by neetha Napew
The cat sauntered towards the curlycorn and the two of them ambled off into the woods. With a stealthy wiggle of his fingers, de Peugh motioned them to follow.
Together they crept after the elusive beasts as quietly as five men unaccustomed to Petaybean groundcover could creep. The animals managed to stay just out of range, but did not seem to notice their arrows.
‘You can tell nothing here is used to being hunted,’ Ersol whispered. ‘They aren’t taking anything fired in their direction personally.’
With another gesture from de Peugh, the men spread out and came towards the animals from five different angles. This time, when Ersol fired his arrow, it glanced off the flank of the curlycorn, which whinnied and began to run. The cat chased it, as if in a game. The men broke into a run too, and because of their angles, closed in on the cat.
Suddenly the curlycorn reared, his chest looming over Minkus. Now was the time to use the spear or never. But the cat evaded Mooney’s dagger by springing straight across the shaft of Minkus’s spear, knocking it aside.
Minkus, who fancied himself no mean hand at springing, threw himself at the cat at precisely the same time as the other four men. The cat’s fur brushed his hands as his feet landed, tangling with eight other feet, and the lot of them plunged through the underbrush and down, down, bruisingly down into a deep, dark hole.
Landing on that part of his anatomy best suited for abrupt seating, Minkus was showered with debris from above. Looking up, he saw the faces of the cat, its teeth bared in a wide grin, and the curlycorn, staring down at him and his companions. Perhaps there was something to this anthropomorphism after all, he thought. He could have sworn that both animals wore expressions of profound satisfaction.
‘I think I broke my jaw,’ mumbled Mooney. Or that was what Minkus understood him to say. Mooney’s actual statement was obscured by what seemed to be the echo of his last word, distorted into ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’.
After sending Liam and Seamus on to the other culling places, Sinead and the extra curlies turned back to where she’d last seen the cheechakos. It had started snowing in the time they took to make their plans, and a light coating of snow masked the lake shore and its surroundings. She missed the spot at first, for there was no longer any clothing or weapons or any trace of the dead rabbits.
‘I know I left ‘em around here somewhere,’ she said, dismounting and looking for a sign that would enable her to start tracking the men. Brushing aside some of the snow, she uncovered the vestiges of several sets of tracks, two sets leading away from the site and one leading back. There was also one clear set of the paw prints of a track-sized cat. She began calling but her cries were not answered, and after trying to tell one broken bush from another she gave up and decided to find Liam and Seamus instead so that she could send Seamus back to Kilcoole for help while she and Liam, the best tracker of the three of them, continued to search.
Clodagh was beginning to realize why religious congregations were sometimes called ‘flocks’. The ones following her to the hotsprings had less sense than sheep and were noisier than magpies.
They insisted on walking to the hotsprings cave barefoot, even though she warned them about the coo-berry brambles that still guarded the entrance to the cave from the unwary and uninvited. The coobrambles had settled back into being ordinary weeds again, their extraordinary growth curtailed once the brambles had penetrated and removed all of the Petraseal, and most of the people who had painted the sealant, in four of the planet’s communion caves. The brambles had been cut back, poisoned, and burnt but there was still a thriving growth at the hotsprings. You just had to know how to avoid it.
Clodagh did avoid it. The newcomers insisted on walking straight through the brambles and she had an awful time getting them loose again, finally having to resort to the small mist bottle of coo repellent she had thankfully remembered to carry with her.
Then the newcomers wanted to enter the cave by prostrating themselves and crawling in like worms, but Clodagh pointed out that since the entrance was through the waterfall, they could drown that way and really, truly, the planet didn’t care a bit how they came in as long as they didn’t have any Petraseal with them.
They did insist on grovelling and kissing the cave floor the moment they entered, though.
After genuflecting six or seven times, Sister Igneous Rock threw her outstretched arms into the air and cried, ‘Speak to us O Beneficence…’
All they got was an echo, not of the last word, but of the O. It sounded like Wo, no, no…’
‘Tell us what you would have us do! How can we dedicate our miserable lives to your service? How can we redeem the error of humankind to your greater glory? How can we demonstrate that, though unworthy, we are more than willing to do your bidding? How can we convince You to show us your will?’
‘How?’ echoed the others. ‘Tell us how.’
Clodagh sighed. They could start by shutting up. Even if it had something to say today, which it apparently didn’t, not even the planet could get a word in edgewise the way these folks carried on.
After a time, they did stop babbling. Clodagh had half fallen asleep by then.
Lazily, she roused up. ‘You all done now?’
But just then, Brother Schist collapsed back down to his knees and yelled, ‘Halleluja! I just heard voices!’
‘What? Where? Why should it talk to you and not to the rest of us? What did it reveal to you?’ cried Sister Agate.
‘It said, “Fraggitall, these things have thorns.
‘Ah-ha,’ Clodagh said, and stepped over them to the cave’s entrance, sliding between the waterfall and the cliff face.
Portia Porter-Pendergrass and Bill Guthrie were tangling themselves to shreds in coobrambles.
Clodagh took her spray-mist bottle from her apron pocket, spritzed her way to them and tried to help.
‘Get away from me!’ Portia shrieked. ‘Guthrie, what kind of a man are you? Make this… this witch - let go of me!’
‘I thought you came to talk to me,’ Clodagh said, genuinely puzzled. ‘Sean said you folks wanted to.’
‘Pay no attention to her, Dama,’ Bill Guthrie said. ‘She’s hysterical. She became addicted to one of her company’s own tranquillizers - sad case, really. I wanted to talk to you about the pharmaceutical potential of some of the materia medica you have discovered on your charming planet but Portia thought we should just begin taking samples. Unfortunately, the samples seem to have taken us.’
‘Sure looks that way,’ Clodagh said. ‘Dama, if you just stand up and pick off the ones stuck to your clothes, I think you’re free now. It’s startin’ to snow anyway. Coobrambles shrink when it snows. Come on over to the spring and let’s wash and treat those scratches. You got some pretty deep ones.’
The easiest place to give the distraught Portia and Guthrie a dry bramble-free place to sit while washing and treating their wounds was the inside of the cave. The ‘rock flock’, as Clodagh was beginning to think of the white-robed pilgrims, eagerly assisted in ‘ministering’ as they called it.
‘What did you want samples of anyway?’ Clodagh asked Portia Porter-Pendergrass, just to distract her from screeching in the ear of her rescuers whenever Clodagh daubed a little sting-bush leaf on a scratch.
‘That stuff you’re putting on me now, for starters,’ she said. Her face and hands were a mess and one thorn had narrowly missed her left eye. Clodagh felt bad for her.
‘That’s OK then, alannah,’ she said as if to a child, being as gentle as she could with a very deep scratch on the leg. ‘You can have the rest of this when we’re done here. You’ll need it anyway to make those scratches go away.’
‘How about me?’ Bill Guthrie asked plaintively.
‘You too,’ Clodagh said, patting his knee. ‘Just be brave and hold on till I’m finished here and I’ll gather some more for you to take home.’
‘And that cough medicine you gave Yanaba Maddock?’ Portia asked.
‘Why? You got a
cough?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, giving a forced hack.
‘Me too,’ Bill Guthrie said.
‘That stuff you sprayed on the bushes,’ Portia said as pitifully as she could.
But before Bill Guthrie could chime in again, Sister Agate threw herself between the two coobramble victims and Clodagh.
‘Do not harken to the false words of these infidels, Mother Clodagh…’
‘I told you, I’m not your mother…’
‘Clodagh, she’s right,’ Brother Shale said, taking her shoulders and attempting to pull her away from the pharmaceutical reps. ‘These people are out only to exploit the Beneficence. They want to strip it of its miracles and synthesize its wonders for base motives of pecuniary profit.’
‘They’ll desecrate the Beneficence,’ Sister Igneous Rock howled.
‘Be quiet,’ Clodagh said.
‘You mustn’t…’ Sister Agate began.
‘They’re crazy…’ Bill Guthrie said, shaking off Brother Shale.
But both were drowned out by a booming echo of Clodagh’s voice, rebounding through the cave. ‘QUIET! QUIET! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Et! Et! Et. Et…’
‘It spoke!’ Sister Igneous Rock whispered, clasping her heart.
‘That was an echo, you idiot!’ Portia Porter-Pendergrass said with a snarl.
‘QUIET, IDIOT!’ the echo said just once. And this time nobody spoke.
Finally, Clodagh said, ‘You people quit fighting and stop being so silly. You lot,’ she nodded at the rock flock,’ the planet isn’t a Creator any more than any of you. It’s part of creation. The powers that be at Intergal even helped make it how it is now, though they only woke it up, they didn’t create its life.’
‘But how do you know, Clodagh,’ Brother Agate asked. ‘You are but a mere mortal, though favoured …
‘I know ‘cause the planet told me so, of course,’ she said. ‘And if you want it to tell you anything, you’re gonna have to get rid of some of your funny ideas long enough to make room for what it’s got to say. As for you folks,’ she nodded to Portia and Bill, ‘you can have any medicine you need and welcome to it.’
‘They’ll Analyse it,’ Sister Agate moaned.
‘They’ll Synthesize it,’ Brother Shale groaned.
‘So?’ Clodagh asked. ‘If there’s sick folks needing medicine and they can make up stuff like we got here to cure them, that’s a good thing.’
‘You don’t understand!’ Sister Igneous Rock wailed. ‘We’ve seen it happen before on other worlds! Our own worlds! We even aided in the desecration, may the Beneficence forgive us, before we realized what we had wrought and saw the light. Brother Shale was a geologist for the intergalactic energy rapists and I myself engineered plants with which they could steal the treasures of other worlds. Even when I learnt there were Better Ways I could not convince my masters. They want only to destroy. Oh, believe me, Clodagh, for I have seen how they work. We have all seen it.
They’ll build factories here and pollute the waters, clog the voice of the Bene - the planet, they’ll strip it bare of its healing plants and minerals!’
‘It’d just be a small factory,’ Bill Guthrie said, holding up his thumb and forefinger with an inch spread between them to show how small the factory would be.
‘And if we took all of the mature plants, well, they’re plants, they’ll grow back, right? We call it a renewable resource, Clodagh,’ Portia said like she was talking to someone dumb enough to go out in midwinter without a coat on. ‘It’s a growing thing.’
‘So’s your skin,’ Clodagh said, shaking her head. ‘But if the coobrambles stripped it all off you, it wouldn’t grow back - at least not fast enough to keep you alive. Petaybee’s just like you. You take off its skin and it’ll be back to what it was - not dead maybe, but not awake either.’
‘But, don’t you see, there are real lives, human lives, being wasted for want of the cures Petaybee has to offer. You owe it to them…’ As if in support of that argument, the cave began to echo with the cry, ‘Help! Help, please! Somebody help us.’
10
Gal-3 - Repair bay
Contents - Prev/Next
Bunny tried to get the ship’s computer to sound an alert while Diego attempted to persuade the hatch to reopen. His bracelet didn’t do the job, nor did any amount of trying different button combinations on the pad located beneath a smooth metal panel. Finally, something clicked, he wasn’t sure what, and the panel irised open. He heard footsteps in the corridor and looked to see where they were coming from.
‘Bunny, quick, we’ve got to hide!’ he said. ‘The white suits are coming back. They’re carrying things. More bodies it looks like.’
‘Can we run for it?’
‘You can’t outrun a laser.’
‘Diego, they’ve all got pressure suits on. If they open the outer hatch while we’re here, we’re goners.’
‘That, too, although with them carrying stuff, they aren’t likely to have free hands to pull the lasers on us.’
‘Come on, Diego. If we stand here arguing about it, we’re goners for sure.’
‘They’re too close!’ he said. He saw them clearly now, the white-suited figures, carrying two women -Yana and Marmie! One of the figures, a tall man, wore the helmet but no white suit. Diego was pretty sure he hadn’t been with them earlier.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, and pushed him out the door.
They were halfway down the corridor when a cloud of sweet-smelling pink gas overtook them.
Yana awoke coughing so hard she thought for a moment her life of the last few months had been a dream and she was still in the infirmary following the Bremport massacre. She had a sickly sweet taste in her mouth and a constriction about her chest, which she found, when she stopped coughing, was caused by another body lying across her. She reached out and her hand was full of face - smooth, unlined face and a tangle of hair.
A chorus of coughing, not as violent as her own, erupted all around her and then Bunny’s voice grumbled in a sleepy-headed childish tone, ‘Ouch, your finger’s in my eye.’
‘Sorry,’ Yana muttered and Bunny wriggled away, provoking another’sorry’ from whomever she rolled into in giving Yana more space: Diego, in fact.
‘Sorry, Diego,’ Bunny said. ‘It’s a little crowded in here.’
‘Yana,’ Marmion’s voice was faintly slurred, and she too began coughing, but daintily. ‘Was that party of Ples’s much better than I thought it was?’
‘I don’t think so, unless she uses pink perfumed, gas on her guests afterwards,’ Yana said, coughing again.
‘Merde alors! Is that what it was? Where are we?’
‘I don’t know. (Hack) It’s dark.’
Then suddenly it wasn’t and a chirpy voice said, ‘Oh, good, our guests are awake. Tell me, none of you have any food allergies do you? Anyone a vegetarian?’
Yana blinked fast and focused on the small port where a pert face dimpled in at them. Yana had seen hundreds of faces like that pushing everything from shampoo to specific space craft for flights to anywhere you cared to mention.
‘What’s it to ya?’ Bunny asked, surprisingly pugnacious on such short notice.
‘Now, honey, that’s no way to be. Just because you have to be our guests for a while doesn’t mean the experience has to be unpleasant. Sorry to crowd you all in like that but we thought you’d feel reassured to find each other near by when you woke up. I’m afraid the boys were a little careless how you landed. So, let’s try again, shall we? Any food allergies?’
The tangle on the floor sorted themselves out. ‘I demand to know where we are and why we’ve been detained in this fashion,’ Marmion said.
Til be glad to explain but really, the crew is going to be cross if they don’t get their dinners on time so could you please answer my question first?’ the person at the port said with a trace of irritation.
‘I would dislike causing your crew any inconvenience,’ Yana said in a trenchant tone. ‘Non
e of us is a vegetarian but I,’ and she paused for a coughing fit, ‘am sensitive to any sort of gas!’
‘Fine, good. Wonderful. Back in a jiff,’ the person said, and left.
‘Marmion,’ Yana said sotto voce, and when she had Marmion’s attention in the dimly lit room, she gestured to where she had hidden her alarm. It was gone now: she’d’ve been surprised if it’d still been there, a gross oversight on their captors’ part.
Marmion gave the most imperceptible of nods and a sly smile. So, thought Yana, both of them had had a chance to send signals. Help ought to be on its way. Wherever they were.
‘Macci’s not here,’ Marmion said suddenly. ‘What have they done with him, do you suppose? There’s just us four.’
‘Oh!’
Then Pert-face, as good as her word, was back. When she opened the hatch, she had two armed guards with her and the three of them stayed outside the room. The guards wore orange coveralls with no identifying patches. Pert-face wore a bodytight in green with an aqua tunic of what appeared to be crocheted lace. Her hair was light brown, with lynxlike grey tufts at the ears and in a diamond pattern at the crown, extending into the fringe of hair accenting earnest brown eyes.
‘I’m Dinah O’Neill,’ she introduced herself. ‘I represent Louchard Enterprises’
‘As what?’ Yana asked.
‘Oh, Public Relations, Legal, Administrative, what-have-you. I’m the representative. And you, I take it, must be Colonel Yanaba Maddock?’
Yana nodded but declined to shake her hand.
‘And the famous Marmion de Revers Algemeine!’ Dinah O’Neill said, the stars practically dancing in her eyes as she addressed Marmie. ‘I’m thrilled to meet you.’
‘I wish I could say the same,’ Marmion said.
‘Now, now, Madame Algemeine, I’m sure you’ve been unavoidably detained for business reasons before. Think of this little interlude as another minor delay. And these lovely youngsters must be… let’s see, Diego Metaxos? Right? Right! And Buneka or Bunny - my, that really suits you - Rourke. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have you here.’
