The Stars Down Under (37 page)

Jodenny trusted her
old
husband, her husband before Garanwa had done whatever he'd done, before brain damage and trauma and whatever else had gone wrong in his head. This man couldn't even tie his own shoes, but he liked to throw himself into the sea.

“Don't go,” she begged.

Myell watched the ceiling. “Now it's a gecko,” he said. “It's leaving. I have to follow it.”

He kissed her again, brief and fleeting. Then he walked out of the room.

“Terry!” she shouted, trying to rise. “Come back! Get back here!”

Her frantic shouting eventually brought an overworked Aboriginal nurse, and the nurse finally found Nam.

“You have to stop him,” Jodenny said.

“Stop him from what?” Nam asked, irritated.

“I don't know.” Despite her broken hip, Jodenny started to pull herself up. She would throw herself to the floor and crawl across the outback if it meant stopping Myell from whatever craziness was going on in his head. “I have to go after him.”

Nam pushed her back down. “Don't be stupid.”

“He's out there, alone! He can't defend himself. He doesn't know what he's doing.” Tears stung her eyes, and angrily she wiped them away. “He'll die, and you know it.”

Nam grimaced. “If I leave you, you might die.”

Which was true enough, though hard to admit. Nam had brought her food, had changed her stinking bedpan, was there when the med techs and Ruiz couldn't be.

Jodenny raised her head in challenge. “I'm not the one with the power to summon a token, maybe control the whole Wondjina network.”

“You don't believe that.”

“I don't, but you do.”

Nam gazed past her to the dirty window.

“I'll go,” he said. “I'll stop him. But not because of that.”

The why didn't matter.

“Find him,” she said.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Myell walked out of Carnarvon just before dawn, following the paths of the Dreamtime gods.

The town was not quite in ruins, because it hadn't been much to begin with. Back before the Debasement it had been a quaint outpost between the Indian Ocean and the Gascoyne River. But the long decades since had been rough. The trees and shrubs had mostly died off, and the tourists were long gone. The people who lived there had no place else to go and not much to hope for. The town was all they had.

And now Myell was leaving it. Leaving, probably never to return.

He had spent days by the sea, wading in the water, trying to talk to crocodiles. He had clutched Yambli's dilly bag so tightly that his knuckles ached, but the totems gave no answer. He had walked around Carnarvon until every street seemed familiar, every sad building like home. He had wandered through the clinic where Jodenny was, slipping through the rooms like a ghost. Nothing had made a difference, nothing had changed. He was still only half of who he had been. Maybe a third. An illiterate, impaired third, and he suspected that he was even worse than he believed.

Lying awake in Jodenny's room, the smells and sounds too strong for him to rest, he had peered into the darkness under her bed for hours. Watching shadows, waiting between heartbeats for mental acuity that would not return.

Then the crocodile came slithering across the ceiling. It peered at Myell with eyes darker than the blackness of the room. Its jaws opened, its teeth gnashed—

And Myell was back on Yambli's beach, the old crone sitting across the fire from him.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He tipped his head back to a sky full of bright stars. The breeze off the ocean was cold and made his arms prickle.

“Waiting,” he replied.

“Waiting for what?” Yambli poked the fire with her stick, sending sparks spiraling into the night.

“I don't know.” Myell peered into her eyes but saw only his reflection. “There's no more time, is there? Everything's going to end.”

Yambli poked him with the stick. He yelped.

“You've learned nothing,” she said. “You are Jungali. There is no end, only a beginning.”

A beeping noise brought him back to Jodenny's hospital room. A nurse paused in the doorway to hush a gib. Myell watched her come in and check on her patients. If she saw him lying awake on the cot, she said nothing.

When the nurse left, her feet disturbed the golden lines glowing on the floor.

Myell sat up slowly. Lines to follow. Garanwa's station, the ever-changing rooms, the songlines. He was in Old Australia, land of the Wondjina, and he'd never thought to look for the songlines under his feet.

He closed his eyes and saw them weaving and unweaving beneath the hospital, beneath the town, all the lines, branching out like dried-up streams through the land, his to follow.

The hardest part had been saying goodbye to Jodenny.

The second hardest part was trying to persuade Nam not to join him.

He hadn't expected Nam to find him, never mind follow him, but when Myell reached a road that led east he heard footsteps behind. The sky was still gray with night. The drunks and rioters were sleeping, leaving the town quiet and still.

“Go back, Commander,” Myell said, without breaking stride.

“The sea's the other way,” Nam said.

“Not going there.”

“Really? Going somewhere else?” Nam sounded out of breath. “Your wife was wondering. You left her without much explanation.”

The gecko songline was pulling him now, strong like a magnet, always here, always waiting for him.

“What's at the end of this road you're traveling?” Nam asked.

“I don't know.”

“You think maybe we could bring water, some food?”

Myell frowned. “You can't come. It's not your journey.”

Nam pulled on the bandanna around his neck. He smelled like he hadn't showered in a while, and there was stubble on his chin. “Well, maybe, maybe not, but I promised Jodenny I'd come with you. She's a little worried.”

The air smelled burnt, rotten, but there was a cleaner wind out there, singing over the countryside. Myell stopped and met Nam's gaze.

“I don't know what's there,” he said, struggling again with words, their meanings, their shifting vagueness. “But it's not for you.”

“So when we get there, I'll wait outside.”

Myell said nothing.

Nam held his right hand up in a pledge. “You're not going alone, Terry.”

Myell stared. Nam had never used his given name before.

“I'm coming with you,” Nam said. “For more reasons than I can say. At the end of the world, it's rare that you get to pick your own exit.”

Myell resumed walking. Nam followed.

The sun came up in the hazy east. The heat came up, as well. The road out of Carnarvon was littered for the first few kilometers with abandoned cars, rusty vehicles, old jeeps. The pickings were slim, no hope of water or food. Nam found a crushed bush hat and dropped it on Myell's head.

“Keep your brain from frying,” Nam explained. “More than it has already, that is.”

The debris gave way to acres of refuse that the townsfolk had hauled out in years past, before the effort became too much. Steel and glass, and plastic garbage bags, and small animals that scurried in between them, but the worst thing was the smell, and the flies that bit at their clothes.

“Great road you're traveling,” Nam muttered, but didn't turn back.

Thirst made itself known, first a niggling tickle, then a strong itch, then the inside of him burning up, drying out. Myell had no canteen or water bottle. He had no way of knowing how far the road would take him, but he was walking with his ancestors now, and there was no turning back.

He was unsurprised that Nam grew increasingly restless, worried about their trek.

“Are we going to wait for rain? Manna from heaven?”

Myell didn't answer. He had nothing to go by other than the knowledge that this was the right path, that he was trusting the gods. He couldn't think ahead. But wasn't that foolishness? Was he so far demented that he couldn't tell instinct from psychosis?

“I don't know,” he said, surrendering again to the song, to the intuition that this was the way it had to be, was always meant to be.

But it was hot, scorching hot, and he was parched inside and out. The day was cloudy, no rain. The landscape was quiet, just bugs and occasional scurrying animals in the brush, and the wind. He remembered that there were dingoes out here, and snakes, and other things eager to kill, but he told himself that he wasn't afraid. That everything had been planned for. Not by him, but by someone else.

Would have been nice, though, to see Jodenny one more time.

The horizon shimmered and shifted, skeletal trees stretched toward the sky, nothing but the crisscross to guide him, the ancient paths. A lonely land, baked dry, desolate enough to drive a man crazy.

“I'm not crazy,” he said to Nam.

Nam was gone. There was no sign of him anywhere on the horizon.

That
was crazy.

Myell paused, not sure if he should turn back. Had Nam fallen by the wayside? Had he said goodbye? For a moment Myell was sure that Nam had never been there, that he'd been walking this long road from Carnarvon with no companionship other than his own deranged mind.

In the end, he was alone.

He walked in the now, the moment, baked in the heat and misery, detached but feeling every jarring step in his bones.

“What did you expect, that this would be easy?” he heard Captain Kuvik ask.

Another hallucination. Kuvik was back in Supply School, sitting mired in regulations and invoices, running his command like a ship.

“There's more to being Jungali than just putting on the uniform,” Senior Chief Talic added, his shadow keeping pace with Myell on the road.

Irritated, Myell asked, “What do you know about it?”

Talic replied, “You haven't gone through initiation. You haven't changed. Things that don't change end up dying. Isn't that what you said?”

“Leave him alone,” Senior Chief Gooder said. His face creased with an encouraging smile. “Man's got a job to do.”

Myell kept walking, listening to the chiefs bicker around him in voices like the wind.

Darkness finally came, bringing relief after the blistering day. He slumped by the side of the asphalt, unable to trudge even one step farther. He had neither water nor food, only sunburn on his face and blisters on his feet.

He was lying on his back, no stars overhead because of the haze, when a loud, strange noise came from the highway. Some kind of machine powered by a combustion engine, misfiring, belching noise and chaos. It rolled on the ground instead of a cushion of air. Its headlights were weak but blinding anyway. Maybe it was a Roon scout, scouring the countryside …

The machine slowed to a stop. Its engine continued to grate and screech and make appalling noise. A man descended from the elevated cab. His outline blocked the light.

“Australia's pretty damn big,” Nam said. “I thought we could use some help on your walkabout.”

*   *   *

As it turned out, Nam's truck couldn't be turned off for fear that it might never turn on again.

“Engine's as old as dirt,” Nam said from the front seat, which was a lopsided collection of springs and torn stuffing. The backseat wasn't much better. “Fuel's enough for a couple hundred kilometers, nothing more. Unless we find a gas station. What are the chances of that?”

Myell was stretched out with a wet cloth over his face. Every jolt of the truck sent shock waves through his aching body.

“There's some food in a box back there,” Nam said. “Nothing too tasty, but it'll do.”

Myell rummaged through the box halfheartedly and found something that he supposed was jerky. He bit it cautiously, and reached for the bottle of lukewarm water that Nam had tucked under his arm. Though he didn't remember asking Nam where he'd found the truck, Nam was telling him anyway.

“One of those roads we passed led to an old sheep station. The man there says it was his grandfather's place, way back. He's not much left for the world but he loves the military, said he would have joined up if it weren't for his wife and kids. It took some negotiating, but he was willing to lend me this truck, and the food and water, in return for an afternoon of swapping sea stories.”

The truck was faster than traveling by foot, but louder and more grating. The engine was in constant danger of falling out from under the hood. The blowers spewed hot air that stank of grease. Myell managed to sleep a few minutes here, a few minutes there, though he was never completely unaware of the engine noise, of the stench. Part of him was still focused on the crisscross, the songline. When he could no longer see with his inner vision, he sat up and said, “Stop.”

Nam slowed the vehicle to an obnoxiously loud idle. “What's wrong?”

“We've got to turn that way.” Myell pointed off into the darkness.

Nam had some maps, badly wrinkled pieces of paper that he peered at in the dim light of flashlights. “I thought you didn't know where we were going.”

“I don't. I just know that it's that way.”

“Sure of that, are you?”

“More sure than anything.”

“We'll be crossing overland. Rough going, even if we had the best ground vehicle on Earth.”

Myell said, “We'll get as far as we can, and walk the rest if need be.”

Nam gave him a sideways look. “You're talking much better.”

Myell squinted at him. Words were indeed coming easier, he realized. His mind felt clearer, as if he were waking up from a long, muddy dream.

“Broken axle, here we come,” Nam said, and steered the truck off the road.

The jostling got much worse. The truck didn't have a prayer of making it across any ravines or gullies, so Nam had to slow down and let the headlights pick out any potential hazards. Myell offered to spell him at the wheel, but Nam insisted that he was fine to drive. Myell stayed with him in the front seat to make sure he didn't nod off. At oh-two-hundred a low, flat farmhouse appeared, and they got out of the truck to investigate.