Powers That Be (8 page)

“Whatever,” she said noncommittally, not willing to accept the truth, or the inevitability, of his suggestion.

They walked the rest of the way back to the main house in silence, a silence that was the most companionable one she had enjoyed in many a year. Sean Shongili was a most unusual man. Where under what sun could she possibly have encountered him before?

5

When they reached the house, they almost ran Bunny over: she was in the process of reaching for the door latch just as Sean flipped it up. Seeing her face, Yana knew that something had happened—something bad.

“Message from Adak, Sean. A hunting party found one of the lost teams.”

“They did?” Sean took the hands that Bunny had held out in an unconscious appeal for comfort. “And?”

“There are five still alive . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Which five?”

Yana read into that question that he was amazed that anyone had survived.

“Two of theirs this time, three of ours.”

He dropped Bunny’s hands and started to gather items about the room, cramming them into a pack at the same time he put on outerwear. He was ready in one circuit of the room.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Clodagh’s.” As if that should have been a given.

“Drive us there, will you, Bunny?”

“Sure!” And the girl began to shrug into her wraps.

Yana wondered at how lightly Sean Shongili had dressed for a long drive in freezing temperatures. He hadn’t even rolled down his sleeves or done up his shirt collar, and the smooth pelted fur jacket he donned wasn’t nearly as thick as Bunny’s or hers. He grinned as he caught her expression.

“I’ll be warm enough.”

Then he hurried them out to the sled, where the dogs were already standing in their harness, yapping as if infected by the urgency that possessed the humans.

With deft movements, Sean settled Yana into the sled, bundled the furs about her, ignoring the cat’s attempts to get into her lap, and gave her custody of his pack, telling her not to let it fall off.

Then he snugged his hood over his head, tying it under his chin, and shoved his hands in the thick fur mitts that were fastened by thongs to his sleeves.

“Come on, Bunny!” he yelled, and whistled at the team; the dogs strained against their harness even as Bunny wrenched the brake free of the ice and paddled with her foot to set the sled in motion.

The sled bumped forward, Yana clutching the pack for fear it would tumble off her fur-encased lap. If she had thought the outbound trip was fast and jarring, though she knew that Bunny had gone easily for her sake, the inbound journey was another matter. Sean ran beside Maud, the red leader dog, urging her to her best pace, chivying Bunny down steep inclines when she would have taken safer routes.

Yana hung on, determined not to close her eyes when the sled tilted at alarming angles and the landscape seemed to fly past her. She was particularly aware of the increased speed when the sled thudded from one hummock to another, crashing her bones together. Or when the cat, who had somehow crawled back under the rugs, sunk its claws through her pants leg to keep from being thrown about. Stands of hardwoods that had seemed miles apart during the outward journey streaked past her with barely an interval between them.

The abrupt arctic daylight had waned by the time they neared the settlement and saw its lit windows blinking welcomingly through the trees at them. The dogs slowed as they reached Clodagh’s, making their way through a welter of other teams parked there. Sean grabbed the pack with a flash of a grateful grin at Yana and charged up the steps, Bunny right behind him as soon as she had hauled on the brake.

Grunting but telling herself that of course she understood their haste, Yana peeled back the furs and extricated herself from the sled. The cat jumped out and disappeared under the pilings. Oddly enough, as Yana straightened up she found that she wasn’t nearly as stiff this time. She felt for the bottle of Clodagh’s elixir and wondered what it contained. Then, hesitant about intruding, she climbed the steps to the porch. She could hear the subdued buzz of many voices even before she opened the door and slipped inside. The warmth was like a blanket surrounding her, but the press of people almost made her withdraw.

Peering over and around the bodies packed inside the room, she could see no part of the injured survivors, though there was a long clear space in one corner of the room where they might be lying obscured by the crowd. Clodagh’s head and hips appeared from time to time, and once she saw what looked like the top of Sean Shongili’s head. Bunny was standing by the stove, where she was precariously dribbling coffee into two cups, trying to keep from spilling any as she was repeatedly jostled.

Yana hoped one was for her, and it was: Bunny threaded her way through the throng and offered Yana a cup. She reached eagerly to accept it, for the warmth on her hands as well as her innards. She blew across the surface and at the first careful sip wondered if Sean used Clodagh’s recipe or if it was the other way around.

“Could you see? Are they going to make it?” she asked, nodding toward the corner.

Bunny nodded, her eyes dark with worry.

“Ours’ll recover a lot faster’n theirs, so there’ll be more questions an’ tribunals and inquests and stuff.”

Which Bunny felt were irrelevant, Yana decided. “Isn’t it just that your people are better acclimated?”

Bunny looked disgusted. “Of course they are and we try to explain that to them, but
they
”—the pronoun was used in contempt—“never admit the fact. Their people should somehow be better able to cope when most of ’em’s never lived outside at all. And,” she added with perplexity in her voice, “that’s not the real problem anyway. The real problem is that they think they have to know everything about everything, and they don’t. Even we who live here don’t. But we know enough to pay attention to what the planet tells us, and they don’t seem to pay attention to nothin’.”

Yana sipped, letting the warmth thaw the ice in her blood. Maybe she would do better if she ran like the others did. She had done nothing but sit, and she was whacked—whereas Bunny’s face was ruddy with stimulation, and Sean hadn’t even looked puffed when he had grabbed the pack off her lap. Everyone in the room had settled down to what might be a long wait, one of many they endured with great patience. Yana felt her own running out, complicated by a growing sense of claustrophobia in a room packed with folk she didn’t know well enough to wait equably with. She shifted her feet restlessly, wondering if she could withdraw without giving offense. Not that that was so much a problem, since she doubted anyone would notice one less body in the room except with gratitude. A more realistic concern was whether she
could
make it through this bunch to the door. And if and when she did, what would she do then, back at her cold and lonely cabin? That half hour in Sean’s company had emphasized the disadvantages of solitude. She had felt oddly alive and on the alert in his company, the first time she had felt that way since Bry.

“Look, this might take hours,” Bunny said, and Yana glanced sharply at her. “I’ve got to tend the dogs.”

“Could I help, so I’ll know something about their care?” Yana asked, hoping to delay the onset of bleaker hours alone.

“Sure.” Bunny grinned, pleased at her offer. “It’s not all that hard.”

“If you say so,” Yana said, and bundled back up in her winter gear to walk beside the team as Bunny drove it back over to the kennels at her Aunt Moira’s.

It wasn’t hard, exactly, but it required Yana to concentrate as she followed Bunny’s example in removing the harness, checking it for wear, oiling it, and hanging it up properly, then checking the dogs’ paw pads for any cuts and applying an ointment concoction of Clodagh’s between the toes before chaining the animals up.

“You’re lucky,” Bunny told her. “I cleaned the dog yard and put down fresh straw this morning already, so you don’t have to do that part.”

Having shown her what to do, Bunny retrieved some prechopped chunks of fish and other meat from a barrel outside her door and went into the house. When Yana had finished the dogs, she went inside and saw that Bunny was boiling the preboned meat, mixing with it what looked like hardened bread dough and fat. She finally crumbled up some suspiciously familiar pink-and-green tablets that looked like vitamin-mineral supplements of the kind issued to company troops. While the mixture heated, Bunny thawed snow on the back of the stove. Once it was melted, she and Yana used the same container to water each of the dogs in turn. By then the mixture was cooked to Bunny’s liking, and they distributed it to the hungry animals.

Some of the dogs picked at their food like company diplomats at a high-level formal dinner; others wolfed it down with great gusto, growling over it, their jaws snapping as they ate.

“They—uh—seem to enjoy their food,” Yana observed as the dog nearest her savagely gulped down his carefully prepared meal as if it were a bear, just-killed.

Bunny shrugged, grinning at the vagaries of her charges. “They do, right enough. And if one doesn’t get it down fast, another’ll try to snag it. That’s one reason we chain them apart. Cuts down on meal fights.”

“That cat of Clodagh’s that followed me home seemed to want to eat the fish Seamus gave me frozen solid,” Yana said.

“Nah! He might bat it around a little and gnaw at the edges, but he’ll wait for it to thaw, or better yet, for you to cook it for him.”

“The same way you cook for the dogs?”

“Of course not. The same way you cook for yourself.”

“I don’t,” Yana admitted. “I’m ship-bred, you know. Food supplements and healthful nutrient bars for rations. Occasionally we get something else, but only the crew members assigned to cook for special functions learn to cook. So, how would
you
cook it to feed yourself and, uh, guests?”

Bunny grinned at the folly of the people who ran her world but didn’t know how to feed themselves, then patted Yana on the hand and said, “Don’t worry. It’s not hard. I just stew it with a handful of my aunt’s herbs and it makes right good eating.”

Yana thought that over for a moment. Then, taking a breath, she asked, “Tell me which herbs make that sort of fish palatable.”

“Sure, but you ain’t had a chance to get any yet. So I’ll scrounge enough. Meetcha at your place.”

Yana had her stove fire going nicely when Bunny arrived with a small sack of the things she had filched from her aunt’s kitchen.

“Aw, don’t worry about a pinch of this and that,” Bunny said when she saw Yana’s worried expression. Then in short order, she demonstrated the art of concocting a fish stew from the herbs, a handful of rice, and chunks of what cooked into edible root vegetables. Bunny used all the fish from the string. “Because a stew gets better the longer it’s alive. All you gotta do is freeze what’s left overnight and thaw it on the back of the stove when you’re getting hungry. I’ll also show you how to make pan dough.”

She did, and Yana ate a gracious sufficiency. Bunny was still mopping up the stew juices with some of the pan dough when Sean’s unmistakable voice called out, “Sláinte, Yana!”

Bunny was closer to the door and, at a nod from Yana, went to open it.

“Ah! Any left in the pot?” he asked, sniffing expectantly.

“Wouldn’t Clodagh feed you?” Bunny asked, catching a plate and a spoon from the shelf on her way to the stove.

“She had enough, and I needed a little space,” Sean said, undoing his coat and hanging it neatly beside the others on the door pegs.

“Who got out this time?” Bunny asked as he settled at the makeshift table so comfortably that Yana stifled the apologies she was about to make.

He paused long enough to ingest a spoonful before he answered.

“The Yallup group,” he said, jamming a piece of pan bread down into the juices. “Lavelle, Brit, and Sigdhu made it; they’ll be grand with some rest and decent eating, though Siggy lost another toe. The odd thing”—Sean wriggled his spoon about as if the movement would solve the oddity—“is that two of them made it.”

“Yeah!” Bunny looked awed by that.

Shouldn’t outworlders survive on this planet if their native guides were efficient? Yana wondered.

“Who?” Bunny went on.

“The team geologist the Yallups sent, father and son, Metaxos by name, Diego and Francisco. Damn fool brought his kid along for the experience.” Sean spaced his phrases, eating in between gouts of information. Bunny snorted at the folly of folks’ notions of experience; Sean grinned, light from the mare’s-butter lamp on the table dancing in his silver eyes. “The son’ll sing about it. The father . . . now, that’s where the trouble begins. He’s aged. The boy said his dad was mid-forties. Looks closer to ninety.”

“Ohhhhh!” Bunny drew out her exclamation, rounding her eyes, apparently finding great significance in this.

“Does hypothermia age you?” Yana asked.

“On Petaybee it can,” Bunny said tersely. “So did they find anything?” She leaned conspiratorially close to Sean, her eyes glistening with eagerness in the lamplight. “The usual?”

Sean snorted, sopped up more stew on a piece of bread, and ate it before he answered. Yana thought he deliberated over his reply.

“More or less the usual. The kid gave some pretty concise descriptions. Caves, glistening lakes of free water, horned animals, sleek water beasts—you know, the usual.” He broke off more bread, affecting keener interest in the business of eating than telling.

“Ahhhh!” Bunny let out another of her pregnant syllables.

“If you’re deliberately speaking in parables, I’ll go walk the cat,” Yana said, rising.

Sean’s arm reached out and pulled her back down to her chair, grinning an apology.

“People lost for weeks, gripped by hypothermia and close to the edge of starvation, tend to hallucinate.”

“But you say he gave concise descriptions . . .”

“Vivid ones, though not necessarily accurate,” Sean said, but Yana had the feeling he believed them. “Then the Spacebees arrived and took them all away. Rounded on Odark’s people for not bringing them directly in to SpaceBase. But Terce was at the base and you were with me out at the lab, so what were they supposed to do? Clodagh’s is certainly on the way, and closer.” Sean took a deep breath, suppressing his disgust. “They needed aid as soon as could be. They got it. I’m not sure the geologist will pull through, though.”

He chased the last of the juice in his bowl with the last of the pan bread. Yana debated the protocols in her mind and had her hand on the stewpot to offer more when Sean held up his hand.