Turning Point

by Lisanne Norman

  “At twenty-three most girls are well and truly married,” her father grumbled. “If you had a house to run, you wouldn’t have time to bring in useless stray animals. I think it’s high time I arranged a marriage for you since you don’t seem capable of choosing a partner from among the young men in Valleytown.”

  “Stop ducking the issue, Dad. The barn or the house, which is it to be?” insisted Carrie.

  “Jack? You’ll back me up on this, won’t you?”

  “Me?” said the doctor, pausing as he put on his coat. “I don’t want to be involved in a family argument, Peter. I will say this, though. The cat is too weak to be a danger to anyone at present, and living in a cold barn will certainly kill him.”

  Her father glanced from one to the other. “Oh, very well,” he said, exasperated. “Have it your own way. You’ve obviously got it all organized between the two of you. But as soon as he’s recovered enough to be moved, out to the barn he goes!

  “Good day to you, Jack!”

  With that he stamped out of the kitchen, back to work with his beloved wines.

  “Thanks, Jack,” said Carrie, trying to stand.

  “It was nothing, but your Dad has a point, you know. Our friend could turn nasty at any time.

  “Richard, you make some kind of cage to put Kusac in at night; and you, Carrie, you’ll keep your promise to me by getting back up to bed before you collapse!” he said, accepting his gloves from Richard.

  “By the way, how did you come by the name? Kusac, eh? Not bad, it rather suits him. Well, I must be off. I’ll call back to see you both in a couple of days. If you need me, you know where I am.

  “Just keep him warm and try to find something light that he’ll eat. Soup or something like that. No meat for the time being, and the same for you, young lady,” he said, waggling an admonishing finger in her direction as he followed her brother out through the taproom.

  “Good-bye Jack, and thanks again,” Carrie said.

  Once they had gone, she ambled over to the stove and began to ladle some soup into a bowl for Kusac. It was a strange name, now she came to think of it. It sounded unfamiliar, yet it did suit him. She carried the bowl back over to him and set it down near his head.

  The cat looked up at her, giving her hand a quick lick before raising himself on his front paws to lap the soup. Carrie smiled. His tongue tickled. There was an almost gentle roughness to it. She knew he wouldn’t harm anyone, it wasn’t in his nature.

  As he ate, she pulled up a chair and watched him. His amber eyes never left hers until he lay down, his hunger satisfied for the first time in five days.

  With a sigh, Kusac pillowed his head against her hands and closed his eyes. Though he could not yet understand the language of these people, he understood Carrie’s thoughts completely. It was to his advantage that they thought he was a forest cat; no one could then betray him, and he would probably learn much more that would be denied to him as an Alien.

  Besides, it had been a surprise for him to find two sentient species on this planet, so how much worse would it be for Carrie’s people who had only known the repression of the Others? The Valtegans, he corrected himself, drifting off into a contented sleep.

  Carrie felt her shoulder being shaken roughly. Looking blearily up at her brother, she pulled her hands carefully from underneath Kusac and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  “What is it, Richard?” she mumbled.

  “The Valtegans are searching all the houses. Dad wants you and the cat upstairs out of the way.”

  “All right,” said Carrie, getting stiffly to her feet. “Have you finished Kusac’s bed?”

  “It’s in your room,” he replied, reaching out to help her as she staggered away from the table. “I don’t know how you’re going to manage to nurse our friend here when you’re nowhere near fit yourself.”

  “I’m fine, Richard,” she said, pulling away from him. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “No, you’re not, but I’m not going to argue with you about it. Let’s get you and this character settled down before the Valtegans get here.”

  “What are they looking for this time?” asked Carrie as Richard lifted the sleepy Kusac.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” he said, following her upstairs. “But what is even stranger, I don’t think the Valtegans know either.

  “Five days ago there was a full-scale panic on. The sky was buzzing with aircars and scouters, all centered over the forest and hills behind us. Not long afterward, I saw something white falling toward the ridge. It could have been anything, a scouter in trouble, even a small spacecraft.”

  He fell silent, waiting for his sister to open the bedroom door. When she did, he went in and carefully laid Kusac down on the pile of rugs he’d arranged in a large wooden box on Elise’s bed.

  Carrie sat down on her own bed. “Well?” she prompted. “What do you think it was?”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know, but the Valtegans are doing a head count as well as searching every house. They want to know if we’ve seen any strangers.”

  “Could it have been a craft from Earth?” Carrie asked bleakly, staring at her clenched hands without seeing them.

  “Earth doesn’t know about our situation, Carrie. We haven’t been able to get a message out to them. Even if we could, it would take years to reach them, and equally long for them to come to our aid,” her brother replied, taking her hands in his and giving them a comforting pat. “And no one could have helped Elise.”

  “What does Dad think?” she asked, her voice still tense.

  “He says it couldn’t be anything to do with the second wave colonists. Their ship isn’t due to reach midpoint for another two months yet. In fact, it can’t be from Earth at all. That only leaves two realistic possibilities.”

  “A Valtegan in trouble, possibly a renegade from the hospital, or a satellite crashing,” said Carrie, looking at him inquiringly, her interest fully caught.

  “It wasn’t a meteorite, that’s for sure. The other possibility I had in mind was that the craft was Alien to both us and the Valtegans.”

  Carrie wrinkled her face in surprise, her eyebrows disappearing under her fringe.

  “You have to be kidding, Richard. An Alien craft?”

  “Why not?” he countered, letting go of her bandaged hands and beginning to pace the room. “No one believed in Aliens until the Valtegans arrived. If there are two species in the galaxy, why not three or even more? Who are the Valtegans fighting, if not other Aliens?” He paused by the window. “Dad thinks it’s a viable possibility, and you can’t escape the fact that the Valtegans are searching for several strangers,” he said forcefully. “They’d hardly ask us if the strangers were their own people! They aren’t from this colony, and they can’t be from Earth. There is only one other alternative—more Aliens.

  “Don’t laugh,” he said irritably, looking away from her. “It isn’t that ridiculous an idea.” He stared out of the window for almost a minute before it penetrated that he was watching a patrol of Valtegan soldiers making their way across the main street to the Inn.

  “Carrie, they’re almost here! I’d better get downstairs now,” he said. “Get back into bed and stop giggling!” He strode over to the door. “Come on! We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.”

  Still chuckling, Carrie took her coat off, threw it across the chair, and crawled back into bed. As she stretched out between the cool sheets, she realized how bone weary she was. She looked over to the other bed where Kusac lay supine among his blankets. The bed which up until a year ago had been her sister’s.

  “You aren’t asleep,” she murmured, “I can tell. Never mind, you play your little game, I don’t mind. You’re safer to trust no one.” She reached out her hand and touched him gently on the head. “Sleep, you’re safe now.”

  The door burst open, shocking her out of her nap.

  “I’ve told you, she’s ill! Leave her alone,” came Meg’s angry voice from outside.
/>
  “I decide,” was the sibilant reply as two Valtegan soldiers forced their way into the room. Their energy guns focused instantly on Carrie and the cat as their cold gazes swept the room looking for signs of other occupants.

  “What happen to she,” hissed the leader, gesturing to the other soldier to enter and search the room.

  “Accident,” said Meg succinctly. “The oven exploded.”

  “So.”

  Carrie lay frozen with fear as the second soldier paced around the room, moving the curtains, opening the wardrobe doors, and finally lifting the end of her bed to look under it.

  She was simultaneously aware of the presence in her mind growing stronger and a low, menacing, guttural sound that built in pitch till it filled the room.

  Kusac raised his head and stared at the soldier at the end of her bed. The growl changed to a snarl as his lip pulled back to reveal a set of formidable canines.

  The soldier dropped the bed and backed off hurriedly.

  “Is no one else,” he said to his superior as Carrie yelped in pain at the shock of the violent movement.

  Both soldiers backed out, trying not to appear to hurry, their usually pallid complexions a shade or two paler.

  “Next room,” she heard the officer snap.

  Kusac’s snarl reduced to a low-pitched rumble as he continued to stare at the door. He kept it up until they heard the Inn door bang shut as the Valtegans departed.

  “So they’re afraid of you, are they?” she said slowly, reaching out to pat him. “Good boy. You keep it up.”

  Footsteps sounded in the passageway and Meg entered, carrying a tray.

  “I thought it was time you both ate,” she said, putting the tray down on Carrie’s bedside table.

  She helped Carrie sit up, plumping up her pillows behind her, then setting the tray on her lap. Bending down, she reached under the bed and drew a second tray out from under it. This she cautiously put in front of Kusac’s bed and shifted the second bowl of broth from Carrie’s tray to his.

  “There you are, my boy,” she said. “Anything that can frighten those bastards is a friend of mine.”

  “Why, Meg,” said Carrie, as the housekeeper sat down beside her, “you surprise me. I’ve never heard you talk about the Valtegans like that before.”

  “You should have seen the mess they made of the house after they left your room,” she said heatedly. “It’ll take me hours to put it to rights. Still, it was worth it. I’ve never seen them back off so fast in my life before!” She smiled at the memory. “Maybe your furry friend does have his uses after all.”

  “Meg,” Carrie hesitated, spoon held in midair, “I’m sorry about ...”

  Meg smiled and patted Carrie’s other hand where it lay on the coverlet. “Don’t you worry, love, I understand. If your friend can behave like that when he thinks you’re threatened, I reckon we’ve nothing to fear from him. If he’d meant us any harm, we’d have known it by now.

  “Now come on, eat up your broth. There’s plenty more in the pot where that came from.”

  Chapter 3

  Valleytown Inn served a variety of functions. It was first and foremost the place where the adult members of the town—population some 300 souls plus assorted livestock and one forest cat—could relax. It was also where the Ladies’ Sewing Circle met on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and the center for the informal exchange of information. The less charitable called it the Gossip Shop.

  Its second most important function was as the central clearing house for information gleaned by the Passive Resistance movement run by Carrie’s father, Peter Hamilton.

  Unlike the guerrillas led by the Captain and what remained of the starship crew, the Passive Resistance did not use violence. They claimed that it only brought retaliatory action, resulting in more deaths of the already depleted colonists.

  Though Carrie’s talent lay in working with children, she was often called upon by her father to help out in the taproom during the evenings. She enjoyed the break from her routine and found it refreshing now and then to be able to talk to people who were over a meter tall. So for her first sortie back into the community life, the taproom was a natural place to start.

  She had taken longer than she had expected to heal. It had been six weeks since ... that night ... and occasionally she still felt weak and drained from her ordeal. At least all the broken bones had mended and she could use her hands again. Even the faint scars from the lacerations on her arms were beginning to fade.

  She looked round to where Kusac lay on the floor by her feet, nose on his front paws, tail curled round him. An ear cocked in her direction and his eyes opened slowly.

  His recuperative powers had been something else. Of the terrible wound in his flank all that now remained was a slight limp and a long patch of shorter fur.

  He was like her shadow, never leaving her side for any length of time even on the couple of short walks they’d taken on the slopes out at the back of the fields.

  This pleased Carrie. She enjoyed having him around, especially when the Valtegans did one of their sudden searches of the Inn. They showed Kusac a healthy respect that bordered on a pathological fear of him, although it hadn’t stopped the soldiers from the local base outside the village from coming into the Inn when off duty.

  Kusac lay quiescent, well aware of Carrie’s surface thoughts. He desperately needed to know more about these Valtegans, but the girl’s mind was strong—growing stronger since he had started teaching her—and now he doubted whether she would respond to a gentle nudge in that direction.

  Carrie took another sip of her coffee, finding her thoughts slipping back to the past. Ten years ago when the Valtegans had descended on them like a plague of locusts, the colony had only just gotten itself established. Each interdependent unit was finally in its proper location: the fishing center remained at the landing site, calling itself Seaport; the mining community had set up its houses in the hilly country—Hillfort; and her own group had moved to the fertile plains they called Valleytown. Oceanview moved up the coast, taking advantage of the pure seawater to farm seaweeds and shellfish as well as the land.

  They had only been on the planet two years, and what they had achieved in that time had been outstanding.

  Keiss had been almost a new Eden. There was no intelligent dominant life-form on the planet, though given time it was argued by some that the felines could have filled that niche. The soil was rich and fertile, hardly even needing the manure they ploughed into it to help feed the Terran crops they had brought with them.

  Most of the native grasses and grains were edible by livestock and humans alike, and the climate was temperate. It was all they could have wished for. Until the Alien ships landed.

  Carrie’s thoughts veered away from that back to the present time and she grinned. At least the Valtegans hadn’t found the human population on Keiss a walkover. Despite delaying tactics from the forced human labor groups, the two giant domed cities of Geshader and Tashkerra had been built—plus a major military base on the coast and local garrisons at each of the four settlements, these last thanks to their guerrilla activities.

  The Valtegans’ R & R planet—for such was the use they had intended Keiss to fill—had ended up as armed camps that their recuperating troops had to be virtually interned within until they were fit to return to their spacecraft. It was no holiday world.

  Who and where the Valtegans were fighting was a puzzle that no one could uncover. It seemed the Valtegans on Keiss didn’t even know. All the humans could discover was that Keiss was well back from any combat zone, and this only because over the years they had learned to judge the state of the injuries of the hospitalized Aliens. The who and where were recurrent topics of speculative gossip given their total lack of any known facts.

  Carrie pulled her wandering thoughts back to the here and now, aware that she was supposed to be working.

  Kusac lay quiet, piecing together what he’d learned. Apart from having a good understanding
of their language now, he’d found out more in the last few minutes than in the last six weeks.

  The taproom was large and had a friendly atmosphere. Every effort had been made to create as pleasant surroundings as possible. A solid screen stood in front of the doorway to prevent the bitter winter winds from howling round the room whenever the door was opened. Alcoves had been created along the walls, the benches padded and covered with hand-woven brightly colored cloth.

  In the center of the room stood the open log fireplace, the local resinous wood scenting the air with a smell reminiscent of pine. Smaller round tables and chairs filled this middle area.

  The bar was opposite the door and this was where Carrie was sitting. Reaching forward, she took the jug of coffee off the hot plate and poured herself a second mug, adding sweetener and milk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kusac’s head raise and his nostrils twitch appreciatively at the smell.

  “Sorry, Kusac, coffee isn’t for cats. You know where your bowl of water is.”

  She took a mouthful, then set the mug down.

  “I’d better get started, I suppose,” she said, letting herself slide off the high stool.

  Taking the notepad and pencil out of her pocket, she went round behind the bar and began checking the bottles of wines and spirits off against her list.

  They made all their own alcoholic drinks using a mixture of the grains and fruits they had brought with them as well as some of those indigenous to Keiss. Her father’s passion was his vines, though, and he spent hours tending them in his greenhouses. He did brew lovely traditional wines, but Carrie preferred those made with the other fruits.

  All their crops were either edible or tradable at the monthly markets held at Seaport, the only large gathering the Valtegans would allow them, and that only because it provided amusement as a tourist attraction for the Valtegans from Geshader and Tashkerra. The markets were sacrosanct, needed by the humans for their continued survival, so no anti-Valtegan activities were allowed for fear of losing the privilege of exchanging goods for foodstuffs.