Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  Every muscle taut and every nerve stretched, she endured, as Torkel did beside her. She really should have made her escape at Sean’s, she decided. That was her first mistake! She could have used one of the curlies or the comm unit or something to get her back to the village. Her second, she thought grimly, was not watching the miners and letting one of them take her weapon. Again, if she had played her cards better she could have been safely back at Kilcoole, where she knew she had friends and where she would have had a chance of finding Sean. If half of what people said about him was true, if what she felt about him was true, he would know what this was all about.

  Then, miraculously, the roaring abated, a gust of side wind blew some of the smoke and ash away, and a light rain began to fall.

  Maybe, Yana thought with small hope, it would rain harder, clear the air a bit, and cool the mud off enough so they could walk out of there.

  When at last she dared to peel herself off the boulder, she did a damage report on herself. Burns stung, rock scrapes ached, she was covered with ash, blood speckled here and there. Then she looked at Torkel, who looked much the same way she felt. Only . . . her hand went to her head and she was relieved to find that she had more hair left than he did. Torkel had lost quite a swath, including his eyebrows, down his right side. And most of his shirt. The back of his fatigue pants, made of a supposedly indestructible material, looked more like mesh drawers. His right arm was a mass of tiny blisters, and her left one was in no better shape. Both packs were smoking, riddled with burn holes. She was putting the remains of the pack out where the rain could douse the final sparks when she saw Giancarlo lying unconscious, half-buried in the runnel of mud. He must have been trying to make it to the shelter of the boulder, too. There was no sign of Ornery-eyes.

  The copters and other aircraft were grounded by falling ash, the snocles could not run over rivers and muddy slush, the tracked vehicles were too slow, and the runners of the sleds would not slide over broken ground. Rivers had changed their courses so that travel by water was unreliable to the point of insanity.

  Therefore, the little string of sturdy curly-coats, each bearing either passenger or pack, traveled alone across the vast emptiness of the uninhabited northwestern sector of Petaybee, toward the mountains stretching up from the plains on one side; on the other, down onto the ice pack to the north and on to the open sea.

  The lead curly, Boru, carried Sinead, while the next, the largest and the sturdiest of the beasts, carried Clodagh, wrapped in a poncho that covered both her and her mount so that she looked like a mountain on hooves. Behind her traveled Bunny, then Diego Metaxos, who was still fretting about leaving his father in Aisling’s care. He had been badly torn between the honor of being asked to join the rescue party and his responsibility to supervise his father’s steady improvement. He had left his father absently stroking one of the several cats, who had continued to adhere to the man like leeches. Both Clodagh and Aisling had assured him that this was a very good sign and told him to let matters proceed at their own pace. Diego couldn’t hurry the healing process but he had extracted a promise from Aisling that she would take his father down to the hot springs as soon as possible. Steve Margolies had insisted on coming along as the “technical” observer to the phenomenon. He carried the only concession to modern technology, a comm unit, for contacting Adak in Kilcoole and SpaceBase.

  Bunny thought it was the most ill-assorted rescue party imaginable, but, what with all the injured being tended at Kilcoole, these five had been the only ones available. Sinead would have gone by herself, if no one else had accompanied her to rescue Yana, hoping to find her brother, too. No sooner had Bunny told Clodagh what Adak had said about Yana being in trouble and the shuttle crashing than Sinead had barged into the cabin, muttering that Yana was in trouble and she had to go help.

  “Sean send for you?” Clodagh had asked, her gaze unusually piercing.

  “Not just Sean,” Sinead had answered, biting her words off. She glanced about, measuring the occupants for suitability to her need. “This is it, Clodagh!”

  Clodagh had nodded once and brought her meat cleaver down so hard that it quivered, stuck, in the board. “I go with you!”

  “You?” Bunny couldn’t believe her ears, but Clodagh was already taking off her apron, striding to the litter of parkas and boots by the door, and searching through them for her own gear.

  Her statement had galvanized the others. Nothing would have kept Bunny from following Clodagh, though her insistence astounded Steve. But he repeated his assertion that he had to make observations of the phenomenon. When Diego vacillated, obviously distressed, wanting to go, yet unwilling to leave his father, Aisling had volunteered to look after Francisco.

  As they went outside to select curly-coats from the herd Sinead had rounded up, another volunteer made it plain that he was coming along: Nanook. A quick smile lit Sinead’s anxious face, and she laid her hand in a brief gesture of gratitude on the animal’s black-and-white head.

  Dinah joined them, too, using drastic measures to get her way. Seeing them ride out of the village, she had howled so piteously and continued to yelp at such an earsplitting volume that Herbie must have given in and ordered Liam to let her loose. She came charging up to Diego just as they dipped down in the valley northwest of the town, and she maintained a position beside his mount throughout the trek.

  Nanook had taken it as his right to lead the expedition and ranged way beyond Sinead, now and then padding back to them as if hoping he could speed up their progress. But the slush and mud made the going slow, and even the clever curly-coats got trapped now and then in melting drifts.

  On the first day, when the ground shook again, Clodagh lifted her hand to signal a halt. Laboriously she dismounted and slowly lay down, arranging herself flat on her belly, her right cheek pressed onto the snow-packed ground. After a long time, she rose, wiping her face clean before she pointed west. “That way.”

  Clodagh also had other means of communication and Bunny watched, fascinated, as she employed them. She sang. Using tonelike sonar, she sang to the birds and the rocks and the plants:

  “Friends, have you seen our friend, Yanaba?

  She met the enemy and was taken into battle with him.

  See that she comes to no harm.”

  If the addressee was a raven, it promptly flew away; if it was an animal, it ran purposefully off; a stream, it kept about its business, but Bunny swore that the ripples changed pitch; and if it was the ground beneath the hooves of the horses, it simply absorbed the songs, listening. Clodagh listened, too, and then she would alter their direction a compass point or two. They would continue for a while on the new course until she found something else to sing to.

  In this way, despite Margolies’s demanding explanations of this quixotic form of directions, they traveled for two days and two nights and half a day again. They got what sleep they could in their makeshift saddles, stopping only to feed the horses, and for ten minutes in every two hours to rest their mounts’ backs. The horses kept moving tirelessly, mostly at a walk but occasionally, where the terrain had been swept free of snow, breaking into their smooth little canter.

  Very early on the rescuers had to cover their mouths with pieces of cotton cloth that rapidly became clogged with dust and ash and had to be shaken often. Even the food they ate during their brief halts tasted like more of the same. Soon everyone’s eyes went from stinging to being red and swollen. When they could dig down to clean snow during the rest halts, they bathed their faces, trying to relieve the irritation.

  Everything was mud gray—the sky, the ground, the air—and the people and animals moved like big ashy lumps in front and behind. Bunny was so tired and so full of ash and smoke that only her sore tailbone let her know that she was not traveling in a dream. Then Nanook began racing forward and back to them until they quickened their progress in anticipation of what he might have found. He led them to a place where the snow and ash still bore faint indentations of human feet, th
e long flat marks of copter skids, and a pile of discarded effects, all but the metal reduced to scraps of melted or fused material. Fingers of cooling, hardening mud crept up the side of a canyon wall.

  Nanook leapt the few feet from the edge of the canyon to the mud, and Bunny caught her breath, fearful that Nanook might be risking injury. But the cat was far from stupid, and he landed and solemnly stretched out on a surface that was apparently comfortably warm. He began licking his filthy paws as if he were back in Sean’s laboratory.

  “Trust him to find the perfect spot to relax,” Clodagh said, amused.

  Dinah also settled down to lick her paws clean. She had trotted dutifully by Diego’s mount, her red coat barely visible under its ashen cover.

  They slipped the saddle blankets and hackamores from the horses and fed them. They munched trail rations as they unstrapped the snowshoes that they hoped would give them better footing over the ash-covered mud and snow. While they made a final check of their packs, Steve Margolies called their position in to Adak. Bunny only hoped the transmission was better than the reception. All they could hear was a hiss and crackle a little louder than the wind, which was blowing steadily east.

  “I hope they got all that,” Steve told the others. “I didn’t hear exactly what they said but, having done a personal on-the-spot review of conditions, I think they said this is a no-go area. There was also some gibberish about there being no one in command to give orders.”

  Clodagh gave a contemptuous sniff and, with a groan, once more began to spread herself flat on the ground. The others stood about for what seemed a very long time—at least the curly-coats had moved a good distance away in search of any grass the mud and ash hadn’t buried—before she moved again.

  She hauled herself up, mopped the ash from her face and neck, brushed it off the front of her clothes, and then pointed. “That way.”

  “The volcano’s that way,” Steve protested, pointing elsewhere.

  Clodagh moved her arm slightly toward the north. “The volcano is that way.” Then she dropped her snowshoes to the ground and stepped into them. Scooping up her pack and twitching her shoulders so that it settled on her back, she started off in the direction she had indicated.

  Bunny looked at Diego and shrugged. Sinead jerked her head at the perplexed Steve, and very shortly, all were following her down into the valley, Dinah sticking right at Diego’s heels. In several leaps, Nanook caught up and passed the humans. Clodagh took particular notice of where he put his paws. For all her bulk, she moved with unexpected agility as she followed the cat’s tracks.

  16

  Yana and Torkel dragged Giancarlo back to the uncertain safety of the boulder, the three of them hostage to the hot mud surrounding them. Yana bound up Giancarlo’s pulped arm and leg, but the heat of the mud and flying rock had pretty well cauterized the wounds inflicted by the blast—or so she would have to hope, she thought ruefully. The colonel would be lucky to live long enough to get infections.

  Torkel had taken a worse beating than she, for although her back was pretty well skinned, her hair hadn’t been as badly singed and her scalp hadn’t been peppered with ash because she’d had sense enough to protect her head. Torkel’s face was scored and swollen where rock had hit it before she had pulled him down, and he was ravaged with grief besides.

  She had had to prod him painfully to get him to move enough to help her with Giancarlo.

  “Look, Torkel,” she said in her best bracing tone. “If your dad survived the crash and the first blast, it’s likely he survived the second one, as well. At any rate, we can’t do anything about it one way or the other unless we survive. Here, eat this so we do!” She thrust a battered ration pack at him, somewhat amazed that the wrapping was still intact. It seemed years ago that she had stuffed them in the front of her shirt.

  She wasn’t sure when she slept, but she knew that sometime within that interminable period, the searing heat from the mud dissipated and the sunless air grew cold again. She and Torkel Fiske put the unconscious Giancarlo between them and hunched over him, sharing their warmth with him. In her sleep she dreamed that she was holding Sean rather than Torkel, and he was bathing her wounds with water from the hot springs, telling her, “I’m here, Yana. Trust me. Nothing of this world means you harm. Listen to its voice. Remember now . . .”

  The dream and others like it repeated as she slept or half dozed, shivering, clinging to the warmth and life in the two other bodies for more time than she could count or was conscious of.

  Then, without knowing how or when it happened, she woke from the dream of Sean, feeling warm again. She smelled a freshening in the air and realized that her hand was touching something cool, hard, and smooth; and, rousing, she found that she was touching the once scalding mud.

  Torkel was still sleeping, and Giancarlo moaned in a fever. Yana sat up and placed both palms against the mud. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. It still retained some warmth, but was otherwise hard and seemed stable. Standing, she tested other areas, pressing her fingers into the layer of ash overlying the previously steaming rivulet. It gave with a slight hiss and a hint of smokiness, but once the crust was broken, solid hard mud was only an inch or two down. She carefully hauled herself up on top of the flow and found that it held her weight.

  The air was clearer. She could definitely smell and see the difference at this height. A strong wind whipped at her, blowing the ash back away from them and over to the north and east. Torkel sat up and blinked lashless eyes at the sudden change. Yana rubbed cautiously at her arms, avoiding the burn blisters but needing to increase blood circulation and reduce hypothermia. She was glad of the visibility, glad of the ability to travel again, if only they knew where they were going. Then she opened the remaining ration pack, twisted it into two more or less equal halves, and let him choose.

  “We’ll have to drag Giancarlo,” she told Torkel when they had finished their scanty meal.

  “He’ll slow us down,” Torkel said.

  “You want to leave him?” she asked. She didn’t like being directly responsible for anyone’s death. On the other hand, if she was to be responsible for someone dying here, she wouldn’t much mind if it was Giancarlo.

  Torkel looked down at the colonel, then shrugged and bent to hoist him by the arms up the wall of mud, where Yana helped support the unconscious man.

  “We’d better get him back to where a copter can land, then,” Yana said.

  But he shook his head stubbornly, unreasonably. “Dad may still be out here.”

  “You can come back afterward,” she insisted.

  But just then a fresh gust of wind from the west carried a raven toward them. The bird swooped, diving so low that its wing brushed Yana’s hair.

  Its cry was no doubt only the usual raucous caw, but to her, wounded, shocked, and probably a little delirious, it seemed to be saying “’ana, ‘ana,” or maybe it was “Sean, Sean.” Then it made an abrupt turn and flew back the way it came. Abruptly she recalled Sean’s dream message.

  “Okay, you win,” she told Torkel. “But we spell each other dragging the son of a bitch and you get first shift.”

  She was pleased when the crow’s west eventually turned out to be the right direction. Even so, both she and Torkel were at the end of their strength from dragging Giancarlo’s heavy and unresponsive body when she caught the first gleam of open water. She hadn’t realized how parched she was until that moment. Then her throat took over, reminding her that she was so dehydrated it didn’t know if it would ever come unstuck. Up closer, Yana saw that the water was a little stream, running from one edge of the mud and on into the side of a hill. Yana fully expected the water to be milky with ash and mud and clogged with debris, but in fact it was so clear she could see the stones at the bottom. Somehow this stretch had escaped all of the ravages of the volcano. Where the stream emerged from the hill, she could make out a deep, cavelike opening, into which her crow guide disappeared as she watched.

  Judging by the way
the ash had drifted, Bunny thought that the wind had been westerly for some time, possibly the entire two and a half days it had taken them to make it this far. Nanook even began to touch down on the mud from time to time, and when the humans walked on it, they felt only a tolerable warmth through the soles of their boots. It certainly wasn’t hot enough to damage the snowshoes, which were proving their worth through the heavier ash deposits.

  They were moving steadily to one side of the smoldering cone. Smoke or steam was windborne away from them to the east, so that the air was not so clogged with ash and sulfur stench.

  Seen from this safe distance, the volcano didn’t, to Bunny’s way of thinking, look all that dangerous. It was actually not very big.

  “It doesn’t have to be big to be dangerous,” Steve said when she voiced her observation. “I’m no expert on vulcanism—Petaybee is not supposed to be labile,” he added in a sourly amused tone, “but, on a world which does have considerable activity, a volcano can rise up one day and disappear the next. After raining ash, lava, rock, or whatever all across a landscape. We’re just lucky this is only an ash-and-mud type. Some rise for the one blowoff and then remain dormant.”

  “Is this one dormant now?” Bunny asked, eyeing it nervously.

  “We hope,” Steve said with a grin.

  “Clodagh?” Bunny persisted.

  Clodagh shrugged and plowed on tirelessly. Nanook skirted a vast lake of hardening mud that steamed more than did most of the rivulets and puddles of the stuff.