautiful, Wyzen, dost thou think yon daubing beautiful?’ Inside the bridge, the Wyzen said ‘Wyzen?’, and outside in the clearing the Eldest thought Guinevere was addressing him, and replied: ‘Oh yes mighty Dark One, Destroyer of Nations,’ which was one of Dark One’s many titles.

‘Who is this Dargwan?’ asked Guinevere, who could not hear the Eldest properly because of his lack of teeth and his mumbling.

‘You are Dark One,’ the Eldest answered, and added, ‘Crusher of Bones, Brain Sucker, Defender of the Human Race. You are. You ate Dark One. So you are Dark One.’

Guinevere thought this theory illogical. ‘If you ate a horse, would you be a horse?’

The Eldest thought about this question for some moments before he realized that Dark One was joking. He had never heard Dark One make a joke before. Dark One’s new incarnation was subtly different from the last who had never spoken aloud at all, but only inside the Eldest’s head, an arrangement which the Eldest much preferred. As the Eldest hesitated, his flock were pondering Dark One’s question: ‘if I ate a horse, would I be a horse?’ Some were saying yes they would be, and others were saying no they would not be, and still others were saying that though they would not become like a horse in appearance, and they knew this by past experiment, because they had often eaten horses, they might well have acquired some of the more desirable qualities of a horse such as stubbornness, violence of temper and bigger teeth.

The Eldest interrupted this debate with his revelation: ‘Dark One makes joke! Asks riddle!’ This having been explained, the Looters all laughed politely, their harsh baying sounding like nothing so much as the barking of a pack of dogs.

Guinevere wanted to get things straight between herself and these Indians. ‘Ye are Looters,’ she said, ‘are ye not?’

The Looters were horrified. To be accused by Dark One of being Looters simply appalled them. They believed that Trolls were Looters. ‘No! Not Looters us! No!’ shouted the Eldest, and the other Looters joined in shouting ‘No! Not Looters us! No!’ until cockatoos and currawongs rose from the trees around, shrieking and calling until the clearing was one great uproar.

‘Who are you then?’ Guinevere’s amplified voice sounded out like a great bell above all the others. ‘We are not Looters,’ said the Eldest of the Looters. ‘We are,’ he said, pausing for effect, ‘the Human Race!’ ‘Yes!’ yelled the other Looters, ‘Human Race! Yes! Human Race us! Yes!’

For some time the school bus had been travelling through terrain which was progressively getting flatter, and whose plant life was growing increasingly sparse, twisted and forlorn. The giant forest trees had given way to scrub, and the scrub had given way to ti-trees, twisted as if they had been bonsai-ed, and all leaning back toward the travellers as if shrinking from some dire force ahead of them on their road. Now they had come through the last of the ti-tree and all that seemed to be ahead of them was a white plain, shimmering in the sunlight and beyond it, blue sea. Zachary brought the bus to a halt and looked ahead. ‘Salt pans,’ he said.

The Don moved up and stood beside him, crouching so that he could look through the windscreen. ‘There, off to the right,’ the Don murmured, and Zachary saw in the distance what looked like a man ploughing the salt pans. ‘Narranjerry,’ said the Don, and gestured “forward”. Zachary set the bus in motion again, and they drove out onto the salt plain itself, with Rocky and Ulf riding alongside them, leading the spare horses. Harold felt a lift of excitement inside him: they could smell the sharp tang of the sea, and soon they would be meeting the legendary Old Man, the salt king Narranjerry.

The Old Man was well called, for he was indeed old, probably only ten years or so younger than Helena, the Our Mother of the Foresters. He had been young when he first came here, and had been tall and thin and back then he had possessed muscles like wire ropes beneath the dark skin. He was still thin, and the muscles were still like wire, but sixty years scooping salt and overseeing his smiths had bent him like a bow. He still scooped the salt himself, though he allowed others to help, and could have, if he had chosen, spent his last years in the cool of his library, fingering the books he had collected over a lifetime. He could scarcely read them now, that was the irony. The white films which covered his eyes let him see a few things, let him guide the salt scoop behind the horse, let him enjoy the colored blurrings of his garden, but the smaller print was now beyond him. The bigger print he could still read, but he regretted the books with the fine print which lay, like his dead wives, in the irretrievable past.

He was a black man, Narranjerry, an Australian Aborigine, who had been taught by an uncle the workings of the salt pans, how the gates were opened to let the sea in, and closed to keep the salt water on the pans, how the scoops worked, how the refining was done. He had learned all that in half a year as a young man, and learned it a thousand times more since. He was wealthy, was Narranjerry, but he did not think of it in those terms. Salt, steel blades and books, that was his life, and he loved it, and his love had made him rich.

Now he saw the big autobile coming across the salt pan, with its outriders. Trolls, his old eyes told him, more from the riding style and the glint of the sun on their armor than by any details his milky eyes could see. Trolls with a big autobile, that was interesting, he thought, and his hand went inside the loose white poncho he wore against the sun, and loosened the big handgun in its holster.

The Slarn had put the Forbid on guns but Narranjerry did not run his life according to the laws of the Slarn. This was his land not theirs, and to Narranjerry they were just another invader to be ignored, to be told what they wanted to hear and, in the long run, to be survived. As Zachary steered the bus across the salt pans, he looked at the Don, his left arm now bandaged, sitting beside Meg. ‘Seems to be a lot of salt here,’ Zachary said. ‘Why don’t we just take what we want and split?’

The Don looked at him with a half smile on the lips but a bleak appraisal in his eyes. ‘The Old Man knows the salt wisdom. If we steal from him, the salt may not be here when we come back for more.’

‘I didn’t mean steal exactly,’ Zachary said, ‘more like come back at night and liberate.’

The Meg smiled at the Don in the kindly way someone might who was explaining why their puppy had made a mess on the rug. ‘Zachary is what we call a moral defective. He doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong.’

‘I’m not against stealing as such,’ the Don told her. ‘The first Don, Spider the First, points out in the Troll Archive that if you’ve got the muscle, stealing is called “conquest”.’

‘That was all right for him to say,’ Zachary muttered. ‘He was a government.’

They were now approaching the Old Man Narranjerry, who simply continued following his horse and scoop as if he were alone on the salt pan. Now they were closer they could see what he was doing. Narranjerry’s horse dragged a six foot wide scoop with a blade set to take off the top few inches of salt crystals. The salt then fell into the scoop, and stayed there until Narranjerry emptied the scoop which, judging from the piles of salt along his route, he seemed to do every 20 yards or so. No doubt, Harold thought, a cart came out later to take away the piles of salt to a central processing and packing area.

At the Don’s command, Zachary brought the bus to a halt and then they all got out, just as Narranjerry was emptying the scoop of its accumulated salt. He finished doing this, and turned to face them. Even though stooped with age, Narranjerry was still a tall, commanding figure in his white poncho, with its hood pulled forward over his dark wrinkled face, and the white-glazed eyes staring out of the hood’s shadow. Zoe found herself thinking that he should have been a frightening figure but, to her surprise, she was not afraid of him at all. There was something about the ancient man which she knew she could trust.

Narranjerry, his right hand held loosely inside his robe, moved nearer and looked at each of them in turn. Finally, after casting his gaze over the school bus, he spoke. ‘Yes?’

‘We come in peace,’ the Don said. ‘We come to deal.’

‘Deal for what?’

‘Salt,’ answered the Don. ‘My friends want a two hundred poundweight of salt.’

‘They have two hundred poundweight of steel?’

Zachary hooked a thumb at the bus. ‘Plenty of steel in that, mister.’

Narranjerry looked at Zachary and then at the bus. ‘You must want salt pretty badly,’ he said, and then he moved to his scoop, and unharnessed the horse, and handed the end of its leading rein to Rocky. Narranjerry then walked to the bus, climbed in and sat down. The Don took Meg’s arm, and led the rest of the party into the bus. Once Zachary had started the engine, he looked at Narranjerry, who pointed off to the right. Zachary put the bus into gear and drove in the direction indicated. They drove in silence, and Zachary found himself constantly checking the fuel gauge. It was showing perilously close to empty. Several times he caught Narranjerry watching him, so he gave up looking at the gauge. If Trolls knew about handbrakes, who knew what knowledge Salt Kings had?

Occasionally Narranjerry had given directions without speaking. Now he spoke. ‘Where’d you get a new autobile?’ he asked Zachary.

‘Oh … picked it up?’ Zachary said.

‘Stop the bus,’ Narranjerry told him. ‘I’ll get out here.’ He stood and moved to the doorway.

‘Hey come on,’ Zachary said, ‘I thought we were going to get salt.’

‘I don’t deal with liars,’ Narranjerry answered.

‘Okay,’ Zachary said, ‘the truth. We found it.’

‘I’ll get out here,’ Narranjerry said.

‘They’re from the past,’ the Don said crisply.

‘I was getting around to that,’ Zachary told him.

Narranjerry was ignoring Zachary and speaking to the Don. ‘We’re all from the past. We come out of the past, live in the present, pass into the future.’ He smiled. ‘Or are always in the present, whichever way you like to put it?’

The Don was not a great man for metaphysical speculation. ‘They come from 90 years ago. Before the Slarn raid.’

Narranjerry nodded, as if satisfied with this answer. Zachary was amazed. He certainly would not have been satisfied with an improbable answer like that. He watched, puzzled, as Narranjerry moved back to his seat and sat down. ‘They made very good books and steel back then,’ the Old Man remarked casually.

Harold too was amazed. ‘Just like that? You believe we’re from the past?’

Naranjerry’s white-filmed eyes sought him out. ‘Why not?’ Narranjerry asked. ‘People move in space … why not in time? Is one more unlikely than the other?’

Yes
, thought Zachary,
one is one hell of a lot more unlikely than the other
, but kept the observation to himself. After a time, they came off the salt again, and moved onto a dirt road rutted by cart tracks and bounded on each side by ti-trees. Meg was beginning to get a nagging feeling that she had been here before, that at some time she had been over this terrain, if not on wheels, then on horseback. When she saw the high stone house with the palm trees and steel windmill towers and vanes beyond it, she knew she had indeed been here before, and also when. The palm trees were much taller now, but, she thought, they had had 90 years to grow taller in. But to her sense of time, it had been only last summer that she had driven through these same gates with her father and mother. She felt she knew what was beyond the gates which even now were slowly being opened from the inside. There had been a garden with lawns, and beds bright with flowers, and a circular driveway, and beyond all this a house built of freestone with the corners groined in old rose-red brick, and the roof covered with mossy old slates. Her heart sank within her. It would be different now. The last time she had seen it, the barbered lawns had had sprinklers playing on them, and there had been ducks on a pond lying to one side of the house and overlooked by the billiard room and some of the upstairs bedrooms. Now, she knew, the grass would be rank and uncut, the house derelict, the flowerbeds turned into salt piles.

The gates opened and Zachary drove the bus inside. All of the starship’s crew gasped. Only Maze, and the Don and the other Trolls were not surprised, for they had seen it all before. Of all the starship crew, it was Meg who was the most surprised. For it had scarcely changed at all. The palm trees and the other trees were all taller, and some of the eucalypts she remembered were gone, grown old and died since she had been here last. Otherwise, everything was as it had been. Sprinklers played on barbered lawns, bright blooms filled the flower beds, and there were even ducks on the pond by the side of the house. ‘What is this place?’ Meg dimly heard Zoe asking Narranjerry. ‘My place,’ the Old Man replied.

‘I came here once,’ Meg heard herself saying, as if from a vast distance, ‘to a weekend houseparty. It belonged to Sir Reginald and Lady Foster.’

‘It belongs to me now,’ said Narranjerry. In the silence that followed, the bus ran out of fuel. They all sat in silence. Zachary did not even attempt to restart the bus. The fuel gauge was telling its own sad story. He became aware of someone leaning across him, someone dressed in white, who smelled of the sea. Narranjerry was peering at the fuel gauge. ‘Seems you’re out of gas,’ the Old Man said. They were looking at Narranjerry, all of them. The gates behind them were shut again, by whose hands they had not seen, so taken aback had they been by what was inside the walls of this strange place.
Had they driven into a trap? Were they going to have to fight their way out again?

Narranjerry seemed to feel their stares boring into him, for he smiled before he turned to face them. ‘I won’t cheat you,’ he said. ‘You’ll get your salt. How you get it back to where you came from … that’s going to be your problem.’

Despite Narranjerry’s reassuring words, the starship crew took their Slarnstaffs with them as they got off the bus. They had come to realize that it was a dangerous world here in the future, and that private property only stayed that way if the owners kept their hands on it. Narranjerry seemed either not to notice, or not to mind the fact that they were carrying things which looked like weapons. He simply led the way up the gravelled drive, and onto the verandah of the house. As they reached the door, someone opened it from the inside, but stayed behind the door as they trooped down the wide, cool hall with its floor of worn black and white tiles.

At the end of the hall was a stairway which, Meg knew, led to the upper floor and what in the past had been the bedrooms, but Narranjerry took the first door on the right and led them through into what Meg remembered as the billiard room overlooking the duck pond. The billiard table still stood on its six heavy legs in the centre of the room. It had its wooden cover on it, concealing the green baize, but the netted string pockets could still be seen protruding at its corners and sides. On the wooden cover of the billiard table was arrayed a collection of swords and daggers of all kinds. Meg knew that they must have been taken from museums, and private collections and officers’ messes in military barracks. Her father had had a small collection of antique swords, and she knew the value of what she was seeing. In her time, such a collection of bladed weapons could only have been put together by a government-owned museum or a millionaire private collector.

Looking around, she now saw the major change which had been made to the room. Every wall had been shelved from floor to ceiling and every shelf had been crammed with books. More books were piled on chairs and on the floor. So this was the Old Man’s library! The Trolls, the Don, Ulf and Rocky, were drawn to the collection of daggers and swords on the table. Meg and Harold, moved by a similar compulsion, went directly to the bookshelves. Zachary and Zoe obeyed Narranjerry’s gesture of invitation and sat in two of the big leather armchairs which were part of the room’s original furnishings. Narranjerry looked at them with his milky eyes for a while before speaking. ‘From the past.’ He savored the idea. ‘You wouldn’t have a metallurgist among you?’

Harold looked up from the book he was dipping into. ‘I’m good at science.’

‘I could use a metallurgist,’ Narranjerry sighed.

There was silence again at this, and then Harold said: ‘I can’t find Zyglan in here.’

‘What’s Zyglan?’ Zoe thought that Harold always managed to ask the craziest of questions.

‘Some element Guinevere needs,’ Harold said and continued looking through the book.

During this exchange, Narranjerry had been looking at their Slarnstaffs. ‘You want to sell those things you’re carrying?’

‘No thanks,’ Zachary said. ‘They’re kinda useful.’

‘You know what they are?’

Zachary was about to lie, then thought better of it and nodded. ‘Uh huh.’

‘They’re Slarn.’

‘Uh huh.’

Meg was rapt in the amount and variety of knowledge she was finding on the bookshelves. Narranjerry had not collected just any books. You could take this library and rebuild civilization in under a century. She said as much.

‘You’d want to do it better,’ Harold said, ‘there were many inefficient aspects to our civilization before the Slarn came.’

Zachary could guess what those were. He had an uneasy feeling that guitar-playing drifters might have to disappear in Harold’s Utopia. He looked around the room. ‘I didn’t think anything like this still existed.’

‘You have to know your markets,’ Narranjerry told him. ‘Salt and good blades. There’s always a market for them.’

As if in answer, the Don hefted an old Museum-piece of a sword. Meg recognized it as a Scottish basket-hilted broadsword. Her father had had one. ‘Would you put this away for me?’ the Don asked Narranjerry.

‘That’s worth a lot of books,’ Narranjerry replied.

‘You’ll have them.’ The Don dropped into an en garde position with the sword. He lunged, parried, and slashed. The invisible opponent was dispatched. He straightened again and looked at the sword.
Love at first sight
, thought Zachary.

A hammer smashed onto a red-hot blade in the making. They had at last met one of the Old Man’s helpers. This one was short and squat and so powerful was his neck that his head seemed to grow straight out of his shoulders. The strip of metal on his anvil had once been one of the leaf springs of their school bus, and now the small square man was working it into a blade. Watching him, Zoe realized that though the blacksmith at the village was a good tradesman, this man was something else, he was an artist. She was watching someone at work who knew precisely what he was doing to the point where the skill seemed almost casual. She watched in awe.

Zachary was watching in despair. ‘That’s a leaf spring,’ he said.

‘Sure thing,’ the smith said. ‘Make good blades.’

‘You were only supposed to take a two hundred pounds of the steel from the bus! If you’ve taken the leaf springs…’ Zachary’s eyes roamed around the workshop which had once been part of the stables attached to the house. There in one corner were piled the wheels of the bus. ‘You’ve taken the lot!’

‘Without fuel, where were you going to take it?’ asked Narranjerry.

‘We don’t have a bus any more,’ Zachary said to the others. ‘You realize that? The Salt King and his boys just dismantled our bus?’

‘No fuel, you’re not driving anywhere. We’ll pay you for the steel.’ Narranjerry looked at the smith. ‘What do we owe?’

‘Lotta crapmetal in it, say 800 poundweight,’ said the little smith, putting the half-formed blade back to heat.

‘There you are,’ Narranjerry said. ‘A fortune. Eight hundred poundweight of salt? The King of Vic hasn’t got that much!’