The Stars Down Under (15 page)

He found his flashlight and played it around. Walls of rock, a narrow channel, strange shapes. He thought at first they were ghosts. Eagles and crocodiles, and something like a whale, or a large shark. White and yellow outlines painted in ocher. Petroglyphs.

Exhausted, sodden, shaking with cold, Myell nevertheless thought the paintings were beautiful and strange, wondrous.

He glanced up, searching for Nam or Gayle, and saw light gathering in the sky. Boiling white light. How very strange. The light became burning lines and curves shaped like the snout of a crocodile, like a twisting long tail. More beautiful than any real creature, and more deadly.

The lines collapsed, the crocodile diminishing to a tiny point that exploded outward, downward, a directed explosion of heat and sound that blasted through Myell and turned the entire world white.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

“I know what I saw,” Nam said.

For the third time, Myell said, “It must have been a trick of the light, sir. Of the storm.”

Gayle, who was busy examining the petroglyphs on the cave walls around them, spared a glance over her shoulder. “No entry or exit wounds. Besides, if he
had
been hit by lightning, he'd probably be dead.”

Nam didn't look persuaded. Myell rubbed the side of his head. His head felt full of static, but he wasn't about to admit that. He'd woken up from a sound sleep feeling muzzy-headed and sore from tumbling along in a mudslide, but he had no obvious injuries or burns and no memory of being struck by lightning, as Nam claimed.

Gayle was right. If he'd truly been struck by a bolt of enormous electricity, he'd probably be dead. Or close to it.

Daylight spilled through the cave opening. Outside, a steady rain kept falling in the gulley. Thunder rolled in the distance and the water drummed against mud and into puddles. The cave wasn't very deep but it was elevated, making it a dry and safe haven. Gayle was ecstatic over the paintings that covered the outside gully and rapturous over the ones inside the cave. Eagles, crocodiles, whales, and other animals stretched from floor to ceiling, yellow and red and white and sometimes blue, a cornucopia of artwork, a zoological spectrum caught in stone.

“See how they layer over each other? How the style evolves slightly?” Gayle pointed her flashlight at an example. “There's centuries of work here. Generations of painters. It's not the kind of discovery that will thrill the military, but I know people who would die to see this. If only I could show them…”

Myell reached for his recently refilled water bottle. He ignored the grumbling in his stomach. Nam, gazing out at the rainy day, said, “We better get going. Back to the Spheres.”

“Going?” Gayle asked, her voice shrill. “We can't go anywhere.”

“We stay here, we'll starve,” Nam said.

She turned back to the wall. “I'm not going anywhere until the weather clears. Go hunt something down and cook it.”

Myell raised an eyebrow. Nam said nothing. He seemed recovered, but his eyes were bloodshot and his hands shook as he drank from his water bottle. Myell had wanted to start a small fire, but they had no chemical sticks or kindling and Gayle forbade anything that might damage the paintings, such as smoke.

“I can go looking,” Myell offered. “Try to catch something.”

“Ever hunt down your own dinner before?”

“Used to catch lizards back on our farm.” Myell didn't mention that he'd always released them afterward.

Nam said, “Right now I could eat a crocodile.”

The word
crocodile
struck deep inside Myell, spasming a muscle that was already sore and stretched. He sucked in a sharp breath.

“Chief?” Nam asked.

“Nothing.” The memory of a crocodile in the sky flashed through him, too quick to hold on to.

Nam examined his boots. “It's natural to be a little confused after being hit by lightning.”

“I wasn't hit by lightning,” Myell said.

Gayle said, in exasperation, “Shut up, the two of you. Don't you have any idea how significant this find is? We're millions of light-years from Earth and there are Aboriginal paintings on the wall. You two are just sitting there like logs.”

Nam said, carefully, “Maybe this
is
Earth.”

She shone her flashlight on his face. “Are you crazy?”

Myell gazed out at the rain. A spider was perched in the cave's mouth, one leg flexing in the air.

“We haven't seen any constellations,” Nam said, quite reasonably. “We know there aren't any Spheres on Earth now, but we could be thousands of years in the past. Chief Myell here thinks the Wondjina Transportation System moves through time as well as space.”

Myell shrugged. “That was just speculation.”

“What speculation?” Gayle demanded. Her light shone into his eyes, and he waved it off.

“Those marsupial lions,” Myell said. “Saadi's GNATs not getting a fix on the stars. I was thinking aloud.”

Gayle sighed rather dramatically. “Don't think too hard. There's no evidence we traverse anything but distance.”

“Then who painted these walls?” Nam asked. “Interstellar Aboriginals?”

She said, “I hope we find out.”

Nam studied his boots some more. Despite his Aboriginal heritage, he hadn't shown any interest in the cave paintings. Myell, for his part, was still numb with surprise over the Bunyips. Aliens with guns. Jodenny, having seen one. Compared to that, petroglyphs weren't much to get excited about. Unless …

“Are they recent?” Myell asked. “Are the painters still around?”

Gayle said, “I don't know. My gib's broken, and I don't have any other way to test the paint.”

Myell's belly rumbled with hunger. He imagined his stomach shrinking up, folding into itself, lines of white shrinking to a distant point—

“Chief?” Nam asked.

“I'm fine.” He pushed himself upright. “I'll be right back.”

He stepped carefully out of the cave and into the rain, skirting a low outcrop of rock to the spot they were using as a latrine. He kept an eye out for crocodiles, Bunyips, and Aboriginals, but the landscape was desolate and empty. Water ran down his neck and under his uniform. He wondered if one of them would catch cold out here, if sickness or exposure would claim them before starvation did. He eyed a patch of dead shrubs and dug up some weedy-looking plants by the roots.

When he returned to the cave, Nam said, “Going to eat those?”

“Thinking about it,” Myell said.

“Poisonous, probably,” Gayle said.

He wasn't in a hurry to find out, hunger pains be damned. The rain outside slanted down harder and the thunder grew louder. Nam said, “We'll give it until morning. Then, weather or not, we'll have to head back.”

Gayle made a noise in her throat and resumed her studies.

Nam nodded off with his chin against his chest. Myell stretched out stiff muscles, drank more water, and joined Gayle in examining the back of the cave. She was using a small ink pen to take notes on her arms, because her paper notebook had been ruined by water. Her handwriting was very fine. On her upper arms she'd drawn copies of swirls and symbols.

“What are these?” Myell asked, pointing to seven odd figures on the wall. “Men with kangaroo heads?”

Gayle said, “Therianthropes. Ancestor gods believed to have entered the rock, merged with it, and left their imprints behind.”

“And these people over here?” They were elongated and sticklike, but wearing robes and headdresses. Some of them carried arrows or spears. They were beautiful and strange, and made him shiver.

Her tone was cool. “Remarkably similar to the Bradshaw paintings discovered in northwest Australia. Those were believed to be fifty thousand years old.”

Myell almost touched the paintings, but one stern look from her quelled his hand. He spread his fingers a few centimeters over a white handprint and eyed a fine black boomerang.

“Sorry you can't vid it?” he asked.

“Of course I am. That's a stupid question.”

“You couldn't show your colleagues anyway. Top-secret mission and all that.”

Gayle moved sideways and continued to write on her left arm. “One day it'll be declassified.”

“And you'll be ready to tell the world.”

“Is there something you need, Chief? Otherwise I prefer to work in silence.”

Myell eyed the kangaroo men again. “Jodenny told me you wanted our help to find your husband. I don't see how studying cave walls helps you do that.”

Her lips pursed. “Expert on heartache, are you?”

“Yes,” he replied.

She stepped away from him. “Robert would be fascinated by this. He'd want me to find out as much as I can, in the short time allotted.”

“Allotted, or created?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

Myell took a step her way. He enjoyed that she was discomfited. It was a look that suited her.

“That rope and harness,” he said. “Commander Gold's team never went down into that ravine. You put them out there so there'd be a reason to investigate the other Spheres.”

“Maybe you
were
hit by lightning, Chief. You're delusional.”

“Am I? That harness wasn't very weathered.”

“But there was ice on the cable.”

“A wet cable will get icy overnight.”

She smiled. “So I snuck out of camp during the middle of the night, when it was dark and wolves were out, just to loop a cable around a tree and throw it down the slope, so that we could go down there and discover the aliens that probably killed Dr. Jiang and Dr. Meredith. I'm pretty clever, aren't I?”

Myell said, “I think you'll do anything you can to further your knowledge of the network. You've already proven yourself a liar.”

“Chief,” Nam called out. “Dr. Gayle.”

They went to where he was standing at the cave mouth. He was staring out into the gray afternoon. “There's someone out there.”

“You're sure?”

“Up on that ridge.”

Myell couldn't see anyone. Gayle shook her head. Nam said, “I'm going to check it out. The two of you stay here, and try not to kill each other.”

Myell wished their radios worked, but they'd been ruined in the storm. He watched Nam go down the gully and start up the incline. The threat of mudslide was still imminent, and he held his breath as Nam steadily ascended, his figure growing fuzzy in the dusk.

“You should go after him,” Gayle said.

“He said to stay here.”

“Lot of good that will do if he tumbles down the hill.”

Myell hesitated, unwilling to disobey an order. Gayle said, “Fine, I'll do it,” and went out into the rain.

Left alone, Myell rubbed the sleeves of his uniform. The fabric had dried out on its own, as it was designed to, but he still felt damp. A crack of thunder made him withdraw into the cave. The painted animals appeared to shift and change, ever so slightly, at the edges of his vision. He turned a sharp eye on a yellow kangaroo.

“No funny stuff,” he said. His dilly bag weighed heavily against his leg. “I'm not in the mood.”

Rain poured down. The cave was deeper than it had first appeared, folds of rock hidden in darkness. He swung his flashlight over the recesses. Painted animals stared back at him. The stick people, with their long legs and arms, remained locked in stone. He imagined men kneeling in this cave with ocher and brushes, painstakingly setting down the stories and symbols of their lives. Stories and legends, victories and losses. The world would spin and seasons pass, storms rage, generations die off, but still the stories would remain.

Myell turned and saw an Aboriginal crouched in the cave mouth, spear in hand, teeth bared in the dim light.

His heart lurched, but annoyance quickly overrode the first cold wave of fear. “I said no funny stuff,” Myell snapped. “I don't have time for visions right now.”

The Aboriginal cocked his head but said nothing. He was a young fellow, sturdy, midnight black. Feathers and seashells were entwined in his long hair. Swirls of yellow ocher decorated his torso from throat to waist, and wavy lines flowed from his shoulders to his wrists. He had a dilly bag like Myell's, but no clothing. A shark's tooth hung on a cord around his neck. His penis, large and flaccid, hung between his well-muscled thighs.

Myell edged backward. “Shit. You're real, aren't you?”

The Aboriginal took that as an invitation to speak, and replied with a series of words that Myell couldn't understand at all.

“If this is your cave, I'll be happy to leave,” Myell said.

Shark Tooth—the name seemed as good as any—took his long, sharp spear and drew quick lines in the dirt. A head, two arms, two legs. He jabbed at the drawing, pointed to Myell, and spoke several long words.

“That's me?” Myell gestured at the lines and at his own chest. “Me?”

A grunt. Shark Tooth drew another line in the dirt. He clapped his hands together and made a rumbling sound, then stabbed the spear in the shape meant to represent Myell.

Myell said, “I wasn't hit by lightning!”

Shark Tooth leaned back on his haunches, quite satisfied with his artwork.

Myell edged along the cave wall, inching by Shark Tooth and his spear with deliberate slowness. “Sorry for disturbing the place. We didn't touch anything. Nice to meet you.”

He got no farther than the cave entrance before he spied Nam and Gayle up on the ridge. Relief was quickly replaced by disappointment. More Aboriginals flanked them, a tribe of young men carrying spears and knives.

Shark Tooth shouted out something long and triumphant, and the warriors cheered.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Snow and ice blanketed the landscape outside the conference room, bleak gray and white as far as Jodenny could see.