Free Starship Home by Tony Morphett Page B

in the forest had formed its own clearing when it appeared. Trees had literally been blown aside, rocks vaporized, so that there was now a cleared area around the starship. In the lowest step of the starship, a hatchway opened, and a ramp slid out. Down the ramp came Zoe and Harold, followed by Zachary and Meg. They walked as far as the trees, and then turned and looked back at the starship.
    ‘A pyramid,’ said Zoe.
    ‘I had no idea of the size…’ said Zachary.
    ‘A ziggurat, a stepped pyramid,’ said Meg. ‘In the Middle East … Central America … the homes of the gods.’
    ‘What are you saying?’ Zachary was looking at her oddly.
    ‘I’m saying the ziggurats and pyramids might’ve been built to look like starships. Guinevere said the Slarn have been to Earth many times before.’
    ‘But … pyramids are kinda smoothed off and pointy, aren’t they? I had a girlfriend, and her mother was an old-style hippie and used to sit under one to meditate.’
    Meg shook her head. ‘The oldest Egyptian ones are stepped. And the ziggurats of the Middle East, and the Central American pyramids … they all rise in steps. They look like the starship. But built in stone or mud brick. They were where the gods lived. Where you … sacrificed … where you gave your crops … your people.’
    ‘Guinevere?’ yelled Harold.
    ‘I hear thee, Hal. And what cranky Meg doth say … ‘tis so. ‘twas long before my time, but I am told ‘tis so.’
    In silence, they looked at the giant starship, and then in silence looked around. Finally Zachary spoke. ‘I got to tell you Guinevere, this isn’t where you picked us up. It’s got to be much farther out of town, in a National Park maybe…’
    ‘Nay.’
    ‘I think, really, that Zachary’s correct…’
    ‘Thy thinks change nothing, Zoe. We are where I say we are.’
    Another silence, and then, ‘Okay let’s explore around a bit,’ said Zachary, and turned toward the forest, trying to take the lead, but was beaten to it by Zoe, who forged ahead of him.
    Crouching in the forest, the child Maze watched them pass, her hand on the hilt of the sheathed knife she wore in her belt. The belt cinched clothes of animal skins and hand-loomed cloth, and her pale hair was held in place with a leather headband. As she followed them, her moccasins made scarcely a sound on the leaf litter of the forest floor.
    Harold, Zoe, Meg and Zachary moved on through the forest, followed by the strange young girl.

19: WHEN ARE WE?
    The undergrowth had thinned out and they were now moving through primary forest. Tall gum trees, some of them as much as six feet through the trunk, towered above them, their peeling trunks smooth of side branches for their first thirty feet. Beneath the trees, the forest floor was littered with leaves and dead branches, and covered with what Meg recognized as a mixture of native and exotic grasses. There were signs that a fire had come through this part of the forest in the past year. Many of the trees were blackened at the base, with vivid green shoots now appearing through the charred surfaces. The loudest sound was the droning of cicadas, varied occasionally by the cry of a big black and white currawong, the hacking laugh of the kookaburra, and the shrieks of some black cockatoos who had found a big pine tree and were tearing apart the green pine cones in order to get at the pine nuts inside them.
    They were passing under this pine tree, a radiata or Monterey, a Californian interloper in this mostly native eucalypt forest, when Harold made the first disconcerting discovery. As they passed beneath the tree, smelling the sharp piney scent of it, they could hear a crunching sound above them as the black cockatoos tore at the pine cones with their strong hooked beaks; shredded chips of the green cones were filtering down through the branches onto them. Then one of the cockatoos dropped a whole cone. They heard it crashing down through the branches toward them and they ran