Power Lines

by Anne McCaffrey

  In most places, the increased and highly specialized activity of the animals was little more than a curiosity. In some places, no one even noticed what was going on. At McGee’s Pass, Krisuk Connelly and his family, who had been keeping watch on Satok’s old house, noted the odd influx of animals and, between deliveries, sneaked in to see what they could possibly be doing.

  The coo-berry plant was one of the planet’s great puzzlements. Most things on Petaybee were good for many things: medicine, food, shelter, warmth. Coo-berries had never been much good for anything. They were poisonous if you ate more than a handful, and the ailment that might have been devised by the planet to cure it had yet to be discovered. The thorns were sharp and stingy, the leaves were sticky, and the blossoms were as small, and rare, as the coo-berry itself. Once they got a start on any little dab of dirt, the damned bushes were almost impossible to kill. Worse, they grew so fast you could watch them grow, which was what Krisuk spent two days doing: watching the infestation of coo-berry. While the birds were still ferrying shoots in daily, bushes sprang up from the first plantings and grew waist high overnight, their roots spreading out to cover the field between the town and Satok’s house and climbing up the house’s stone exterior and covering the outbuildings.

  When that happened, Krisuk called the whole village to come and see. His mother’s mouth was set in a bitter line and her dry eyes watched the incursion despairingly.

  “Now,” she said, “now Petaybee is punishing us. For ever listening to Satok. For letting him harm it.”

  Matthew Luzon resisted the urge to hold his nose. Really! The things he did for the company in the name of humanity. To say the least, Brother Howling smelled extremely gamy. Even Braddock was tempted to open the helicopter’s door to escape the stench and showed signs of wanting to divest himself of his most recent meal over the ice-speckled sea.

  At least the headphones in this helicopter worked properly, and Matthew could occupy himself by listening to the pilot’s transmissions and the messages received from SpaceBase and MoonBase.

  As they approached land again at Harrison’s Fjord, a crackling message came in from MoonBase.

  “Captain Torkel Fiske requests that all council members get in touch with him immediately. He is currently tracking the activities of the shanachie of McGee’s Pass.”

  Matthew needed to hear no more. McGee’s Pass was on the way back to SpaceBase from Harrison’s Fjord, and a break from his present company would be most welcome.

  “Take us directly to McGee’s Pass, pilot,” he ordered, and the man gave him a thumbs-up signal and headed up the coast.

  As they approached the pass, Matthew saw that the village was built on an incline, gradually scaling the foothills leading up to the pass itself.

  “Well, for frag’s sake!” The pilot cursed as he flew beyond the village over a field heavily overgrown with vines stretching from the houses all the way to a stone farmstead about half a mile distant. “What the frag have they done to the fraggin’ helipad?”

  “Set it down anywhere, man!” Matthew commanded. “The plants’ll cushion the skids.”

  The pilot sounded doubtful as he said, “Well, okay. You’re the boss, Dr. Luzon.”

  Finally, someone who did as he was told, Matthew thought with relief.

  The pilot landed, crushing a good half meter into the surrounding vegetation. When he made no move to leave the aircraft, Matthew impatiently tore open the door and leaped out, and instantly regretted it.

  His legs caught fire all the way to his crotch, and thousands of tiny needles stung through his pants, boots, and undergarments to tear at his flesh with each tiny movement.

  In fact, he didn’t even have to move. The wind from the copter rotors drove the plants all around him. Involuntarily, he screamed. Braddock jumped down to help him, and he, too, began to scream.

  The Shepherd Howling stood in the doorway, one hand uplifted, his mouth moving and his other hand pointing.

  “What?” Luzon managed to ask as the chopper engines stopped.

  “The Great Monster has thee in its grasp!” Shepherd Howling cried. “Beware!”

  “For pity’s sake, man, it’s no great monster, just some sort of vine!” Matthew screeched. “Help!”

  A young man sitting atop a rock that was a virtual island in the sea of stinging brambles called out, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Get us out of here!” Matthew demanded.

  “Ah. Your aircraft will be the safest place for that, sir. I suggest you get back in it before the vines overgrow it.”

  “What? No plant can grow that fast!” Braddock replied, doubting his own words as he unsuccessfully tried to disentangle the vines from his legs.

  “The Great Monster is devious and wily and tireless in clutching for the souls and bodies of virtuous men!” Shepherd Howling declaimed.

  “Indeed!” Matthew snapped at him. He turned to the boy. “If I wished to return to the helicopter I would never have landed here, young man. Please assist us out of these weeds and take us to your shanachie and Captain Fiske at once.”

  “Never heard of no Captain Fiske,” the boy called back lazily, obviously enjoying their situation, “and we run the shanachie off.”

  “Did you?” Matthew stood among the stinging brambles and digested that.

  “You heard him, sir. Let’s get out of here,” Braddock whined.

  But any inclination Matthew might have had to do just that had vanished with the boy’s words. “Now why did you do that, son?”

  “He was a wicked man, sir. Tryin’ to make us think the planet wanted one thing when it wanted the other.”

  “I’d very much like to talk to you about that, son. Please get us out of here.” Matthew, despite the stings, turned on the force of his not inconsiderable charisma.

  The boy shrugged and disappeared. Matthew and Braddock shoved Shepherd Howling back and sat in the copter while a crew of villagers arrived with various stones and pieces of board to make a path for them. Matthew was somewhat surprised that they hadn’t brought machetes or sickles to hack the weeds down. Before he could ask about that, the boy ran across the stones and grabbed him by the arm.

  “You’d best hurry, sir, or the coo-brambles will be a-growin’ over these, too, like.”

  “You will be rewarded by the company, my son,” Shepherd Howling said, pushing Matthew aside to sprint over the stones with the agility of a mountain goat. The speed with which he took advantage of the temporary path and his nimbleness in avoiding questing bramble tendrils caused Matthew to reevaluate the man’s degree of insanity.

  Matthew followed quickly, Braddock somewhat more reluctantly. The pilot opted to remain with his ship.

  With the boy leading them, Shepherd Howling on his heels, and Matthew followed more slowly by Braddock, they reached the nearest of the hovels. There they were joined by a man and woman and a pack of whooping children. The rest of the village crowded in after them.

  Shepherd Howling slowed to hover noisomely by Matthew. “This is possibly a wholesome place, Brother Luzon. None of the orange minions of the underworld one sees in many of the heathen towns are visible. And nowhere did I see the monster’s yawning maw waiting to be fed by the ignorance of the unenlightened.”

  “That is good news,” Matthew said tersely, and turned to their adolescent guide. He was far more interested in what the villagers had to say.

  “Now, my boy, you must explain something to me, for I am a bit confused. I was supposed to meet Captain Fiske and the shanachie of this village here. Now you tell me you’ve banished the shanachie. Being a stranger to this planet, but one very interested in your customs, have I indeed been brought to McGee’s Pass?”

  “That’s where you are, sir,” said the woman of the house, undoubtedly the boy’s mother, pushing herself to the front. “And the best way to explain, sir, is by singing you the song we made.”

  Groaning inwardly at the prospect of another of the Petaybean songs, Matthew arranged his feat
ures in an engaging and interested smile.

  “We sing it together,” explained the man who seemed to be the woman’s husband and the boy’s father. “Because it happened to us all.”

  “We were all duped, he means,” the boy said.

  A little girl said, “All but Krisuk. He wasn’t fooled.”

  “Please sing,” Matthew said, trying to cut to the performance if he had to hear it to learn what they were talking about.

  “You start, Krisuk,” the mother said.

  The boy stood stock-still, arms at his sides, not a foot from Matthew, and began to chant in an eerie singsong style:

  “One day the roof of the world fell

  It killed our friends, our cousins

  It killed the heir to its wisdom

  For days we dug, too numb to cry.

  Our world had ended.

  Aijija!”

  The other villagers joined in, some crying loudly, some mumbling, all reciting the nonsense words at the end of the verses as if they were expletives.

  “A stranger came among us to dig

  He came among us, he said, to teach.

  Sure he was.

  Strong he was.

  He knew what to do.

  He knew where to dig.

  The world still spoke to him,

  He said.

  Aiji!

  He said if we followed him we could win back the world

  He said if my sister lay with him she would be one with creation

  She went with him

  He said if we gave him the best pups of the litter

  His team would carry the spirit of our village to the world’s corners

  And it would know us once more

  We gave him the pups

  He said that the planet’s orange feet carried tales against us to other villages

  He said if we were to heal, the feet must be killed.

  This, to our shame, we allowed.”

  And here, quite alarmingly, people began to tear their hair. All of the villagers sang the next verse loudly and lamentingly.

  “To our shame we didn’t hide them

  To our shame we didn’t feed them

  To our shame we heard his blows

  To our shame we heard their cries

  To our shame we did nothing

  Until only Shush

  Shush the silent and swift

  Survived. Shush who led us back into the world

  Shush who brought our neighbors to us

  Shush who left us at last

  Footless in a world

  Whose voice had been strangled

  Whose tongue had been blown away

  By the one we called

  Satok, shanachie.

  Where is our sister now?

  Gone to a bad man in a distant village.

  Where are our best pups?

  Starved and broken in spirit.

  Where are our cats, the world’s orange feet?

  No longer walking, bones except for Shush

  And when our world speaks to us again as we have

  Hoped and dreamed?

  It screams.

  Aijija.”

  “Oh, dear,” Matthew said when they had finished. “And all this because of your shanachie, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. “He took all of our best for himself and betrayed everyone.”

  Matthew could scarcely keep from rubbing his hands together with glee. “Oh, that’s terrible. Terrible indeed. Right, Brother Howling?”

  Howling’s lips twitched with a smile. “That’s what comes of trafficking with monsters.”

  “You can say that again, mister,” the woman said. “Can you stay and eat, sir?” she asked Matthew, but he waved a negative.

  “I’m sorry, dear lady, but your story distresses me so much that I really think our best course is to resume our journey and seek to bring justice to you and people like you who are taken in by those who would mislead you. I hope I can count on you to repeat your song before the council when I call on you?” he added, addressing the boy, who had sung every word in a voice unexpectedly good, loud, and clear.

  “I’d be honored, sir,” the boy said, although he sounded puzzled and wary.

  The villagers had to throw fresh stepping-stones and logs over the brambles for Matthew’s party to return to the helicopter. Even then, the pilot had to climb out and hack at the vines with a machete before he could free the copter’s skids. The vines were tight against the belly of the ship, strands attempting to encircle the narrow stern. Matthew thought that such fast-growing vegetation would also bear scrutiny. George, he rather thought, had some botanical knowledge. He’d send him to get a sample—if one could be contained long enough.

  Satok landed the shuttle, loaded with barrels of Petraseal, at Savoy. His three assistant “shanachies” were still there, drinking and talking.

  “Where’s Luka?” Reilly asked.

  “Ran off,” Satok replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll get her back, and when I do, I’ll make her sorry she was ever born. The fraggin’ bitch stole the ore samples and put rocks in their place.”

  “So you didn’t get to make a deal with the company?”

  “Course I did! Guy named Fiske saw them first before Luka switched ’em, but he wants to have genuine samples to show off.”

  “It was hard enough getting together what we did without you letting it get snitched,” Reilly complained. He liked easier work than mining.

  “Hold it! All we gotta prove is that there is genuine ore available. We’ll use the one here, and who’s to know if we don’t tell ’em, huh? Fiske gave me some more Petraseal, so Reilly and I will mine the earlier veins while you two paint us a path back.”

  “Shit! I hate doing that,” Soyuk grumbled. “Damn caves give me the creeps.”

  “Stop bellyachin’,” Satok told him. “If we make this deal with the company, you’ll have enough money to go off-planet permanently.”

  They climbed onto the Petraseal-laden shuttle and flew to the cave mouth, which was inconveniently distant from the village. In Satok’s absence, the location had grown even more inconvenient.

  “Where the hell did these weeds come from?” he demanded, astounded by the sea of tangling vines choking the cave mouth and cloaking the cliff and mountain meadow where they usually landed.

  Reilly shrugged. “I dunno. They weren’t here a coupla weeks back, but the season’s gone nuts. We can torch ’em?”

  “Not enough time. The fraggin’ cave would fill with smoke and we’d never get at the ore.”

  “We could try the site back at my place,” Soyuk suggested.

  “No, hell, we’ll hack ’em back and splash ’em with Petraseal as we go. We only need to get inside the cave.”

  The stalks were amazingly tough and the stinging vines clung to the men with fierce tenacity, but they hacked and splashed until they reached the entrance of the cave.

  “Just hack this crap away from the front here, and it’ll all be clear back where the Petraseal is, boys,” Satok directed.

  The way was not as clear as he had hoped. They had to make several trips to lug the vats of Petraseal into the cave. Left on his own while the others pumped the Petraseal in, Satok wondered how the weeds had managed to penetrate right through the ceiling of the cave. Had the latest tremors shaken a hole in the roof? Roots and tendrils of vines drooped from the ceiling.

  When Soyuk, Clancy, and Reilly returned, he sent the first two on ahead to paint where they could excavate, and told Reilly to start patching farther back in the cave. In order to listen for Fiske’s copter, Satok took the area nearest the entrance—he wanted to make sure the captain didn’t see too much of the operation.

  He hacked and daubed and hacked and daubed. The interior of the cave, now insulated by the cover of vines, seemed hotter than it ever had before. The light grew dimmer and greener as he worked, almost as if he were working underwater.

  He thought at one point he heard some scuffling, and
the others seemed noisier than they had been for a while, hollering and swearing as they worked. Getting stung, no doubt, he thought with a grin, but that noise was soon masked by the steady chop and daub of his own work. The beat of his own heart, the rasp of his own breath, was all he heard.

  In this new rhythmic silence, he worked and sweated, the faint drip of his perspiration landing on the cavern floor the only other sound he heard as he strained to listen for the engines of Fiske’s copter.

  He didn’t notice when he first heard the slithering sound, a soft rustle followed by a dry whispering crackling noise, as if paper had fallen—or leaves.

  Then it came to him, just as he felt something slide across the toe of his boot and curl to brush his pant leg, that he had heard nothing from the others for some time. The thought crossed his mind just before the thorns bit into his leg as the vine tendril tightened.

  “Reilly!” he hollered. “Soyuk!”

  For an answer, another rustle, another slither. It was darker now, and as he turned toward the doorway, he saw that a thick net of greenery had replaced what they had hacked away a bare hour before. More alarmingly, some of the greenery bore splashes of white. He tried to kick off the vines clinging to him, but succeeded only in embedding the thorns deeper into his ankles. Feeling an edge of panic, he switched on the flashlight he’d brought along.

  It seemed to attract the plants, as if they couldn’t tell the difference between the light and sun. First roots, then more tendrils dropped from the roof, opening leaves as they slid.

  This shouldn’t be happening, Satok thought. This couldn’t be happening! The Petraseal should have impeded any new growth, reduced it to dust. Where he had painted so industriously, he now realized that the Petraseal was marbled with cracks, fine in places, broadening in others to allow the plants to burgeon forth. Even the swath he had just painted had opened to emit tendrils.