The Peytabee Omnibus

by neetha Napew

  And now he and Satok both would have some explaining to do if they were going to convince the company commission that Petaybee contained secrets valuable enough for them to make the necessary investments to civilize and control the planet. At the moment, all he had to show was one green hunk of copper-bearing rock and one small gold nugget that had rolled out of the crates into a dark corner.

  “That was a good trick,” he told the still—fuming Satok. “I don’t know how you treated these rocks to make them appear to be the ores I thought they were, but in this state they’ll never convince the commission.” He knew as well as Satok that the ores had been replaced by Luka and those Kilcoole women, if not by a conspiracy of the whole village of Shannonmouth, but he wanted to force Satok to reveal more. As long as the man kept his secrets to himself, they were of no use to Torkel or the company. “There’s more where those came from!” Satok growled.

  “And where, exactly, is that? McGee’s Pass?” The man had said he was shanachie there, so Torkel’s guess wasn’t that wild. Space probes had shown some ores in that general area.

  But Satok shook his head. “Nah, that vein’s played out for now. But I got other sources. Only thing is, and the reason I decided to cut the company in, I need supplies. For my method.”

  “Like what?”

  Satok grinned for the first time since they’d discovered Luka’s treachery. “That’s right, Cap’n. When I tell you what I use, you think you’re gonna have some ideas about my method. And you will have. Only thing is, it’s somethin’ you’ve been using all along. What I need the most is Petraseal. You get some of these boys to load up the shuttle with Petraseal, and I’ll get you some more ore samples within a couple of days.”

  “I go with you and you show me,” Torkel said, negotiating, “and I’ll get you all the Petraseal you want.”

  But the hairy bastard had the gall to shake his head. “No way. Not till I have a contract with the company patenting my methods and with full claim to my sites.”

  “You can’t get that without proof,” Torkel said.

  “Well, without my help, man, you can’t get samples of ores you need for proof the planet’s worth something to Intergal, so I guess if you don’t get me my supplies, we’re both out of luck.”

  “All right,” Torkel said on a long exasperated sigh. “I’ll release you the Petraseal. But go get those samples ASAP, okay? I’m not sure how long the commission is going to take to come to their conclusions.”

  “Then have your boys start loadin’ my shuttle. Oh, and fill ‘er up while you’re at it, will you?”

  Torkel agreed, still seeming reluctant for the sake of verisimilitude. Actually, he would go along whether Satok agreed or not. He could easily plant a bug and track the man to his mine. He could even invite the commission along to see the results of the new mining operation first-hand, and learn something of Satok’s secret process while they were at it.

  Birds—songbirds, ravens, ducks, geese, hawks, and herons—brought them, as did relays of rabbits, foxes, wolves, feral cats, tame cats, track-cats, bears, and squirrels. Each bird, each animal, carried in its mouth a cutting, a root, a shoot, of coo-berry bramble. The birds flew directly to the farthest points, to Dead Horse, Savoy, Wellington, Portage, Mirror Lake, Harrison’s Fjord, and McGee’s Pass. Following the cats’ directions, they dropped the shoots near the planet’s portals, the places where humankind could commune with Petaybee. The largest deliveries went to the places where the planet was at its most open and vulnerable, and could be most easily looted. All of these places were caves, and around the entrance of each cave and on the ground above the entrance, and all along the length of the cave, the shoots and roots and cuttings were dropped by birds and buried by the other animals, the badgers, the squirrels, the rabbits, and the foxes. Every quarter of an hour or so for two days, fresh bits of coo-berry bush arrived, supplied by the tireless efforts of Clodagh, Whittaker Fiske, and assistants from the town and the surrounding forests and tundra’s of Kilcoole.

  In most places, the increased and highly specialized activity of the animals was little more than a curiosity. In some places, no one even noticed what was going on. At McGee’s Pass, Krisuk Connelly and his family, who had been keeping watch on Satok’s old house, noted the odd influx of animals and, between deliveries, sneaked in to see what they could possibly be doing.

  The coo-berry plant was one of the planet’s great puzzlement’s. Most things on Petaybee were good for many things: medicine, food, shelter, warmth. Coo-berries had never been much good for anything. They were poisonous if you ate more than a handful, and the ailment that might have been devised by the planet to cure it had yet to be discovered. The thorns were sharp and stingy, the leaves were sticky, and the blossoms were as small, and rare, as the coo-berry itself. Once they got a start on any little dab of dirt, the damned bushes were almost impossible to kill. Worse, they grew so fast you could watch them grow, which was what Krisuk spent two days doing: watching the infestation of coo-berry. While the birds were still ferrying shoots in daily, bushes sprang up from the first plantings and grew waist high overnight, their roots spreading out to cover the field between the town and Satok’s house and climbing up the house’s stone exterior and covering the out-buildings.

  When that happened, Krisuk called the whole village to come and see. His mother’s mouth was set in a bitter line and her dry eyes watched the incursion despairingly. “Now,” she said, “now Petaybee is punishing us. For ever listening to Satok. For letting him harm it.”

  Matthew Luzon resisted the urge to hold his nose. Really! The things he did for the company in the name of humanity. To say the least, Brother Howling smelled extremely gamy. Even Braddock was tempted to open the helicopter’s door to escape the stench and showed signs of wanting to divest himself of his most recent meal over the ice-speckled sea.

  At least the headphones in this helicopter worked properly, and Matthew could occupy himself by listening to the pilot’s transmissions and the messages received from SpaceBase and MoonBase.

  As they approached land again at Harrison’s Fjord, a crackling message came in from MoonBase.

  “Captain Torkel Fiske requests that all council members get in touch with him immediately. He is currently tracking the activities of the shanachie of McGee’s Pass.”

  Matthew needed to hear no more. McGee’s Pass was on the way back to SpaceBase from Harrison’s Fjord, and a break from his present company would be most welcome.

  “Take us directly to McGee’s Pass, pilot,” he ordered, and the man gave him a thumbs-up signal and headed up the coast.

  As they approached the pass. Matthew saw that the village was built on an incline, gradually scaling the foothills leading up to the pass itself.

  “Well, for frag’s sake!” The pilot cursed as he flew beyond the village over a field heavily over grown with vines stretching from the houses all the way to a stone farmstead about half a mile distant. “What the frag have they done to the fragging helipad?”

  “Set it down anywhere, man!” Matthew commanded. “The plants’ll cushion the skids.”

  The pilot sounded doubtful as he said, “Well, okay. You’re the boss, Dr. Luzon.”

  Finally, someone who did as he was told, Matthew thought with relief.

  The pilot landed, crushing a good half meter into the surrounding vegetation. When he made no move to leave the aircraft, Matthew impatiently tore open the door and leaped out, and instantly regretted it.

  His legs caught fire all the way to his crotch, and thousands of tiny needles stung through his pants, boots, and undergarments to tear at his flesh with each tiny movement.

  In fact, he didn’t even have to move. The wind from the copter rotors drove the plants all around him. Involuntarily, he screamed. Braddock jumped down to help him, and he, too, began to scream.

  The Shepherd Howling stood in the doorway, one hand uplifted, his mouth moving and his other hand pointing.

  “What?” Luzon managed
to ask as the chopper engines stopped.

  “The Great Monster has thee in its grasp!” Shepherd Howling cried. “Beware!”

  “For pity’s sake, man, it’s no great monster, just some sort of vine!” Matthew screeched. “Help!—“

  A young man sitting atop a rock that was a virtual island in the sea of stinging brambles called out, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Get us out of here!” Matthew demanded.

  “Ah. Your aircraft will be the safest place for that, sir. I suggest you get back in it before the vines overgrow it.”

  “What? No plant can grow that fast!” Braddock replied, doubting his own words as he unsuccessfully tried to disentangle the vines from his legs.

  ‘The Great Monster is devious and wily and tireless in clutching for the souls and bodies of virtuous men!” Shepherd Howling declaimed.

  “Indeed!” Matthew snapped at him. He turned to the boy. “If I wished to return to the helicopter I would never have landed here, young man. Please assist us out of these weeds and take us to your shanachie and Captain Fiske at once.”

  “Never heard of no Captain Fiske,” the boy called back lazily, obviously enjoying their situation, “and we run the shanachie off.”

  “Did you?” Matthew stood among the stinging brambles and digested that.

  “You heard him, sir. Let’s get out of here,” Braddock whined.

  But any inclination Matthew might have had to do just that had vanished with the boy’s words. “Now why did you do that, son?”

  “He was a wicked man, sir. Tryin’ to make us think the planet wanted one thing when it wanted the other.”

  “I’d very much like to talk to you about that, son. Please get us out of here.” Matthew, despite the stings, turned on the force of his not inconsiderable charisma.

  The boy shrugged and disappeared. Matthew and Braddock shoved Shepherd Howling back and sat in the copter while a crew of villagers arrived with various stones and pieces of board to make a path for them. Matthew was somewhat surprised that they hadn’t brought machetes or sickles to hack the weeds down. Before he could ask about that, the boy ran across the stones and grabbed him by the arm.

  “You’d best hurry, sir, or the coo-brambles will be a-growin’ over these, too, like.”

  “You will be rewarded by the company, my son,” Shepherd Howling said, pushing Matthew aside to sprint over the stones with the agility of a mountain goat. The speed with which he took advantage of the temporary path and his nimbleness in avoiding questing bramble tendrils caused Matthew to re-evaluate the man’s degree of insanity.

  Matthew followed quickly, Braddock somewhat more reluctantly. The pilot opted to remain with his ship.

  With the boy leading them, Shepherd Howling on his heels, and Matthew followed more slowly by Braddock, they reached the nearest of the hovels. There they were joined by a man and woman and a pack of whooping children. The rest of the village crowded in after them.

  Shepherd Howling slowed to hover noisomely by Matthew. “This is possibly a wholesome place, Brother Luzon. None of the orange minions of the underworld one sees in many of the heathen towns are visible. And nowhere did I see the monster’s yawning maw waiting to be fed by the ignorance of the unenlightened.”

  “That is good news,” Matthew said tersely, and turned to their adolescent guide. He was far more interested in what the villagers had to say.

  “Now, my boy, you must explain something to me, for I am a bit confused. I was supposed to meet Captain Fiske and the shanachie of this village here. Now you tell me you’ve banished the shanachie. Being a stranger to this planet, but one very interested in your customs, have I indeed been brought to McGee’s Pass?”

  “That’s where you are, sir,” said the woman of the house, undoubtedly the boy’s mother, pushing herself to the front. “And the best way to explain, sir, is by singing you the song we made.”

  Groaning inwardly at the prospect of another of the Petaybean songs, Matthew arranged his features in an engaging and interested smile.

  “We sing it together,” explained the man who seemed to be the woman’s husband and the boy’s father. “Because it happened to us all.”

  “We were all duped, he means,” the boy said.

  A 1ittle girl said, “All but Krisuk. He wasn’t fooled.”

  “Please sing,” Matthew said, trying to cut to the performance if he had to hear it to learn what they were talking about.

  “You start, Krisuk,” the mother said.

  The boy stood stock-still, arms at his sides, not a foot from Matthew, and began to chant in an eerie singsong style:

  “One day the roof of the world fell

  It killed our friends, our cousins

  It killed the heir to its wisdom

  For days we dug, too numb to cry.

  Our world had ended.

  Aijija!”

  The other villagers joined in, some crying loudly, some mumbling, all reciting the nonsense words at the end of the verses as if they were expletives.

  “A stranger came among us to dig

  He came among us, he said, to teach

  Sure he was.

  Strong he was.

  He knew what to do.

  He knew where to dig.

  The world still spoke to him,

  He said.

  Aijija!

  He said if we followed him we could win back the world.

  He said if my sister lay with him she would be one with

  creation

  She went with him

  He said if we gave him the best pups of the litter

  His team would carry the spirit of our village to the world’s

  corners

  And it would know us once more

  We gave him the pups

  He said that the planet’s orange feet carried tales against

  us to other villages

  He said if we were to heal, the feet must be killed.

  This, to our shame, we allowed. “

  And here, quite alarmingly, people began to tear their hair. All of the villagers sang the next verse loudly and lamentingly.

  “To our shame we didn’t hide them

  To our shame we didn’t feed them

  To our shame we heard his blows

  To our shame we heard their cries

  To our shame we did nothing

  Until only Shush

  Shush the silent and swift

  Survived. Shush who led us back into the world

  Shush who brought our neighbors to us

  Shush who left us at last

  Footless in a world

  Whose voice had been strangled

  Whose tongue had been blown away

  By the one we called

  Satok shanachie.

  Where is our sister now?

  Gone to a bad man in a distant village.

  Where are our best pups?

  Starved and broken in spirit.

  Where are our cats, the world’s orange feet?

  No longer walking, bones except for Shush

  And when our world speaks to us again as we have

  Hoped and dreamed?

  It screams.

  Aijija.”

  “Oh, dear,” Matthew said when they had finished. “And all this because of your shanachie, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. “He took all of our best for himself and betrayed everyone.”

  Matthew could scarcely keep from rubbing his hands together with glee. “Oh, that’s terrible. Terrible indeed. Right, Brother Howling?”

  Howling’s lips twitched with a smile. “That’s what comes of trafficking with monsters.”

  “You can say that again, mister,” the woman said. “Can you stay and eat, sir?” she asked Matthew, but he waved a negative.

  “I’m sorry, dear lady, but your story distresses me so much that I really think our best course is to resume our journey and seek to bring justice to you and people like you who are taken in by those who woul
d mislead you. I hope I can count on you to repeat your song before the council when I call on you!” he added, addressing the boy, who had sung every word in a voice unexpectedly good, loud, and clear.

  “I’d be honored, sir,” the boy said, although he sounded puzzled and wary.

  The villagers had to throw fresh stepping-stones and logs over the brambles for Matthew’s party to return to the helicopter. Even then, the pilot had to climb out and hack at the vines with a machete before he could free the copter’s skids. The vines were tight against the belly of the ship, strands attempting to encircle the narrow stern. Matthew thought that such fast-growing vegetation would also bear scrutiny. George, he rather thought, had some botanical knowledge. He’d send him to get a sample—if one could be contained long enough.

  Satok landed the shuttle, loaded with barrels of Petraseal, at Savoy. His three assistant “shanachies” were still there, drinking and talking.

  “Where’s Luka?” Reilly asked.

  “Ran off,” Satok replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll get her back, and when I do, I’ll make her sorry she was ever born. The fraggin’ bitch stole the ore samples and put rocks in their place.”

  “So you didn’t get to make a deal with the company?”

  “Course I did! Guy named Fiske saw them first before Luka switched ‘em, but he wants to have genuine samples to show off.”

  “It was hard enough getting together what we did without you letting it get snitched,” Reilly complained. He liked easier work than mining.

  “Hold it! All we gotta prove is that there is genuine ore available. We’ll use the one here, and who’s to know if we don’t tell ‘em, huh? Fiske gave me some more Petraseal, so Reilly and I will mine the earlier veins while you two paint us a path back.”

  “Shit! I hate doing that,” Soyuk grumbled. “Damn caves give me the creeps.”

  “Stop bellyachin’,” Satok told him. “If we make this deal with the company, you’ll have enough money to go off-planet permanently.”