Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  The sled bounced along from there, the dogs frisking up hills and running down them, the sled sometimes suspended breathlessly in midair for a moment as it went over a bump. Bunny kept control with the brake and her voice, and once the lead dog, Maud, turned back to look at her and whined when Bunny called out “Gee!”. Bunny promptly called out “Ha!” instead, and Maud, satisfied, turned back to the trail. Mostly the dogs trotted at a leisurely pace, and Yana got a good view of their excretory functions as they stopped to mark the trail every once in a while.

  Finally, however, the trail turned downward for a long time, and then a vast treeless straightaway of ice and snow stretched clear to the horizon, broken only by huge, jagged, upright ice teeth that seemed to be shifting ever so slightly against the brightening sky. The howling of dogs close at hand occasioned answering howls from Bunny’s dogs.

  Bunny whistled the dogs to a stop then, and Yana saw that the coral-tinted squarish hill between them and the giant ice teeth was not actually a mound of snow kissed by the rising sun but a building painted in that unlikely shade. As the dogs trotted to a halt, they rounded the corner of the building, and Yana saw a snocle similar to Bunny’s sitting before half a dozen small houses, each with a howling red fox-hound on top of it, caroling a greeting to the newcomers.

  “Here we are,” Bunny said. “And it looks like he’s at home, too.”

  Yana had formed no preconceptions about Bunny’s relative, apart from expecting him to vaguely resemble someone of the blood kin she had already met. But Dr. Sean Shongili wasn’t like anyone she had ever met, either here on Petaybee or anywhere else in her lifetime—despite the fact that she had the distinct feeling that she had encountered him before.

  Bunny had rapped on the door, singing out a cheerful “Sláinte, Uncle Sean,” a greeting lost in the canine chorus. She urgently beckoned Yana to hurry up, but Yana had to disentangle herself from the furs and the cat before she could stagger to her feet. That long, cold ride in a less-than-comfortable position had stiffened all her joints. She hated to appear less than agile and forced her body to move with something near a semblance of normality.

  The door she approached pulled inward, and with snow glare impairing her vision, Yana could distinguish only a medium-sized form, for once not distorted by layers of clothing. The man was actually in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the collar open.

  “Uncle Sean, I gotcha home! I’ve brought Yanaba Maddock to see you. And I gotta favor to ask. In Clodagh’s name.” On those words, Bunny put a hand on Yana’s back and propelled her into the house.

  Blinking to adjust her eyes, Yana looked about a room that sprouted unusual shapes from every surface, wall and ceiling, a veritable djinni’s cave of wonders and a heinz of unassorted utensils, tools, parts, and, as usual, felines. These were six times the size of the one left curled in the sled furs and not a one of them was orange-colored. Fine heads turned, and autocratic amber, yellow, and green eyes assessed her. In a basket near the fire, a black-and-white bitch with a harlequin face lifted her head, sniffing, moved her foreleg to hide the pups that nursed her, and remained alert the entire time the visitors remained in Sean’s cabin. That was the sum of Yana’s first impression. Then the man dominated the scene.

  Sean Shongili smiled, and his eyes did, too: sparkly silver eyes that looked straight into hers, clever, “seeing” eyes that were bright with an unqualified welcome, a decided change from the superficial social manners that were usually all she was accorded and many degrees more kindly than Colonel Giancarlo. But Giancarlo had a mission for her, and he probably never regarded his mission personnel as remotely human.

  Shongili wasn’t much taller than she was; a subtle aura of great strength, intelligence, and charm emanated from him, though charm was a quality she had never trusted—until now. He was a lean man, which for starters she liked, with a narrow face, slightly broad at the eyes, which were wide-set and large; cheekbones that were more Magyar than Indian; a generous mouth with finely carved lips, white, even teeth just visible behind them; and a purposeful chin and jawline. Not a man easily persuaded from his purpose.

  “Well, now, so you’re Major Maddock,” Sean said, and she hurried to pull off her right glove as he extended what looked like an abnormally long-fingered hand. But it was warm and grasped hers just firmly enough for her to sense, again, the unexpected resources in him. In fact, the touch of his skin on hers was slightly electric, stimulating.

  Then the silver eyes blinked and something in the altered look made her frown slightly, confused, for all that there didn’t seem to be any diminution of his welcome or smile.

  “Has everyone on this frozen ball of ice heard of me now?” she asked, slightly petulant. She forced a smile on her lips to make her words seem more of a joke than they had sounded in her own ears.

  “Good news travels faster than bad on Petaybee,” Sean said. He moved with lithe grace to the ever-present stove of a Petaybee home, pouring three cups from the equally ubiquitous steaming pot. “Actually, I have the only radio link with the town around. Adak at the snocle depot gets downright chatty if anything interesting happens—such as Kilcoole getting a new citizen, and a war hero at that. Here’s something to warm your guts after such a long sled ride, Major.”

  “Thanks,” Yana said, ignoring the war hero comment and hoping to restore herself to his good opinion after that flash of aggro. “You’re very kind.”

  His silver eyes glinted as he handed her the cup. “Bunny would skin me alive if I never asked you where your mouth was,” he said, and winked with pure mischief before he presented Bunny with her mug.

  “Too right, Unk,” Bunny said, “and Sean makes a good bev.”

  Yana clasped it in both hands, to warm numb fingers, taking her time about sipping a liquid she knew would be too hot to drink immediately. The rising steam carried a spicily inviting odor to her nostrils.

  “Charlie’s gone, I hear,” Sean went on, hitching his hips up onto the nearest flat surface.

  “Yah! With barely time to say good-byes, and no song,” Bunny said, then cocked her head at him, smiling winsomely. “Which is why we wondered if we could have the recorder. The major here knows all about equipment like yours, and she volunteered to help us send him a letter. To make up for his sudden departure, like.”

  Sean flicked a gaze at Yana, and she quirked her lips in a smile.

  “Charlie-boy’s not the one to irritate folk,” Sean said. “Wonder why they posted him off-planet.” But he put his cup down and, with a single fluid movement, spun on one heel to an overburdened wall cabinet from which he unerringly extracted a recording device. Not, Yana realized as she saw the face of it, an obsolete affair but nearly state-of-the-art from the last time she had been issued one. The cabinet was crammed with technological gadgets of all kinds, half of which she couldn’t put a name or use to. She watched as Sean negligently pushed back into place equipment that would have been worth a small fortune on any planet, much less a technologically starved one like Petaybee.

  “Half of it doesn’t work,” he said, without seeming to have noticed her attention. “Petaybee’s hard on any kind of instrumentation and machinery.”

  “How do you manage your work then?” she blurted out.

  He gave a diffident shrug. “I improvise. We do a lot of that on Petaybee.” He handed her the recorder. “Do you understand this type?”

  She examined the display keys more closely and nodded, deciding to limit her comments. “Had one almost like this on my last assignment.” She slid the thin rectangle into a thigh pocket. Then she nodded at the big cats. “I haven’t seen anything like them here.”

  “Them?” Shongili looked half-surprised, half-amused. “My track-cats. When they’re of a mind, they’ll even pull a sled.”

  “They’re big enough.” Yana moved slightly on her buttocks. She was near enough to the stove to begin to feel the heat. She shrugged her jacket open a little more. “Do they always look at a person like th
at?”

  Sean laughed. “They’re always interested in new things.”

  “Did you design them like that?”

  Sean’s mobile eyebrows developed a quizzical quirk. “Design them? They designed themselves,” he said with a shrug.

  “Yes, but I thought you and your . . .”

  “Not them. What he did; what I do is check on adaptability, not evolution or even mutation, but something in between as each species makes subtle improvements to survive in conditions their ancestors never had to cope with. Petaybee is a prime example of survival of the fittest.”

  “He’s off,” Bunny said with an air of resignation, and let herself fall backward into the chair she had been perched on. There she struggled out of her outer layers, preparing to endure. She shot Yana a grin to quell any apprehension.

  “Like cats whose ears are no longer susceptible to frostbite?” Yana asked, remembering Clodagh’s offhanded comment.

  “Exactly.” Sean grinned. But the humor in his silvery gaze held more than acceptance of her statement. He was probing, too, and a lot more deftly than Colonel Giancarlo could.

  “Why haven’t you done as much for the humans stuck here?” Yana asked, not quite certain she could tease this unusual man, but suspecting she could.

  “Ah, them.” Sean waved a hand. “We genetic manipulators aren’t allowed to help humans. They have to do it the hard way.”

  “Have they?”

  Sean cocked his head, his amusement not one whit diminished. “I’d say there have been . . . adjustments made. Learning what furs, for instance, are most suitable for the purpose of keeping human bodies warm.”

  “That’s intellectual, not biological,” Yana said.

  “Mankind’s intelligence distinguishes us from the animals, my dear major. And allows adjustments much faster than animals can alter their genetic codes.”

  “Do they? Here on Petaybee?”

  “Over the last two hundred years, they’d have to, to survive. Wouldn’t they?” He drained his cup. “Of course, the original Admin was sensible about some of the species they sent, which helped.”

  “Which ones?” Yana asked.

  Bunny snorted, obviously knowing the answer.

  Sean grinned, a grin of pure unadulterated mischief. “Why, the curly-coats.” When Yana cocked her head at him inquiringly, he beckoned to her. “I’ll show you.”

  “They’re his pride and joy, Yana. You’re in for it,” Bunny said, propping her feet up on a footstool and obviously not intending to join Sean and Yana.

  “I asked.”

  “The curly-coats are equines,” Sean said, and as he cupped her elbow with his hand, she experienced the same electric shock of contact. “Originally from the Siberian area of the Eastern Hemisphere. They exist comfortably in extreme temperatures, having a spare flap in their nose that closes off frost. They survive on vegetation that wouldn’t keep a goat alive. Small, sturdy, able to maneuver on tracks even a sled has trouble running.”

  He led her down a corridor from the main room, past closed doors, and into a link between the house and a spread of other buildings that she took for research and laboratory facilities. The link passed in front of other closed doors, some with security keypads. She was adept enough at sussing her immediate surroundings without appearing to do so, yet she had the sense that Sean was aware of her automatic scanning. They came to the end of the link, which opened onto a paddock with snow fences keeping the drifts from its surface. In the paddock were a dozen small horses, curly-coated to the point of being shaggy, with long fur icicled under their throats, and long feathers curling down from their sturdy barrels and down their short thick legs. At first she wasn’t sure which end was which, since the manes were as long as the tails and just as thick. There were several brown animals, but most were a creamy color; they were all browsing on what looked much like the icicled spines she had seen on the riverside three days before.

  “You’d never spot half of them in this terrain,” was Yana’s first comment.

  Sean chuckled, apparently pleased by her remark. “They’re survivors!”

  “What do you use them for?”

  “A variety of things. Their milk we can drink, fresh, frozen, or fermented, or make into a butter which we use in our lamps.”

  “I have,” she said, restraining herself from wrinkling her nose.

  “It smells but it’s better than nothing. Their coats we can comb and use for wool.” Yana thought of the warm soft blanket she had seen in Clodagh’s. “We can eat their flesh, drink their blood—” He glanced at her to see if that repulsed her, but she had eaten far worse than curly-coated equines in her time—worse and tougher than these little animals looked. “We can ride them, use them as pack animals, use them as extra blankets if we’re caught out in bad weather. They don’t object to sleeping with humans . . .”

  She looked at him then, for the undertone to his comment was both risible and dogmatic. His silver eyes glinted with the mischief that seemed an essential part of his public self.

  “They are amenable to anything we can think up for them to do. And they never complain or balk.” That seemed to be of paramount importance. “They’ve saved many a team from hypothermic death and starvation. In fact, you can bleed them quite a bit before they are weakened.”

  “Useful.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Were they used by the teams that disappeared?”

  Sean was surprised at that question and scratched the back of his neck. “Been given a few ghouly stories to keep you awake at night?”

  “Not ghouly to me,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve been first-team on a few company planets, a couple where I’d’ve been glad to have a few curly-coats along.”

  “Oh?”

  She could see interest sparking the glint in his eyes. He leaned back against the plasglas, propping his arms on the wide sills, apparently not affected by contact with the cold surface, whereas she could feel the frost of it oozing into the semiwarm link.

  She gave a laugh. “Don’t get me started on that phase of my life. It’s over.” She made a cutting gesture with her hands.

  “Then it’s time to sing about it. You came through.”

  “Sing? Me?” She ducked her head in denial. “Not me—couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

  Sean smiled—almost challengingly, she thought. “Inuit chants can’t be called tunes, not without a stretch of the definition, but they do grab the mind and make audiences listen. I think they’d like to hear your songs.”

  Yana was not affecting modesty: she just didn’t think any of her experiences were worth hearing about, and certainly some of them she wouldn’t talk, much less sing, about.

  “I’m serious, Yana.” He spoke her name with an odd lilt. She shot him a quick look and saw that he was, indeed, serious. Then his expression turned sly. “The spring latchkay’s coming up soon. You’ll be coming, and there are some folks hereabout would like to hear a song about Bremport.”

  “Bremport?” She went rigid.

  He laid a light finger on her arm. “You were at Bremport. Charlie picked up on that when he got a copy of your orders and the briefing on your medical history.”

  “That should have been confidential,” she said, feeling less guilty about Charlie than she had the day before.

  “Charlie’s older brother Donal was at Bremport, too, so it was of more than casual interest to him. So were three other sons of Petaybee and two daughters, and us here knowing nothing about their deaths but that they are dead.”

  Damn Charlie anyway. Giancarlo had been right to transfer him—the boy’s loyalties had been too mixed for him to be an effective company representative here. Still, she couldn’t blame him, but—damn. She remembered to exhale then, and swallowed hard on all the things she didn’t wish to remember about Bremport.

  The swallow was a mistake. Somehow it went down wrong and she started to cough. Hard as she tried to limit it to the one cough, another burst past her lips, an
d the next thing she knew she was racked by a paroxysm. She fumbled in her coat for her syrup and dragged the bottle out. But she moved too swiftly: it flew from her groping fingers and smashed on the stone floor of the link. As if the loss of the syrup were a signal, the coughing fit intensified. Sean’s very strong fingers gripped her arms, supporting her convulsing body, and he began to hurry back the way they had come, though she had trouble keeping on her feet. She had to bring her knees almost to her chin to keep the spasms from tearing her abdominal muscles.

  “What’s the cause, Yana? The gas at Bremport?”

  She managed to nod a yes. Then he was assisting her into a laboratory, flicking up lights, and settling her onto a nearby stool before he sprang across the room to the large array of cabinets there. Without fumbling, he poured out a dose of a clear yellow liquid and returned to her side.

  “Something of Clodagh’s that makes cowardly coughs evaporate on its fumes,” he said. “We all take it now and then.”

  Yana was in no condition to object to anything anyone might consider remedial. Between one spasm and the onset of another, she knocked back the liquid—and rolled her eyes, inhaled, and then exhaled gustily, for the medicine had a kick in it that could only reduce any cough to tatters. And the next spasm didn’t materialize.

  Surprised, Yana took several short breaths, fully expecting each one to deteriorate into a cough. Sean regarded her with a growing smile curling his lips.

  “See? Guaranteed effective.”

  “What was in it?” she gasped respectfully, still aware of the taste of it in the back of her mouth.

  The mischief returned to Sean Shongili’s eyes. “Well, now, that I don’t know. Clodagh won’t pass on the secret of her elixir. She just makes it.”