by neetha Napew
Yana thought Marmion and Whittaker Fiske might find support in the man’s suggestion, but instead, Whittaker visibly scooted his chair farther from the table and the comm screen, and Marmion let the tip of her tongue show against her upper lip before answering carefully. “An excellent suggestion, Vice-Chair Luzon. I shall go personally.”
“And I, as well, will go, Madame Marmion,” Luzon said. “I am most interested in the belief patterns and customs of colonial peoples, especially those who have been without the benefit of extensive company contact over the years.”
“I’m sure you’ll find Petaybee a fountain of information, Matthew,” Whittaker Fiske said with a somewhat strained attempt at his customary amiability.
Matthew Luzon. Yana had heard the name often before, she realized suddenly—and not in a positive light.
“Your investigations and attempts to correct the thinking of colonists are well known, if not widely appreciated,” Whittaker said. “But I think an actual fact-finding expedition, led by Marmion here, is in order now. Her delegation could take advantage of the warm weather to use audiovisual recording equipment generally too sensitive for the climate on this planet. I think the more subjective material could wait until later.”
Luzon allowed the corners of his mouth to curl in his version of a smile. “Oh, no. I think my presence will be of great assistance. Come, come, Dr. Fiske. I do not take up so much room. I will accompany Madame Marmion.”
The floor trembled beneath their feet and the screen wobbled on its brackets for a few moments. Yana glanced at Clodagh and saw that the big woman was watching the image of Matthew Luzon with a certain studied wariness that Yana had never seen on her face before. It wasn’t fear exactly; dread, perhaps. That was when it hit Yana who Luzon was. And she was instantly appalled to learn that he had risen to such prominence in the company.
Luzon was trained in cultural anthropology, a discipline that should have made him more broad-minded and accepting of others. Instead he had the reputation of using his eminence to condemn the ‘less civilized” or “unenlightened” peoples, using their cultural differences as cause to withdraw or withhold company support or cooperation. Saved the company a lot of money, she supposed. His name had been bandied about when the inhabitants of the central continent of a world called Mandella had been herded into tenements so the jungles and bogs they had formerly inhabited could be tapped for fossil fuels. The tenements had not been well built, and the reeducation program had not included instruction in the use of the modern implements in the new homes, including the sanitation devices. Those Mandellans not killed in the great fire that raged through the tenements died of the communicable diseases that swept through later. Luzon’s reports had been what allowed the company to sidestep its responsibility when dealing with the Universal Court. In fact, Yana thought she recalled hearing something once about Luzon being; under consideration as a judge for the court.
And now the man was proposing to come looking down his nose at Petaybee!
“Well, I’m not coming down there,” Farringer Ball was saying. “Lot of damned nonsense. I have a company to run here. Can’t go traipsing around to every backwater bush planet whose colonists get a little peculiar. Hell, if they weren’t peculiar, they’d be in the corps or out in space.”
Marmion raised an eyebrow and he desisted. “Anyway, I can’t and won’t interrupt my work to go. But Matthew’s done some crack investigating before, and Marmie will bring back the goods. I’ll be guided by their evidence.”
“That’s a relief,” Whit snapped. “You sure as hell haven’t shown any inclination to be guided by mine, or that of Metaxos and Margolies.”
“Of course I have. I read the reports and I haven’t evacuated the place and stripped it back to rock yet, have I?”
“Sir,” Torkel Fiske said. “What about the additional troops? And I insist that Major Maddock face an official inquiry and possible court-martial for her actions.”
“We’re already talking about an official inquiry, Captain, or hadn’t you been paying attention? If the inquiry determines that there’s been subversion or sabotage, I doubt Maddock will have gone far, and she may he able to assist the investigators. Now then. There’ll be an escort with Madame Marmion and Dr. Luzon, of course, and additional technical personnel. If we decide to evacuate, we’ll call in more then. Meanwhile, you’ve got enough manpower on hand already, I should think. It’s not like an army’s going to be any help stopping earthquakes and volcanoes. This meeting is concluded.”
Goat-dung knew that she was evil, willfu1, spiteful, malicious, and would someday, if she didn’t mend her wicked ways, be prey for the creature from the bowels of the planet. She had been told so often enough, as the welts from the Instrument of Goodness impressed the lessons on her backside.
For her crimes, she usually got the hardest, dirtiest work to do of any girls her age; but when the warming came, melting the ice falls on the sides of the cliffs and turning the floor of the Vale into a great lake, the rest of the community joined her in scrabbling up the sides of the Vale to higher ground, carrying with them the teachings of the Shepherd Howling and all of his sacred implements, plus what food, clothing, and housing materials they could salvage. All of the greenhouse gardens were lost and many of the animals had drowned.
For days the waters rose up the icy walls of the Vale, creating slush and even mud underfoot and also a steaming mist that made it impossible to see. Goat-dung and the other children, packs strapped to their backs, climbed the walls of the canyon and carried dripping parcels to the adults, then splashed back down in the bright cold water to try to retrieve other articles.
Bad as she was, even Goat-dung was so used to obeying the will of the community, the will of the Shepherd Howling, that she failed to see the possibilities for escape in the situation.
She’d just climbed up again after falling three times back into the water. Shivering with cold, muddy, scraped and bruised, half-naked, she huddled by the fire and ate the bowl of thin soup she had at last been permitted to ladle out for herself. The soup was mostly cold, and the fire, a pitiful stinking thing of still-damp animal dung, was nothing but a slightly sultry draft that failed to chase the ache and chill. It didn’t banish the goose bumps, never mind the frigidity in her bones.
For once, no one else was better off than she, however. The one hundred or so followers of the Shepherd huddled along the rim of the steaming Vale of Tears, their lives and homes inundated by the Great Flood the Shepherd claimed had been sent to try them.
The monster seeks to subjugate us to its will in this fashion,” the Shepherd said over and over again. “We shall not succumb. When the waters subside, we’ll return to our Vale and continue to defy that which would corrupt us.”
The Shepherd, instead of staying within his offices and superior quarters, was now among the flock organizing, counseling, exhorting—and observing. Feeling the disapproving eyes of the rest of the flock on her was bad enough, but twice Goat-dung looked up from her misery to see the Shepherd himself watching her, and his regard made her colder than the waters in the Vale.
She rested from her last climb, as the short day drew to a close and the mists from the Vale crept up over the edge of the encampment. She heard soft footsteps approach and Conception, her belly as flat as it had been before the Shepherd married her and her name was still Swill, squatted beside her.
“Good news, little sister,” she said.
Goat-dung said nothing. Until she knew what Conception wanted, silence was safest.
The other girl, a bare four years older than Goat-dung, held forth a piece of metal. “You’ve been chosen,” she said simply, and rose to go.
Goat-dung stared at the piece in her hand. It was cut into the shape of a heart. The Shepherd had chosen her to be his wife.
“What? When?” she called after Conception.
Tonight,” the older girl called back and was lost in the mist.
And that was when she did the worst thin
g she had ever done in all of her wicked days. She ran.
The mist covered her trail and the slush muffled the sound of her steps. She ran as hard and as long as her exhausted, undernourished body could. She had no idea where she was going. She had known no other people but her own, though sometimes the Shepherd made allusions to others, outsiders, those who had fallen into error. They were horrible people, the Shepherd said, who would sacrifice girls like her to the Great Monster.
Better that than be a dutiful wife to the Shepherd, like Swill-Conception and Nightsoil, now known as Assumpta. Wives of the Shepherd, though they were no older than children, were given adult names, usually related to the Teaching.
Assumpta, once a rosy-cheeked, titian-haired angel of a girl, full of childish agility and grace, was now old at thirteen. She had lost four children to a bleeding disease and had been beaten after losing each one. She no longer walked very well.
Conception, on the other hand, was still barren at fifteen, and she was beaten for that, as well. Their own mother, Ascencion, was another of the wives, and supervised the beatings herself.
Goat-dung’s mother had also been the Shepherd’s wife, although Goat-dung was not one of his own lambs. One reason she was so wicked, the others told her, was that her parents had been outsiders. She had been too small when her mother died to realize it, but it was said that her mother had been an extremely unrepentant outsider who had not wanted to be the Shepherd’s wife and had been prevailed upon to accept the blessings of union with him only through the firm kindliness of the flock. No one among them had met Goat-dung’s father, who had died in ignorance and error and slavery to the Great Monster.
Goat-dung ran and ran, splashing through slush, hot with her effort as long as light remained in the sky, then ran to keep from freezing as the night swallowed the planet. The moons came up and she stumbled on by their light. She ran on and on, down and down, as if into another Vale. Looking back, by the moonlight, she saw the peaks of the mountains behind and above her: the monster’s back, its snout, its teeth.
She dragged herself farther. Down here the slush gave way to mud in places, and a stream ribboning down the mountain steamed just as the water in the valley floor did. As she drew near it, it gave forth warmth, and when she touched it, it was as hot as if it had been heated in a pan and only cooled slightly.
She eased her way into it. It was deeper than it looked and had quite a current. It buffeted her along, lapping her with warmth, until it ran into a kind of tunnel, carrying her with it.
She was too tired, too full of lassitude from the water, to avoid being swept into the side of the mountain, and remembered, just before she hit her head on a rock and all became blackness, that the Shepherd taught that this was the very sort of place never to be caught.
Chapter 2
“Well?” Bunny Rourke asked breathlessly as the elders and the company friends of the Petaybeans filed out of the building. She handed the reins of the curlies to each rider. “How’d it go?”
Clodagh shrugged. “Like usual. They pretended we weren’t there, and if we were, that we’d nothin’ sensible to say. They’re sendin’ down more investigators.”
Yana sighed. She’d known it wouldn’t be easy, but something else was disturbing her. As they rode back through the woods to Kilcoole, she asked, “I don’t get it. Torkel was with us. He felt the planet, too. He knows about it. If he had really rejected it, he’d be like Frank Metaxos was.”
“Denial,” Diego said, drawing on his own counseling experience. “He knows, okay, he just can’t stand to admit it. He’s not a complete creep, after all. You and he used to be friends, didn’t you, Yana?”
“Friendly, at least,” Yana said. “Or I thought so. But he’s been so unreasonable . . .”
“Maybe irrational’s a better word,” Sean said. “He might not have had the reaction Frank did, but it strikes me that Fiske isn’t sledding on both runners anymore, if he ever was. Maybe his unwilling contact with the planet has done him more harm than shows on the surface.”
“At least it’s that lady coming to investigate,” Moira Rourke said with some relief.
“Yes, but I don’t like the look of that bald fella,” Clodagh said.
“Nor do I,” Yana agreed. “At the risk of sounding like the conspirator Torkel thinks me to be, I suggest that all of you avoid any direct contact with Luzon and save your explanations strictly for Madame Marmion. He is known to . . . twist . . . anything he’s told.”
As they neared the village, they were met by a pride of cats, all of them striped bright rusty orange and all of them meowing and purring and twining dangerously around the large snowshoe-sized hooves of the shaggy, curly-coated horses.
“What a welcoming committee!” Yana said as Marduk, or at least she assumed it was he, hopped up behind her and rubbed his head against her back briefly before hopping down again. “Did you call them, Clodagh?”
Clodagh shook her head. “No, but I was worried, before we left, about how committed the other villages were to the planet. So far the PTBs have only questioned us, but I figured they’d get around to asking some of the others sometime soon. These little ones scattered as soon as we left, and here they are back again.” She tilted her head as she looked down at the cats.
“What’s got ‘em so antsy?” Bunny asked.
Clodagh reined her curly-coat to a halt. Immediately the cats converged on her, stropping the legs of the pony, who regarded this activity with mild surprise and didn’t so much as twitch a muscle.
“You’ll get muddy doing that,” she told the cats, since the pony was coated up to and including his belly with good Petaybean wet earth. With a groan, she heaved one leg over the saddle and dismounted, ignoring the fact that her skirts immediately became as dirty as the pony’s legs. “Now, what’s all this?” she asked, hands on her hips, looking from one upturned cat face to the next.
Clodagh’s special relationship with her cats was known—or at least suspected—by everyone in Kilcoole. So the other villagers, except for Sean, Bunny, and Yana, rode politely around the cats and pretended not to notice anything more than a woman being greeted by overly fond pets.
Frank Metaxos, in whose healing process the cats had had a rather unusual role, remained behind, too, along with his son Diego. The two were returning to Kilcoole without Frank’s partner, Steve Margolies, who, still on the company’s payroll, had stayed on at SpaceBase.
Both cats and Clodagh waited for the rest of the village to parade past before the mewing and chirruping began.
Ordinarily the cats would have sat down to impart what was evidently a long story, but the mud offended their dignity. So they prowled around her, twitching their tails high, as they communicated their messages. The humans waited patiently.
Sparks of uncharacteristic anger flickered in Clodagh’s eyes as she looked up at Sean and Yana “We got all kinds of trouble now.” She gave a disgusted snort. “Seems like some villages want Intergal to come down and mine, while the mining’s good and they can get paid for working.”
Sean frowned and Yana told her heart to stop racing. “How many dissidents? she asked.
“Four towns that the cats know of.” Clodagh’s usually merry face was solemn.
“Which ones?”
“Deadhorse, McGee’s Pass, Wellington, and Savoy.”
Sean let out a burst of sour laughter. That figures.” Clodagh had named villages which in recent years spurned contact with the others. He sighed deeply. “Have the cats any good news?”
“Yes, out the bad news is they haven’t had a chance to check everyone out. If four villages oppose us . . .”
“How many more might be disaffected and looking to please Intergal for the sake of wampum? Sean asked.
“So, the good news? Yana prompted with a sigh.
“Well, we do have at least twelve communities behind us solid. Tanana Bay, Shannonmouth, New Barrow, Twin Moon Village, Little Dublin, Oslo Inlet, Harrison’s Fjord, Kabul, Bogota, Machu P
icchu, Kathmandu, and Sierra Padre.”
“Most of the closest ones,” Sinead said, looking encouraged.
“And the ones,” Clodagh went on with a pessimistic expression, “that have the most Petaybean boys and girls in company service.”
“What bothers you about that?” Yana asked. “Wouldn’t they be on their folks’ side in this?”
“Might be, if they weren’t required to lean on their folks to do what the company asks,” Clodagh said gloomily.
“Oh!” Yana sighed Dirty tricks department Farringer Ball and Matthew Luzon would pull every one they needed out of storage to see that their interpretation became the official one. “Could you be wrong about which side of the blanket the Petaybean troops would fall on? The pilots, O’Shay and Greene in particular, gave us some support during the volcanic crisis.”
Clodagh shrugged her broad shoulders. “You can always be wrong about anything. Sure, I think a lot of them would feel loyalty for us and for the planet. But they’ve been out there”—she nodded toward the heavens—“for a long time. They’re used to the kind of stuff you’re used to. Some of ‘em have prob’ly forgot how to cook, too, like you, and how to hunt. How to take care of themselves. And if the company decided to punish them and us by dumping them here and pulling out support, well, that’d be pretty hard on them, pretty hard on us, and pretty hard on the planet. I figure if all the Petaybee troops still working for Intergal got sent back here, it’d triple our population. At the least! I don’t know how many kids those troops have had. Course they’d be welcome and the planet would provide, but it might be as hard on it as some kinds of mining operations.”
Frank cleared his throat. The ecosystem in these icy regions is quite fragile.”
“You know it and I know it, but Intergal seems oblivious to the fact,” Sean said.
