The Stars Down Under (24 page)

She smiled. “Well, that's what some of us call it. I don't think you could pronounce the local word for it. Home sweet home.”

Myell pressed the palm of his right hand against his right eye, wishing Ensign Collins were nearby with his medkit. Then again, he'd survived worse hangovers.

“Do the villagers back on the mainland know you're here?”

“The People? They have rumors. Folk tales. We try to keep our distance.”

“How'd you get to Team Space?” he asked.

“I grew up here. When I was old enough, I was sent to Fortune—as were many others—to look for the man called Jungali. I joined Team Space, hoping to find him along the Seven Sisters. So there I was, on the
Aral Sea,
and fate put me in your department. It all worked out.”

Myell's headache was easing. “It almost didn't. Commander Osherman ordered you to tell the ship's bridge that Lieutenant Scott and I were trapped in that cargo tower. We nearly died.”

“The Rainbow Serpent came to me, told me who you were, said you had your own path to follow. Honest!” Ishikawa crossed her heart. “He told me to come back here. And so I did. Now you're here, too. That's destiny for you.”

“It's something,” he agreed. “But just because my mother picked a strange nickname for me doesn't mean I'm the man you're looking for. Who told you about that nickname, anyway?”

Ishikawa put her small hand on his arm. “The Snake.”

He sighed.

“Your mother gave you the name Jungali because the Rainbow Serpent whispered it in her ear while she slept. You were chosen for this a long time ago. The Nogomain need you. Garanwa needs you.”

“I'm afraid to ask. Who are the Nogomain? Who's Garanwa?”

Ishikawa brushed her hands on her knees and stood up. “Yambli will tell you. She gets to tell all the good stories. Silrys is our leader, but Yambli's like our grandmother. She wants to see you.”

He glanced down at himself. “Maybe you could find me some clothes first.”

While she was gone Myell watched the tree village and the children who dashed across the rope bridges without a care. Mothers were cooking meals in carefully tended stone ovens, and someone was playing a didgeridoo. A traditionally male musical instrument, if he remembered correctly. Yet he didn't see any men besides himself, which led to the question of who had sired all the kids.

Ishikawa returned with a brown woven shirt and a red skirt.

“We don't have any trousers,” she said. “Sorry.”

He eyed the skirt judiciously.

“Yambli sent it herself,” Ishikawa said.

When he was presentable, Ishikawa led him across the nearest bridge. Myell didn't like the swing and buck of it, but it held their weight easily. Across platforms and huts and more swaying bridges they went, the chatter of women in the air. The sun was lower now, streaking the sky red, leaving the forest in deepening darkness. Bugs tried to feast on his arms and legs.

“Here, smear this on,” Ishikawa said. “Insect repellent. The good stuff, too. Imported from Fortune.”

At last they came to a large hut. The inside glowed yellow from the light of oil lamps. The single room held several hand-carved chairs and rugs woven from palm fronds. Tree-bark masks hung on the walls, their mouths and eyes wide, their faces decorated with shells, flowers, and paint. Seven or eight women, including Silrys, were in attendance around the oldest person Myell had ever seen.

She was tiny and shriveled, with gray hair cropped close to her skull. Her dark skin looked fragile and bruised. Her right arm was bent awkwardly against her chest and the hand was a tightened knot, useless. Her legs were like a bird's, sticking out from under a blue blanket. But her eyes were still lively, and her mouth stretched wide in a smile when she saw him.

“Jungali,” she rasped out.

The other women stared at Myell, not all of them so welcoming.

“Sit here,” Ishikawa said, and showed him to a spot very close to Yambli. Myell sat cross-legged, careful not to expose himself under the ridiculous red skirt. Most of the other women sat as well. Somewhere nearby, incense was burning. It smelled like lavender and salt.

“Chief Myell,” Yambli said. “I am so pleased to be meeting the son of my daughter.”

“Your daughter?” he asked, startled.

She raised her good hand and said, “All are my daughters.”

White streaks of light flashed from her fingers and spread across the ceiling. Tangled lines, twisted, the roots of a vast eucalyptus tree, and he was at the tail end of one of the tiniest threads, and she was farther up the convolution, and the whole tree itself pulsed with energy, ancient and enormous power.

Yambli said, “Your mother came from Australia, the lost People of the northern coast, the same as my mother, and her mother before her. That's how we measure families here: through the mother, always. The People of the land are the same way. They believe you to be the next incarnation of the Lightning God.”

Myell blinked. Yambli's house reassembled itself around him. The other women were gazing at him with careful eyes. Yambli herself smiled toothlessly.

She said, “The People were taken out of Australia and through the Egg several generations ago, by the Nogomain. The Nogomain serve the Wondjina. We serve the Nogomain. You are Jungali. Favored by the Rainbow Serpent, destined to join the Nogomain. We've been searching for you for generations. Since Garanwa told us to. When you step through the Egg, you'll be part of them.”

Yambli coughed, a dry and raspy sound. Ishikawa pressed a teacup into her hand. The incense smell was very strong.

“The Egg,” Myell said. “The Child Sphere below?”

Silrys stepped forward, her expression grim. “Garanwa is the last of the Nogomain. He needs Jungali's help. To take his place in the First of all Eggs, and to keep the interlopers from taking the helm. The ones you call the Bunyips. He calls them the Roon.”

Myell wished he had Ishikawa's wine jug again. He gazed at the women's faces and saw fervent belief, irrational hope, skepticism. The lavender and salt smells were very strong now, and the insect repellent made his skin itch. He was sitting in a skirt in a hut in a village of women who wanted him to help the gods.

“Your wife,” Yambli said. Her smile was long gone. “She saw the Roon. She knows the threat. Bring us to dust, they will, unless Jungali stops them.”

Myell stood up. “Look. I'm sure you're all great people and you mean well, but I'm not the one you're looking for. I'm sorry.”

Yambli stretched her useless hand to him. The skin on it was withered and sagging, and the bones underneath looked too thin to bear weight.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and lightly touched her fingers.

The world dissolved into chaos.

*   *   *

Light and dark, everywhere mixed, vibration and not-vibration, cacophony and silence in swirl, and he was without shape or form, but his mind soared through the world like a bird, or a spear thrown by an unseen warrior.

“The beginning,” Yambli whispered in his ear.

The chaos separated into brown land and blue sky, and sun so bright that he feared blistering his nonexistent eyes. His physical body was a memory, fleeting and inconsequential. He barely missed it all. He was free (Free-not-chained, he remembered, giddily) and nothing would ever bind him to Earth again. It was paradise and perfection and power that could never be tamed.

Around him, balls of light dropped to the ground like shooting stars, and where they landed, the land humped and moved. The humps rose into shapes like crocodiles, birds, gum trees, dark warriors. The beginning, he understood. The newly created shapes trekked across the flatland, over hills raising themselves from the dust, over lakes springing in great gushing geysers, over rivers mingling and twisting together in shining blue paths.

He swooped in lower, his nonbody dipping and lifting, laughing in spirit if nothing else. The ground reached and pulled him into an embrace that left him in the shape of a gecko, a gecko crawling forward through an enormous world of rocks and blades of grass. He felt less joy, now, dwarfed to insignificance, the stomping dark feet of children making the ground shake around him. He darted through the brush and an ocean bay opened up beneath his vantage point: a bay of shimmering blue, a wooden ship sailing into it with great white sails made in England, white men come to claim and steal land—

Abruptly Myell lost the shape of a gecko. He was a man now, an Aboriginal standing on the shore with the men of his tribe, their fists wrapped around spears that were no match for pistols. He was decorated with feathers and sticks in his thick hair, and his skin was painted with ocher. Sweat itched between his shoulder blades. The English ship was drawing closer. The world was about to change forever.

But before the ship reached shore, the great Rainbow Serpent curled down from the sky and dropped a stone egg. From the egg emerged the Nogomain and their shaman, Garanwa, who bade the People to journey to the stars.

To this land, where the People would be safe.

“But what do I have to do with any of this?” Myell asked, with a mouth that had no lips, no voice.

The Serpent swallowed him whole.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Night on the island of women. Myell felt drunk again, though he hadn't had any wine. Torchlight streaked across his vision like the burning trails of comets. He was a planet spinning its way through a void, but the void was full of palm trees and beautiful women, and dirt between his toes, and children singing.

“I'm going to be sick,” he said to Ishikawa.

She pulled him to a fine wooden chair carved from a tree trunk. “Sit down.”

The party swirled on without him. Flower petals drifted down from above, soft like rain. Myell caught some and crushed them against his face, thinking of Jodenny's perfume. The archway of Painted Child had been decorated with garlands and wreaths. The darkness inside soothed him, steadied his vision.

“You want me to go through there,” he said.

“It's what you were born to do,” Ishikawa said.

He leaned back in the chair—the throne—and let his head loll. The women's music was bright and fast, no more didgeridoos here. In harmony they sang words he didn't know. The little boys of the village banged on drums made of skin and wood. Whenever Myell closed his eyes he saw white trees and red landscapes and Jodenny, calling to him.

“My wife,” he said.

“Lieutenant Scott understands duty,” Ishikawa said. “She of all people would want you to do what's right.”

He corrected her. “Lieutenant
Commander
Scott.”

Ishikawa's hand pressed against his. “You'll have the power of the entire network in your hands. Your control, your will. Otherwise the power of the First Egg will fall to the Roon.”

The Roon. The Bunyips, with their white feather cloaks and silver helmets and clawed hands. Fantastical and strange. Surely creatures from a dream, or a nightmare.

Ishikawa's voice was close to his ear. “You're always going to do the right thing, Chief. It's just the way you are. So you might as well walk into that Egg and face what needs to be done. Stop the Roon.”

Damn her for making sense.

Myell stood up, straightened the red skirt tied around his waist, and stepped toward the Painted Child. If he could dive off a cliff, he could do this. Embrace his destiny, whatever it was. Be their Jungali, at least until they realized that they had the wrong man. It wouldn't be the first time he'd been mistaken for someone better than he was, but maybe it would be the last.

The music stopped and the drums fell silent.

He kept walking, aware of Ishikawa trailing a respectful distance. He almost asked her to accompany him but that would be selfish, unfair. He had no idea what lay ahead. Some paths could only be walked alone.

Myell saw Yambli watching him, her eyes bright. Beside the old woman, Silrys stood with a frown. She didn't believe in him at all, which was strangely comforting.

I don't believe in me either,
he wanted to say.
But I'll try.

A small boy stepped in front of Myell to give him a bouquet of flowers. Feeling absurdly like a bride, Myell took the flowers and patted the boy on the head. Jodenny had carried flowers during their wedding. The ceremony had been short and efficient, both of them still recuperating from injuries, well aware of the risk of fraternization charges and retaliation, but worth the danger. If anyone had ever told him he'd marry an officer, he would have laughed at the idea.

The flowers in his hand were red, not white. Tropical and wild, not carefully cultivated and cut from a ship's hydroponics bed. They smelled like wild honey, and the dirt on their roots, and the fresh green of their stalks.

The Painted Child called to him, beckoned.

Jungali. Save us all.

“Chief?” Ishikawa asked.

The words came out on their own, unbidden. “I can't.”

Panic crossed her face. “Of course you can.”

“I can't leave her.” His head felt clearer, his knees steadier. He hadn't realized how hard they were trembling. Myell clutched the flowers closer to his chest and gave Ishikawa a quick kiss on the cheek. “I'm sorry. It's selfish and wrong, but I made a promise. I'm going home to my wife.”

He walked off into the jungle, taking the red bouquet with him.

*   *   *

Myell walked through the jungle toward the moon. When he found a clearing he slept with his arms pillowed beneath his head, and when he woke the sun was up and Silrys was sitting next to him.

“You're a surprise,” she said. “I'll give you that.”

She had water and fruit for him, and he was famished enough to accept both. As he chewed he said, “You're not here to persuade me to go through the Child Sphere. You don't think I'm the guy for the job anyway.”