Quest Beyond Time by Tony Morphett Read Free Book Online Page A

He looked down, and found himself looking at carved letters each about thirty centimetres high.
    LION they spelled.
    He stood up, and dropped to his knees before the stone ledge. Grass and a small-leafed ground vine covered some of the surface of the stone. He tore at it, ripping it away so that he could see if there were any more writing.
    When he had finished, he was looking at the remains of what had once been a sign, impressed into a concrete wall.
    LION ND SAFAR PAR it read.
    ‘Lion and Safari Park,’ he whispered. He could see, in his mind’s eye, the days, the weeks, the months following the nuclear destruction of the cities. The open range zoos abandoned by fleeing employees, or simply left to themselves as the employees died. Perhaps some zoo keepers had opened the gates before they left or died, hoping to give the animals a chance of survival in the midst of universal death.
    And then the African animals, breeding on the Australian plains, eating sheep and cattle, kangaroos and wallabies, breeding, adapting.
    Now Mike understood why the lions had been there on the day he had flown into the future.
    He put out a hand and touched the stone. He and it came from the same civilization. It was like something found on the beach, washed up from the wreckage of a great ship. For a moment, Mike was suddenly hit by a wave of loneliness and personal loss.
    After a moment he became aware that Fergus and Katrin were watching him. He turned from the sign as Fergus said, ‘He can read the Letras.’ Fergus looked at Mike. ‘Are you Warlock? Are you Shaman?’
    Mike looked at Katrin. Instinctively he felt she was more of a friend to him than the grim warrior was.
    ‘Only the Wise Ones can read the Letras,’ she said.
    ‘And the Warlocks and the Shamans and the Witchboys,’ interposed Fergus flatly.
    ‘In Before, we are all taught to read,’ Mike said, carefully laying no stress on his words, desperate to avoid misunderstanding. He had learned that, here and now, misunderstanding could be a terminal condition.
    At Mike’s answer Fergus simply closed his eyes and drew the tips of his right index and middle fingers across his eyelids from left to right.
    Mike knew that he had somehow just uttered another blasphemy. Suddenly he felt tired with Fergus and his gestures. He shrugged. ‘That’s how it is. Was.’ He felt confused and irritable.
Take it or leave it,
his tone suggested.
    Fergus glared at him, and then the harsh features relaxed into what might have been intended as a smile. If so, it was a smile guaranteed to give its recipient nightmares. ‘Since I cannot teach you to mend your mouth, I shall have to teach you to use a sword,’ the warrior said. ‘For all people here are not as gentle and forgiving as I am.’
    They were in open country when the sun was at its highest, and Fergus and Katrin insisted on eating as they walked. There could be no stopping in a place with no cover. They had told Mike that the reason for heading inland was that there was a river to cross. At the coast it broadened into a bay, and round the bay lived a fishing clan with whom the Murrays were at feud. Up-river lived the River Yobbies but for them Fergus and Katrin had nothing but contempt. They laughed about their legendary clumsiness and foolishness.
    Mike was obscurely glad to know that racism was alive and well in the Twenty-fifth Century. It made him feel at home.
    As they moved out of the open country again, they crossed remains of the freeway. Mike was again gripped with a feeling of loss. All of the people he knew, parents, friends, teachers, were dead in the far past and only he of his generation was alive. His sixteen years felt as if they weighed a century. Five centuries, he corrected. Five. Five hundred years. He was lost, he thought again, five hundred years from home.
    When he saw the Mobil sign, he could have wept.
    It was, of course, no longer standing. The sign and its concrete stanchion had fallen centuries before.