Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Not much. Too busy warming up and far too glad to have been found to deal with more than that right now.”

  Yana nodded. She knew what Sean meant. “They’ll be debriefed then?” she asked.

  “Oh, and how!” He tilted the chair back, balancing himself with one foot on the table leg.

  “Front, back, inside out, and outside in,” Bunny agreed, shaking her head as if she felt sorry for the victims. “Did they find anything? I mean, anything real?”

  “Like the deposits they thought sure they’d locate?” Sean’s voice was level, but there was a silent laugh in his eyes, as if he knew something no one else did and treasured the knowledge. “No, they didn’t find the sites, though Lavelle and Brit swear they should have, for they had updated and accurate readings and should have been right on site when the storm hit them. They dug in, of course.” Bunny nodded, and Sean went on. “No time to make a decent icehouse, but Siggy’s a damfine survival artist.”

  “They owe their lives to him, I’d say,” Bunny remarked stoutly in support of Siggy’s abilities.

  “They do indeed, and the boy, Diego, said as much several times.” Sean shook his head. “I hope they go easy on the kid with this debriefing nonsense. He was telling the truth or I’ve never heard it.”

  Bunny’s mouth twitched irritably. “They wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them.”

  “And it has.” Sean and Bunny locked eyes, sharing some private knowledge. “I must get back,” he said, rising and walking to the door to collect his things.

  “Have you a light?”

  He held up the long cylinder he extracted from a pocket. “I’ll be fine. That rib-sticking stew’ll see me home.” He grinned at Yana, tipping the cylinder to his forehead in gratitude. “Yanaba, Buneka!”

  The use of formal names surprised Yana, but she smiled and nodded in acknowledgment. He was gone in a swirl of cold air. Peering out her small window, Yana saw him, the cylinder held over his head as he jogged off at an easy pace, quickly lost in the night.

  “Isn’t he taking a dogsled back?” she asked Bunny.

  “Sean? Not that little distance.”

  “That little distance took us nearly two hours.”

  “Oh, he’s a good runner. Lotta times when we go out, he breaks trail for me. Sled’d only slow him up.” Bunny lifted the thermos and shook it. “I’ll bring you more water tomorrow. Thanks for the chow. G’night!”

  A second swirl of cold air saw her away, leaving Yana alone, confused and with plenty to think over.

  Over the next couple of days she didn’t see much of either Bunny or Sean, nor hear anything about the rescued men, although she did glimpse figures in Intergal regulation winter-survival uniforms lumbering through the streets more than once. The conversations she had with others in the settlement never touched on the subject she knew was in everyone’s minds, as if the people thought they could will the incident into nonexistence by carefully avoiding it. Clodagh appeared on her doorstep the first morning, a lumpy bundle in one big hand and four cats at her heels. They promptly entered and did a quick recon before settling near the stove while Yana politely invited her in, though she was damned if she knew what to offer in the way of hospitality. She still hadn’t had a chance to get in any supplies, and her fish stew was not going to last four days if that was all she had to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her stomach was learning to demand food, not the bloat of nutrient pills.

  “Did a quick round,” Clodagh said, plopping the bundle down on the rickety table and untying it. A variety of small packets, some of them squares of cloth tied with a narrow thong, were revealed, and a half-dozen small jars. Three seemed to hold salves, pink, white, and green; the largest of the others held salt crystals, the second a dark powder, and the third a red-orange powder. “We’ve good salt supplies from the caves so don’t worry about asking anyone for more when you go short but hot stuff”—and her big fingers closed about the dark powder—“is hard to come by, and you don’t need much to flavor the pot. This”—she indicated the red-orange powder—“is good for the trots. Just enough on the tip of your finger put on your tongue and swallowed with a sip of water. Tastes awful but sure stops the bo-wells.” Yana had never heard the word spoken quite that way. “When your crapper’s full, just tell Meqo. She’s manager of the dung heap this winter. The white stuff is good for frostbite. Use it even if you’re not sure you’re bit. Does no good too late. The pink is for chilblain—keeps ’em from cracking. Watch your toes for the itch . . .”

  “I know about chilblains.”

  “Sure, and I ‘spect most company soldiers do at that,” Clodagh said amiably. “This greeny stuff is antiseptic. You might have some of your own—no? Well, this is better’n anything Intergal ever whomped up. These,” she went on, gesturing at the small packets, “are spices, hots, sweeteners: reckon you can tell which is which by the smell of ’em.” Then she hauled a much larger white sack from the folds of her parka. “Flour, single ration.” A small tightly covered pot followed. “Risings, and soon’s you take a schmerp, add some flour to keep it going. Keep it warm at all times.” After a rummage in her clothing, a small quilted wool affair appeared, and the yeast pot was wrapped inside it. “Beans.” A sack was pulled out of a pocket. “Three kinds. Puto says she has more she’ll add when she gets back here. Navarana and Moira say you can join them in the woods when the time’s right to collect your own wood pile.” From another source, a hatchet emerged and was formally presented to Yana. “I’ll need it back, a’course, when you can get one of your own. Aisling’ll have some yarn for you.” Keen eyes peered into Yana’s. “Unless you don’t know how to knit?”

  Yana shook her head.

  “Nah, a company person wouldn’t need to, would she, drawing supplies direct from Intergal? Well, Aisling’s patient, and there’s nothing she likes better than to start someone off on the right foot, iffen they’re willin’.”

  “I’m willing,” Yana said firmly. “And thanks, Clodagh. I really appreciate all your help.”

  “Pshaw! You’ll do the same in your own turn. Ippies stick together, cocking a snoot at the company for all they’re so superior!”

  With that she swung her ample bulk about with unexpected grace and was out the door before Yana could say more.

  6

  The wind roared down the pass from the mountains, through the foothills, and across the snowy plain that hid treacherous muskeg, rattling the snocle with bullying gusts. Bunny sat inside in full outdoor dress, watching the big shots prowl around and point as if they knew what they were doing.

  They didn’t. Even after they hauled Siggy’s team back out here, way before the team had had a chance to recover from their ordeal, they knew no more than they had before. Of course, being stupid ips, Siggy and the others had no idea what the technical readings actually said, but this was where the storm swept down upon them, losing both ips and company men in a whiteout. Bunny had been in whiteout conditions herself several times along the river with the snocle and going back and forth between Sean’s place and Kilcoole. White snowy ground underfoot, white sky overhead, and white haze and snowfall obscuring any other features of the surroundings, whiteout was disorienting and dangerous. It was a little like she’d heard space described, only white instead of black.

  You could either keep driving, if you knew your trail, and hope you’d come out on the other side or find a landmark, or you just stopped and waited it out. The sensible thing to do, this far from any villages, would have been to bed the dogs down and wait it out, but the geologists had brought a lot of equipment and only allowed space for as much food as they felt they would need on the strict timetable they had set for themselves.

  Lavelle told the company men, “We said, ‘You better stop here until we can see something’ but they said, ‘Aw, no, we’ll just be usin’ our instruments.’ Only problem was, their instruments broke ’cause of the cold.”

  The company men insisted that the instruments had been made for th
is climate and that it was impossible that they would break, and Lavelle had just shrugged. Thereafter she didn’t know much except that the sleds had gotten separated, and the other three had been lost, drivers, dogs, geologists, equipment, food, and all. She had been driving the sled with the boy in it, so she had had room for a few more supplies. Brit had been driving the sled with the father, with Siggy running between them to keep them connected, as he had tried to do with the other sleds before they got lost back up to Moose Lake. Maybe they hit a thin patch of ice. Then, as they were coming down a pretty steep slope, the sleds overturned and both passengers were thrown out of the sleds, to roll down the hill and vanish.

  “Didn’t you think it was a little strange, them just vanishing like that?”

  “No. What I thought was strange was that they couldn’t find us. We were hollering like everything and the dogs were barking. Brit wanted to start searching, thinking maybe they were knocked unconscious, and we did look around where they should have logically been. But when we didn’t find any holes or anything, Siggy said the safest thing to do for everybody was stay put, light a fire, keep warm, and make noises all the time while the whiteout lasted.”

  “Trying to save your own skins, huh?” asked Colonel Giancarlo, the one who had sent Charlie away.

  “No, no,” said a younger captain with a handsome weather-beaten face and a much pleasanter manner. “Very understandable,” he said soothingly to Lavelle, who had started to bristle. “What happened then?”

  Lavelle looked straight at the colonel and said, “Then the weather cleared a little and Dinah kept whimpering, so I unhitched her. She run off and pretty soon we heard her howling; then she came trotting back with the boy. He said she dug through a drift to get him but his father was hurt and could we come and help him pull his father out. He got trapped in sort of a little avalanche, but fortunately, there was a cave in the side of the hill where he was trapped. They made it to the cave, but the snow blew back against the entrance again and it was real dark. The boy said he knew we wouldn’t find them there but it was shelter and he’d been afraid to leave for help for fear he wouldn’t find him again. He’d called out but we didn’t hear each other for the wind.”

  “You didn’t even try to find the others?” Giancarlo snorted contemptuously.

  Lavelle had started yelling then, a rare event for the gentle and mild-mannered woman. “We didn’t even know where the heck we were, mister! If Odark hadn’t found us, I don’t know if we’d have any of us made it back alive. Siggy couldn’t even walk by then, and Brit and I would never have been able to dig the father out without the dogs helping us.”

  All the while the conversation was going on the boy, Diego, stood out there in the cold listening to them flatter on, his face closed except for the occasions when something said or done seemed to make him angry; then his dark eyes would glow like fresh-stoked embers in the snow-burned red rawness of his face.

  Bunny didn’t know what to make of any of it, except that she was tired of acting just smart enough to drive her snocle, but dumb enough and friendly enough so that the big shots would keep talking in front of her, continuing their interrogation as she drove them to the ill-defined area where the party had been discovered. Terce was carrying on as if he had already become part of the inquisition, and the company men didn’t make a move without consulting him.

  It took two days on the snocles, driving them out to where the hunting party had run across the survivors, and then, with the recent snowfall in these parts and the wind blowing drifts everywhere, they could only approximate the location. Bunny shivered. She was out of the wind here in the snocle, and the sky was clear, but outside the wind picked up veils of snow and flung them across the landscape. Behind her, the trail was already drifted over in places. The company men had sent Terce back to make camp at the halfway point with Odark and Brit. Lavelle and the boy had remained behind to “assist with inquiries,” and try to help them determine what had become of the other team members.

  Bunny opened the door and climbed out of the snocle, trudging over to where the men stood arguing. Diego’s adrenaline seemed to have run out while the company men wrangled around him. He had been radiating tension and at times anger at the interrogation, but now he slumped against Lavelle, who put her arm around him. He looked exhausted. He really shouldn’t have been out here again so soon, but his father couldn’t be moved. Siggy definitely had to rest and look after his frostbite, or gangrene might get the rest of his foot. Clodagh had given him some stuff, but the company men had taken him back to SpaceBase and “accommodated” him in a separate room from the crazy man, Diego’s father, until he could be moved with the others to “another facility.” Bunny didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it.

  “Excuse me, folks,” she said to the party, “but we better make tracks while it’s daylight.”

  “I say when we move,” Giancarlo told her. “You do realize, young lady, that if I decide to, I can see to it that your license is revoked?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I know what an important man you are—how important all you people are. And that’s why I’m telling you. If we don’t get going now, I might lose my snocle instead of just my license, or another hunting party might have to find us. Our weather here, sir, as you may have noticed, is tricky. It has lots of—uh, different things—”

  “Variables?” the captain suggested helpfully.

  “Yeah. Those. Lots of variables. And right now a bad storm’s making. Also, sir, that lad looks to me as if he’s all done in.”

  “She has a point, Colonel,” the captain said. “Maybe we should make for camp now that we’ve seen the approximate site and come back better equipped when the weather clears.”

  The colonel glared but waved his mitten toward the snocle.

  Diego Metaxos sat by himself in the corner of the shelter while the soldiers cross-questioned Lavelle. He wished they would let her alone. She had tried to help them—in fact, he thought, she had helped him a lot. And she could help him more, if only the interrogators would go away so he could talk to her.

  Dad’s delirious ravings seemed incredible to those men, and Diego knew they hadn’t really believed him either when he had tried to tell them about the cavern, even though he was obviously unhurt. In a way he didn’t blame them. Now the whole thing seemed like a dream to him—or it would have, except that his father had emerged from the same time and place looking as if he were still trapped in a nightmare.

  Diego wasn’t sure exactly what he and his father had gone through. All he knew was that their experience of that time in the cave had to have been wildly different for Dad than it had been for him, because while he felt fine, something awful had happened to Dad in there. Even after the icicles had melted from his hair, it remained white, and his face was drawn and sunken, like a skull’s, the skin dried and far more wrinkled than it had been. The worst part was that except for the initial babblings, he wasn’t responding to much of anything, just staring straight ahead, as if he couldn’t see at all. The doctors said he was in some kind of severe shock, but how could that be? He and Diego had been together, and whatever it was Diego had experienced, it hadn’t been anything to produce such an effect—at least not in him.

  At first, he had told the rescuers and the company investigators everything, but when he saw their immediate skepticism, he had sense enough to clam up, beginning to doubt and second-guess his own perceptions. He needed to sort it all out, and he didn’t intend to say any more until he was sure Dad would be tended to by someone who cared about him as more than an employee or a subject for study. Unfortunately, civilian dependent teenaged sons didn’t have much clout with the company hierarchy. Dad needed Steve, and he needed him quick.

  And maybe when Steve came Diego could talk with him and go over everything again in his own mind. But right now he shied away from thinking about it.

  One thing was for sure, and that was that the company investigators weren’t going to be able
to answer any of Diego’s questions. They were too busy third-degreeing everyone for answers to listen to questions.

  The girl was looking at him funny. Most of the time she stared straight ahead, pretending to listen to the men as they talked amongst themselves or barked questions at Lavelle. But when they were looking the other way, or at each other, the girl’s eyes slid sideways, trying to meet his, and her mouth opened, as if she were about to speak.

  Finally she got up and went outside, and he thought she had to go check on her snocle or pee or something. When she came back, she casually sat down beside him. None of the company men seemed to notice.

  “I’m Bunny,” she said, sideways out of her mouth.

  “I know. I heard them talking to you. I’m Diego.” He realized he was talking out of the side of his mouth, too. But he felt relieved that someone was finally talking to him rather than around him, and he knew immediately that this girl understood that what had happened to him and his father was not just another academic problem or fact-finding mission.

  Her eyes gleamed the same way the dogs’ eyes had gleamed in the darkness, and her lowered voice reminded him of the whisper of the sled runners on the snow.

  “I know,” she said. “Are you scared?”

  “No—well, scared about Dad, maybe. But otherwise, no.”

  “You ought to be,” she said in a tone that implied she knew something he didn’t know.

  “Why? Is it going to storm again or something?”

  “Probably. But I don’t mean that, I mean them,” she said, nodding to Colonel Giancarlo and the others.

  Diego shrugged. “They’re just doing their jobs, trying to find out what happened,” he said. He watched Giancarlo’s fierce expression as the colonel tried for the fiftieth time to catch Lavelle in a lie, and added, “Not that they seem to believe anybody.”

  “They’re like that. Look, I’ll be around. If you need anything, let me know, okay? I mean, with your da sick, is your mum going to come down here, too? Does she need a place to stay? My people would help.”