Power Lines

by Anne McCaffrey

  Well and truly blurred, Yana was still quite conscious of some of the discussion that went on late into the night, to the accompaniment of guitar, fiddle, flute, tambourine, maracas, and castanets. But she, Loncie, and Johnny—possibly Bunny, too, at one point—had decided that the most important thing they could now do was rescue La Pobrecita from Shepherd Howling.

  From Lonciana’s description, the man was worse than Satok, but only marginally, if he insisted on marrying a prepubescent child when he already had four or five wives. Yana had been well drilled in leaving alone the customs and motes of indigenous populations, but she was not indigenous, and the whole concept of forced wifehood was abhorrent. That night they pieced together what La Pobrecita had said and came up with a fair idea of where the Vale of Tears might be, judging from where she had been found, how long she said she’d been traveling, and from what direction. By Johnny’s reckoning, the place should be a valley set in the Sierra Padres somewhere near the head of the Lacrimas River. Given decent weather, they should have no problem flying right to the place. And if they met Luzon, at least two of them could give chase on the snocub, a two-person snocle that Johnny had fit handily in the cargo net.

  12

  Dr. Whittaker Fiske received the coded messages from Johnny Greene with concern and no little dismay—particularly the second one, the one Johnny sent him after he first returned to the north. He had quickly approved the pilot’s scheme and given him all due assistance. By calling in a few personal favors owed the pilot and promising the supply sergeant R&R to the tropical planet of her choice, he had ensured that all Petraseal available at and to SpaceBase had been urgently requisitioned elsewhere. At Johnny’s suggestion, the Petraseal cans had been emptied into a single tank for immediate shipment, while the empty containers still labeled “Petraseal” had been filled with the last consignment of white paint, which was rarely used on Petaybee except for camouflage purposes. However, between implementing Johnny’s scheme and work at SpaceBase, he had been too fully occupied to be able to return to Clodagh to warn her of the grave implications of what had taken place at McGee’s Pass.

  He was concerned about how Clodagh would take it. She was an amazing woman, unconventionally beautiful, intelligent, wise, and kind, but she felt everything that happened to Petaybee personally. Maybe if everybody did the same, there wouldn’t be any problem, but even after his experience in the cave, he still retained a detachment that kept him from that sort of bond with what he had once thought of as the creation of his family. He did, however, feel a bond with Clodagh—a closer one than he had felt with anyone in a long time—including, maybe especially, his own son.

  He walked into Kilcoole the morning after Greene’s second transmission. The river was down a bit now that much of the initial thaw had already taken place, but it was still full and fat with water.

  He knew Clodagh wasn’t at home before he knocked on the door. No cats in the windows, on the rooftop, or perched on the various objects in the yard. He peeked through the open door into the neat, empty house and looked down Kilcoole’s one muddy street. The town seemed even more deserted than it had before. He called Clodagh a couple of times, but when he received no answer, he strolled down to Yana Maddock’s place. There, at least, her cat Marduk sat on the stoop, and sprang up as if it had been waiting for him. Well, knowing these cats, maybe it had been.

  At that point, the door of the house across the street opened and Frank Metaxos poked his prematurely white-haired head out. The man’s speech was still a little slow, but he was a far cry from the wreck he had been only a few weeks earlier.

  “How’s it going, Frank?” Whit asked.

  “I hate being stuck here,” Frank told him. “You heard anything of my boy?”

  “Matter of fact, I did,” Whit replied affably. “He’s doing fine. Been a great help to everybody. Say, you haven’t seen Clodagh, have you?”

  “She went out to the springs, I think. Marduk there”—Frank nodded at the cat—”knows the way. Though you’ll have to walk. All the curlies are carrying the people to visit the neighbors.”

  “Visiting the neighbors” was the term the Kilcoole people were using to describe their mission to the other villages. Whit wasn’t overly surprised. After all, these people were half-descended from the Irish who had described their own centuries-old guerrilla conflict as “the Troubles” and a massive international war as “the Emergency.”

  He followed Marduk through knee-high weeds that had been lying in ambush under the snow, waiting for the thaw.

  Birds sang and dived overhead, both small, pretty song-birds and swooping, squawking ravens. Small creatures rustled the underbrush; a red fox darted across his path. Marduk scurried up a tree when the fox passed, and hissed and spit at the silvery wake the creature cut in the tall grass.

  Whit found Clodagh beside the springs, surrounded by not only her cats but all sorts of animals, including a large, strong curly-coat. They stood, lay, or sat and watched her as she pulled and separated, pulled and separated a profusion of plants growing rampant around the hot-springs banks. Her bountiful wavy black hair was braided and coiled on top of her head; sweat ran down her face and neck as she worked.

  “Sláinte, Whittaker,” she said without looking up.

  “Sláinte yourself, my dear. What the devil are you trying to do?”

  “I’m pullin’ weeds,” she said.

  “So I see,” he responded dryly. “Are you just pulling these particular weeds around the springs, or did you plan to personally defoliate the entire area between here and Kilcoole?”

  She stood up, hands planted on her broad back. “Just these,” she said, smiling. “I could use a hand. I’m kinda in a hurry.”

  “Be glad to. I’m afraid, however, that I’ve come as the bearer of bad tidings.”

  “You going to tell me about that guy that sealed up some of the communion places? Silenced the planet and fooled all those people at McGee’s Pass and so on?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard about that.”

  “You did?” he asked, dumbfounded at first and then shaking his head as understanding set in. “Of course. I suppose your usual informants told you.”

  “Kinda. It took the cats a long time to find out, because he killed all but one of ’em. But that one got word out to mine and they told me. They say he put some white junk on the inside of the cave that fuses the rock—stuff they use to shore up walls in mines.”

  “Yes. Petraseal. Johnny Greene also reported that to me. It’s very bad news, Clodagh. If our adversaries at Intergal learn that there is something that can defeat your communication with the planet, they’re apt to go overboard on using it.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded gravely. “That’s what I thought. I was pretty worried about it, too, so I came out here to talk to Petaybee.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s very happy about all this.”

  “It’s sure not.”

  “Did it have any ideas?”

  “Well, not in so many words. Except, I just started wondering, what if this stuff doesn’t always work? What if there’s something stronger than it is, that can go through it? And you know, all of a sudden, I looked down and saw where this coo-berry bramble was growin’ right up through the floor of the cave, and when I came out here, why I noticed what I hadn’t seen before. You know how that is?”

  “I do,” Whit nodded.

  “Anyway, we never had a problem with coo-berries here before. And coo-berries are a problem. Just about impossible to destroy and they’ll go through anything. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “I think I do. You’re sure it’ll work?”

  She shrugged, then directed him where to pull. The berries had sharp thorns. “After we get a bunch pulled up, we wrap ’em in leaves and our bigger, faster friends here will see that they get delivered.” She nodded at the animals.

  It was Whit’s turn to shrug as he buttoned down his sleeves and started pulling.

&nbs
p; Satok had no problem eluding the trackers from McGee’s Pass. For one thing, he was wily, with a lot of friends and resources. For another thing, one of those resources was a shuttle hidden in a secret camouflaged shed about a half hour from his house, close enough that he could get to it in a hurry, and far enough away from the center of things that it was unlikely to be found.

  He flew first to Deadhorse, then Wellington and Savoy. There former shipmates of his, all of whom he had set up as replacements for the recently expired shanachies, were in various stages of converting the people in the towns to their version of “what the planet wanted.”

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” said Reilly, Savoy’s new headman, as he sat drinking with Satok. “These people believe anything they’re told. Just tell ’em the people at McGee’s Pass have gone nuts or something.”

  “Your problem is you don’t think far enough ahead, Reilly,” Satok said. “The brats got away. The McGee’s Pass people scattered to a lot of places. They know about the cave. Now, the problem is not so much what they think of us as the possibility of competition. Using the Petraseal was my idea. Finding out how to use the Petraseal without the planet freaking us out of our fraggin’ minds was my idea. I want credit and credits. You boys will get yours, as well, of course. But if this committee that’s investigating things sees the Petraseal before we claim our finders’ fee, Intergal will have everything and there’ll be nothing for anybody else.”

  “So what do you need from us?”

  “Ore samples, of course, and a low profile until I can show up with some company bigwig to buy our method.” He snapped his fingers for the slattern who was serving the booze to bring another round. This was stronger stuff than the blurry, even considering the effect this stupid planet had of neutralizing intoxicants with every other native beverage or food consumed. Fortunately, Satok had had little else to eat or drink for a couple of days. The girl looked familiar—one of his castoffs, no doubt. Sure had let herself go, though. Moped around with downcast eyes, ugly shapeless clothes, dirty lank hair, sallow skin mottled with bruises. Some women just had no self-respect. If she’d looked like that when he first came to the village, he’d never have touched her.

  “Okay, so when do you need the samples?”

  “Now,” Satok growled. “Or haven’t you been listening? I want the shuttle loaded with the best you’ve got.”

  “How do we know you won’t just take it and take off?”

  “Because there’s a lot more to be made here than what we could gouge out of the ground by ourselves. You have to think big. Besides, I’ll need some of you along to help me unload.”

  “So where are you taking this stuff?”

  He shrugged. “SpaceBase, for a start.”

  The cold of the icy waters was more of a shock than usual because Sean had just been so warmly wrapped about Yana. But it was always the first part of him to enter the water that experienced the trauma. Despite the almost stupefying cold, he forced himself to drop into the freezing dark waters. The change occurred more abruptly than ever: self-preservation at its highest level.

  Once the waters closed over his altering head, the sounds he hoped to hear pinged back and forth. He sent out his call and felt the stir of water as a tube whale responded. The brush of the huge mammal against him in human form would have been crushing, but the selkie was less vulnerable. Stroking one flipper on the firm flesh of the whale, Sean-Selkie floated forward until he came to the proportionally small whale eye. One flipper-hand reaching as high up on the skull above the eye as possible, Sean communicated his need.

  Do you remember the place before it fell?

  Yes.

  Take me to the other side.

  As you wish.

  Sean-Selkie had time to secure a hold on the side fin before he was propelled forward at amazing speed. For what seemed a very long dark time in this lightless medium, Sean-Selkie clung there. Finally the tube whale halted, so abruptly that he was sent flipping end over end, past the whale’s bright unblinking eye and skidding up the icy slope of a tunnel that gaped open onto the subarctic seas.

  You have been of great assistance and have my gratitude.

  You are known and your needs considered.

  Then the whale departed, once more singing its weird song, one that Sean-Selkie heard faintly, distantly answered. In that direction the tube whale now swam. Sean-Selkie watched until the churning of its flukes was no longer visible in the dark sea. He climbed up into the maw of this section of the underground link between the continents, with its luminous walls and slightly misted footing.

  He had gone no more than a few hundred meters before he knew that both Aoifa and her track-cat had managed to get this far. A neat pile of animal dung, frosted over but identifiable, lay in a little hole, claw marks around it to show that the track-cat had not lost its sense of propriety despite its inability to cover its feces. And four paces beyond the cat’s were human excretions. Sean-Selkie sighed with relief and lumbered on up the long slope, through immense caverns and more upward corridors. He saw other signs—fish skeletons—by lakesides and, diving into the same places, found food for himself to keep strong for this long and lonely journey. He saw the crumpled envelopes of travel rations, too.

  How far and how long the journey took, Sean-Selkie could not gauge. He traveled more safely and economically as a selkie; having no clothes for his human manifestation was the best reason to continue as he was.

  When he eventually emerged into daylight, the sun dazzling him, he had no warning of the danger into which he had blundered. He was always particularly vulnerable as he changed, the transition altering his senses—especially his eyesight and hearing. The first arrow took him in the thigh while it was still elongating from a flipper, still covered with spotted fur; the second would have been fatal but for the fact that a feline knocked him to one side. Snarling, the feline guarded him, facing the ragged humans who surrounded the mouth of the cave, one paw, its claws unsheathed, raised against their advance.

  Thanks, clouded one. I owe you a life.

  Can you run with me?

  Must finish transition first. Can’t run or swim, not as is, not wounded in the leg. You go. There is a rifle aimed now at you. Go quickly. They think me helpless.

  Giving one last forward leap, which sent the ragged creatures screaming backward though the armed man did not move, the feline whirled and sped back into the cave and disappeared from sight.

  “Don’t bother with the cat. They’re a half credit the dozen. Secure that monster! He mustn’t escape!”

  So Sean-Selkie, neither man nor seal at this point, endured the indignity of being bound limb to limb and the agony of having the arrow yanked out of his flesh. Even a selkie can faint.

  When Sean recovered consciousness, he wished he had not, for he seemed to be lying in a pile of slushy cold water in a dank-smelling and dark place. His enhanced selkie vision told him that he was alone with some bundles and crates, in a tent made of badly cured skins; the air stank of that, as well as of the mold of continued damp. He had been pegged down, and the wound in his haunch ached.

  Continuing the transformation to human would not be useful, Sean realized, for his limbs as a seal were thinner and more graceful. The bindings would be tighter on human wrists and ankles. He wallowed in the water beneath him, trying to wet himself enough to encourage the full transformation to seal, despite his wound, but it was useless. The melted slush was too shallow and he remained half-transformed, with his lower legs and his arms those of a man, while most of him remained seal.

  Exterior sounds began to filter through to his awakened senses. He could smell fire, a big one, and had a horrible premonition of what a big fire might mean for a captured “monster.” He could hear sounds of quite a few people moving about without much energy, and two male voices, which seemed to punctuate the muted noises of the others with orders, too muffled for him to understand.

  It was while he was trying to decipher the noise into c
onversations and understand the orders that he heard other small noises and then felt something sawing at the bindings of his feet.

  “I’m cutting you free, monster,” a frightened whisper told him above the sawing. “Coaxtl said I must free you. That you are not a true monster but a proper creature, and you can save me. Coaxtl was my friend and kind to me. They are not kind to me here.” There was a small hiccup and sob, and suddenly the efforts of the frightened whisperer were rewarded and the thong parted. Fumbling fingers unwrapped the rest of the wet leather from Sean-Selkie’s feet. “Please don’t eat me, monster. I must help you.”

  I won’t eat you, little one, Sean said, for if she had been talking to Coaxtl, whom he had now identified as the clouded leopard that had saved him, she would hear him speak. I am grateful to Coaxtl. I am also no monster who harms those who rescue him.

  “Shepherd Howling says they are going to roast you in the fire.” Another piteous sob broke from the child’s lips as she snaked herself along his length to his hands. “And Dr. Luzon is trying to talk him into surrendering you for scientific study. I think that means cutting you up. Dr. Luzon said he would adopt me, but instead, he’s given me over to the Shepherd Howling. When Dr. Luzon is gone, I will be punished and then I will be married. If Shepherd Howling prevails, you may be my wedding supper. I would hate to see you suffer. Coaxtl says that if you die, other monsters will avenge you, and the flock would suffer. I know life is supposed to be suffering, but we suffer very much already and I think it is enough. More would be too much.”

  Enough is too much, Sean-Selkie said, trying to assist her sawing efforts by holding his bound wrists as far apart as possible to strain the leather thong. She had to be using the dullest knife in the world to take so long at her job, but he blessed her arrival and her attempts at rescue.

  The wrist thong snapped and he inadvertently slapped her face. She gave a little gasp but no more than that, and it occurred to Sean that she was accustomed to blows. The thought infuriated him.