Starship Home (38 page)

‘I have, my love,’ he said.

‘No!’ Zoe cried out in despair and anger. ‘Not farewell! You’re not going!’

‘Oh yes. Oh yes, I go before to meet old friends and family, old enemies forgiven, to meet all and have sweet discourse in the fair fields of Heaven. Now to matters practical. Is the Don’s priest here?’

‘Here,’ said Father John.

‘Then bless me father for I have sinned. It is many centuries since my last confession and I have done those things which I ought not to have done and not done those things which I ought to have done, and I seek forgiveness.’

Father John moved to main control desk and laid his hands flat upon it in the only gesture he could make to a human soul without a body, and as the others moved in and laid their hands on his he spoke the ancient words of absolution. ‘Ego te absolvo ab omnibus peccatis et censuris in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,’ he murmured and signed the control desk with the sign of the Cross. There was heartbreak on all their faces, as on the giant main screen, the shapes merged and divided and the moving dark shapes became the walls of a tunnel leading far off into light. At the end of the tunnel there were shapes of light and an indistinct calling of voices creating a strange melody, and then the screen exploded with golden light for a moment and suddenly went black.

Zoe, weeping, said, ‘She’s gone? Is she gone?’

‘Yes, little one, she’s gone,’ said Charles, ‘and Heaven is the richer for it.’

They gathered in the clearing. Zoe and Harold, Meg and Zachary, Maze, Marine, the Don, Ulf and Rocky, the forester people and the Trolls and Charles de Josselin. Father John was there too in his role as priest, saying the ancient service for the dead. As he sprinkled the hull of the starship with holy water, he intoned the old Latin words: ‘Ego sum resurrectio et vita: qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit, vivet; et omnis, qui vivit, et credit in me, non morietur in aeternam. Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison,’ and then translated: ‘I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever believes in me, even if he dies shall live, and everyone who believes in me shall never die. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ he continued in English, and as he did so, Zoe and Maze clung together, weeping. Meg stood with the Don, she tearful, he grim-faced. Zachary and Marine were side by side, Zachary pushing aside a tear, while Marine stood at attention, right fist on left breast in the Slarn salute. Harold and Rocky stood side by side, Harold pinched and white and Rocky refusing to shed a tear because Trolls don’t cry.

Afterwards they gathered on the bridge. The screens were dead, the speakers were silent, and the people were as numb, as blank as the screens themselves. Zoe, Harold and Zachary were there, Meg and the Don standing together and slightly apart from the others, a sign of their growing closeness. Maze sat on an acceleration couch hugging her knees, and Charles de Josselin was also there, icy with grief.

‘Liked Giniveer,’ Maze finally said. ‘Miss her.’

Zoe went to sit beside her. ‘Yes, Maze, we all miss her.’

‘Picturemovie lady. Could see through her,’ and here she looked darkly at Charles, ‘like that one.’

Zoe put an arm around Maze and drew the child to her. Wanting to break down and howl like a hurt animal, she had instead been forced into the adult role of comforter.

Charles spoke, and his tone was ice-cold. ‘It is necessary that I now return to my post.’

Harold went immediately to the self-destruct clock. ‘The self-destruct is still running. It’s only three days now.’

Charles shrugs. ‘The self-destruct is designed to prevent Slarn technology from falling into the hands of savages.’

‘Savages like us?’ asked Zachary.

‘Precisely. Savages like you. The ship can no longer lift. The self-destruct will occur.’

‘Hang on there!’ Zachary exclaimed, ‘you’ve got to help us! The bomb’s still ticking, sixty miles of countryside is going to blow up taking maybe thousands of people with it!’

Charles finally allowed his long pent-up anger to be released. ‘Help you? Guinevere helped you and died for it. You insects tempted a starship into mutiny and she’s dead. The ship I loved! Help you? Leave me to my grief and help yourselves!’

And with that, his image vanished from the bridge, leaving them staring at the empty air where he had been.

No sooner than he had disappeared from the starship bridge, Charles reappeared in the cell aboard his own starship where Marlowe still lay in a Yogic trance. ‘Marlowe!’ Charles said, ‘do you hear me?’

Marlowe’s deep, resonant voice seemed to come from far away. ‘I hear you.’

‘I am here to tell you that because of your refusal to cooperate, the starship Guinevere is dead.’

Marlowe shivered as the shock of the news spread through his system, and he blinked, he breathed, his mind rose from the depths of his trance and he was once again fully in the world. ‘Dead? How?’

‘Waste products, fatigue toxins, extraordinary output of energy, it was all too much. If you’d told us only a day ago where she was, she could’ve been saved. Live with that knowledge as I must myself. We all failed her.’

Marlowe swung his legs off the couch, devastated. He sat, staring at the floor. Then suddenly he was sobbing, his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

Charles was remorseless. ‘A little late for that, don’t you think?’

Marlowe looked up, his face bathed in tears. ‘I killed a starship?’

‘You helped.’

Marlowe put his feet on the ground and attempted to stand but, weak from his long days on the couch, he fell to the ground, and lay there, huddled in grief. ‘Holding out for some selfish dream of my own.’ He looked up at Charles. ‘You can make her alive again.’

‘I am not the good God, my friend.’

The full horror was sinking in. ‘My father loved the starships. The great warrior mystics of the Galaxy. The repositories of all knowledge. The minds who sailed in the river of Time itself. And I killed one.’

Charles was implacable. ‘I thought you might be interested to know that.’

‘I can’t live with what I’ve done,’ Marlowe said, simply, irrevocably.

‘But that, living with the results of what we have done, is precisely the human condition, is it not?’ Charles said, and having taken his revenge, disappeared, leaving Marlowe huddled on the floor.

On Guinevere’s bridge, they were assessing what to do next. In three days when the starship self-destructed the whole district would become a radioactive crater and anything and anyone within the blast zone would be dust and ashes. The obvious plan was to run, but as the Don put it, ‘It took the first two Dons thirty years to win this turf. And I’m to quit it in three days?’ Then his eyes went to Maze. Already he was seeing her as the future leader of the Forester People. The child, so old in many ways, looked deep into his eyes and answered not his words but his thoughts. ‘You ask in your head if the Forest People would run away with you? Answer is no. Our Mother’s very old, can’t travel. Our Mother can’t go, Clan can’t leave her, Clan can’t go.’

Zoe turned to the Don. ‘You can make them go,’ she said but the Don shook his head. ‘It’d take every man I’ve got and they still wouldn’t leave Our Mother behind.’

It was going nowhere, and then in the ensuing silence, Zachary clapped his hands. ‘Okay. It’s simple. We just stop the self-destruct countdown. We know the Slarn can do it, and they’re no brighter than us, so we can stop it.’

Harold cleared his throat. ‘Zachary, the Slarn are, in fact, brighter than you.’

‘Matter of opinion,’ Zachary said, and while Harold was wondering how to phrase his next statement, which was going to be along the lines of “It is not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact,” Zachary went on, ‘Marine can help me.’

But Marine shook her head. ‘I’m not a technician, I’m a reconnaissance marine!’ she protested.

‘You know more about it than anyone else does,’ said Zachary. ‘And what’ve we got to lose?’

‘Except everything?’ said Meg.

‘Apart from that,’ Zachary replied, and he grinned. He wanted laughter from them and he got close. These people who thought they would never laugh again were smiling at the craziness of the idea. ‘First thing,’ Zachary continued, ‘is everyone gets out of here except me and Marine.’

Harold was outraged. ‘Are you kidding? I’m the only person around here who knows anything about computers!’

‘Shut up, Harold,’ Zachary reasoned, ‘just for once shut up? I may be dumber than you but I’m sixteen years older and a lot heavier and this is my one chance to play hero, so get out of my way!’ There was silence. ‘Marine’s got the knowhow, I can fix motor bikes, together we can do it.’

The Don spoke. ‘This is a really stupid idea, but on the other hand Zachary’s the luckiest man I’ve ever met, so maybe he can pull it off. Let’s leave him to it.’

‘You’re going to leave this to luck?’ Harold exclaimed to a world gone mad.

‘Sometimes luck’s the only thing you’ve got left,’ said the Don.

Outside the starship, they separated, Meg deciding to go back to their castle with the Troll party to help them make preparations for escape should Zachary’s plan not work, as in her heart she knew it would not, and Zoe and Harold heading for the village with Maze, in the faint hope of persuading the villagers to evacuate. This left Zachary and Marine facing the self-destruct clock. Marine opened the front panel, and found another panel behind it, and when she opened this one, they were faced with a crystal, pulsing light. It was very hard to know where to begin. Zachary was realizing that hero’s work was not always just a matter of waving a sword and yelling ‘Charge!’

The starship Charles de Josselin hung in space against the blackness and the blazing stars, and the image of Charles sat on the hull, the stars shining through his transparent lineaments. He was brooding, nursing his grief, staring down 23,000 miles to Earth, the planet which had been his birthplace, the planet which was now the final resting place of his beloved Guinevere. He was remembering old friends, fellow musketeers like the long-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac, and that dashing young idiot from Gascony, the boy d’Artagnan, the battles, the carousing, the clash of swords behind the Cathedral by the light of dawn. Most of all he was remembering Guinevere and, remembering her, the cyborg wept.

Marlowe lay on the acceleration couch in his cell, staring at the ceiling. The human eye, the metal eye, staring into the horror of what he had allowed to happen.

Zoe, Harold and Maze had reached the village, and Zoe was preparing herself to face her ancient younger sister. ‘I’ll see her alone,’ she told Harold and Maze, ‘and I know I can persuade her to come.’

Maze smiled that smile of hers, so mature, so young. ‘Our future’s here,’ she said, ‘I see it in my dreams, I see in my dreams myself grown old here.’

‘Those dreams were before everything changed,’ Zoe said, ‘and now the future can be changed.’

‘
The future can be changed?
’ said Maze, and laughed merrily. ‘You do say strange things sometimes.’

‘If I fail,’ Zoe said to Harold, ‘you must go to the castle and get away with Meg and the Trolls.’

‘We’ll both go,’ said Harold, but Zoe shook her head. ‘If the villagers decide to stay, I’m staying with them. ‘This is my place, they’re my kin and my Clan, it’s where I’ll be staying.’ And then she turned and walked alone into Our Mother’s house.

On the bridge of the starship, Zachary and Marine had managed to open up the area around the flashing crystal. They were sweating, on edge. Marine stepped back and looked at the device. ‘There’s a built-in safeguard against anyone tampering,’ she said, indicating part of the mechanism, ‘I think we could trigger it.’

‘You mean like a booby-trap?’

‘We call it a “fool slicer” but it means the same thing.’

‘So our choice is to go ahead and blow up now or wait around and blow up in three days?’

The lights suddenly flickered. ‘The power cells are going,’ Marine told Zachary, ‘with Guinevere dead they’re not being re-charged. Soon we won’t have enough light to work by.’

‘Okay,’ Zachary said, ‘here’s what we do. You go to the village and I go and tell the Slarn where the ship is. They’ll salvage her.’

‘And you’ll be a prisoner.’

‘So what?’ Zachary said, smiling his bright conman’s smile, ‘That just means I end up on a new planet somewhere, free travel, board and keep, who cares?’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, you won’t. I’m just a gritzy primitive, don’t know any better. But by now they know you’ve joined our team. It’s not just that you were captured by us, you’ve changed sides, gone feral. What’s the outlook on that?’

‘Not good.’

‘So you go to the village, tell them my plan and I’ll see you all when I get back.’

‘You risk everything? For what?’

‘For the sake of risk. Risk is my second name. I don’t want to sound preachy but little Maze is right. The Forester People aren’t going anywhere. I do this, or in three days that kid’s going to be dying, and Zoe, and a whole lot of other people. Compared to that, me going to another planet is nothing. Anyway, I can out-think them.’

Zachary, his guitar slung over one shoulder, and accompanied by Marine, came out of the starship into the clearing. They hesitated, and then Marine impulsively took off her translator mask and kissed him, then looked embarrassed, fearing she might have breached some cultural taboo. She held the mask to her face and asked, ‘Do you do that on this planet?’

‘Well no,’ lied Zachary with the straightest of faces, ‘but maybe if you demonstrate it for me again?’ So she kissed him again, this time a little longer. ‘I think I’m getting the hang of this,’ he said, and she kissed him again, this time for a long time, and then broke loose and ran for the village. ‘That’s a wonderful custom you people have,’ Zachary called after her, ‘it could really take on!’ and then remembering what he had said he was going to do, he grimaced, and turned in the direction of the Slarn skimmer before he could change his mind.

Harold was sitting in the Forester village square when Marine arrived, and he rose to meet her. ‘Zoe’s in with Helena, she’s very sick. So did you get it defused? Did you stop the clock?’

‘There’s a … what Zachary called a booby-trap. We could have set it off. So Zachary’s gone to tell my shipmates where the starship is so they’ll come and salvage her.’

‘He’ll be captured!’ wailed Harold. ‘They know who he is, they know he’s an escapee!’

‘He says he’ll out-think them.’

‘To out-think someone you’ve got to be able to think in the first place and Zachary can’t think at all. He’s got the IQ of a soft toy. He couldn’t out-think a guppy. Do you understand me? He’s a moron.’ He cast a look at Helena’s house, and then said, ‘we can’t interrupt Zoe. Tell her when she gets out. I’m going after him,’ and he took off at a flat run, leaving Marine staring after him.

Zachary emerged from the forest and walked toward where the Slarn skimmer lay, encased in its protective forcefield. He was taking his time, for he knew that this was probably his last look at his home planet. The sky, the forest’s edge, the grass, the sound of birds. He hunkered down and took a handful of grass and pulled it up by the roots, and smelled the scent of wet earth, something to take with him to whatever planet he was destined to go to. And it was then that he heard a familiar voice calling, ‘Zachary! Wait for me!’ It was Harold, pounding up to him, stopping, putting his hands on his knees and catching his breath. ‘Glad I caught you.’

‘Glad one of us is glad.’