The Last Starry Night

They all stood and stared, awestruck.

“Wow,” said Gwen.

“It’s so beautiful,” said Srini. “The Warriors made that? How?”

Trocmo just shook his head.

For a long time they stared at it. Then Azzie pulled her eyes away. Her leg was still hurting, she was dizzy from the falling sensation in her stomach, and she needed to find out what had happened to Johnny and Mama. And Grandma, for that matter.

“How do we get home?” she asked.

Srini glanced at Trocmo, who laughed rather unpleasantly. She turned to Gwen.

“Well,” said Gwen slowly, “I could try the console again.”

“Look,” said Azzie quickly. “You did a great job capturing the ship! That was great.”

“It sure was,” said Srini. Trocmo rolled his eyes.

“But it probably wasn’t such a great idea to just punch things randomly on a ship’s console,” said Azzie. “We should take some time to figure out how this thing works, and do it properly. Right?”

“Yeah,” said Gwen unhappily. “You’re right.” She looked over at Srini. “You know a lot about astronomy, right? Do you want to give it a try?”

“Okay,” said Srini. She drifted over to Gwen’s console and examined its leafy, viney covering. “Why does this look like a bunch of vines grew all over it? Where are the buttons?”

Trocmo growled something in some other language and pushed himself away, through the doorway that led back into the passage they’d come in by. Gwen started after him, but Azzie said, “Oh, never mind. He’s annoying anyway.”

She carefully tapped a couple of leaves. “I guess it’s supposed to be decoration,” she said. “These leaves look like they’re made of plastic, and they snap back into place when I touch them. And they’re arranged around these little displays...”

She stared at the console for almost a minute. Azzie felt the pain in her leg getting stronger. At last Srini said, “I think I found some kind of map. It’s like there’s a little picture of the sky sheet, and a blinking red dot next to it -- that’s probably us. So if I punch in some coordinates on the map, maybe the ship will fly us there.”

“Please, just try something,” said Azzie.

Srini glanced over at her and bit her lip. “Okay,” she said. “I think I’ve found the Earth on this map. Here we go.”

Immediately, through the window, they saw two bright silver ribbons shoot out and ripple towards the ground. They quickly lost sight of the far ends of them in the haze of landscape below. A soft hissing noise echoed through the ship.

“What the blazes was that?” asked Gwen.

“Uh,” said Srini.

Trocmo reappeared in the doorway. “What in the world are you doing?” he said. “You are sending us down to the ground!”

“What?” said Srini. “You mean we’re going to land on that sky sheet?”

“Of course!” he said. “You pushed out the extensible rails! Pull them back!”

“How?” said Srini.

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “You think I can fly this ship?”

The ship lurched; Azzie grabbed her console as hard as she could. The falling sensation eased. She suddenly felt very certain that the sky sheet was down. She looked at the silver ribbons reaching from the ship far down into the sheet below, and had a horrible feeling of being poised at the top of a roller coaster, right before the first big drop.

“Oh no,” said Gwen. The ship began to inch along the silver ribbon. “No,” she said again. The ship paused; then slowly the view through the window tilted forward to show them the great breadth of the massive tabletop below. With a final hissing noise, the ship plunged. Azzie felt herself yanked back, and she held on, though it felt like her arms would be pulled off. The ship wasn’t falling; it was pulling itself down, faster and faster, shaking and rattling as it went. Azzie screamed.

Minutes passed, during which the landscape below seemed to grow no closer. Azzie stopped screaming after a while, and so did the others. They had to save their breath to hang on. Then Azzie noticed that certain green splotches far below were somewhat larger than they had been before. They looked no larger than her thumb held at arm’s length. Islands? Continents?

More time passed. The green splotches and blue areas between them grew larger and larger. Faster and faster they went; the green areas were resolving into patterns of nut brown and olive green and alabaster; one splotch, definitely continent-sized, was now large enough to fill the window. Then they began to hear a faint whine.

“I don’t like the sound of that!” shouted Gwen over the noise of their fall.

“It’s just from the air outside,” shouted Trocmo. He had strapped himself to something that, now he was on it, looked a little like a chair. “Now we’ll start to slow down.”

“Won’t we burn up like a meteorite?” cried Srini.

Trocmo looked contemptuous. “Of course not! The ship is controlling its own speed! It won’t go that fast!”

The whine grew louder for a while, and then leveled out to a continual noise. Azzie found that the pressure on her arms decreased. She was weightless again. And then they did start to slow down a little, and Azzie had to hold on to prevent herself being thrown out of the hemispherical window.

They were descending into a bright pea-green patch. Azzie could make out a long mud-colored twisty river flowing through the green. It was coming up uncomfortably fast.

The ship lurched. They heard a low groaning noise as the ship labored to slow itself. It shook and rattled. Azzie looked over at Trocmo: he looked terrified. Azzie didn’t want to see that, so she shut her eyes.

The groaning, rattling and shaking went on for what seemed like an eternity. When Azzie couldn’t stand the suspense anymore, she opened one eye. She was just in time to see a jungle leap at the window and then darkness as the ship plunged under the canopy of the trees and came to a gentle stop.

Immediately, all of Azzie’s weight came back. She dropped to her knees on the floor next to the console. After hours of free fall, she was amazed at how heavy her body felt, how gravity pulled on every muscle and every bone.

“Thank goodness!” said Gwen. She stood up and planted her feet wide apart, stretching. “The landing was a little rough, but it’s good to be down.”

“A little rough?” said Trocmo, snorting. “It’s gentle compared to how human ships land. They just drop in the sea, or glide like a brick, or -- ”

“Shut it,” said Gwen. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Okay, Srini, now what?”

“Let me think,” said Srini, sitting down. “The most important thing we need to do is help Azzie. The best way to do that would be to get back to Earth, but we tried that, and it didn’t work. So we’ve got to figure out something here on this sky sheet. We need something to clean and bind the wound with, and we need food and water.” She stood up. “All of that should be available on this ship, don’t you think, Mr. Trocmo?”

Trocmo scowled.

“Well, Taco?” said Gwen. “How about it?”

He looked at Gwen, who was easily twice his size, and nodded sullenly.

“There’s water for certain, and wraps for the wound, but no food.”

“That will do to start with. Lead on,” said Gwen.

Azzie and Srini waited in the large room. After a few minutes they came back; Gwen was carrying three large plastic bags of water and some long thin strips of brown material.

“Toothpick says these strips are especially for space-rip wounds,” said Gwen as she wrapped them around Azzie’s leg. They felt warm and soft. “They’re not made for humans, but they can’t hurt.”

“We hope,” said Srini.

They all gulped down water. Azzie looked out the window at the jungle all around them. Huge trees, dozens of feet thick, towered over them and blocked out the sun with massive leaves. Vines and smaller plants choked the jungle floor.

“Is there anything out in that jungle that we can eat?” asked Srini.

Trocmo looked reluctant to answer, but Gwen shot him a warning look. “There are things we can eat,” he said. “Most of it fills up our stomachs but doesn’t give us many nutrients. Others are poisonous; others are good. There are fruits and also fish we can try catch.”

“Sounds good,” said Gwen. “You and I can go.”

“Are you kidding?” said Srini. “I’m not going to let you be the only ones to see an alien jungle.”

“Someone needs to stay with Azzie,” said Gwen.

But Azzie was already standing up. “I feel much better,” she said. She tried a couple of steps. Her leg ached a little, but she could manage. “I’m coming too.”

“Wow,” said Srini. “I guess that alien bandage really worked.”

Gwen grinned. “Great,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Trocmo led them to the edge of the great window and just stepped through it as though it were nothing more than a curtain of water. Gwen cast a worried glance at Srini, shrugged her shoulders, and followed. Srini and Azzie followed as well.

When Azzie stepped through, she felt a slight tingle over her skin. Then she was wrapped in a blast of hot, humid air. Her ears buzzed with the cries and chirps of thousands of insects and birds. It smelled sickly-sweet, like overripe fruit, but there were other, stranger smells mixed in -- almost like cinnamon and vanilla. Azzie breathed deep. The hot sweet air actually smelled good; perhaps the air in the ship had been getting stale.

There were half a dozen metal steps going down from the edge of the window to the forest floor. At the bottom, Azzie took a good look at the rails they had ridden down on. The ship was still perched on them, resting partly on them and partly on the ground. The rails had swept down from the sky and plunged directly into the ground; they must have hit with tremendous force, because a circle of toppled trees surrounded the impact point, and the ground was riven and tumbled.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Trocmo. “The rails are carried on the ship in a compressed liquid form, and woven together like a spider’s web when they’re needed for landing. Once they’re sent out, they become incredibly strong. When they hit the ground, they go hundreds of feet deep. Then the ship rides down the rails to the ground. When the ship is ready to take off again, it can just ride its rails back out into space.”

“Wow,” said Azzie. How many of these rails had plunged into the surface of the Earth?

Trocmo led the way through the dense undergrowth.

“You know the way to the local grocery store?” asked Gwen.

Trocmo laughed. “No,” he said. “But I think we come down near a river. If we find the river, we can get water, and maybe fish.” He was pushing aside the plants as best he could, and they followed his example. There were surprisingly few thorn bushes, although more than once Azzie felt leaves sting her as she brushed past them. Poison?

Much sooner than she’d expected, they arrived at the river. It was broad, lazy and brown, and plants clustered thickly around the edge. Trocmo found an old stump of a massive tree, easily ten feet across, that hung out over the water’s edge. They crawled up on the stump. Trocmo drew out a small plastic cup from somewhere in his ragged pockets and dipped it in the water.

He sniffed it, swirled his finger in it.

“You’re not going to drink it, are you?” asked Srini. “You don’t know what kinds of bugs or diseases might be living in it.”

“Actually,” said Trocmo, “water from Earth is much more dangerous, for you and for me, than any other water you find in the universe. Bugs and diseases in Earth’s water know how to hurt the life of the Earth, but whatever bugs might be in this water have never met the insides of humans before. So I think it is fine.”

“Trocmo,” said Gwen, “we have plenty of water from the ship. Why do we care whether we can drink this water?”

“If we can drink the water,” he said, “then we can eat the fish.”

Before any of them could object, he swallowed it in one gulp.

For a moment he stared at them with his large brown eyes. Then he smiled, and his face looked surprisingly pleasant.

“It’s water,” he said.

“Good,” said Srini. “Who has been fishing before?”

“I have,” said Gwen. “Just tell me what to use as bait.”

“There are bugs in the soil,” said Trocmo.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Gwen. She began poking in the earth with a stick.

“I saw some hisssss fruit on the way here,” said Trocmo to Srini.

“Say that again?” said Srini.

“I’m sorry, I said it in Warrior language,” said Trocmo. “A fruit that they like to eat, I think it is good for us as well. I saw it as we walked along. I can show you.”

“Good,” said Srini. “Azzie, can you get together some firewood?”

“I’ve never done that before,” said Azzie, suddenly nervous.

“Hey, don’t worry, it’s easy,” said Gwen. “I mean, it’s easy to look, but it might be hard to find any. Just look for any dry wood you can find. Don’t bother trying to cut wood from a living tree. If you have trouble, just don’t bother with it; I’ll help you after I’ve caught a fish.”

“Okay,” said Azzie, trying to sound confident. She stepped carefully away through the undergrowth. Insects buzzed everywhere in the air, but she wasn’t bitten: she supposed they didn’t like the way she smelled. Finding dry wood was tough, but Azzie was lucky. She found a huge tree that had toppled over and lay resting at an angle against another tree. It had not rotted much, since it was far above the ground, and was quite dry. She broke off branches and bark from it, all that she could carry. Her leg felt almost entirely better now.

She brought it back to the tree stump by the river. Gwen had taken some string from her pocket and tied the end of it to a four-foot branch she’d taken from a nearby tree. Then she’d taken a pin from her pocket, bent it into a hook, and tied it to the end of the string. She showed Azzie what she’d found for bait: a six-legged hairy creepy-crawly. No bites yet, but she was hopeful.

Trocmo and Srini arrived with about two dozen green, spiny, apple-sized fruits tied up in Trocmo’s shirt. He dumped them on the stump.

“Here,” said Gwen. “Use my knife to cut them open.”

Trocmo sneered. Srini scowled back, took the knife and hacked at the fruit, but couldn’t scratch it. Gwen lay down her fishing pole and took a turn at it, but only nicked the knife. Trocmo laughed in a nasty way.

“Okay, genius,” said Gwen. “How do you suggest we open these fruit? If they are fruit. Are you sure you didn’t pick them up in a rock quarry?”

“Give me your gun,” said Trocmo.

“Very funny,” said Srini. “Not a chance.” She put a piece of fruit on the edge of the stump, took out her gun and aimed it carefully. A bolt of darkness from the gun nozzle sliced it neatly in half. Inside it was bright red and juicy with black seeds. Trocmo began eating ravenously, and the girls followed suit. Azzie thought it tasted like watermelon tinged with cinnamon.

Finally Gwen got a nibble on her fishing line. She carefully, gently pulled on the string, and drew from the water a fish-shaped beast about the size and color of a football, with stubby fins and entirely too many eyes.

“Dinner!” she said happily.

"You can eat it if you want,” said Srini.

“Oh come on, I’m sure it’s delicious,” she said. “Right, Trocmo?”

“I’ve never had that before,” he said doubtfully.

“I caught it, now somebody’s going to eat it,” said Gwen, growling. “I’ll clean it, and you folks get the fire going.”

They started the fire all right (using matches from Gwen’s seemingly bottomless pockets). Gwen cooked the fish thoroughly and took a bite. They watched her as she chewed slowly.

“That’s disgusting,” she said at last, and she spat out her bite and threw the rest of the fish into the fire. They cracked up laughing.

After they ate the quarry fruit, they felt beyond exhaustion. They stumbled back and went out of the hot sweet jungle air into the cool dry ship, and curled up on blankets to sleep. (The couches of the Warriors were lumpy in all the wrong places.) Azzie felt almost comfortable and safe, for the first time since she’d looked up into the sky and seen the stars disappear. Tomorrow they would have to try to figure out some way to find their way home, and when she closed her eyes she could see her apartment building burning; but at least her stomach was full and satisfied. She fell asleep quickly, and dreamed that she was trying to tell her mother something very urgent, but she couldn’t make her understand.