by neetha Napew
By the time she had gone five more steps, Torkel recovered from his surprise enough to tell her that she wouldn’t be able to penetrate such a hedge of weed, and where were the boards and other spanning materials he had sent for? She gave no answer, plodding up the track toward the cave. The other new arrivals followed, plus half the village, which seemed to consider this expedition fine entertainment.
At the edge of the vast jungle of waist-high vines, which seemed even more impenetrable since Torkel’s first look at them, Clodagh paused. She bent down and gently touched the center of one of the leaves.
So what are you doing? Asking it nicely? Torkel demanded.
“Lookin’ at this white stuff. Wondering why somebody tried to paint the bushes. This is the only thing that works.” She drew out a large clear flask filled with a greenish liquid, uncorked it carefully, and then inserted a sprinkler head of home manufacture. She shook the bottle a bit in front and to each side of her.
Instantly the vines retracted as if they had been mowed with a scythe, and as she moved forward, Marmion fell in step behind her, followed by Sally Point-Jefferson, who had had the good sense to put on heavy boots.
Marmion turned around and said, “Quickly, boys. I don’t know how long the effect lasts. Clodagh’s very mysterious about it.
They followed with alacrity. Torkel felt like a fool, trailing behind the big woman as she doused her concochon to the right, the center, and the left, like some ancient prelate dispensing holy water or preparing a pontiff’s path with incense.
When they reached a wall of greenery where the vines from the meadow above the cave spilled down over into the field, she increased the area and parabola of her casting, widening the path. The vines drew back like curtains, and Torkel saw the entrance to a largish cave.
“Better use lights,” Clodagh said, though she imperturbably stepped into the dimness, Marmion behind her.
“Oh!” Marmion said. “What ever has happened here?”
“Somebody tried to kill this place,” Clodagh said. “But Petaybee fights back.” She indicated the streamers of vines and roots extending from the ceiling.
She proceeded until, farther inside the cave, she stepped cautiously around what looked like a green hillock.
“Ah! Here. Captain,” she said to Torkel, sprinkling the hillock so that the vines gradually shrank away to show the body they had encased. “Is this yer man here that you were looking for?”
The popped eyes, protruding tongue, and cyanosed face were nevertheless identifiable as those of the former shanachie. The bloodied grooves tightly scored about his neck gave ample proof of the agency that had killed him.
“He said he had a sure fire mining method,” Torkel said. “Something to do with Petraseal.”
Faber knocked on a piece of the roof that had remained vineless thus far. “This is Petraseal all right, but this on the cracks—“ He ran his fingers over it and shone his flashlight beam on the result and on what had covered the ends of the withered vines. “Look. It’s not even white. It’s pale lime green and it’s not Petraseal, Captain Fiske. This is exterior wall paint, and not a real high quality at that.”
Shepherd Howling, visibly shaking, suddenly sprang at Matthew Luzon as if attacking him. “Get me out of here! I must escape the Great Monster before it devours us all as it devoured that man.”
“Uh, Dr. Luzon,” one of the assistants called nervously. “Can you come back here?” He had followed Clodagh, who was continuing to sprinkle, undeterred by her grisly discovery, farther into the cave. “We’ve got three more corpses.”
“I demand that this woman be held for questioning and that the bottle containing her weed-killing solution be seized and analyzed,” Matthew Luzon said.
Marmion Algemeine, still unhappily abstracted by the grotesque deaths of the four men, regarded Matthew with stupefaction.
“Held for questioning? Whatever for?” she demanded.
“Clodagh helped ! Without her we’d never have found those poor men.”
Matthew didn’t exactly say “aha!” but a malicious light did glitter in his eye as he said, in a quiet voice, “And how exactly did she know that these particular vines would need her particular remedy? And how did she just happen to have it available?”
“And I,” Torkel said sternly, “only requested materials and manpower to reach the cave.”
Marmion was not to be confounded. “Why, I would suppose that plants as aggressive as these might be a fairly common nuisance. Is that how you knew, Clodagh?”
Clodagh shrugged but didn’t defend herself.
A woman from Savoy spoke up quickly. “And how wouldn’t she know that? Sure, coo-berries has never been this bad before. It’s that hard to root them out wherever they grow, but they never strangled anybody before this. Still, it’s been an uncommon early spring, and everything is growin’ the like of which I’ve never seen before in all my life.”
“So you would say, would you, madam,” Matthew said “that the weather was unusual and the plants are unusual? Tell me, if what Ms. Senungatuk used on the coo-berries was an ordinary remedy for their sting, why didn’t the rest of you use them?”
“Sure, why should we?” she asked. “Coo-berries wasn’t botherin’ us any, were they? And only ‘cos you come, did we know they was up at the cave. And another thing,” she went on, winding up to unburden all her complaints, “back before Shanachie Reilly arrived, people used to come here for latchkays and have a chat with the planet, like. Only then Reilly gave us to understand that a lot of our problems, the floods, the avalanche, the quakes, were on accounta we were too pig-ignorant to understand properly what it was the planet was sayin’ to us. After the time lightnin’ struck the meeting hall and burned up all them people, just before Reilly came to us, we let him do the talkin’ and I would say things have been pretty peaceful since.” She paused and said, “But for all that many folk thought Reilly knew best, he never did learn the remedies like Kilcoole’s Clodagh. Our old healer died two winters back and we’ve been wanting to get someone new trained up, ‘cos I’ve known about her since we was both younglings. Village even had a promising girl child ready to go ‘prentice’ herself to Clodagh, iffen Clodagh Senungatuk’d have her, but Reilly wouldn’t allow it.”
“Thank you, madam, for the testimonial.” Matthew said. “We’ll let you know if you’ll be needed to repeat your statement at the hearing. Meanwhile, I must insist Ms. Senungatuk be placed into company custody and her flask seized for analysis, along with the contents of the barrels the deceased had with them in the cave. Autopsies must be performed on the bodies and the entire area sealed.”
‘No worries on that score, sir,” Ivan told him. They were standing just outside the field of coo-berries, and Ivan’s nod indicated the place where Clodagh’s path had been. It was once more covered with twining brambles.
Two weeks later, the investigation was finished and all the data collected had been entered by Luzon’s overworked computer men and hard copies made for presentation.
First, however, at Shepherd Howling’s insistence, he was sent off-planet on the same shuttle that carried the bodies. He couldn’t have been on the MoonBase for more than an hour before angry messages arrived from first MoonBase command, then the hospital facility on Bethany Station, which indicated that the Shepherd was urgently proselytizing on a broad scale for converts to his just cause of trying to raise an army to fight the monster, which must be over come before the planet could be truly holy. He had a real knack for spouting his cant to the already disaffected, the misfits, and those in the lower ranks who were more easily swayed by his rhetoric. Within the first three days, he came close to single-handedly instigating a mutiny.
Such complaints made Matthew thankful that the man was out of the way so that he would not be part of the group greeting the remaining commissioners. They were soon to arrive on the planet’s somewhat seismic-shaken surface to read and evaluate the information prior to the final hearing. He wished there had
been someplace he could have immured Marmion Algemeine and her assistants, but her absence would have caused embarrassing questions even if he had thought of a way to rid her, however temporarily, of her three constant attendants.
Torkel Fiske was invaluable in helping Matthew and his committee. It was he who suggested that they should also interview newly arrived colonists in the most recently formed villages far from the influence of such people as Shongili and the Senungatuk woman, or even families such as the brood that had entertained Matthew in the south.
The new people, it was hoped, would be more objective and scientific in their outlook. When Matthew noted that the influx had come from the Mariana Islands and the Scottish highlands, where large deposits of deutronium and molybdenum had recently been located, and some resettled from the disastrous colonies of Bremer, he was equally ready to cancel that idea if the initial interviews proved negative. He resolved to read each of the collected reports before permitting them to be admitted as evidence. Meanwhile, his assistants and Marmion’s vied with each other to be the first to record the testimonies of people from the villages of the four murdered shanachies.
Matthew himself had made a special, personal effort to reach Goat-dung and persuade her to tell the truth about her part in the sudden disappearance of “the monster” who had been injured by members of Howling’s community—an injury rather too similar to the one from which Shongili was recovering. Matthew also had placed a strong letter of reprimand in the file of Captain John Greene, who had certainly exceeded his authority by removing the girl from Matthew’s custody at a critical time.
Now no one seemed to know where either the girl or Shongili was. Shongili’s mannish sister and her girlfriend were also nowhere to be found. Through Marmion’s influence, Clodagh Senungatuk, much to Matthew’s dismay, remained in her own home, under nominal “house arrest,” and still ran the village. And the whole planet, as far as he knew—including Whittaker Fiske, who actually seemed to have the poor taste to be besotted with the fat cow—paused to gossip to her through her windows. Unstoppably, of course, those damned cats went in and out as they pleased. Discreet efforts to capture any of them—either by the lure of choice cuts of meat or by chasing them with otherwise savage canines—had met with abysmal failure. They had spurned the food and terrified any dog set on their spoors.
He had tried to insist that Shongili and Clodagh both be sent off-planet in detention cells pending the hearing. Whittaker Fiske and Marmion Algemeine had immediately blocked that, just as they’d quashed the off world reassignments he tried to engineer for captains Greene and O’Shay.
He let himself be consoled by the fact that it was only a matter of time for all their little petty tricks to come tumbling down about their ears. Once he presented his evidence at the hearing and it was seen how these two-bit shamanistic charlatans were preying on the people’s fears and hopes to influence them against the company, Shongili and Clodagh and all their helpers would be evicted from their cushy company homes and Maddock, Greene, and O’Shay would be busted back to KP duty.
The workload was overwhelming. While he seemed able to gain momentum in his search for truth, his assistants, who had previously seemed so promising, had grown unaccountably bumbling and incompetent. Their reports did not have bottom-line conclusions that satisfied his requirements. And then the computers kept developing break downs and suffering from sporadic erasures.
The locals, including company troops, were hostile; the working conditions were appallingly primitive, and the weather—how he loathed wild weather—was unspeakable. Lashing rains and electrical storms alternated with spitting snow and heat far above the comfort zone. The SpaceBase facility was constantly quaking with unexpected convulsions on land that had originally been tested as geological
stable. Matthew longed for the sane and sanitary shipboard ambiance, one engineered for human comfort by rational minds such as his own. No mold grew there, as it did on the walls of his lavatory despite the repeated scrubbings of some low-ranking corpsman. No thunderclaps disrupted his concentration, and despite the fact that one was always moving in space, one never experienced sensations of bobbing like bubbles in a test tube as buildings bounced.
To make matters worse, another volcano erupted, ten klicks to the northwest, sending ash into every crack and crevice. This emergence occurred in a meadow, near nothing else, and didn’t even cause copters to falter over flying it. However, a seaquake of 9.3 on the Richter scale had a mid-ocean epicenter that caused tsunamis in every direction and quite devastated the small facility at Bogota.
The company would simply have to face facts. This planet was not working out. The terraforming was faulty, the terrain had not fully stabilized, the whole place should be evacuated, scraped clean, and either abandoned or reformed with more modern techniques. It would put an end to all this talk of sentience and settlements.
Chapter 14
Yana couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding, something she would not give voice to, even to Sean. At least his wound was closing with extraordinary rapidity, thanks to a poultice and Clodagh’s expert attention. That bit of doctoring had happened before Matthew Luzon’s asinine notion of putting Clodagh under “house arrest.” That wasn’t as bad as Luzon’s original orders to send both off-planet. Sean had been immediately hidden in Bunny’s snocle, which had been decommissioned for the “summer” and stored in Adak O’Connor’s garage. Clodagh had shrugged off the threat and maintained it wouldn’t come to that. Which it hadn’t, with the forceful help of Marmion and Whittaker Fiske. Only someone totally ignorant of the situation on Petaybee, as most of the company brass were, or someone so hostile as to be beyond reason, as Luzon was, would think that putting Clodagh and Sean in any sort of detention made sense.
Yana couldn’t quite believe, or hope, that Luzon had failed to realize the function of the cats in Clodagh’s and the planet’s—communications network. Torkel knew. She wondered why he didn’t try to round up the cats and put them under house arrest as well. It would have been just about as ridiculous.
When they knew the order was for house arrest rather than transfer off-planet, Sean, with his customary imperturbability, emerged from hiding like a bear from hibernation and smilingly chose Yana’s as the “house to be arrested in.” She was glad to have him near for several reasons. Although the wound was healing so well, the arrow had torn muscles and almost severed one tendon. She could keep an eye on it and him better if she didn’t have to worry about concealment. She knew it was unrealistic to think she could single-handedly protect him from the company if they tried to take him, but she would do what she could. And now that she was well again, she could do quite a bit. With her years of training and experience, she was not without resources. And quite aside from that, it just helped having him there. He calmed her. Here his world was on trial and he was able, with a look. a smile, or a joke, to soothe her fears.
She needed that. Even with the “off-planet threat dissolved, tension vibrated in the air like off-key music whether it was in sympathy with Clodagh, or apprehension of what the Powers That Be would try to do to them next.
Not that everything in Kilcoole came to a stand still: everyone carried on, gardening and planting all hours of the lengthening days. But the smart ones were frightened, as they should be, with Matthew Luzon coming on so strong. At least that loony, Howling, had been shipped out, which gave the planet one score against the Powers That Be, as the locals called the company in all its omniscience. She wondered if the MoonBase had smelled him coming. She’d had the first laugh in days when Adak reported that Howling had the base command howling complaints.
Adak said he had ears the size of flapjacks from listening in on his radio, trying to make sense of orders misheard through the static. He usually brought a summary of what he had heard to Yana so that she could convey the information to Clodagh. Like everybody else, she just went to the windows and chatted. If the guard was new, and didn’t know her—as the guards often were, since
Torkel was obviously afraid Clodagh would bewitch her jailers as he seemed to feel she had his father—Yana cleverly disguised herself as what she had been, a major in the company corps, collected a smart salute from the trooper on duty, and walked into the house. This worked only if the guard hadn’t already been posted on her house to guard Sean, but she slipped past all of them an amazing number of times just by putting her hair up in a fatigue cap when she wanted to be a ranking officer, and throwing one of Aisling’s hand woven blanket jackets over her uniform and letting her hair down when she didn’t. Nevertheless, she had to keep a fairly low profile when she did this, lest Torkel or one of the other brass who knew her catch on and prohibit her specifically from visiting Clodagh. They hadn’t thought of it yet, which was not an oversight that Yana would have permitted had the mission been under her command, but fortunately, it wasn’t. Whittaker Fiske visited Clodagh often, openly and casually. The first time Yana had walked into the house to see him sitting at Clodagh’s table having tea, she had been wary, until his wink reassured her. “We would appreciate a knock next time though, Major,” he said, squeezing Clodagh’s hand. Clodagh had surprised Yana by responding with an actual blush and a mischievous bawdy chuckle.
But Yana was at home, in multi with her hair streaming, talking to Sean, when Adak, who was also still officially a company corps employee, knocked briefly and entered without waiting for permission. Sean, who had been slowly walking around the room to supple up his abused leg muscles, stopped just short of the abruptly opened door. Yana had been listing the issues and arguments concerning them that were likely to come up at the hearing, and practicing succinct answers. That always impressed committees: this witness had all facts in order and did not hesitate in answering.
“Sean, oops, sorry, Yana, the static’s getting worse but the committee’s ship has landed. That Luzon fella was transmitting orders to the crew for the last couple of hours about how the committee was supposed to be taken to his board room for a private briefing first, but somehow”—Adak gave a good imitation of an ingenuous shrug for a fifty-five-year-old man—“Dr. Fiske and Dama Algemeine found out and beat him to the landing pad.”