Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  “What do you think?” he asked teasingly.

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m not exactly the religious type . . .”

  “Religion has nothing to do with it, Yana. We weren’t worshiping. The planet is alive. It’s only courteous to communicate. There’s—a relationship involved,” he said, quite lightly and happily. She realized that he was more relieved than he cared to admit that she had come through her—introduction—without trouble. He continued his rather nonchalant explanation while draped around her, nibbling her ear. “The company wants us to think that everything on the planet came from them, but that’s not the case. This planet has a mind, and has developed resources, of its own. Living here, most of us know that and accept the gifts, the protection, and in return, we offer it companionship and—I don’t know, expression, I suppose.”

  “But why? Why does it not only accept you but give you so much? If it really is a living, thinking being, it could as well resent you for occupying its surface. What does the planet get out of you—us—being here?”

  He smiled lazily again and ran his finger the length of her spine. “Scientifically speaking? I haven’t a clue. But I do have a theory: I think that the reason probably is—maybe—that Petaybee likes us.”

  “That’s it? It provides for you, lets you live here and allows you this . . .” She searched for a word. “This blissful form of communication just because it likes you?”

  “That’s about the size of it.” He nodded. “And it protects us from its own extremities as well, don’t forget, with the adaptations.” He gave her a delicate nibble on the back of her neck to punctuate his remark.

  “That didn’t ultimately provide enough protection for Lavelle,” she reminded him, trying to sound rational when all she wanted to concentrate on was how to twist in order to nibble him back.

  “It can only protect its people here, Yana. Miracles are seldom things.”

  “Will I grow the adaptations? The—what was that ugly term?—brown fat and the protective layer under the skin?”

  “If you need them.”

  She pressed a thumb roughly across his bare forearm and gave him a quizzical look.

  “Oh, yes I have it,” Sean said comfortably. “And a few other accommodations you’ll just have to find out for yourself. Some of us are more fully adapted than others. I, for instance, am even more a creature of Petaybee than Lavelle.”

  “I don’t believe it! You don’t look different. And you don’t carry an extra ounce of flesh anywhere,” she said, almost accusingly. She was remembering his body all too vividly.

  “Are you sure?” he said in a teasing voice, and his hands began to wander across the skin of her back and arms.

  That was the first moment she realized that she was as naked as he was. When had that happened? Yet their nudity did not surprise her, seeming as natural as if they had just shared a sauna—and she had wanted to see his finely muscled body again. Did this damned planet grant three wishes? Had she taken hers without knowing what she really wanted?

  Of their own accord, her hands began to caress his warm silky flesh, the muscles excitingly firm beneath her fingers. Then Sean added the persuasions of his lips to those of his hands, and Yana responded with an ardor she thought she had lost too long ago to ever regain it. He was so silky, so strong, so agile, suddenly so demanding, and she found she had a few demands of her own. His chuckle seemed to beat against her diaphragm and against her breasts, forcing an echo from her as he rolled himself into her with a speed and skill she had to admire. He filled her as she had never been filled before, and the ascent into ecstasy was almost more than she could bear . . . than they could bear, for Sean, in mind and body, was subtly, and impossibly, linked to her in a way that she had never experienced before. She was herself, matching the urgency of his rhythm; she was him, sheathing and unsheathing with a power that he, too, had never encountered in a long life of couplings.

  They both called out at the same time, in the same voice of joy that was colored with an agony of regret for so ephemeral a moment. As they clung to each other, breathless, unbelieving, that moment seemed uncannily elongated—and all too brief.

  “Yana!” Sean murmured in her ear, his tone reverent.

  “Oh, Sean!” With strengthless arms, she pressed him against her, burying her face in his neck. The million things she wanted to tell him remained unsaid, for words would shatter the sense of bonding and she felt she had to preserve it, extend it.

  For the first time in her adult life, sleep overcame her after sex. Sometime later, Sean shook her gently by the shoulder, kissing the corner of her mouth.

  “Hmmmm.” She didn’t wish to move. She wanted more of him and put her hand out to pull him back to her. But he was dressed. That effectively brought her fully awake.

  “We must leave now, Yanaba,” he said, his eyes tender and his hand gentle as he began to dress her.

  That, too, was a novel experience, being dressed by a lover. She helped him even though she didn’t want to.

  When she was jamming her boots on, he took her hand, pressing it against his leg, and with his free hand, tilted her chin up so she met his eyes. She had to catch her breath against the lovingness in their silvery depths. He stroked her cheek with a touch that reminded her of another one.

  “Sean, if you were taken off-planet—if they hauled you in for questioning like Lavelle? Would you die, too? Torkel was—”

  He put a finger to his lips. “I know. And I can’t stay here—” And she knew he meant Kilcoole, not just this cavern. “But I will return to you”—and the slight emphasis made her heart bump—“whenever I can, Yanaba Maddock.” He dropped his hand to her breast, over her heart, and pressed in hard. “Am I in yours as you are in mine?”

  “Yes.” Why she could admit it so easily she didn’t know. Except that it was true. And it didn’t matter if he never did return to her. She would love Sean Shongili for the rest of her life.

  His lips brushed hers as gently as he had stroked her cheek.

  “Come, we have to hurry.” He turned abruptly and led the way out.

  As they moved up the slope, it seemed to her that the light behind them gradually dimmed. It was dawn when they ducked out from under the cascade. Dawn of which day, Yana wondered.

  12

  Yana was still pleasantly disoriented from the experience in the cave and bemused by lovemaking as they walked back to the village. She was not exactly sure how far they had come from the hot springs when Sean pressed her hand in farewell and disappeared into the trees. Considering their conversation and his sudden insistence that they leave the cave, she was hardly surprised.

  The sky resembled a healing bruise, staining the morning with yellow-brown haze and, even out here in the woods, smelling like a spaceport, which was unusual. Mostly the smells about Kilcoole were delicate and crisp, refined by the cold to mere essences, but now the stench of hot ship-shielding filled the air and cast a pall over the woods. How many troops had landed since she left SpaceBase?

  As she walked out of the woods and into the long clearing preceding the village, one of Clodagh’s cats—the one who lived in her own cabin? she could never be sure—trotted up to her, and a short time later Clodagh appeared.

  Her beautiful smile livened her face as she embraced Yana and kissed her cheek. “Welcome, neighbor. I knew there would be no problem for you.”

  “Sean’s gone, Clodagh.”

  “Very wise. You should find somewhere to go, too, Yana. The soldiers are all over the village now. They came the morning we returned from the chant.”

  “When was that, Clodagh?”

  “Yesterday. Don’t worry. It didn’t take you long for an offworlder. Giancarlo has gone up to Sean’s place with the others, but he was asking for you, too.”

  “I need to find Torkel Fiske before Giancarlo finds me. Is he here, too?”

  “I don’t think so. Bunny will know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Somewhere be
tween here and SpaceBase. They been keepin’ her and Terce and Adak all awfully busy. Adak will know where she is though.”

  As it turned out, they didn’t need to go to the snocle shed. They met Bunny, accompanied by another of the cats, coming down the street toward them through a village that had changed during the time Yana had been in the cave. Snocles ferried uniformed and parka-clad figures up and down the streets, and similar figures wandered between the houses, trying to look as if they were patrolling something. Snocles were parked willy-nilly along the streets. Many of the vehicles were loaded with equipment, and Yana saw two trains of the machines heading away from the village. Several houses farther on, winter-uniformed corps members were slapping together another of the prefab buildings.

  “As you can see, we’ve been invaded,” Clodagh said. “Sláinte, Bunny.”

  “Sláinte, Clodagh. Yana! Oh, Yana, you did great. Isn’t it wonderful?” Yana was momentarily confused all over again as Bunny gave her a welcoming hug, then realized that the girl’s words referred strictly to the earlier portion of Yana’s encounter with the cave, not to the more private events occurring afterward. Still, the relief behind Bunny’s joy reinforced Yana’s recognition that not everyone found the communion wonderful, or even pleasant. The cave—no, the planet—could and did damage those it rejected, or those who rejected it; she wasn’t sure quite what the criterion was. She was just immensely glad to have been found satisfactory.

  She grinned back at the girl. “That it was. Even more wonderful than you can possibly imagine. But right now, Bunny, I need to find Torkel Fiske fast.”

  “That’s dead easy,” Bunny said. “He just left the station for SpaceBase. I’ll take you out there. I’m trying to be there when Colonel Giancarlo is here, and here when he’s there, so he doesn’t remember his threat to take away my license.”

  The usually silent riverbed was now a high-speed thoroughfare, vehicles skiing back and forth, passing each other. The ride to SpaceBase was nerve-racking, because it was obvious, even before Bunny began to veer out of the way of poorly driven snocles, that not every driver was as capable as she was on such a treacherous surface.

  Bunny dropped Yana at the headquarters building and drove off even more cautiously through a great deal of snocle traffic, toward the infirmary, where, she told Yana, she hoped to find Diego.

  As opposed to the bustle outside, headquarters was quiet—stripped of personnel, Yana thought. The door to an inner office stood open, and through it she could see Torkel’s bronze hair shining in the light from his console.

  “Hello, Yana,” he said when she strode in, closed the door behind her, and sat down. He barely looked up at her, which under most circumstances would have been a rather refreshing change from his pronounced attentiveness of the past few days. “I’m on comm line with my father. I’ll be right with you.”

  She waited while he returned to his conversation.

  “Great, Dad, see you soon. Over and out,” he said aloud, tapping the final key. He was still smiling as he turned expectantly to Yana and asked, “What can I do for you?”

  “You offered me Giancarlo’s job. I want it.”

  He grinned. “Is it my turn to say, ‘But this is so sudden’ ?”

  “Torkel, he’s making a balls of the whole thing. Listen, we have got to talk seriously about what’s going on here on Petaybee and the company’s interface with the natives.”

  “Yana, let me remind you of a point that others seem to be forgetting: the natives are transplants of barely two hundred and fifty years ago from Earth. Johnny-come-latelies as our projects go. And from my conversation with your buddy Shongili, it seems to me they’re awfully damned possessive for sharecroppers on company property.”

  “That’s because you only know part of what’s been happening. Look, Torkel, Giancarlo told me to find out what’s been going on with Petaybee and the unauthorized life-forms, and I think I have. Both the natives and my own experience confirm my conclusions. I think you’ll agree, after we’ve talked, that the mining operations can’t be started precipitously, and any mass transfer of the inhabitants of this planet is out of the question.”

  “Excuse me, Yana. Dear. The company makes the decisions; not you, not me, and certainly not the illiterate dregs the company was kind enough to resettle here.” He gave her his best company-negotiator’s poker face. The set-to with Sean had either done some serious damage to his goodwill, or that goodwill had been an act.

  “Torkel. Dear. At least hear me out, okay? You did ask.”

  He relaxed again. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Before you slap my wrist, let me remind you that I was retained by the company to investigate, and I took that as my authorization to do so, not only in what’s happening here on Petaybee, but also in company records pertaining thereto.”

  “You accessed Lavelle Maloney’s autopsy file?” he asked with a one-wolf-to-another-wolf grin.

  “That’s a roger.”

  He shrugged. “I would have preferred you to go through channels, but I see your point. And if you can explain to her friends that birth defects caused her death, rather than our interrogations, so much the better.”

  “They weren’t birth defects, Torkel.”

  “No?”

  “No. According to Shongili and the others, they were anatomical adaptations engendered by contact with Petaybee.”

  “Really? Is there any proof of this?”

  “Tests on any mature Petaybean will yield similar anomalies, Sean says.”

  “I see. We can run the tests on Sighdu and the other woman then, I suppose.”

  “You can, but you need to bring them back to Petaybee ASAP and run the tests here. From what I understand, the adaptive mechanisms making the inhabitants suitable for a cold planet of this type would make them exceedingly uncomfortable in temperatures you find normal. And recycled air would contain viruses and bacteria which their immune systems couldn’t handle. That’s what actually killed Lavelle Maloney, and what may soon kill the other two if they aren’t returned here.” Before he could say anything, she continued. “Torkel, until the company can figure out a way of adjusting these peoples’ highly sensitive immune systems to all of the free-spinning viruses and bacteria on satellites or other planets, the kind of move you say the company’s proposing would amount to genocide.”

  “That’s a fairly dramatic statement to extrapolate from the autopsy of one off-planet Petaybean, Yana. Besides, it’s the Petaybeans themselves who are making this necessary, with their guerilla sabotage against our geographical and mining exploration expeditions.”

  Yana cocked a cynical eyebrow at him. “There’re no guerillas on Petaybee, Torkel, no sabotage! If anything, it’s the other way around.”

  “How so? The company owns the planet. The company terraformed the planet. It has the right to extract mineral deposits.”

  “The company might own the right to inhabit the surface of the planet, Torkel, and under normal circumstances, it might have the right to harvest certain resources the terraforming process sowed. But owning the planet itself?” She slowly shook her head. “This planet was here way before Intergal was formed or terraforming was invented. You don’t own this planet.”

  Torkel gave a scornful snort. “If the company doesn’t, who does? Not the inhabitants that the company put here.”

  She awarded him a pitying glance. “No, they just occupy it. The planet owns itself. It’s sentient, Torkel. A living entity.”

  “Now you sound like Metaxos and his boy.” Torkel threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “That’s because I’ve seen what they saw. Or, rather, ‘seen’ isn’t exactly the right word. Felt it, experienced it, heard it, been touched by it. Whatever. The locals say it’s a way of communicating with the planet, and you have to be willing to be touched by it or you can become disoriented enough to be in the same shape as Metaxos. Or, like some of the other missing teams, if you’re too far from help, die as a result.”

  He
regarded her a long moment. “And Metaxos aged in this process?”

  “That’s a possibility. The phenomenon can take a lot out of someone who resists it.” Something occurred to her suddenly. “Do I . . . look any older to you than I did the last time you saw me, Torkel?”

  “No. Younger if anything. There’s a glow about you that, if you had ever given me any encouragement, would make me jealous.” He briefly dropped his lids over his eyes.

  She smiled like one of Clodagh’s cats after a snootful of fish. “Other than that?”

  “No. So you contend that you’ve been through the same thing as Metaxos? And didn’t fight it, so came out revived? So where did this happen? In one of these illusive mineral deposits?”

  “I didn’t find any deposits.” Yana was unsettled by that shot. “I—found—myself in a quite ordinary cave formation, same kind I’ve seen other places occurring naturally under hills. According to the spatial map I received with my briefing, the cave isn’t in one of the spots where your instruments have detected mineral wealth.” She tried another tack. “Look, the locals accept me to a greater degree than you, Giancarlo, or anyone else. That makes me the best qualified to organize this operation in a way that won’t be harmful to the natives or the planet.”

  Torkel gave her one of his suave smiles, which she had begun to find infuriatingly smug and condescending. “Yana, get real! We own the planet, and the natives are technically nothing more than employees. Also, it seems to me that you’re treading—you should pardon the expression—on thin ice here. Are you really offering to do this job, or have you, in fact, gone over to the side of the people you were supposed to be investigating?”

  “Why does it have to be sides?” she asked, leaning forward and willing him to keep making eye contact with her. “If this is a company planet and the inhabitants are company employees, isn’t the company interested in the potential above and beyond the usual? This may be something entirely new here, Torkel. Something that would be useful without the expense of reterraforming a planet.” She could see that “expense” was a key word, and he was definitely mulling over the “entirely new” notion. “At any rate, we’ll need to delay any evacuation or even the transfer of a single Petaybean until we’ve developed some means to compensate for their dependency on the planet.”