Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Oh, frag! No, I haven’t, really. Clodagh came by once, too, but I completely forgot to ask her when she wanted to do the song for Charlie. If you need it, maybe I could—”

  “No, no, that’s okay.” He peered over her shoulder. “Your water’s boiling.”

  “Thanks.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “What I actually wondered was, well, while you’ve got it, have you given any more thought to making the song about Bremport?”

  “Oh, Sean,” she said, sitting back down hard. To her annoyance, she began to cough again, not because she had to but out of reflex. “Sean, I just can’t do that. It’s too soon. A lot of it’s classified. And I just don’t want to think about it. People here don’t want to hear it, either, trust me.”

  He reclined on the bed, propping himself up on his elbow, and gave her a long hard look. “I could say the same thing, Yana. Trust me. You need to do this. We need to hear it.”

  “Sean, I can’t. I’m no songwriter and I can barely stand to talk about it. Anyway, I only saw one small, awful part. The rest I’ve put together from what I was told before or since about Bremer.”

  “I’d like to hear about it,” he said, quietly insistent.

  “Did you have someone there? Did you know someone there?” she asked.

  “You,” he said, making and holding eye contact. “At least, I’m trying to know you.”

  That unsettled her for a moment. She put some of Clodagh’s herbs in a bag and steeped them in the tea water while she thought. Maybe she should talk about it, not only because Shongili wanted to know, but because she was still furious about the whole thing. She couldn’t keep popping off at superior officers on whose goodwill she was dependent and get away with it.

  “Okay,” she said. “Since you think it needs to be told to everybody else, let’s turn on the recorder. I don’t believe I could go through this twice.” He said nothing, but raised his eyebrows inquiringly and she said, “My coat. In the pocket.”

  He moved with natural, lanky grace, rolling across the bed and onto his feet, striding the step or two to the doorway and extracting the recorder, rolling back across the bed with the machine in one hand. He set it on the table beside her chair and punched in the recording sequence.

  She put the cup of tea beside him, then realized it was her only cup. Giving a shrug, she carefully raised the pan in both hands and sipped the tea from the lip before settling down again.

  She could have gone next door and borrowed a cup, perhaps, but she didn’t know the people and she felt that if she interrupted this moment, it wouldn’t return. She might never again have the courage to discuss it. She certainly would never again have the kind of total attention she had from Sean Shongili.

  “I’m not sure what’s classified,” she said to begin with. “Except that I’m not supposed to tell you how the terrorists infiltrated the station.” She shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know that for sure anyway, though I could speculate. The thing is, Sean, the deaths were unnecessary. None of those people had to die. None of them should have. The terrorists were after food, medicine, and supplies.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I lay there on the floor playing dead, watching them loot the place, and that’s all they bloody well took.”

  “We heard that they systematically ran through the place executing everyone they found alive,” Sean said.

  Yana shook her head. “There was no need of that. I think they did make sure of a few of the crew, but the station commander and supply officer just happened, by pure coincidence mind you, to be visiting another ship that day. My ship. It had just transferred supplies, and I was bringing fresh recruits over to familiarize them with a Class One station and demonstrate some of the equipment. I—um—I was just showing them how the snorkel worked.”

  “The what?” Sean asked, leaning forward.

  Her voice had been clear and matter-of-fact so far, but suddenly she was having trouble forcing it above a whisper. Her throat began to spasm and she started coughing again. Sean held out the bottle of Clodagh’s medicine, and she took a good swig before she continued.

  “The snorkel. It’s for short repair jobs in airless sections of the ship, so that you don’t have to suit up. There’s an exchange unit in it that returns oxygen for CO2, breath for breath, without the need to carry heavy tanks or wear a full space suit that might be too bulky to do some of the inside repairs in tighter places. Also, you can send snorkled personnel into certain areas of the ship without having to flood the whole area with O2. New invention. They discovered the exchange material on Bremer.”

  She stopped and watched him. She had lit the lamp earlier, and now its glow and that of the moons and stars through the window illuminated the room. The planes of his face were shadowed, and his eyes held hers, silently pulling more out of her. The tension was broken when the cat jumped up onto her knees and settled down, purring, as if knowing she needed reassurance that she was here, on firm ground, with living people and in no immediate danger, instead of back there.

  He nodded slowly, an almost imperceptible movement.

  “I stepped back into an air lock with the mask in place and let the inner door close. The students were looking through the view plate and watching me on the screens on either side of the door, as I explained the mask to them.

  “I saw the vapor pouring in through the ventilation duct before any of them did, but I couldn’t speak to them because of the snorkel. I signaled them to stand back and hit the O2 button for the lock, waited a beat, and hit the exit panel for the door. But then I realized the vapor was pouring in behind me, too. I heard an explosion—felt it really—and the door jammed half-open between us. The recruits were coughing and crowding the outer door.”

  She stopped for a moment and took a swig of cough syrup, seeing the faces in front of her. “An eighteen-year-old girl blocked my way back into the hold. She was trying to get through to the outside, I guess, and was coughing so hard she couldn’t straighten up. People were vomiting, crying. The girl’s nametag said Samuelson and she had almost white hair, cut into a crew cut. You know, trying to look the part of a company cadet. Her scalp was bright red through her hair, and her eyes were bulging. I exhaled into the mask, tore it off, and tried to wrestle it over her face, but she fought me. I—uh—had to knock her down to get past her, into the room. I put the mask back on and breathed into it but the O2 that came back wasn’t pure. I must have let some of the gas leak in while I was trying to rebreathe her. The yellow vapor was still swirling, and through it I saw the viewscreens. Masked figures were running around, carrying weapons and containers, grabbing all the new supplies. My first thought was that they were station crew investigating the gas in the ventilation system. But that didn’t jibe with the weapons and the way they were ignoring the people dying under their feet. I tried buddy-breathing with the nearest cadet who still had some life in him, and he seemed to realize what I was trying to do, but when he breathed into the mask, it fouled it, and he died too. They all died. Every damned one of them died and I just lay there, playing dead, on the floor breathing through the contaminated mask, exhaling the gas and CO2, sucking in poisoned oxygen while the terrorists ran through the station. The alarms were blaring and the station computer calling for help, but the last thing I saw was the masked face of one of the terrorists through the viewport leading to the main corridor. She looked surprised to see us lying in there. I had my face against the floor so the mask wouldn’t show, and I was wedged among the cadets’ bodies. I did—not—cover myself with glory.”

  She didn’t realize until he pulled a rag out of his pocket and wiped her face that she had been weeping. She took the rag from him and scrubbed at her face vigorously, not wanting undeserved sympathy.

  He withdrew gently, asking, “How did you get out?”

  “The station computer alerted the ship’s computer, and they sent medical teams and oxygen. It can’t have taken very long, any of it, but I was unconscious by then.
I woke up at Andromeda Station, unable to move. I was on an automatic respirator. Four or five of us survived, I understand, but we weren’t allowed to meet. Once we were well enough to talk, we were questioned for weeks about how we managed to survive the others. At first I think they thought I was in league with the terrorists. But then some of the administrators on Bremer got scared and turned over the terrorists. We were exonerated, they were executed . . .” She shrugged, at a loss for any more to say. “Some song, huh?”

  This time he rose from the bed and put his arms around her. She tried not to cry, not to play for sympathy. She had no need of it. But she developed a very sudden and crucial need for being held against Sean Shongili—since he had volunteered.

  “I—Um, I can’t tell you anything specific about the kids from Petaybee,” she said into his shoulder.

  He hugged her more tightly and she relaxed into him, closing her eyes, relieved to have talked about it. Relieved that so far he hadn’t told her what she should have done instead of what she had done to save the kids who were in her charge.

  He surprised her then by saying, “Get dressed.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not tired, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t want to try to go to sleep now, no,” she said, wiping her face with the heels of her hands so she could look him in the eye.

  “I want to take you somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “A place we use for cleansing. Come on.”

  She pulled on her quilted pants and parka, her mittens, hat, and muffler, and stuck the cough medicine back in her pocket.

  “Let’s take this, too,” Sean said, sticking the recorder into his own pocket.

  “You don’t still think I could sing . . .”

  “We’ll see what you think,” he said, prodding her toward the door with a hand that lingered between the bottom of her cap and her folded-down hood, at the base of her hairline. A rush of longing for him made her feel weak-kneed and ashamed at the same time, as if she were exploiting the tragedy to hold his attention.

  She sat with him in the cab of his snocle, the motor obscenely loud in the silent village. In a moment they were through it, past Bunny’s sleeping dogs and Clodagh’s house, past the company station and out onto the snowy plain.

  The machine slid over the snow and parted drifts, spraying white glitter in its wake, the engine’s hum the only sound, as if they were riding the wind. After a few moments Sean leaned forward and pointed up, and she looked above her to see a long weaving band of rainbow-striped feathers undulating across the sky like the warbonnet of an old-time cinematic warrior.

  They watched and rode in silence. A big cat sprang away from them; then the lights of their snocle snared a wolf and they had to tack around him to keep from injuring him. They didn’t really need the lights, it seemed to Yana. The snow reflected back the light from the moons and stars and the aurora, casting deep shadows against which prominent objects were etched in a sharp relief. For the first time, she saw that the settlement was within sight of hills and mountains, off to the east and southeast. They passed between the first pair of hills and cut behind them, following a winding pass that didn’t assail the mountains directly, but nudged gently into them. Within this shelter was more of the vegetation she had seen along the river, tall conifers and a great deal of brush.

  It was darker here, in the shadows of the hills, and Sean stopped the snocle.

  “We have to walk in,” he said. “There’s no way to get back there by snocle or sled, but it’s an easy walk.”

  She nodded and followed, thinking she could use the crisp air to clear her head of cough-medicine fumes and the leaden emotional aftertaste of Bremport. She could taste the gas on her tongue again and smell it deep inside herself.

  The air here was not as cold as that at the village. Stunted trees and brush grew along the man-made walkway fashioned of carefully pieced bits of flattened machine hulls and suspended over the snow and humped mounds of undergrowth.

  Sean had been taking the lead, and now he reached back for her and pulled her forward.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to a large animal watching them from the shadows.

  “It looks just like I do in this getup,” she said of the burly furry form.

  “That’s because you look like a bear,” he said, his voice husky, whether from whispering and cold or emotion she couldn’t tell. “This is all muskeg underneath here, spongy, swampy. You’ll soon see why. Berries stay on the bushes much later than elsewhere, which is what interests him.” He nodded at the bear. “Come, we’re almost there.”

  And around the next bend she saw the rising steam, curling above the snow-laden tops of larger trees, and two steps farther she saw the pools and the falls.

  “Sean, it’s beautiful,” she said, taking in the upper pool, closest to them, where water bubbled up from the center in a fountain and formed a deep wide well reflecting the moons and stars in its ripples. Some hidden current sent the water cascading into a second pool and a third. A narrow path, almost free of snow, ran alongside the banks, leading in steps down to the lowest pool. Sean was already shucking his clothing. He turned and grinned at her.

  “You’ll dry out better if you only get your hide wet. If you can’t swim, there’s a lot of places where it’s shallow enough to wade, but you’ll prefer total immersion.”

  She had already begun to unfasten her outer clothing. He jumped into the water with a flash of moonlight on his pale muscular backside. She caught a shadow-darkened glimpse of him sliding over the falls and heard him laugh.

  Hoping this wasn’t another of those instances where everybody else was freezing their butt off while Shongili was warm and under—or in this case un—dressed, she quickly finished stripping and much more quickly waded into the pool, then glided into the water. The pool by the fountain was indeed warm, almost uncomfortably so, and it unknotted her chilled muscles and soaked her through and through with its heat until she felt lazy and languorous. The water carried a hint of sulfur and mint. She kept as much of her under the surface as possible, diving repeatedly.

  The diving caused a ringing in her ears that sounded almost like music. She swam underwater as long as possible, listening to it, hoping to remember which tunes it called to mind.

  She surfaced long enough to catch her breath before approaching the waterfall. It wasn’t a long one, a drop of just a few feet, and the lip of the fall was smooth beneath the tumbling water. If Shongili could do it, so could she, she thought, but she flipped over and went down feet first, her knees, belly, breasts, and face momentarily tweaked with the bite of the icy air.

  The water in the lower pool was a little cooler, a little easier to swim in without falling asleep, but as she was surfacing, something flashed between her legs and up behind her.

  She flipped around and grabbed, thinking to find Shongili, but her hand touched wet fur instead of wet skin and she found herself looking down into the laughing silvery eyes of a large gray seal.

  She hadn’t thought seals liked fresh water, especially not warm fresh water, and especially not inland streams, but perhaps this was another of Petaybee’s permutations that Sean wanted her to see.

  The seal flipped up and back under her and dived down into the lower pool. Where the hell was Sean? She felt a cold droplet on her face, and another, and looked up to see that light snow was floating down from a sky now only partially clear. She shivered and dove under, hearing the music again. This time, perhaps because of the closeness of the falls, she could almost hear the singing of lyrics as well.

  The seal somehow or other had propelled itself back into this upper pool and now came up under her, as if inviting her to hold on to it while it swam around and around.

  Yes! She did hear words, not lyrics after all, but spoken words, low and murmured. She thought perhaps Sean might have returned and was talking to her from the land. When she raised her head, however, he was nowhere near, though the murmurous words continued to
the soft water music. She glimpsed the seal under the falls for a moment, and she decided she would get out of the pool. But first, she’d warm up beneath the water pouring from the hot pool above.

  There was a narrow ledge under the pool, and as she climbed up on it, she saw the flash of gray fur again as the seal darted in and out. Ignoring the creature, she stood and let the deliciously warm water play over her face and hair, cascading down her shoulders, back, hips, and calves, caressing her face, throat, breasts, belly, and thighs. The water continued its tune, and listening for the rhythm, she realized suddenly that the air pressure had changed around her. It wasn’t water alone that was caressing her, stroking her abdomen, counting her ribs with splayed fingers, cupping her breasts . . .

  “By the powers that be, I welcome you home,” Sean’s voice said, as if reciting a line from a song or a poem. His lips slid beneath her ear and kissed her throat, and she turned in his arms, knowing full well that this was probably going to mean no end of trouble at some point but not caring at all.

  His skin was slick with water but almost as well furred as the seal’s. She turned in his arms and threw her own arms around his neck, kissing him hungrily. When the kiss was done, he held her for a moment, then looked down at her with silver eyes confusingly like those of the seal. She blinked and retreated a half step. The laughter in his eyes saddened briefly into wistfulness, then brusqueness as he held her away from him and said, “We’d better go now. You get out and get dressed. I’ll be right behind you.”

  As if now was a time to be formal? She pulled away from him and dove back into the cooler pool, swimming briskly out and deliberately letting the cold touch her bare skin before dressing again.

  Frag, what was it, anyway? Had her revelations been too much for him after all? Or had he really meant this little swim to be therapeutic and just gotten momentarily carried away when it became erotic instead? Maybe he had a serious interest elsewhere. Maybe he didn’t like women. No, she had had definite evidence to the contrary. Angry and baffled, she pulled half-frozen clothing over her wet body and began walking very briskly indeed back down the pathway.