Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Thanks, uh . . . Seamus,” she said, pretending to admire them. She didn’t have any idea what to do with them, so she hung the string over the back of the chair, where it was instantly the object of much interest from the cats.

  “Get away, you lot,” Clodagh said, wading through orange fur to rescue the fish. The cats stood on their hind feet and batted at the string as she held it aloft. “Better hang them outside until she’s ready to go, Seamus.”

  “Right,” Seamus said, casting an odd sidelong glance at Yana. She waved and said thanks again, and planned to ask Bunny later about the etiquette involving gifts of fish.

  They stayed a short while longer, and while they were there two more people came by, a rakish-looking girl introduced as Arnie O’Malley and her little boy, Finnbar, who chased the cats. Finally, all of the extraneous guests left, the girl calling, “Wait’ll you see my new latchkay dress, Clodagh! The lads will be making songs about me for years to come.”

  “That Arnie, always showing off,” Bunny said disgustedly.

  “What are these songs everybody talks about?” Yana asked. She was full of food and on her third glass of home brew and was feeling pleasantly relaxed and even a bit sleepy. “Are there a lot of musicians in this town?”

  “Nah, only old man Ungar and his bunch,” Bunny said. “But everybody makes up songs.”

  “Everybody?” Yana had never personally known anybody who wrote songs, or admitted to the practice.

  “Yes,” Clodagh said. “We make songs about everything, even one about the reason we make songs, but that particular song belongs to Mick Oomilialik. Maybe he’ll sing it for you at the latchkay.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s a big feast and sing where we get together to talk things over. My Inuit ancestors called such a thing a potlatch and my Irish ancestors called it a ceili, so one of the first batch here combined it into latchkay. Anyway, everybody makes songs to sing then about what’s happened during the last season. Sometimes villages get together and share food and news.”

  “So you only have them once a season?”

  “Except for weddings, funerals, and other special events, yes.”

  “Well, what might you write a song about, for instance?”

  “Charlie having to leave is one kind of thing. I might write a song pretending I was Charlie.”

  “And you can make up music and everything?”

  “Oh, no, not usually. Mostly we use the old tunes. And there’s drumming, too,” Bunny said. From Clodagh’s wall she pulled down a circular drum, holding it in one hand and using the other to extract a stick from the back of the drum.

  “Our drums can be used like Inuit drums and beaten with a wand in strict time,” Clodagh explained, “or if you want to use it like an Irish bodhran, you beat it with that little stick. Or your fingers, if you’re real clever. When a song is first presented, we use only the drums so everybody can hear the words. Later on, if the song’s owner permits it, others sing along and other instruments join in.”

  “I can sing her one of mine,” Bunny said.

  Clodagh looked mildly surprised. “Okay. I’ll drum. Which one?”

  “About getting my snocle license. Irish Washerwoman.”

  “What?” Yana asked.

  “Oh, ‘Irish Washerwoman’ is the tune,” Clodagh told her. “Our ancestors liked each other well enough but it was easier for the Inuits to adapt to the Irish music than it was for the Irish to adapt to the Inuit. Of course, some of us don’t have the voice for Irish melodies, so then we sing in the Inuit way.”

  “It’s more like chanting,” Bunny said. “So our singing is like us—all mixed-up. Anyway, here’s my, song:

  “Oh, I’m getting my license to snocle today

  From the big shots although I’m a Petaybee maid

  You’ll forgive me if I’m very vocal, hooray!

  But I’m getting my license to snocle today.

  “That’s all there is,” Bunny finished. “But I sure was happy about it, even if it’s just a short little song. I didn’t want to brag too much.”

  Clodagh said, “Here, I’ll sing you a song in the other style.

  “Before it awakened the world was alive.

  It brooded in a shell of ice and stone.

  Alone, thinking of its own mysteries,

  Deep dreaming.

  Jajai-ija.”

  Clodagh was chanting slowly and deliberately, and the effect was that of an eerie tune, similar to some styles Yana had heard on shipboard holos and in company pubs throughout the galaxy. The last note of the verse was very low, almost guttural.

  “Then came the men with their ships, their fire

  Awakening the fire within the world

  Sundering rock, cutting river channels,

  Great holes were gouged for ocean beds.

  Jajai-ija.

  “Painful was the awakening, the beginning

  As only beginnings can be painful

  But the pain mused the world from dreaming

  Melted its blanket and dribbled water in

  The mind of the world

  Jajai-ija!

  “Awake, the world grew leaves

  Awake, the world grew roots

  Awake, the world grew mosses and lichens

  Awake, the world knew wind.

  Jajai-ija!

  “Then came more men and the world grew wings

  The world grew feet and hands.

  The world grew paws and claws.

  The world grew feathers and fur.

  Jajai-ija!

  “Noses smelled the new world and mouths tasted it

  Fangs tore it and fins and scales swam through

  The new waters. And the tails of the world

  Wagged, happy that it had been given a voice.

  Happy that it woke up.

  Jajai-ja-jija!”

  Yana nodded appreciatively, while pictures of ice caves and snow plains and various disjointed animals somehow connected to the planet’s surface kaleidoscoped in front of her eyes. The blur had become audible as well as visual. When Clodagh was done, Yana smiled and thanked her for the song and the meal and refrained from saying that the Corps of Engineers terraforming department might well wish to adopt that song as their anthem if they ever heard it. Clodagh began clearing the table, and Bunny pulled on her parka.

  Although Bunny was willing to drive her home, she let Bunny take her dogs straight back to their kennels and walked back. Blurred and blithe, she carried her pack and her string of fish, enjoying the snapping freshness of the air, thinking that maybe the world in Clodagh’s song had lungs, too—healthy ones.

  She hung the fish outside the door, as they had hung at Clodagh’s, up high, the effort costing her another coughing fit that doubled her over in the snow until she was afraid she would freeze to death. She crawled inside and started to spread the blanket on her bed, then saw by the moon’s light through the windows that there was already a soft brown fur spread over it, the cat peacefully curled on top of it. Yana gratefully joined the little animal, glad of its steady, contented breathing and its warmth.

  Warmth. Diego shuddered to life, staring out through eyelashes frozen together, feeling himself dragged. He rolled over. He hurt bad. His dad had him under the arms and was tugging him, sliding him, inch by inch, over the springy, snow-covered surface.

  “I’m okay, Dad. I can do it,” he said, and rolled over, away from his father. Dad looked as if he needed Diego to pull him in turn. His lips were cracked and bloodless, but there was a great deal of blood elsewhere, frozen on his face and parka ruff from a cut on his forehead.

  “Cave,” Dad said, shouting against the wind. “Under—the ledge. Limestone—”

  “Tell me when we get in there,” Diego yelled back. Somewhere very far away dogs howled, and he thought maybe he heard voices, too, but they didn’t sound close. That Dinah was something, though. Maybe Lavelle would let her loose, so she could come and find them.

&nbs
p; “We’ll be okay, Dad,” he said, as much to reassure himself as his father, but even to his own ears his voice sounded no louder than a whisper compared to the wind.

  They crawled toward the piece of shadow looming under the side of the hill amid all the white. Snow drifted and blew in front of it.

  His father took a laser pistol from his pocket. “Wild . . . animals,” he said, and they crawled into the opening.

  They huddled inside, listening to the wind howl outside. Diego’s dad looked bad to him; he seemed to have doubled his age in just a few minutes. His black hair was iced over, and the thick black eyebrows that normally made his dark eyes seem so penetrating were dead white with encrusted snow and ice. His expression was not so much scared as dazed, and the blood from the cut was running again, pretty freely. Diego’s own face was wet, too, as was the ruff on his parka. Then he realized that was because it was warmer here in the mouth of the cave.

  “Dad, let’s go on back in. It’s warm in here. Come on, let’s keep out of the cold till the storm’s over.”

  He felt more like his father’s father than his son then, and that was as scary as being stuck out in the blizzard. But Dad nodded a little stiffly and followed him.

  The passage sloped sharply downward for a time, and it was very narrow. Dad had to squeeze sideways and kneel to get through one part, but it had grown so warm that Diego took off his hat, mittens, and muffler and stuffed them in his pocket and unfastened his parka. About this time he began to hear the humming from inside the cave, as if it housed some huge machine. For all he knew, maybe it did. The company had made this planet, hadn’t they? At least that’s what they claimed, though Diego privately thought it was pretty weird to create such a physically inhospitable place.

  The path bent sharply to the right, then to the left, and seemed to stop. Diego groped toward the wall in front of him, his hands touching strange indentations, like grooves swirling in some sort of design.

  With his touch, the wall gave way and a soft, eerie light from within sent a shaft to meet them. Diego pressed forward into the room, where flame-colored liquid bubbled up in a central pool and the walls glowed with phosphorescence, where roots and rock formations twined and curled into strange designs in the elongated, rough shapes of animals and men, and where the humming was so loud, so perfect, so beautiful that after a while Diego thought he must be hearing the voices of the angels he had once read about—and they were telling him things. He listened so closely that he could not hear his father screaming.

  4

  Yana awoke the next morning at the cat’s insistence. It stood by her head and, every time she tried to go back to sleep, poked its nose in her face. She seriously considered throwing it across the room, but then decided that both it and she needed something to eat. She could hardly inflict corporal punishment for a reasonable demand.

  She had a collapsible pot in her survival kit and still had the water left in the thermos jug Bunny had loaned her. She set water on to heat and retrieved one of the fish from the hook outside her door, but from there on she had no idea what to do with it.

  There were still some food pellets in her personal baggage, so she gulped down a green one and a pink one and set the fish on the stove to thaw. When it had well and truly stunk up the cabin, she gave it to the cat, who danced with delight.

  “Don’t tell Seamus,” she said to the cat. “I think he meant for me to cook it, but between you and me, I never learned how to cook a meal, just get the basic pills I need down my gullet.”

  The cat looked up through slit eyes, purring and growling over the fish at the same time, its expression clearly saying, “Your loss is my gain.”

  Yana was used to the close confinement of a living area within a hostile environment but found that despite her fatigue and illness she had trouble remaining inside her cabin for more than two hours at a time. It was cold outdoors, and the gear she had to wear to be outside was heavy and clumsy, but she could by God breathe the air, however gingerly.

  During the few hours when the sun made the sky bright blue and the snow sparkle, she would have clawed her way through the door to get out if she’d had to. With all of its current landmasses clustered near the poles, Petaybee’s light and darkness cycles closely resembled those of the polar outposts of Earth, where both extremes seemed to last for months at a time. Fortunately, she had arrived late in the dark cycle, so she got some differentiation between night and day, though not as much as she would have gotten in the artificially regulated watch cycles aboard company corps spacecraft.

  She saw someone sliding past her cabin on long skis and rushed outside without her hat to ask them where they had gotten the skis.

  The young boy flushed with more than activity. “They—uh—they’re made around here,” he said finally, but she could see the Intergal logo on his boots.

  “Could I buy a pair at the company store, do you know?” she asked, thinking she had yet to find the damned store.

  He didn’t say anything but slithered hurriedly past, which told her they probably were neither made on Petaybee nor sold at the store: more likely they had been “relocated” illegally from SpaceBase.

  Down the street, someone carrying a package emerged from the doorway of one of the houses. The figure, of rather greater mass than most, walked-waddled-glided toward her on the ice, and Yana recognized Aisling, the blanket maker she had met at Clodagh’s.

  “Sláinte, Yana,” Aisling said.

  “Uh . . . sláinte, yourself, Aisling. Say, I’m trying to find my way around the village. Can you show me where the store is?”

  “Sure. I just left there. Why, what do you need?”

  “Nothing in particular. I just wanted to know what was available.”

  “Not much, but come on, I’ll show you. Mostly, we try to make our own from what the planet provides. Some of us trade what we make at the store for the few things they have that we can’t manufacture ourselves. Our stuff never stays in the store, though. I think they’re sold for triple, maybe four times, what we’re paid, on ships and space stations and to other colonies. So mostly we deal directly with each other. You know, one of my blankets for one of the good skinning knives Seamus makes, or Sinead will trade a moose hindquarter for a mountain sheep fleece for me or enough mare’s butter for our lamps. Old Eithne Naknek often trades the sweaters she knits for food and wood, and we all trade hides to cut for boots and parkas. When I can get cloth, I can make real pretty things for latchkays. Used to do that a lot, but since the SpaceBase closed to civilians, you can’t hardly get fabric anymore.”

  “I can see where I need to get to know who to go to for what,” Yana said. She could also see that she was going to need some barterable commodity other than company scrip to get by. She had never tried hunting for food before. Most planets where she had touched down had still been too new for anyone to be sure what was palatable and what was poisonous; and anyway, there was always the awkward possibility of ending up inadvertently lunching on one’s host species.

  Aisling took her into the store. From the outside, it looked like just another house; inside it seemed even tinier, with the stove dominating the room and counters all around the edges. Flanking the stove were two tables, sparsely littered with bags of nutrient tablets and uniform neckties and buttons as well as trousers in very small sizes. Aisling was scanning the shelves beyond the counters.

  “Look, Yana. There’s a good small pot. You better grab it. We’ve got one, but anything useful goes quick.”

  Yana purchased the pot. Looking further for something useful, she saw only small machine parts, burned-out chips, and multicolored wires.

  “Sinead takes the wire and welds it into designs on tools and pots,” Aisling told her as they left. “And uses the chips for jewelry. You should come over for supper sometime and we’ll show you. Though everybody will be bringing things to trade or gift with at the latchkay.”

  Yana said she would like to do that, and Aisling continued on her way.

>   Two days later, as Yana was slowly waking up with a cup of hot watery beverage between her hands, she was jolted out of her semi-trance by the sound of dog feet and dog whines and howls outside. Bunny’s face, framed by her parka ruff and mittens, appeared in the window. Yana waved at her to come in, and Bunny stuck her head in the door.

  “If you still want to come with me up to Uncle Sean’s place, come on. I’ll wait out here with the dogs, but you better hurry. It’s a good two-hour trip, and we may have to track him down once we get there.”

  Yana nodded and, after throwing two more logs in the stove for good measure, pulled on her boots and tugged her coverall and coat over her uniform. Grabbing mittens, hat, and muffler, she walked outside. The cat followed her.

  “You sit there,” Bunny told her, indicating the appropriate place in the sled. She wrapped furs and quilts around her. “It’ll be cold sitting still. Later on, when you’re feeling better, I’ll show you how to drive dogs. Driving keeps you warm.”

  Then Bunny put in Yana’s lap a pair of the big oval nets Yana had seen hanging over Clodagh’s door. “You always want to have all your survival gear with you when you leave the village,” Bunny said. “I don’t think we’ll need snowshoes, but you never know.”

  Something warm landed on Yana’s thighs and burrowed under the furs. She bent over and saw a familiar orange face peeping out at her.

  “Oho! Bunny, can you get rid of the cat?”

  “It’s okay. That’s one of Clodagh’s cats, and they go everywhere.” With that she whistled up the dogs, pulled the brake up from the ice, and pushed with her foot, as if the sled were a scooter. With much wagging and anxious whining, the foxy-looking red dogs began pulling the sled down the icy expanse between the houses, around a corner, and out onto the river again.

  For a while the ride was serene, the sled swooshing over white still lit by the light of moons and stars, Bunny occasionally calling to the dogs or to Yana to look at one set of tracks or another and pointing out “snow goose,” “fox,” or “moose,” accordingly. Then she whistled more sharply, shouted “Ha!” and the dogs made a rather sharp turn up over the bank of the river and through the slender, snow-draped trees.