Anne McCaffrey - Ptb 1 Powers That Be Copyright (c) 1993 by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

We dedicate this book to Neva Reece for holding down the Scarborough fort (and supplying the cats with TLC) while we wrote at McCaffrey's house in Ireland. Thanks from us both, Neva.

Chapter 1

Stiding in the crowded processing center of Petaybee's spaceport, Yanaba Maddock eyed the side door as a drowner would eye a drifting spar. Unobtrusively making her way to it, she hoped it wasn't locked. It was, but the lock was not proof against the skills she had acquired in her years as a company soldier, investigator, explorer, training officer, and, most recently, long-term resident of a medical facility. Automatically checking to see if her activity was being noticed, Yana slid the door open just wide enough to accommodate her thin body. She paused to pull on her gloves: she had been warned in the briefing-and she always took briefings seriously-of the danger of bare skin sticking to frozen surfaces.

For a moment she leaned back against the slide panel, to secure it in case she had been observed. Then the cold air hit her. She knew from previous cold-weather training not to inhale the freezing blast that whipped around the corner of the building and slammed into her face.

"The temp-er-actch-chur of Planet, Terraformation B, commonly called Petaybee, at certain locations during certain points in lime during the winter can range as low as minus two hundred degrees fare-in-height," the computer aboard the shuttle from ship to port had cautioned. "That's cold, troops. Do not touch metal objects with your unprotected epy-dur-mus. Do not run, or the air will freeze into small icicles in your lungs and lacerate them. Wear or carry your winter gear with you at all times. Do not count on a nice warm vehicle for warmth. For one thing, there is a shortage of nice warm vehicles on Petaybee, because machinery that doesn't freeze and crack in the extreme cold is expensive. For another thing, even the expensive equipment breaks down, and you may find yourself stranded. The tem-per-atch-chur at Kilcoole Space Base today is minus fifty degrees fare-in-height. Some of the locals have been known to regard this as relatively tropical by comparison with what they consider real winter. Bear in mind that summer to these same individuals consists of two months of fairly constant daylight as warm as fifty-five to sixty degrees above zero, still twelve to seventeen degrees colder than regulation shipboard settings of seventy-two degrees. So button up your outer gear, 'cause the wind blows free, and take good care of yourselves, remembering at all times that your ass belongs to the company. That is all."

Yana had smiled to hear the computer briefing given in the gruff voice and speech patterns of a senior NCO, but she was no more inclined to ignore the warning than she would have been had it been issued by a flesh-and-blood top sergeant. Minus two hundred, huh? Good thing she'd gotten here during a "heat wave." Icicles lacerating her already trashed lungs would do nothing for her convalescence.

Fumbling with outerwear that had been broiling her in the facility, she pulled her scarf across her mouth, flipped the hood to her head, pulled it down over her forehead, which was fast becoming wooden with cold, and tucked the scarf securely up to her eyes before she tied the hood under her chin.

Cold though the air was, and despite a taint of overheated oil and space fuel from the snow-rimmed plascrete landing pad, the freshness of it-warmed by her breath as she inhaled through the muffling fabric-was clean! One of the small joys of her life were those first moments of breathing fresh, unadulterated, unrecycled air. the real stuff.

She inhaled through her mask, tentatively at first, because her lungs were still not working as well as they should-one of the reasons she was the perfect candidate for Petaybee in the eyes of her employers. Gradually she began to take deeper breaths; she wanted to flush the dead air of a spaceship out of her poor abused lungs. They would have even more of a chance to heal here in Petaybee's unpolluted atmosphere than in the rarefied aisles of that medical complex back on Andromeda Station.

She took in one deep breath too many and started to cough, gasp, and choke until her eyes teared with the spasms. Panting with short chest inhalations, she managed to get control again. The tears froze on her cheeks and she brushed them away. Grimly she thought that you could have too much of a good thing-even air. And she had better get back inside: for all she was wearing garb appropriate to the new climate, she could feel her fingers and toes numbing. She spared one look at the horizon; the great bowl of a blue sky without so much as a defense shield over the spaceport, and the ice-covered land and wondered if she really had made the right decision.

Slipping back inside, she pushed the hood off, pulled down the scarf, and scanned her nearest neighbors. Only one of them seemed to notice that she had left and come back. He blinked and frowned before turning his attention to the screen at the far end of the long hall where the names of those to be processed were blinking. Y. MADDOCK was one of them.

She moved forward, squeezing past people until she came to the more eager layers of folk, packed tightly as they waited for release.

"Maddock, Y," she said to the official, offering her plastics.

"ID," he said without looking up from his terminal.

She extended her left wrist, and with rough fingers, he turned it so he could see it, bending her hand painfully.

"You're cold!" He looked up now, seeing her as a person, not a number.

She shrugged. "Leaning against that door."

"Humpf. Didn't you attend the briefing?" He frowned. "Don't touch metal ..."

"Even inside?" she asked with the innocent inquiring look she had used to flummox brighter men than this one.

He frowned, and then the terminal required his attention, her plastic having jumped out of the processing slot. It skidded halfway across the worktop before he caught it. Yana kept her face straight: he looked the sort not likely to appreciate chasing anything, much less plastic.

A slip of film extruded from the slot by her hand.

"That has your work number, which you will memorize, work assignment, living quarters, ration status, travel and clothing allowance, and the name of your official guide as well as his office hours. Your travel pack has already been delivered to your quarters." Then he paused and startled her by smiling. "You can take one of the waiting vehicles outside the terminal. Major Maddock. Welcome to Petaybee."

Amazed by both the courtesy and the unexpected smile, Yana thanked him and moved smartly out of the way to make room for the next person in line.

A translucent roof shield protected the area outside the passenger terminal. It was filled with the sounds of confusion and impatience as the processed arrivees, most of them lugging their precious 23.5 kilo personal-allowance sacks, searched for each other or for transportation.

"Yellow slip, huh?" someone said in her ear, pulling her hand down to peer at it.

The someone was a young girl, so bundled in furs that only her face was visible, and that slightly obscured by long wisps of fur and, possibly, her own hair. She appeared to be in her early to mid-teens; her keen gray eyes were alive with intelligence and interest

"I'm cleared for yellow, too," the girl added, and her mittened hand shoved a plastic square under Yana's eyes. The woman grabbed her hand for a longer look at the official-looking plastic. The girl didn't resist, though her eyes widened slightly at the strength of Yana's grasp.

The plastic-covered printed documentation that licensed Buneka Rourke to convey passengers in an authorized snocle within the environs of the port but no farther. There was a large A in the right-hand corner and a renewal date sometime later on in Petaybee's year.

"How much?"

Buneka Rourke blinked and then grinned companionably. 'From here to your place, it's on the PTBs."

"The PTBs?" Yana wasn't sure she had heard correctly.

Buneka's grin broadened, and her eyes twinkled with mischief. "Sure, PTB-the powers that be. Petaybee," she added. "You didn't know that's where this planet got its name?"

"The briefing said it was Planet, Terraformation B," Yana said.

The girl waved her mitten dismissively. "They would manage to make it sound dull. But it's really named after them-the Powers That Be that move us from A to B or Z or wherever they gotta plug holes or clean up disasters or fight wars. C'mon. Let me get you out of this mess and give you a proper welcome to Petaybee." The girl tugged at Yana's sleeve, pointing to a battered-looking but clean orange/yellow snocle with fluorescent numerals, MTS-80-84, that matched those Yana had seen on the plastic ID. But as Yana stepped off the curb, a big figure intervened.

"Yellow ticket? I take yellow tickets." The man glared menacingly at the girl. "You doan wanna ride with this flitter-face. She turn you over into snow drift. No one find you. Yellow ticket deserves big, warm snocle." He gestured toward a large, sleek affair.

"I've already-" she began.

"Terce, she's legally mine."

"You ain't cleared for yellows," the man said, hunching belligerently over the girl. He was a tall enough man, but the furs made him even more bulky.

"Am, too." She waved her ID at him; snarling, he batted at her hand, dismissing her qualification. "I got a passenger all legal, Terce," she went on. "You weren't even here."

Yana deftly inserted herself between them and made eye contact with the intruder. "I've already accepted Rourke's assistance, but I thank you for your willingness to transport me."

"I gotta, dama . . ."

At first Yana thought he was swearing at her and then realized that he was bowing with great subservience. There was an edge of anxiety in his voice and manner.

"You're safer with me," the girl said, glaring such a challenge first at Yana and then at Terce that Yana sensed that more was at stake than just a fare.

"Look, girl, another yellow ticket." Terce gestured toward a man whose yellow ticket was plainly visible in his hand, "you take 'im." Then he took a firm hold on Yana's upper arm and began to swing her toward his vehicle.

Deftly, almost automatically, Yana disengaged her arm and then strode across to the battered little MTS-registered snocle.

"Dama, dama," Terce cried, real concern in his voice.

Yana ignored him, lengthening her stride when she heard the triumphant exclamation from Buneka, followed by the sound of boots slithering across the snow mush behind her. Yana hit the door release on the passenger's side, then paused a moment to catch her breath before she slung her sacks onto the rear storage shelf. Still chuckling over her success, the girl slid into the driver's scat.

"You'd better button up. This thing takes longer to warm up than Terce's fancy sleigh."

"And I'm safer with you?" Yana asked at her driest, as she rearranged her hood and scarf and belted into the seat before slipping her hands back into the fur mittens.

The girl's eyes crinkled. "Well, Terce is known to do 'errands' for folk. My hunch is he was there on purpose to collect you. If you'd wanted to go with him, you could have, of course, but you didn't. So you didn't know he was there to meet you. So ... you're safer with me-especially the way he was acting. He's not very bright." Her remark was couched in a kindly tone but held a hint of caution nonetheless. She glanced over at Yana, her eyes bright, alert.

Well, Yana mused. An hour on the planet and intrigue starts already. Never a dull moment, no matter what the spaceflot about Petaybee was. PTB! Powers that be. She chuckled at the thought but let that also be an answer for her driver.

The chuckle turned into one of her coughing fits, and between spasms she fumbled in her sack for her bottle of syrup. She was suddenly weak with the effort it took to draw enough breath between explosions that threatened to blow her ribs apart. The fur mittens made her hands clumsy, and she almost dropped the bottle before she could peel a mitten from her shaking hand and get the plastic cap off. As soon as the syrup began to coat her pharynx, the spasm eased. She cradled the bottle in her hands, against her chest. The preparation had a lot of alcohol in it, but she still wouldn't risk it freezing.

The girl slowed the vehicle and looked back at her with wide eyes. Poor kid looked as if she were wishing that she had let Terce take her fare.

"Are you-all right, Major?"

Yana gulped another swallow of the syrup, this time feeling the warmth spreading into the poisoned cavities of her damaged lungs. Every time she coughed, ;-he images flashed through her brain of the graphic films the doctors had shown her when they had explained why she was no longer fit for active duty. As if the fact that she couldn't laugh or hoist a duffel bag without a paroxysm of coughing wasn't evidence enough of her disability. Still, she was alive, which was more than the others were. She recapped the bottle, tucked it into her parka pocket, and pulled the mitten back over her hand. It was already going numb with cold. She noted with satisfaction, however, that there was no blood on either mitten.

Catching the girl's anxious look, she said, "Don't worry, Rourke, it's not contagious. Took a little gas at Bremport Station was all."

"From the sound of that cough, you must have had a nasty time of it," the girl remarked, speeding up slightly again but proceeding more cautiously than before, as if afraid the jarring would set her passenger off again.

"You might say that," Yana said, thinking of the others. The hell of it was, she had been through a lot worse in her younger days and had come through without a scratch. Bremport was supposed to have been a routine training mission-new recruits, a couple of them from Petaybee, she remembered. She remembered just about everything from that mission, over and over again.

Using the technique she had learned a long time before from one of her old sergeants, she switched her focus, letting her eyes rest on the panorama of blue and white nothingness, the featureless landscape soothing her, helping her blank her mind, the cold in the air matching the cold inside her.

Ground-hugging vegetation pierced lumps of snow with frozen spines. Then she noticed that the snocle track was on ground slightly lower than the rest of the terrain.

"You guys dig a new road here, huh?" she asked her driver.

Rourke snorted. "Not a bit of it. Do you think they'd be spendin' money on improvements for the likes of us? This-is the river!"

"No kidding?" Yana looked out and down. Where the snow had blown away in one patch, she saw the translucence of powder blue ice. "Anybody ever fall through the ice?"

"Not lately. Even this late in the winter it's still between minus seventy-five and minus thirty most of the time."

"If everything is frozen, what do you do about drinking water?" Company leaders automatically considered such details.

"Oh, that. I'll show you." The girl grinned and continued on.

After a few moments the ground had more rise and fall to it. Beside it, stunted trees, rooted and branched in billows of snow, began appearing closer and closer together until they formed a sparse forest on either side of the snocle. The girl veered the machine over toward the trees, and around the next bend, Yana saw a little pavilion set up on the ice, smoke rising from a hole in the top. Rourke had been decreasing the speed of her snocle and now drifted to a gentle stop.

The tent shook slightly from within and what looked at first like a bear emerged.

"Slainte, Bunny!" the bear said with a wave, dispelling the illusion. The fur-clad man lumbered forward, lifting his great fur boots high above the snow. His face bristled with icicles from the ruff around his mouth and nose, which was only lightly frosted, to his beard, eyebrows, and mustache, which were thickly encrusted with ice.

"Slainte, Uncle Seamus!" The girl waved back and cut the motor. The man's eyes flicked up through his personal icicles to glance at Yana, a searching look for all its brevity. "This is Major Maddock, Uncle. She's going to be staying at Kilcoole."

"Is she now?" He included Yana in his wave, and she nodded at him.

"Do you have some thermos or two for me to take to Auntie, since I'm passing her way?" Bunny asked.

"Now, that would be very good of you, Bunny. I've two now, and I'll have more later when Charlie and the dogs come along. This dama doesn't mind stopping on her way, does she?"

"Nah! She won't mind. Will you, Major? You wanted to see how we got water. Come look in the shed."

Moving a little more slowly than she would have liked, Yana climbed from the snocle. Out here, on the river, the cold immediately clenched its fist around her face and thighs, the only parts of her that weren't encased in synfur. She hoisted the muffler around her nose, but the sweet smell of wood smoke still came through. She wondered if it would set her coughing again. But there was Bunny, encouragingly holding up the flap of the tent and pointing to the fire burning in a circle around the rim of a long black hole in the ice. An insulated container on a length of line stood beside the hole, along with two other containers, which Seamus now gave Bunny.

Yana took a couple of steps toward the tent before the smoke from the fires wafted toward her. She felt her throat seizing up and stepped back, silently cursing her weakness. How the frag was she going to survive on a cold planet if she couldn't breathe in the presence of fire?

Bunny, her shoulders bowed as she hauled one of the thermoses with both hands so that the container bumped against her shins, nodded to Yana to return to the snocle. Yana was relieved not to put her lungs through any further ordeal. She turned with more enthusiasm than was prudent and her feet promptly slid on the ice underlying the thin covering of drifted snow. She placed her feet more cautiously then, and managed to make it back to the snocle without falling.

Seamus set the other water thermos in beside her and ran a mitten across his face, an accustomed gesture that dislodged some of his facial icicles. "Welcome to Petaybee, such as it is, Major. You need something, you just ask Bunny here."

Yana nodded. "Thanks." It was just possible that, if her official guide turned out to be anywhere near as inept as she herself was in this environment, she would find Bunny's unofficial assistance more useful.

They arrived at Yana's new quarters long after darkness had fallen, though by Yana's calculation it was no more than late afternoon. She looked at the small single house standing alone on pilings beside others of similar construction. It had one window and one door that she could see in the gloom, and the window was small. Whatever. It was bound to be roomier than some of the berths she'd had, and compared to her place on the ward at the space-station hospital; it looked palatial, as well as incredibly private.

Bunny hefted her duffel out of the snocle for her and pushed open the door. The interior was spare, white as the outdoors, and contained a cot, a small table on which rested her survival pack, a chair, and a stove for heating and cooking.

"It's too late for you to inprocess today. Sorry it took so long," Bunny said. "Look, wait here and I'll get some blankets. You'd better take this water, too. No one's given you your ration." She nodded toward the thermos on a shelf beyond the stove. - "That's for your auntie, isn't it?" Yana asked. "And I can scarcely take your blankets, too."

Bunny shook her head. 'They won't care about the water, and I can spare the blanket. You'll be issued your own tomorrow."

She drove away in the snocle and, in a short time, returned on foot, carrying a bundle of puffy cloth and a packet. "Smoked salmon strips," she said, indicating the packet.

"What?"

"Fish. It's good," Bunny said patiently. "You'll like it."

Yana's day had started back at the station hospital nearly thirty hours earlier, and she couldn't face anything more taxing than rolling up in blankets and going to sleep as fast as possible. "Thanks," she said.

"Okay, then. Shall I pick you up in the morning to meet your guide? I could get the blanket then, too."

Aha, Yana thought, a little blackmail here to ensure the continuing custom. Very enterprising. "That'll be fine," she said with a weary lift of her eyes that would have to pass for a smile. Bunny showed her how to light the stove before she left and promised to help her organize more fuel the next day.

Without waiting for the room to warm up enough for her to remove her outerwear, Yana arranged the chair at the head of the cot, sat down, and stretched her legs out on the bed. She had chewed only a couple of bites of the oddly spiced salmon strip before she fell asleep, as she had for the last few weeks, sitting up.

Bunny Rourke returned to her aunt's house after delivering the blankets to her client and returning the snocle to its special shed.

"I'll need to check it out again in the morning," she'd told Adak O'Connor, the dispatcher and guard.

"No shuttles due from SpaceBase for another week," Adak said, removing his headphones and turning away from the radio that connected him to SpaceBase and the few other places on Petaybee that had such advanced equipment. He scowled at his record book, which contained the schedules for the port and kept track of the whereabouts of the vehicles-both of them. Bunny was licensed to drive one, Terce the other: they were the only authorized drivers to and from Kilcoole. The shuttles belonged to InterGalactic Enterprises, known as Intergal, the omnipresent if not omnipotent corporation responsible for the existence of Petaybee, and the boss of all Bunny's people. Bunny had qualified for her license only because one of her uncles was an important man and owned his own snocle as well as dogs. When Bunny's parents had disappeared, Uncle had taught her to drive the snocle to help her make her own way in the village so she wouldn't be a burden. She was Uncle's driver on the rare occasions when he preferred the snocle to his team. She also made the trip out to his place to keep the machine running for him and repair it when it broke down- usually from neglect. Her uncle was a brilliant man but not mechanically inclined. Bunny took after her Yupik granddad: she could fix anything. And six months ago, on her fourteenth birthday, she had obtained her license to ferry passengers from Space-Base to Kilcoole and back.

"I know there's no shuttles," she told Adak, "but my fare has to inprocess in the morning."

"Can't she walk or go by sled?"

"Nah. She's an important dama. An officer. But she's puny. Said something about being at Bremport."

"The massacre where the Shanachie's boy was killed? Ah, the poor dama. And how is she puny?"

"She coughs. Bad. But she seems nice. Anyway, the snocle is authorized for official functions, so I want to take her round to the outpost as quick as possible so she can settle in, like."

"Good child. You've taken to this dama, have you?"

"She's sleepin' this night under the quilt Auntie Moira made me."

'Then by all means lake the snocle in the morning, but mind you, no sight-seein'."

"Thanks, Adak," she said. "I'll bring you one of Auntie Moira's cakes in the morning when I come, shall I?"

"That would be very welcome, Bunny. Good night now."

"Good night," she said, and headed back to the shed behind her aunt's house.

Ever since her older male cousins had turned a little too inquisitive about her development, Bunny had preferred to sleep out here, in back of the kennel where Charlie kept his team of noisy and protective dogs, who warned her of anyone approaching. She wasn't really scared, though. Most of the people who came to see her brought her things-fish or moose chops, zucchini or tomatoes in the summer-though some came just to visit. She was personally related to a large percentage of the village, and she knew who would help her and who to avoid. There were a few people she didn't want coming to her place-Terce, for one, but he was scared of Charlie's dogs. Mostly, everyone looked out for her. That would have made her feel like a child except that she looked out for them, too. That was how it was in Kilcoole. She was actually very adult for someone her age, trusted with the responsibility of living on her own and holding down her own job.

Approaching her house, she was greeted by the hounds, who set up a good welcoming howl as she walked quickly through them, unclipping the lines from Pearse and the lead dog, Maud.

She was pleasantly surprised to see smoke rolling up from her chimney to the sky. As she followed its path she saw the lights were on display tonight: a simple pale green band whipping across the black sky, dancing and twisting and sequined with stars. The smoke from the chimney smelled grand-nutty and warm. Maud whined and stuck her long muzzle in Bunny's pocket. The dogs were more used to Bunny, who had time for them and who usually fed and exercised them, than they were to Charlie, who was their owner. Bunny petted Maud absently. Even with her stove getting a head start on the chill, without her quilt she would need the dogs for warmth tonight. She would let them in to get toasty by the fire while she ate her supper.

The big red dogs with their thick soft coats took up most of the floor space in the little shed. It contained her berth, a scrounged unit cut out of one of the dead ships at SpaceBase, a shaky tabletop pegged into the wall and placed so she could sit on her berth to eat, plus the stove and the shelves she had built from old storage crates to hold her few belongings. She had the three books left her by her parents, a set of tools-a gift from her uncle upon obtaining her license-and a selection of shells, rocks, and mushroom-shaped tree tumors, as well as hand-me-downs from the cousins and what little gear she had. On the table was a mare's-butter candle; it gave a fairly bright light, though it didn't smell very good. Her shed was built of stone, of which Petaybee had plenty. She had caulked it with mud two breakups earlier and reinforced it with some plasti her cousin Simon had scrounged for her at the SpaceBase when he first joined the corps, before he shipped out. The plasti had originally been used to repair the bubble around the SpaceBase garden, and it did well in the cold, never cracking or contracting.

Something plopped down beside her onto the table and mewed up at her. She reached down to stroke the rust-and-cream stripes of one of Aunt Clodagh's cats, though which she couldn't say since so many of the Kilcoole felines were orange-marmalades. The cat pawed the door, and Bunny smiled and followed, chattering to the cat.

"So Clodagh already knows about my passenger, does she, and left you here to tell me to report? Glad to, cat, as long as there's a bite in it for me."

The dogs in the shed had ignored the cat; the ones in the yard did not bark as it led her through the kennels. No one's dogs even barked at Clodagh's cats. They went where they pleased and knew where everything was and what everyone was doing-as did Clodagh.

Chapter 2

The official guide-only a second lieutenant, Yana noted-stood up when she entered the room. "Major Maddock," he said, saluting and flashing her quite an energetic smile. "Lieutenant Charles Demintieff, first Petaybee military liaison officer, at your service, dama."

"Relax, Lieutenant," she said. "I'm reporting to you, not the other way round."

"Yes'm. It's just that I've read your file, and we don't get many heroes back here."

"Most heroes don't make it back anywhere," she said.

He laughed as if she had said something extremely witty. 'Then we're luckier still to have you, Major. Colonel Giancarlo from SpaceBase snocled in this morning to welcome you personally. When you've had your chat with him, we'll go over the routine stuff."

Walking into the adjoining room, Yana felt as wary as if she were entering the bridge of an enemy-held ship. If the SpaceBase brass wanted to talk to her, why hadn't he done it at Inprocessing and saved himself a long, cold ride?

The colonel, in contrast to the lieutenant, did not look happy lo see her. His insignia was one she had seen only occasionally:

Psychological Operations, a euphemism for the Intelligence branch. She reported, and he waved her into a chair while he continued typing something into a terminal.

"Well, Major," he said after she had been sitting there long enough to become impatient and uncomfortable in her heavy gear. "What do you think of Petaybee so far?"

"Seems friendly," she said cautiously. He was testing her somehow, but she wasn't sure for what. "The air is clean, pretty cold. Fairly primitive technologically. New recruits from here need extensive training in the simplest equipment, and it's pretty obvious why, from what I've seen of my quarters and the village. Am I missing something?"

"If you are, you're not alone," he said, his eyes shifting from the terminal to hers and boring into them. "There shouldn't be anything here that we didn't put here. This planet was nothing but rock and ice when Intergal claimed it. The company terraformed it, upgrading it from frozen uninhabitable rock to a merely arctic climate. For the last two hundred years, it's been useful as a replacement depot for troops, a relocation center for the peoples who were being displaced by our other operations. Because the climate is rough on machinery, only SpaceBase contains much in the way of modern comforts. The transportation needs of the inhabitants are mostly supplied by experimental animals bred for the purpose."

"Experimental?" Yana asked. "Like lab animals?" She had been born on Earth but had spent her childhood being shunted with her parents from one duty station to the next. Lab rats and monkeys were somewhat familiar to her, along with a number of different alien species, but she was unfamiliar-except from pictures-with the beasts she had seen on her way here today.

"Not exactly, although I suppose their ancestors did some time in a lab-originally. The company hired Dr. Sean Shongili to alter certain existing species to adapt to this climate. That's how the resident equines, felines, and canines, and many of the aquatic mammals come to be here."

"1 see," she said, but she didn't. The dogs obviously worked as sled animals, the cats to keep down rodents. But she couldn't understand why Petaybee supported equines, too. Horses, from what little she knew of them, seemed rather inappropriate for such a climate. And considering the need for hacking and burning holes in ice to secure water, wasting such effort on domestic pets seemed totally unproductive.

"Well, Intergal doesn't, entirely," the colonel said, as if he had read her thoughts. "The animals we commissioned are here, but there have been sightings of other types that indicate perhaps Dr. Shongili and his assistants were a trifle more creative than was covered by their authorization. The current Dr. Shongili, also Sean, is certainly an odd bird, not what you'd call a team player. We've monitored his records, however, and can't find any evidence that he's been exceeding his instructions. We could, of course, move him, but this is not a research area favored by many in our employ, and the Shongilis have done so well at producing viable species for arctic conditions that we're reluctant to remove the current Shongili without more concrete evidence. Trouble is, unauthorized species are not the only anomaly. Something else is going on here-our satellite monitors have detected deposits of important minerals on this planet. When we dispatch teams, they either can't find the location of the deposits, or else they simply don't return."

"That's why psyops is interested?" she asked, relaxing a little.

"You got it." Suddenly he grinned at her, an expression that did not make him any more attractive. "That's where we can help each other, Major."

"Sir?"

"You're here this morning technically to be demobilized. You're a medical retiree due to spend the rest of your days on this iceberg, which is unfortunate for you. However, your experience as an intercommand investigator, and your earlier work with preliminary data gathering landing teams, is of some interest to us, despite your disability, as is your record of combat experience. You don't realize it yet, of course, but being a combat veteran carries considerable cachet in this place where most families have at least one, and usually several, relatives in the corps. Furthermore your genetic stock is similar to these people's." He eyed her, and Yanaba knew he was assessing the sprinkle of white in the black hair that Bry used to claim had an auburn cast under bright light, the high cheekbones, the rather bleached-out olive complexion, and the slightly tilted green-gold eyes. Her body had once been lean and athletic, but weeks of illness had reduced her to brittle gauntness at a weight she might have enjoyed had her strength not deserted her along with the extra kilos.

"How's that?" she asked, mystified.

"The people on this continent are a mixture of Irish and Eskimo-we've resettled cold-weather natives all over the planet to assist the others in assimilation. In this area it's Eskimo: in other settlements, ethnic Scandinavians and Indo-Asians."

"I don't exactly fit then," she said, smiling as tolerantly as possible.

"Well, of course, you were practically born into the company, but your father was Irish and your first name, Yanaba-"

"Yanaba," she corrected. "That's Navajo-my mother's people. It's a war name, like a lot of traditional Navajo names. Means 'she meets the enemy.' The Navajo, by the way, were desert dwellers, not snow people."

"Close enough," he said. "Desert can get damned cold midwinter." He dismissed her objection with a wave.

That told her she had made a tactical error by showing up his ignorance before she heard what he wanted. But she had a fierce loyalty to her family. All she had of them now was the history recorded in the computers for her by her parents before their deaths. It was about all she had had in her life that hadn't been Internal-issued.

"We think you can fit, Maddock," he told her. "And we want you to do just that, because we need to know what's going on. We want you to get to know the people, find out what or who exactly is responsible for these problems: if Shongili is concealing experiments in producing new life-forms on this planet, we need to know about it. If the geologic survey teams are being deliberately ambushed and eliminated, we want to know that, and we want to know whom we have to deal with. You don't have enough technical knowledge to locate the deposits yourself, but we want you to find out who's preventing our teams from locating them. If there's some kind of sabotage or incipient insurrection brewing, help us put a stop to it."

"Wouldn't it have been more effective to recruit a local informant?" she asked.

Giancarlo snorted. "There's something screwy about all of them. They all stick together all the time, and every time I've had one of them in my office for any length of time, they start sweating and turn red. Why would that happen if they're not scared, hiding something? Even Demintieff sweats like crazy every time he comes in while I'm here. This office is always freezing when I arrive, and even while I'm here, he keeps that outer office way too cold. These people also have gatherings that nobody from SpaceBase is invited to, and if you ask one of the new recruits from here about it, they just shrug."

"You haven't actively interrogated anyone yet, then?"

"No real excuse so far. What would I ask? Why do you people sweat so damned much, and how come I don't get invited lo your parties?"

Yana nodded.

He leaned forward and stabbed at the desk with his finger, as if the gesture would somehow make his words plainer. "We need someone loyal to the company to gain their confidence, find out what's going on."

"What if they just sweat because they're used to the cold, and they have orgies or something at their parties and don't want to mingle with outsiders out of embarrassment?"

"Major, perhaps I didn't make myself clear. You were injured at Bremport; you saw what happened there. I shouldn't have to tell you what swamps of insurgency these colonial planets can be. Unauthorized life forms have been spotted on this planet. Research-and-development teams have disappeared into nowhere. You can't tell me these circumstances aren't related. What you have to tell me instead is how they are connected with each other. Do you read me?"

She nodded, cautiously, and evidently mistaking her caution for hesitation he pressed on.

"You said something about your quarters. They're pretty standard for down here, but we certainly have the wherewithal to make them more comfortable. Also, you're not full retirement age yet, nor eligible for full pension."

"I have a medical discharge, sir."

"Not exactly. Not yet. Actually your disability status as of now is"- He tapped a key. -"only twenty-five percent. That won't generate much of a pension. If you were on covert active duty, however, you could do a lot better. We could even throw in hazardous-duty pay."

"Sir, with all due respect, while I wouldn't sniff at the money, the doctors back at the hospital . . ."

"You can't contact them from here, Maddock. And in the event you need further, fairly expensive care, the transport from here back to there would be beyond your means, unless, of course, Intergal foots the bill. I'll expect progress reports via Demintieff on a weekly basis unless, of course, something comes up that I should know about instanter. Demintieff will take you around, introduce you to people . . ."

Whatever this guy's specialty was, Yana reflected, it wasn't the gentle art of psychological persuasion. He was about as subtle as a photon torpedo. But she owed Intergal her life and had spent her life in its service. She wasn't going to turn them down just because this hammerhead thought he was blackmailing her. Besides, she could use the pay.

"With respect, sir, I think maybe Demintieff should do the bare minimum of guiding me around. Seems to me I'd be better off on my own. I'd be less suspect to any possible terrorists within the area if an indigenous civilian helped me acclimate rather than a uniformed professional."

"Good thinking, Maddock. This conversation never happened, of course." He dug a sheaf of old-fashioned hard copy from a case at his feet. "However, this contains a full briefing on what we know and suspect thus far. Familiarize yourself with it and burn it."

"Yes, sir."

"Enjoy your retirement, Maddock."

Bunny Rourke was sitting on the edge of Lieutenant Demintieff's desk when Yana and Colonel Giancarlo emerged. Neither Bunny nor Demintieff was perspiring unduly as far as Yana could nee, although at the sight of the colonel, Bunny fled through the doorway with barely a nod to Yana. ..,

"Demintieff!" the colonel snapped.

"Sir!"

"You're to report to SpaceBase. Congratulations, son, you've been chosen for duty shipside."

"But, sir . . ." The lieutenant, formerly so cheerfully obsequious, looked as stunned as if the colonel had suddenly kicked him in the balls. He evidently did not feel that congratulations were in order.

"Grab your gear on the double and you can ride back with me, soldier."

"Permission to say good-bye to my family, sir," Demintieff said with some difficulty.

"Permission granted as long as you can do it within the next forty-five minutes. Duty calls, son."

"Yes, sir."

"Maddock, in view of this man's reassignment, you are authorized to requisition civilian assistance during your civilian orientation process or until the position can be reassigned."

"Yes, sir. May I suggest my driver, Miss Rourke, sir?"

"Sure, Colonel, Bunny will look after the major," Demintieff put in, rather gallantly, Yana thought, in view of his own evident distress. "She's my own sister's cousin-by-marriage and a very good girl."

Seeing this side of Demintieff, and realizing how well connected he was locally, Yana cursed herself for making suggestions before she got the lay of the land. He would have done as well as Bunny from the standpoint of gaining the trust of the villagers, but now he was being sent away from home, an assignment he obviously did not relish, to provide a reason for the change in routine. Damn fool shouldn't have enlisted if he didn't want to serve shipside, she thought fiercely, but she had trouble meeting his eye. Giancarlo returned to the inner room, and Demintieff' s eyes were brimming shamelessly as he turned toward her.

"Dama, would you and Bunny mind very much givin' me a lift up to Clodagh's? My gear's there, and Clodagh'll see to it that my family in Tanana Bay get notified."

Yana could only duck her head as the lieutenant scooped up a tightly wrapped bundle from his desk, started to hand it to her, then carried it out to the snocle.

Bunny was starting the engine when Yana and Demintieff emerged from the building. She started to say something when Demintieff climbed in beside her, leaving Yana the back section, but Demintieff cut her off with "Take me to Clodagh's quick, Bunny. They're shipping me into space." In his distress, his voice had thickened into the same oddly precise brogue coloring of Bunny's and her Uncle Seamus's speech.

Brilliant start, Major Maddock, Yana told herself. Everybody on this damned planet seemed to be related to everybody else.

"Okay, Charlie, but I'll have to drop you and Yana off and take the snocle back. I'm only checked out for another fifteen minutes. I'll hitch up the dogs to take Yana home and bring you back over here."

"If there's time. Giancarlo may requisition your snocle to take us back to SpaceBase, though Terce brought him out. You'll look after my dogs, won't you, Bunny? They already think you belong lo them, and I want them to be well cared for; they've been with me since they were pups." He dug through layers of fur and found

i wallet, then handed her a wad of bills. "Here's to help you with their food."

She released one hand from the wheel and accepted the money, stuffing it in her parka. "No problem, Charlie. I'll keep on looking after them. You didn't know about this reassignment?"

"No idea. He decided just like that."

Yana found herself leaning forward, wheezing into Demintieff s ear: "You'll be going to Andromeda Station to inprocess and for assignment. When you get there, unless he's gone now, the master sergeant in charge of deployment is Ahmed Threadgill. Tell him Yana Maddock sends her love and reminds him of the time she alerted him to the Ship Police raid. He'll know what I mean." Ahmed would know she was calling in the favor and that he was to look after her friend. It wasn't much, considering the way she had caused however so inadvertently the situation, but it could keep his hide intact.

"Yes, Major Maddock. Thank you, dama."

She clapped him on the shoulder, a little feebly, and sat back until Bunny skidded to a halt outside a house a little larger than Yana's own quarters. The morning's exertions had left her panting and trembling with fatigue, but she still took note of this house. The snow in front of it was full of huge strangely shaped lumps, and the crusted snow all around them was lightly dotted with what looked like some kind of shit, which vaguely shocked ship-bred Yana. Stiff oval nets with points at each end hung over the door, three pairs of what were unmistakably skis leaned against the side of the house, and from the back of the house issued a high-pitched keening, like a woman screaming.

"I'll take you back in a minute, Major, if that's okay," Bunny called back as Yana climbed out of the vehicle. "Besides, you'll want to meet Clodagh. She was asking after you last night at supper."

Charlie Demintieff grabbed the bundle of cloth from the snocle, and Bunny drove away.

The screams erupted again and Yana hung back, tensed, listening. Charlie, who had already taken a step toward the house, turned ponderously in his furs, saw her staring, and touched the elbow of her coat with his mitten.

"That's just the dogs," he said, his mouth spilling clouds of condensation into the air, as if his words were freezing there. "When our dogs were first made, our grandfathers called them banshee-dogs because of that sound, but they're just saying hello."

Yana nodded, hearing her own breath rasping in her ears above the screams of the dogs, and willed herself to relax and follow Charlie to the house. A feline with rust and cream markings stood on the roof above the doorway and looked down at them as if considering a pounce. On another corner of the house sat the cat's twin, resembling pictures Yana had seen of the gargoyles decorating ancient Terran architecture. Another of the creatures sat in each of the windows flanking the door.

Just as Charlie reached the door, it opened before him and was filled by the largest woman Yana had ever seen. Of course, people on shipboard were required to keep their body weight to a certain level, a requirement necessitated by the narrow passages, small hatches, and the close confinement of the rooms. Also, anyone in space had to be able to fit into the suits and, should it become necessary, the cold-sleep shells. The rigors of shipboard life plus the uninspiring quality of the nutritious but mostly tasteless rations guaranteed that regulations were easily met by all personnel.

But this woman! She was like a planet herself, or at least an ovoid meteorite, a large round entity unto herself-imposing, to say the least.

"Charlie," the huge woman said as she opened the door. "I hear you're leaving us." She threw a hard look over his shoulder to Yana, as if divining her role in the matter.

The woman fell back, and Charlie Demintieff stepped into the house, holding aside the standard-issue gray military blanket that covered the inside of the door so that Yana could enter.

Demintieff stripped off his hat, muffler, and gloves and loosened the front of his coat; Yana followed suit. The house was small and close, but not as warm as Yana would have expected. Nevertheless, as Giancarlo had indicated, the woman's upper lip and brow were dewed with perspiration. Yana wasn't sure, however, if the moisture on Demintieff's face was sweat, tears, or melting ice from his hair and eyelashes.

The woman embraced Demintieff, her caress oddly delicate and tender for such a massive being. Demintieff returned her embrace with every evidence of affection.

"Don't worry, Charlie," the woman said. "Natark is hitching his team now. He should be in Tanana Bay by tonight."

Demintieff showed no surprise that the woman had anticipated his news, but simply said, "Thanks, Clodagh. I just wanted to say good-bye. Bunny's taking my dogs."

"Good. Good. Bunny treats them well," Clodagh said, making no further attempt to comfort him but seeming to share his sadness. She offered neither a look nor a word of false encouragement that he was likely to return: they all knew he probably wouldn't.

"This is Major Maddock, Clodagh."

"Ah, the dying woman," Clodagh said. It should have sounded tactless except that her tone was vaguely ironic, indicating that she was only referring to Yana's own opinion of herself, as if they had already had a long discussion about it. A soft smile and the penetrating gaze of Clodagh's tilted blue eyes also showed that she meant no offense but simply cut straight to the heart of Yana's concerns as she had to Demintieff's.

"Come, sit, have tea. Charlie's sister and the rest of the family are on their way. Bunka will bring you to supper tonight, if you'll come, but right now we have to talk about Charlie."

Even as she spoke people began arriving, until the room was crowded with bodies that smelled of wet fur, smoke, and wet dog. Clodagh's house boasted a big table with four chairs set close to the stove. Yana, still in her parka, was soon stifling from the heat of the stove, but as the room filled up, she had no elbow room to remove her coat. One of the cats jumped up on the table and began sniffing her coat and her face. She let her hand drop to its marbled fur and it purred and took her gesture as an invitation to settle onto her thighs.

Meanwhile, furs and scarves and quilted fabric brushed by her and she wondered that people didn't singe themselves on the hot stove as they wished Charlie Demintieff farewell. Yana's debilitated lungs labored harder as the room filled, the lack of oxygen smothering her. She began deliberately taking deep breaths as first one and then another of Charlie's friends and distant relations stepped up to crowd around him near the stove, envelop him in a furry hug, and step back away to make room for the next person. Yana couldn't imagine having so much family.

Clodagh stood among them, not as tall as some of the men but distinguishing herself by the space around her. Her hair, Yana noticed, was quite beautiful, cloaking her shoulders in shining black waves, the black of a hue that somehow was not too harsh with the woman's fair skin. Her cheeks were pink with the heat now and she was perspiring freely, glowing like some benevolent "un. She didn't appear to be as old as Yana, and yet she effortlessly carried an air of the kind of authority generally conferred only by well-seasoned maturity.

Just as Yana thought she was going to have to fight her way through the crowd for air or black out, people began filing back out the door with last good-byes for Charlie, and suddenly it was the four of them again, Clodagh, Charlie, Bunny, and Yana.

"We have to hurry," Bunny told the dejected-looking young officer. "1 need to drop the major and get you back."

"Okay," he said.

Clodagh put something in his hand with a soft pat before he pulled on his mittens. As they were leaving she said, "Major Maddock, will you come to supper tonight with Bunka?"

Yana nodded and waved, and turned back toward the path between the houses to face four excitedly yapping dogs strapped to a low sled.

"Climb in, Major," Bunny said.

"You're kidding. There's not room for all of us."

"You ride, and Charlie can drive. I'll run along beside," Bunny said, "just as far as your place."

Yana looked at the low, insubstantial-looking sled and the four wriggling, whimpering dogs, who were having their pointed red ears and muzzles scratched by a kneeling, sad-faced Charlie Demintieff. Their faces looked more like those of foxes or cats than those of the dogs Yana had seen pictured. Their coats were very thick and their legs fairly long and muscular, but their paws were covered in little booties. Every time one of them could get close enough to lick at Demintieff, it did.

"How far is my place, anyway?" Yana asked. She had not formed an impression of any vast distances within this town; on the contrary, the snocle rides had been brief.

"Just down the road," Bunny said gesturing. "But you're not used to the cold and . . ."

"And I'm an invalid?" Yana asked, hitching her muffler up higher on her nose. "The dying woman, eh? Not dead yet, Rourke. Not by a long shot. You take Charlie back-and Charlie?"

"Dama?"

"Don't forget to look up Master Sergeant Threadgill and tell him what I told you."

Charlie nodded once, briefly, his chin set. Bunny tumbled into the sled and settled herself for transport while Charlie, one last time, whistled to his dogs, who obediently trotted off toward the company station.

Yana sighed, sending a plume of her breath up against the crisp blue sky, and began trudging in her heavy gear in the direction of her new quarters. Damn Giancarlo anyway. If he wanted her to spy for him, did he have to start off by doing something that, if the truth were known, would alienate the whole village from her? Of course, there was always the possibility that he, like Yana, had had no idea that Demintieff was one local boy who happened to be stationed close to home because he wished to be. But Giancarlo should have known before he went off half-cocked. If this assignment had any significance at all, he definitely should have had Demintieff checked before he decided to replace him. That kind of rashness could blow this mission.

Mission? This was supposed to be her new life! Not that it looked as if it was apt to amount to much. She ought to thank Giancarlo for giving her something to occupy her mind, to keep from going nuts here on this ice ball.

Feathers of smoke curled up from the houses; if there were any shops or supply stores, they were indistinguishable from the dwellings as far as she could see. Each step in her bulky primitive clothing was like walking in heavy gravity. She couldn't bend her head easily to see the path before her, or her muffler would fall down and her hood ride back on her head. But by turning her head slightly, she saw that many of the houses contained kennels full of dogs and had mysterious-looking lumps out front just like the ones she had seen in Clodagh's yard. Two of the larger places had not only houses but outbuildings, and in one of the yards two horses were zigzagging back and forth in the snow. Yana thought (here was something strange about the horses, but she couldn't quite decide what. Never mind. She'd return to her quarters and read the briefing. She needed to find out what was regular about I his place before she could determine what was irregular.

She made it to her door with only one slight mishap, when "h<- slipped once more on the ice and had to recover from a coughing fit before rising. She hadn't hurt herself seriously otherwise. How could she, with so many layers of clothing? A passerby-impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman in those wrappings, but the person was short-stopped and waited for her toughing fit to abate, then gave her a hand up. She felt like a bloody baby, and wanted to slap the person's hand away, but as soon as she was on her feet the person said in a muffled voice, "You got to walk a little duck footed when it's slick like this."

She watched the person waddle away; then, feeling sillier than ever, she fell into a waddle gait until she reached her own door, the last one on the row.

Something bright flashed ahead of her as she opened the door, and she stiffened, until she heard a thud from the direction of the table and beheld one of the orange cats sitting upon it, nonchalantly cleaning the snow from furry paw pads.

To her relief, the log she had left burning in the stove earlier that morning was glowing coals. She wasn't sure how long such primitive material was supposed to last, but she had the impression it needed refurbishing frequently. She stripped off coat, gloves, muffler, and coverall and sat down on the chair in her uniform. She had best strip off the insignia. She sighed. That would be admitting to her present status. Whatever. She wondered what she would do for clothing here when her uniforms wore out. She had no other kind of clothing, having been shipside most of her life. Considering the assorted outerwear she had seen in Clodagh's, perhaps the locals had indigenous sources and supplies. She would have to ask Bunny where she got her furs. Meanwhile . . .

She spread the brief on the table, while the cat looked on inquisitively. The report contained a short history of Petaybee and its settlements, as well as maps showing the resource sites and the spots where the missing survey teams had last been seen.

Petaybee: third world from star XR798 in the Valdez system. The original evaluation team found no life forms, sentient or otherwise, on the planet: the rocky surface was largely frozen during most of the solar year. The Whittaker Effect was suggested as the best terraforming package for the planet and was inaugurated. Colonization was feasible, and procedures were initiated as the planet warmed. The only landmasses available were in the polar regions, where the climate was sub arctic, with a long extremely cold winter, temperatures frequently as low as or lower than -100 degrees F, summers barely two Terran months. Daylight is intense and almost constant during the summer, but dwindles rapidly into total darkness for most of the winter. Suitable colonists were chosen from ethnic groups accustomed to such conditions.

Knowing Intergal's ways, Yana doubted the "ethnic groups" had been asked their choice in the matter. She kept reading.

. . . following initial seeding, adjustments were made cm-site by company staff members among the colonists. The team determined that although the planet could support life of a primitive sort, most low-level machinery and electronics would not withstand the cold. Therefore, biological alternatives were developed. Company botanists perfected food and fodder crops, and other domesticated plant life specially designed for the Petaybean growing season. Summer thawing of rivers and shorelines is facilitated by the planet's network of subterranean hot springs, which to some extent warm the surface water, which becomes warmer as it deepens, preventing all but the shallower streams from freezing to their total depth. This deep water, along with hot springs occurring on the planet's surface and open year round, and small quantities of melted snow, provide hydration for plants, humans, and animals.

Company geneticists also altered existing animal species to conform to the requirements of the Petaybean climate. The following species were developed under company auspices: Petaybee curly horses, for nonsnow and heavy-duty transport; foxhounds, intelligent hybrid dogs for pulling sleds; domestic felines, originally for fur-bearing purposes but later to control the vermin, the development of which was not authorized. Additionally, fur-bearing species able to sustain themselves in the wild were introduced and specially adapted for the climate-wolverines, wolves, bears, lynx, as well as caribou, reindeer, wild sheep, and moose.

Sounded right to Yana. Just about what one would expect a fully stocked subarctic Earth clone to have. She had done the Service and London interactive holos as a kid. The only thing missing so far was the malamutes, as in Malamute Saloon, and the fox-hounds seemed to be standing in for them. Too bad there wasn't a continental mass along the equator that would be more temperate. But even with long-term terraforming, one couldn't always choose appropriate sites for continental masses, though she didn't know the geology involved in supporting Gaias.

She skimmed past the description of ocean and river dwellers, noting that some long-extinct species on Earth had been revived for this planet, making the terraforming valuable for that purpose if no other, in her estimation. Five kinds of whales populated the ocean: orcas, humpbacks, grays, rights, and the small so-called pilot whales, as well as dolphins, otters, seals, walruses, and all of the fish and plant life necessary to support them. The only odd thing about Petaybee was that the oceans were still many times warmer deep down than they were upon the icy surface, since considerable geothermal activity was still taking place following the terraforming. This same activity accounted for volcanos, hot springs, earthquakes, and the odd domes the Irish-Yupik-descended colonists of this continent called "fairy hills," the report noted.

Yana flipped forward. Nothing irregular here yet that she had to memorize and eat. Nothing she shouldn't know-or be able to ask about, for that matter. If it was here and it was authorized to be here, it was no doubt a matter of public record.

The next aberration she found was a notation that it had been unnecessary to develop a methane-based energy system when, by the time enough colonists had settled the planet to make such considerations a priority, it was discovered that the smallish alder trees transplanted to this planet had somehow mutated far beyond the alterations of the company botanists, into a completely new hardwood that made unusually long-burning and hot fuel. That explained why her home fires were still burning, anyway.

But in the last part of the report, she began to wonder if the computer's word processor hadn't gotten scrambled with some kid's IAH game. One of the expeditionary team members, prior to of complete disappearance, had reported via land-to-ship voice transmitter that she had seen what appeared to be a unicorn, Unicorns were definitely not among the authorized species for this planet, or any other. The official theory, the report went on to say, was that the woman had suffered from snow blindness or hallucinations induced by hypothermia. This climate was hostile to those not bred to adapt to it, the report rationalized. One team member who did return from that expedition appeared to have aged at least a decade and had patently gone insane, babbling about hearing voices from the soil and tree roots, though the reports he .we of crystal caverns led the authorities to hope that there was some thread of reality in his ramblings.

The locals, both company employees and dependents, denied knowledge of crystal caverns or any of the other anomalies but did admit that sometimes they too suffered from cold-induced hallucinations, particularly when out on the trail with their teams.

Yana rubbed her fists through her hair and put the report in the stove. Like a lot of company paperwork, it didn't actually say much that couldn't have been conveyed in a short verbal briefing. Disgusted, she watched the papers burn, the cat poking its nose around her arm to see into the stove as well.

"I'm going to have to take you back to Clodagh's tonight, kittycat," she told it. It blinked golden eyes at her. "At least with "o many like you stalking about, she's unlikely to have missed you."

Just then there was a thump at her door, and she called out to whoever it was to come in. By the time she realized no one was coming and had closed the stove door to investigate, the area in front of the house was as empty as it had ever been-but a bundle of wood sat beside the stoop.

Yana pulled it inside, although it could as easily have remained out in the dry, freezing air. She wanted whoever had brought it to know she had found it and planned to use it, since so far she wasn't sure how she was supposed to acquire provisions and today, at least, she didn't have enough energy left to investigate. She had given the bed quilt back to Bunny, thinking she would get a new one today. Belatedly she realized that the bundle Charlie Demintieff had been carrying might have contained her thermal blanket and other authorized survival gear. In the confusion, it had been left at Clodagh's.

The cat looked up at her expectantly, and she sat back down at the table, wishing she had a console to work on. Nothing to read, write, work at, or interact with unless she wanted to put all those clothes back on and tramp about in the cold. The cat looked up at her and mewed.

"Just as well we're taking you home tonight, beast," she told it, giving it a stroke. "Otherwise I'd go buggy, landed with so much solitude all of a sudden."

As if it understood her, the cat chirruped and hopped down from the table, where it began chasing the toggle string of her parka with every evidence of great concentration and ferocity. It leapt high with front paws spread and twisted in midair to land squarely upon the coat's drawstring. Then the cat sat down, gave its paws a lick, and looked up at her expectantly. Other than the coat's drawstring, there wasn't a single thing to dangle or roll in the cabin.

Finally Yana took off her webbed uniform belt and dragged the buckle on the floor for the animal to hunt, while it did its best to entertain her. After a while, they both fell asleep by the stove, Yana with her head on the table, the cat curled by her elbow, while the winter-muffled village of Kilcoole remained unnervingly free of clanging, computer beeps, and the hive like activity of spacers. Yana's sleep was light and her dreams fragmented with scenes of a surgeon using a horn growing from his head as a scalpel, twenty young troopers convulsing while clawing at a hatch as poison gas slithered into a hold that looked something like a crystal cave, and a tiny man she knew was Charlie Demintieff being pounced at by an orange cat.

Diego Metaxos hadn't been all that thrilled about being dragged down to Petaybee to watch his old man in action as a geological surveyor. In all of his sixteen years, he had never been planet side, and he expected life on Petaybee to be as dreary and routine as life on board ship. But when he saw the place, he was glad he had come, and when he met the dogs, he was even gladder. By the time the lady let him drive her dog team, he had been convinced that this trip was the most brilliant thing that had ever happened to him.

At first he had been freaked out by the whole idea of the expedition, and with good reason. Even the shrink on his dad's ship had told him that he had had a lot to be freaked out about recently. First of all, his mom had fallen for a company exec who liked Mom fine but didn't want any other attachments. Mom, a senior astrophysicist, had never exactly been the warm type, and Diego had spent most of his life moving with her from ship to ship, or watching her come and go from various assignments while he sat in front of a teaching computer. Lots of the places Mom was assigned, there had been no one his own age, and very seldom did he find an adult who wanted to be bothered with someone else's kid. At the last couple of stations, he had begun to pal around with a few of the younger corps troops, listening to their casual conversation and admiring the hard-core way they handled themselves, but he was always conscious that he wasn't really one of them, and in case he forgot it, his mother made no bones about her displeasure in his choice of company. Then, too, about the time he started to gain a little acceptance and make one or two friends, they moved to a new station. He then had to fall back on the resources he had developed since he was a little kid, a good imagination and a quick brain. He didn't really need any friends. Both his mom and his dad were brilliant, self-sufficient people, and he was, too. All he had ever needed was computer access, and he could entertain as well as educate himself. He was good at languages, having started out speaking both Spanish and English from when he was a little kid, and he enjoyed reading actual old hard-copy stories in both languages when there was nobody he wanted to hang around with, so he got by.

He had gone to visit his dad and Steve about once every calendar year, and that was okay. He really loved his dad, even though he was a little on the perfectionistic and ultra serious side, except with Steve. Steve got him to knock it off, to relax and laugh a little. Steve was always finding neat things to share with them. He had given Diego his first hard-copy book-a Spanish-language text of Don Quixote-for Diego's ninth birthday.

"Pay close attention to Sancho Panza and Dulcinea," he had kidded Diego. "I'm a little of both." He struck a flamenco pose.

No wonder Dad and Mom hadn't gotten along. Even if Dad hadn't discovered he was gay, he and Mom were too much alike, both studious and serious and very literal-minded. So Diego didn't mind Dad and Steve's arrangement all that much; it just had never occurred to him that he might end up living with them.

He had just begun to get used to that-and he had even come to find out that Dad had wanted him all along but had been second best when it came to custody because in the eyes of company management theirs was a less-preferred sexual orientation to Mom's. Diego didn't see what difference that made. Nobody tried to tell him which way to swing, even if he had been ready to do any swinging of any kind. So far, he hadn't met anyone who instilled in him a desire to implement the procedures his manuals and texts described.

So he had just been getting used to his new situation and settling in when Steve had come down with some kind of virus just before Dad was due to take off for this mission to investigate something or other on Petaybee. That was when Dad had gotten the bright idea that Diego should come along, too, as his assistant instead of Steve, and "broaden his horizons."

In fact, he hadn't actually seen a horizon before, since he was in it, by dirtside reckoning. Pointing this out had caused Steve to rasp at him not to be a smartass and to give new experiences a chance. So he had come along, and to his surprise, the landscape of Petaybee looked more open and spacious than, well, than space.

But where space was black, Petaybee was blue and white, even when it turned dark, as it quickly did on their way from SpaceBase to the dinky little town where their guides met them. The sky was sort of dark ivory, and he could still see Petaybee's sun, like a small snowball hanging in the sky, as well as its two moons, one organic and one company-manufactured, in the sky.

Being here was sort of like being inside the moon, all pale and shining. SpaceBase was a hole and the town was ugly, but the countryside was really pretty fascinating, and the snocle ride into Kilcoole seemed all too short. The place was so much like something from his books, and yet so different that he knew he would never forget it even if he didn't decide, as his father obviously hoped, that he would become a great geologist like his old man.

Then, when they started unloading the equipment from the snocle, and a whole fleet of dogs, about fourteen to a sled, pulled up in front of the station, he started getting hooked.

The dogs were the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen. They were red as a Mars moonscape but delicately featured with foxy, intelligent faces. At first their barking scared him a little bit, but then the lady-when she spoke he could tell she was a lady-driving his sled said they were friendly and he could pet them if he liked. They were soft! The tops of their coats were a little icy, but when he took his mitten off and dug into their fur with his hand, it was as soft as anything he had ever felt, and warm enough to keep his hand from freezing before he stuck it back into the glove. As he was bending over to pull the mitten back on, the dog licked his face. "Hey, boy!" Diego said, and hugged him.

"Girl," Lavelle, the driver, said. "That's Dinah, my leader. She likes you, and she's a good judge of character."

"Leader?"

"The dog I talk to, and the one who tells me and the other dogs what's going on up ahead, what to do. As you can see from this arrangement, mostly all the other dogs see is the rear end of the dog in front of them." The dogs wagged their curled feathery tails and grinned as if that was a great joke they all shared.

He rode with Lavelle while his dad rode in the sled in front of them. The other members of the expedition, two women, one a seismographer and one a mining engineer, and the man his dad said was a soil mechanics specialist, all of them Doctor Somebody-or-other, rode in the other sleds.

It was a great ride, bundled along with the supplies into the furs on the sled, bumping and whisking over snow and ice while the dogs ran ahead, tails bouncing. But the best part was when, once they were well out of town with nothing much in the way, Lavelle let him drive.

"When you want them to go, yell to Dinah, 'Hike!' and 'Gee!' if you want them to go right, 'Haw!' to the left, 'Whoa!' when you want them to stop. Dinah will do it and see that the others do it. She's a smart pup. You stand here." She showed him the rough hair-hide strips along the runners where he could put his feet without slipping. "The brake is here. Step on it if you want to stop, but you won't stop very quick on ice."

The other sleds all passed them, but Lavelle didn't care. As soon as he had his hands on the handlebars and his feet on the treads and Lavelle had strapped on the nets made of wood and babiche-rawhide strips-he shouted "Hike!" to Dinah and off she went, the others pulling with her, whining a little at the sound of a new voice.

Dinah was, as Lavelle said, a smart dog. She wasn't about to let the other sleds stay ahead of them and passed them easily, falling in behind the first sled, the one his father was riding in.

The run to catch up was the best part, with the wind biting into his face and blowing his breath back, the whole white-and-blue world framed in the icicles clinging to his lashes and the ruff of his hood. As soon as they slowed down to fall in behind the other sled, he got cold, then bored at having to stay so far behind. Lavelle, loping beside him with a funny knee-high gait to let each cumbersome snowshoe clear the snow before she set it down again, began telling him about the great races her grandfather had told her about, the ones they used to have in the old days in Alaska, which was part of a country back on Earth.

"One of the biggest races they had back in those days developed from a dogsled relay that took emergency serum from a big city to a little town called Nome far away," she told him. "People admired the stamina and skill it took to do it, and so they made a race out of it. Whole towns sponsored dogs and their drivers, and people all over the world knew about it. Another race they had ran along the route the mail sled used to take. It spanned two countries, and drivers from all over brought their teams to compete. In both races, they still took a little mail with them to deliver at the end."

"Why did they need to send the mail by dogsled?" Diego asked. "That's silly when they could use computers."

"Some places they didn't have computers, sometimes," she shouted back. "And sometimes folks just liked to prove they could do things in the old ways and still survive like their ancestors did. They were learning to be tough like them, you know?" She grinned, a very white grin in her sun-darkened face. "Tough like us."

He grinned back, but he thought privately it was a little backward to do things the hard way instead of learning new skills. But then, he was now doing things the old hard way and he was learning new skills.

They camped that night and he listened to his father talking about rocks and stuff for a while, over rations that were much the same as what he ate on the ship. Then Lavelle slipped him a stick that smelled strong, but very spicy and interesting.

"Eat it," she said. "It's good. Smoked salmon. I caught it and smoked it myself."

He nibbled on it and she sang him a peculiar song about catching that particular fish. She said the song was her own song, though the tune was to an old Irish song her Grandmother O'Toole had taught her, "The Star of the County Down."

The chorus went:

"From SpaceBase down to Kilcoole town On out to Tanana Bay The wild fish swims but I caught him And he's our food today."

He fell asleep quickly in the heated shelter. The next morning when he woke up, looking forward to maybe driving the dogs again, soft powdery snow was sifting down from the sky. He knew, scientifically, that the snow was part of this world's ecosystem, but at the same time it seemed strange that he had spent so much time above this planet and had never been on it before. His father explained that snow was white rather than clear because it was a dense accumulation of light-reflecting frozen water crystals, but Lavelle showed him that each flake was a different, beautifully ornate design. He had to ride in the sled because Lavelle said they were nearing rougher country, and she had to be vigilant for the place the expedition was seeking. She promised to let him drive again on the way back.

He spent a lot of time lying in the sled, catching flakes on his mitten and trying to memorize the shapes before they melted.

"Maybe tonight at camp I'll make you some snow ice cream," Lavelle said, bending over him so that her breath blew icily into his face. "I've got some seal oil and dried berries with me, and a III lie sugar."

"Seal oil?" he asked.

"Yeah. Gives you instant energy on the trail. Don't knock it till you've tried it."

He pulled a face, and she pushed his ruff down over his eyes.

But the storm picked up as they moved, and twice the Petaybean guy, who seemed to be Lavelle's husband, asked Diego's d"l her and the other men if they wanted to camp, but they said to keep on, that their instruments were showing them the way. The snow no longer fell in single, beautiful flakes but in clumpy sheets, HO hard that it was all Diego could do to see the tails of the dogs In front of him, never mind the other sleds. All around him the world was white, and the sled moved more and more slowly, while Siggy, as Lavelle called the Petaybean guy, tried to break trail, keep track of the sleds, and persuade everyone to stop.

The ride had become much rougher, and although he couldn't see anything, Diego knew they had left the plains, because the dogs were tugging the sleds up and down little hills and, finally, up a long, long pull.

He heard Siggy yell something, and then he heard Dad cry out and the woman in front, Brit, whistle and call "Whoa, you mutts! Whoa! Oh, shit!" and multiple sounds of slipping, cracking, and sliding, but by that time the dogs had reached the summit and were plummeting down, too.

A man screamed, and several heavy things rolled and tumbled just as the sled was suddenly airborne, and Diego felt himself flying more surely than he had ever flown in the spacecraft he had lived in since he was a baby.

Lavelle called, "Whoa, Dinah! Back girl!" and Diego felt her hand pull on his ruff. For a moment she had him; then the sled jarred again and she fell and his hood was free, and he was falling from the sled, rolling, tumbling, into the snow, over and over, until his feet struck something soft at the same time his head struck something hard, and there was darkness.

Chapter 3

Yana tried to take the cat back to Clodagh's that evening when Bunny picked her up, but the cat refused to cooperate. When she tried to pick it up to carry it outdoors to Bunny's waiting sled, the cat escaped, firing a warning volley across her knuckles with its claws, and hid.

Yana explained this to Clodagh while the big woman finished stirring the contents of a pot on the stove. Delicious smells came from the pot and from the oven.

"Keep him," Clodagh advised her. Looking around the room at the four identical felines lounging on various furnishings, she added with a slight smile, "I have extras. Besides, they go where they wish and do as they choose. You seem to have been chosen."

"Yes, but what am I supposed to do with it?" Yana asked.

"Feed it," Bunny answered. "That's the important thing. And let it in and out as it likes, unless you want to keep an indoor tray for it."

"They do all right outdoors for prolonged periods," Clodagh said. "They've been crossbred for that, so they don't lose their tails and ears to frostbite the way their ancestors did. But they usually prefer a fire and a lap most of the time. They're good company."

"Mm," Yana said noncommittally. "I need to find out where to get things: food, clothing, wood. Someone brought a load and left it beside my door. Do you know who it was so 1 can thank them?"

Clodagh shrugged. "Could have been anyone. One of Bunka's relatives, maybe. Someone who knows you need more than the PTBs provided for you. Speaking of that, don't forget your pack tonight. Not that that flimsy blanket will do you a lot of good. You'll need a proper one."

"Where can I buy one of those?" Yana asked.

"Not at the company store, that's for sure!" Bunka said. "They don't have anything there but obsolete spacer stuff." She crossed to Clodagh's bed and pulled aside the standard-issue blanket to reveal another-full of lovely soft yellows, blues, and pinks-underneath. "Here, feel."

Yana leaned over and felt. The blanket was thickly woven or knitted-she had no idea which-of some heavy, long-haired material. It would be wonderfully warm.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"Speaking of that, here comes Sinead and my sister Aisling now," Clodagh said. "Sinead gathers the hair for spinning from the horses and dogs and sometimes the wild sheep she hunts and Aisling spins, dyes, and weaves the hair into the blankets. Perhaps they'll make a trade."

Another woman entered the room. She was almost as round as Clodagh; her face and hair bore a resemblance to Clodagh's, as well, but the newcomer had a much dreamier look about her. She was followed closely by a small, wiry woman who helped her off with her wraps.

"Welcome, sister, Sinead," Clodagh said, smiling at the two women. "We were just talking about you. Have you eaten?"

"Nah," said the shorter and slighter-built of the two women, shucking her outer garments off with great dispatch. "We heard you were entertaining tonight and came to gawk." She stuck out a hand to Yana. "Sinead Shongili here. Nice to meet you. Did you make it home okay without falling again?"

"You were the person who showed me how to waddle!" Yana exclaimed.

"None other. And this lovely lady is Aisling Senungatuk," Sinead said, fussing a bit over Aisling, who was settling her ample form into a rocking chair Clodagh had pulled from a corner of the room. Aisling smiled warmly up at her partner and indicated that she was comfortable.

"Yana was just admiring the blanket you women made for me, sister," Clodagh told Aisling.

"I'll put you on my list, Yana," Aisling promised in one of the loveliest voices Yana had ever heard.

"Yeah, the blankets they send you from the company are all crap," Sinead said. "I need to gather some more material for weaving, but my Aisling can make you the most gorgeous damn blanket you've ever seen, can't you, love?"

Aisling nodded, her eyes dancing when she looked at her partner. "You bet."

"I'm afraid I haven't got much to trade you for it," Yana told them, "apart from some obsolete insignia. Had to give away any souvenirs, and bring only what I couldn't do without. Baggage allowance didn't give me any latitude there. You don't know where I can get a small computer, do you?"

Sinead gave a merry laugh. "You've got to be joking."

Clodagh said, more gently, "Oh, no, dear, that's not for the likes of us, goodness me no. Nobody here in Kilcoole has such a thing. We're just poor ignorant ips you know, and the PTBs like it that way."

"Ips?"

"The inconvenient people," Aisling elaborated. "That's who they got to colonize this place. They wanted our land on Earth, you see, and promised us a new place in exchange. Frankly, we had nothing to say about it. Evicted, we were. No one could afford to own land anymore. So we came here, as they intended." Her eyes dropped as she finished the statement; then she turned an apologetic look to Clodagh. "Sorry. It doesn't do to get me started. And we should be going now. We didn't really mean to interrupt supper. We just came to see if there was anything we could do to help." She nodded in Yana's direction.

"Thanks," Yana said, and Clodagh showed them to the door, Sinead darting three steps forward and two back for each measure of her partner's statelier progress.

When they left, Clodagh pulled a bottle and some cups from the shelf over the cloth-draped cabinets along one wall and asked, "Will you be havin' a drop with your supper, dear?"

"Pardon?"

"Clodagh's home brew," Bunny said. "It's good. Gives you good dreams."

"I don't know. With all the medicine I've had lately . . ."

"It'll do you good," Clodagh said. "Has medicinal properties. You can't get sick drunk on the stuff-just a little pleasantly blurred. You look as though you need blurring, my dear."

"Clodagh's the local healer, so you can trust her on that score," Bunny told Yana.

"Just a little then," Yana agreed. The spicy smells from the stove were making her long to put something in her mouth. If not food, then drink was not a bad alternative.

But with the drink came a heaping bowl of some sort of noodles and a red meat sauce, accompanied by hot, crusty bread. She burned her lip on the first mouthful, something she had never done with prefab ship food.

"This is delicious," she said when she had had a few cooler bites. "What is it?"

"Moose spaghetti," Clodagh told her.

There was another knock at the door. Bunny hopped up, slurping in a strand of spaghetti, and opened it. A rush of cold air and a parka-clad figure entered the room at the same time.

The person, a woman, pointedly did not look at Yana as she unbuttoned her coat.

"Sedna, how's it going?" Clodagh asked her.

"Oh, fine. Just wondered if you had some mare's butter I could have. We're about out."

"No problem. Say, Sedna, have you met Major Maddock yet?" Clodagh asked.

Sedna shook her blond curls and then allowed herself to look squarely at Yana, a look which told Yana that meeting her was more the point of the visit than the mare's milk. She thought she vaguely recognized the woman from Charlie Demintieff's send-off earlier that morning.

"Major Maddock," Clodagh began.

"Yanaba, please, Clodagh, or just Yana," she said.

"Yana, this is Sedna Quinn. How's your boy's earache, Sedna?"

"Better, Clodagh, since you made up that poultice."

"You got time to eat?"

"Nah, I got to get back and help Im scrape that moose hide. I'll bring you some-"

"Well, say, if you're that busy, why don't you take some of this moose spaghetti home for supper? That way you won't have to fuss."

So Sedna sat at the edge of her chair with her coat half-buttoned while Clodagh dished up a containerful of the pasta.

"So, Bunny, pretty sad about Charlie, huh?" Sedna asked.

"Yeah, too bad. I hope he's gonna be all right. It'll be lonesome up there, I bet. I wish they'd given us time to send him off good, make a song for him. He'll miss the breakup latchkay and everything."

"I'll make a song for him, even if he won't hear it" Clodagh said.

"Maybe you could record it or write it down and Bunny could take it in when she's back at SpaceBase," Yana suggested.

Sedna straightened her back, gave Yana a pitying look, and said primly, "A song has to be sung from one person to the other to be any good."

"I'm sorry," Yana said. "I don't know your customs yet. It's just that I could see how much you all liked Lieutenant Demintieff and I know how important it is to a soldier to hear from friends, whether they're dirtside or on some other facility."

"It's okay, Yana," Clodagh said. "Sedna, Yana's going to be staying with us here so she'll find out soon enough. The fact is, Yana, nobody here knows how to record much less write."

Yana sputtered with surprise. "They don't? You don't? But how the hell can that be? The Petaybean recruits I've met all know how; Bunny surely must know how to have passed her snocle test."

Bunny shook her head. "That's all done on comm link- verbal and visual cues. And of course the company teaches the soldiers to read, at least enough to get by in the corps, in basic training and at the officers academy down at Chugiak-Fergus, but other than that . . ." She shrugged.

"Surely the colonists who first came here . . ." Yana insisted.

Clodagh shook her head. "Only those who were high officers in the company already. Oh, sure and some of our great-grandparents maybe knew a little bit at one time-maybe as much as the company teaches soldiers now-but back then, so the songs tell us, everybody had fancy machines to talk to them and show them pictures of what needed to be done. The company apparently didn't think we needed the machines as bad as we needed other stuff when they sent us here, and such things were far too dear for the likes of us to import once we were here. So there's just , a few of those machines on the planet, the ones the company needs to keep here for their own business. As for your written books, well, I don't suppose anybody had a clue where to find many of them anymore, except for the special ones the scientists had. So we sort of fell back into just talking and singing and telling about what happened, like people did way back a long time ago."

"We do okay without that stuff," Bunny said, with a defensive edge to her voice that was immediately tempered by wistful-ness. "Except, sometimes, like now, but still there are some people who can . . ." She turned to Clodagh.

"Including, if I'm not mistaken, your own Uncle Sean, Bunka," Sedna said. "Is that so, Clodagh?"

"Of course. He's a Shongili." To Yana, Clodagh explained, "The Shongilis were originally of Inuit stock but already had careers as valued Intergal scientists when Petaybee was founded. Scan's and Sinead's grandda was the most respected man in our hemisphere until his death." With what seemed undue pride she nodded emphatically. "Shongilis definitely can read-books and books if they want to. Even Sinead can-Aisling's seen her do it, but said Sinead told her mostly she'd rather read animal tracks instead and rely on her own sharp ears and long memory for stories and songs like everybody else."

Bunny bounced up and exclaimed, "I forgot! That's right! Uncle Sean can not only write, but he has stuff to write with and a recorder. He could do it!"

"Your uncle is an important man, a busy man, Bunny," Sedna said, horrified. "He's got problems to solve for the whole planet. We can't go bothering him with every little thing."

"Charlie being shipped out isn't really a little thing, though, is it, Sedna?" Clodagh asked. "No, I think that's a good idea. If Yana knows how to read and make recordings, too, and if you'd help us do it, Yana, we wouldn't need to bother him very much. He could just loan her the machine. You think he'd do that, Bunny?"

"He will if I ask him and tell him it's your idea," Bunny said. "I'll go up to his place in a couple of days, next time I don't have any fares to and from SpaceBase."

"Maybe Yana'd like to go with you. I bet Scan would like to meet somebody else who knows writing."

"How about it, Yana? You're not scared of the dogs, are you?"

Yana shook her head, grinning. "No, I'd like to ride in that contraption." As advertised, the home brew was starting to blur her.

Sedna, a container of moose spaghetti in hand, said goodbye; she crossed at the doorway with yet more drop-in guests, one of whom Yana had already met. Bunny's Uncle Seamus was less encrusted with snow and ice this time and was accompanied by a tiny woman with short, wavy silver hair.

"Slainte, Clodagh! Bunny said you were having the major over for dinner and Moira and me wanted to bring her some fish. Here you go, Major," Seamus said, and handed her a string of stiff frozen fish as if he were handing her a promotion to executive vice-president of Intergal.

"Thanks, uh... Seamus," she said, pretending to admire them. She didn't have any idea what to do with them, so she hung the string over the back of the chair, where it was instantly the object of much interest from the cats.

"Get away, you lot," Clodagh said, wading through orange fur to rescue the fish. The cats stood on their hind feet and batted at the string as she held it aloft. "Better hang them outside until she's ready to go, Seamus." '

"Right," Seamus said, casting an odd sidelong glance at Yana.

She waved and said thanks again, and planned to ask Bunny later about the etiquette involving gifts of fish.

They stayed a short while longer, and while they were there two more people came by, a rakish-looking girl introduced as Arnie O'Malley and her little boy, Finnbar, who chased the cats. Finally, all of the extraneous guests left, the girl calling, "Wait'll you see my new latchkay dress, Clodagh! The lads will be making songs about me for years to come."

"That Arnie, always showing off," Bunny said disgustedly.

"What are these songs everybody talks about?" Yana asked. She was full of food and on her third glass of home brew and was feeling pleasantly relaxed and even a bit sleepy. "Are there a lot of musicians in this town?"

"Nah, only old man Ungar and his bunch," Bunny said. "But everybody makes up songs."

"Even/body?" Yana had never personally known anybody who wrote songs, or admitted to the practice.

"Yes," Clodagh said. "We make songs about everything, even one about the reason we make songs, but that particular song belongs to Mick Oomilialik. Maybe he'll sing it for you at the latchkay."

"What's that?"

"Oh, it's a big feast and sing where we get together to talk things over. My Inuit ancestors called such a thing a potlatch and my Irish ancestors called it a ceili, so one of the first batch here combined it into latchkay. Anyway, everybody makes songs to sing then about what's happened during the last season. Sometimes villages get together and share food and news."

"So you only have them once a season?"

"Except for weddings, funerals, and other special events, yes."

"Well, what might you write a song about, for instance?"

"Charlie having to leave is one kind of thing. 1 might write a song pretending I was Charlie."

"And you can make up music and everything?"

"Oh, no, not usually. Mostly we use the old tunes. And there's drumming, too," Bunny said. From Clodagh's wall she pulled down a circular drum, holding it in one hand and using the other to extract a stick from the back of the drum.

"Our drums can be used like Inuit drums and beaten with a wand in strict time," Clodagh explained, "or if you want to use it like an Irish bodhran, you beat it with that little stick. Or your fingers, if you're real clever. When a song is first presented, we use only the drums so everybody can hear the words. Later on, if the song's owner permits it, others sing along and other instruments join in."

"I can sing her one of mine," Bunny said.

Clodagh looked mildly surprised. "Okay. I'll drum. Which one?"

"About getting my snocle license. Irish Washerwoman."

"What?" Yana asked.

"Oh, 'Irish Washerwoman' is the tune," Clodagh told her. "Our ancestors liked each other well enough but it was easier for the Inuits to adapt to the Irish music than it was for the Irish to adapt to the Inuit. Of course, some of us don't have the voice for Irish melodies, so then we sing in the Inuit way."

"It's more like chanting," Bunny said. "So our singing is like us-all mixed up. Anyway, here's my song:

"Oh, I'm getting my license to snocle today

from the big shots although I'm a Petaybee maid

You'll forgive me if I'm very vocal, hooray!

But I'm getting my license to snocle today.

"That's all there is," Bunny finished. "But I sure was happy about it, even if it's just a short little song. I didn't want to brag too much."

Clodagh said, "Here, I'll sing you a song in the other style.

"Before it awakened the world was alive. It brooded in a shell of ice and stone. Alone, thinking of its own mysteries, Deep dreaming. Jajai-ija."

Clodagh was chanting slowly and deliberately, and the effect was that of an eerie tune, similar to some styles Yana had heard on shipboard holos and in company pubs throughout the galaxy. The last note of the verse was very low, almost guttural.

"Then came the men with their ships, their fire Awakening the fire within the world Sundering rock, cutting river channels, Great holes were gouged for ocean beds. Jajai-ija.

"Painful was the awakening, the beginning As only beginnings can be painful But the pain roused the world from dreaming Melted its blanket and dribbled water in The mind of the world Jajai-ija!

"Awake, the world grew leaves Awake, the world grew roots Awake, the world grew mosses and lichens Awake, the world knew wind. Jajai-ija!

"Then came more men and the world grew wings The world grew feet and hands. The world grew paws and claws. The world grew feathers and fur.

"Noses smelled the new world and mouths tasted it Fangs tore it and fins and scales swam through The new waters. And the tails of the world Wagged, happy that it had been given a voice. Happy that it woke up. Jajai-ja-jija!"

Yana nodded appreciatively, while pictures of ice caves and snow plains and various disjointed animals somehow connected to the planet's surface kaleidoscoped in front of her eyes. The blur had become audible as well as visual. When Clodagh was done, Yana smiled and thanked her for the song and the meal and refrained from saying that the Corps of Engineers terraforming department might well wish to adopt that song as their anthem if they ever heard it. Clodagh began clearing the table, and Bunny pulled on her parka.

Although Bunny was willing to drive her home, she let Bunny take her dogs straight back to their kennels and walked back. Blurred and blithe, she carried her pack and her string of fish, enjoying the snapping freshness of the air, thinking that maybe the world in Clodagh's song had lungs, too - healthy ones.

She hung the fish outside the door, as they had hung at Clodagh's, up high, the effort costing her another coughing fit that doubled her over in the snow until she was afraid she would freeze to death. She crawled inside and started to spread the blanket on her bed, then saw by the moon's light through the windows that there was already a soft brown fur spread over it, the cat peacefully curled on top of it. Yana gratefully joined the little animal, glad of its steady, contented breathing and its warmth.

Warmth. Diego shuddered to life, staring out through eyelashes frozen together, feeling himself dragged. He rolled over. He hurt bad. His dad had him under the arms and was tugging him, sliding him, inch by inch, over the springy, snow-covered surface.

"I'm okay, Dad. I can do it," he said, and rolled over, away from his father. Dad looked as if he needed Diego to pull him in turn. His lips were cracked and bloodless, but there was a great deal of blood elsewhere, frozen on his face and parka ruff from a cut on his forehead.

"Cave," Dad said, shouting against the wind. "Under-the ledge. Limestone-"

"Tell me when we get in there," Diego yelled back.

Somewhere very far away dogs howled, and he thought maybe he heard voices, too, but they didn't sound close. That Dinah was something, though. Maybe Lavelle would let her loose, so she could come and find them.

"We'll be okay, Dad," he said, as much to reassure himself as his father, but even to his own ears his voice sounded no louder than a whisper compared to the wind.

They crawled toward the piece of shadow looming under the side of the hill amid all the white. Snow drifted and blew in front of it.

His father took a laser pistol from his pocket. "Wild . . . animals," he said, and they crawled into the opening.

They huddled inside, listening to the wind howl outside. Diego's dad looked bad to him; he seemed to have doubled his age in just a few minutes. His black hair was iced over, and the thick black eyebrows that normally made his dark eyes seem so penetrating were dead white with encrusted snow and ice. His expression was not so much scared as dazed, and the blood from the cut was running again, pretty freely. Diego's own face was wet, too, as was the ruff on his parka. Then he realized that was because it was warmer here in the mouth of the cave.

"Dad, let's go on back in. It's warm in here. Come on, let's keep out of the cold till the storm's over."

He felt more like his father's father than his son then, and that was as scary as being stuck out in the blizzard. But Dad nodded a little stiffly and followed him.

The passage sloped sharply downward for a time, and it was very narrow. Dad had to squeeze sideways and kneel to get through one part, but it had grown so warm that Diego took off his hat, mittens, and muffler and stuffed them in his pocket and unfastened his parka. About this time he began to hear the humming from inside the cave, as if it housed some huge machine. For all he knew, maybe it did. The company had made this planet, hadn't they? At least that's what they claimed, though Diego privately thought it was pretty weird to create such a physically inhospitable place.

The path bent sharply to the right, then to the left, and seemed to stop. Diego groped toward the wall in front of him, his hands touching strange indentations, like grooves swirling in some sort of design.

With his touch, the wall gave way and a soft, eerie light from within sent a shaft to meet them. Diego pressed forward into the room, where flame-colored liquid bubbled up in a central pool and the walls glowed with phosphorescence, where roots and rock formations twined and curled into strange designs in the elongated, rough shapes of animals and men, and where the humming was so loud, so perfect, so beautiful that after a while Diego thought he must be hearing the voices of the angels he had once read about-and they were telling him things. He listened so closely that he could not hear his father screaming.

Chapter 4

Yana awoke the next morning at the cat's insistence. It stood by her head and, every time she tried to go back to sleep, poked its nose in her face. She seriously considered throwing it across the room, but then decided that both it and she needed something to eat. She could hardly inflict corporal punishment for a reasonable demand.

She had a collapsible pot in her survival kit and still had the water left in the thermos jug Bunny had loaned her. She set water on to heat and retrieved one of the fish from the hook outside her door, but from there on she had no idea what to do with it.

There were still some food pellets in her personal baggage, so she gulped down a green one and a pink one and set the fish on the stove to thaw. When it had well and truly stunk up the cabin, she gave it to the cat, who danced with delight.

"Don't tell Seamus," she said to the cat. "I think he meant for me to cook it, but between you and me, I never learned how to cook a meal, just get the basic pills I need down my gullet."

The cat looked up through slit eyes, purring and growling over the fish at the same time, its expression clearly saying, "Your loss is my gain."

Yana was used to the close confinement of a living area within a hostile environment but found that despite her fatigue and illness she had trouble remaining inside her cabin for more than two hours at a time. It was cold outdoors, and the gear she had to wear to be outside was heavy and clumsy, but she could by God breathe the air, however gingerly.

During the few hours when the sun made the sky bright blue and the snow sparkle, she would have clawed her way through the door to get out if she'd had to. With all of its current landmasses clustered near the poles, Petaybee's light and darkness cycles closely resembled those of the polar outposts of Earth, where both extremes seemed to last for months at a time. Fortunately, she had arrived late in the dark cycle, so she got some differentiation between night and day, though not as much as she would have gotten in the artificially regulated watch cycles aboard company corps spacecraft.

She saw someone sliding past her cabin on long skis and rushed outside without her hat to ask them where they had gotten the skis.

The young boy flushed with more than activity. "They- uh-they're made around here," he said finally, but she could see the Intergal logo on his boots.

"Could I buy a pair at the company store, do you know?" she asked, thinking she had yet to find the damned store.

He didn't say anything but slithered hurriedly past, which told her they probably were neither made on Petaybee nor sold at the store: more likely they had been "relocated" illegally from SpaceBase.

Down the street, someone carrying a package emerged from the doorway of one of the houses. The figure, of rather greater mass than most, walked-waddled-glided toward her on the ice, and Yana recognized Aisling, the blanket maker she had met at Clodagh's.

"Slainte, Yana," Aisling said.

"Uh . . . slainte, yourself, Aisling. Say, I'm trying to find my way around the village. Can you show me where the store is?"

"Sure. I just left there. Why, what do you need?"

"Nothing in particular. I just wanted to know what was available."

"Not much, but come on, I'll show you. Mostly, we try to make our own from what the planet provides. Some of us trade what we make at the store for the few things they have that we can't manufacture ourselves. Our stuff never stays in the store, though. I think they're sold for triple, maybe four times, what we're paid, on ships and space stations and to other colonies. So mostly we deal directly with each other. You know, one of my blankets for one of the good skinning knives Seamus makes, or Sinead will trade a moose hindquarter for a mountain sheep fleece for me or enough mare's butter for our lamps. Old Eithne Naknek often trades the sweaters she knits for food and wood, and we all trade hides to cut for boots and parkas. When I can get cloth, I can make real pretty things for latchkays. Used to do that a lot, but since the SpaceBase closed to civilians, you can't hardly get fabric anymore."

"I can see where I need to get to know who to go to for what," Yana said. She could also see that she was going to need some barterable commodity other than company scrip to get by. She had never tried hunting for food before. Most planets where she had touched down had still been too new for anyone to be sure what was palatable and what was poisonous; and anyway, there was always the awkward possibility of ending up inadvertently lunching on one's host species.

Aisling took her into the store. From the outside, it looked like just another house; inside it seemed even tinier, with the stove dominating the room and counters all around the edges. Flanking the stove were two tables, sparsely littered with bags of nutrient tablets and uniform neckties and buttons, as well as trousers in

very small sizes. Aisling was scanning the shelves beyond the counters.

"Look, Yana. There's a good small pot. You better grab it. We've got one, but anything useful goes quick."

Yana purchased the pot. Looking further for something useful, she saw only small machine parts, burned-out chips, and multicolored wires.

"Sinead takes the wire and welds it into designs on tools and pots," Aisling told her as they left. "And uses the chips for jewelry. You should come over for supper sometime and we'll show you. Though everybody will be bringing things to trade or gift with at the latchkay."

Yana said she would like to do that, and Aisling continued on her way.

Two days later, as Yana was slowly waking up with a cup of hot watery beverage between her hands, she was jolted out of her semi-trance by the sound of dog feet and dog whines and howls outside. Bunny's face, framed by her parka ruff and mittens, appeared in the window. Yana waved at her to come in, and Bunny stuck her head in the door.

"If you still want to come with me up to Uncle Sean's place, come on. I'll wait out here with the dogs, but you better hurry. It's a good two-hour trip, and we may have to track him down once we get there."

Yana nodded and, after throwing two more logs in the stove for good measure, pulled on her boots and tugged her coverall and coat over her uniform. Grabbing mittens, hat, and muffler, she walked outside. The cat followed her.

"You sit there," Bunny told her, indicating the appropriate place in the sled. She wrapped furs and quilts around her. "It'll be cold sitting still. Later on, when you're feeling better, I'll show you how to drive dogs. Driving keeps you warm."

Then Bunny put in Yana's lap a pair of the big oval nets Yana had seen hanging over Clodagh's door. "You always want to have all your survival gear with you when you leave the village," Bunny said. "I don't think we'll need snowshoes, but you never know."

Something warm landed on Yana's thighs and burrowed under the furs. She bent over and saw a familiar orange face peeping out at her.

"Oho! Bunny, can you get rid of the cat?"

"It's okay. That's one of Clodagh's cats, and they go everywhere." With that she whistled up the dogs, pulled the brake up from the ice, and pushed with her foot, as if the sled were a scooter. With much wagging and anxious whining, the foxy-looking red dogs began pulling the sled down the icy expanse between the houses, around a corner, and out onto the river again.

For a while the ride was serene, the sled swooshing over white still lit by the light of moons and stars, Bunny occasionally calling to the dogs or to Yana to look at one set of tracks or another and pointing out "snow goose," "fox," or "moose," accordingly. Then she whistled more sharply, shouted "Ha!," and the dogs made a rather sharp turn up over the bank of the river and through the slender, snow-draped trees.

The sled bounced along from there, the dogs frisking up hills and running down them, the sled sometimes suspended breathlessly in midair for a moment as it went over a bump. Bunny kept control with the brake and her voice, and once the lead dog, Maud, turned back to look at her and whined when Bunny called out "Gee!" Bunny promptly called out "Ha!" instead, and Maud, satisfied, turned back to the trail. Mostly the dogs trotted at a leisurely pace, and Yana got a good view of their excretory functions as they stopped to mark the trail every once in a while.

Finally, however, the trail turned downward for a long time, and then a vast treeless straightaway of ice and snow stretched clear to the horizon, broken only by huge, jagged, upright ice teeth that seemed to be shifting ever so slightly against the brightening sky. The howling of dogs close at hand occasioned answering howls from Bunny's dogs.

Bunny whistled the dogs to a stop then, and Yana saw that the coral-tinted squarish hill between them and the giant ice teeth was not actually a mound of snow kissed by the rising sun, but a building painted in that unlikely shade. As the dogs trotted to a halt, they rounded the corner of the building, and Yana saw a snocle similar to Bunny's sitting before half a dozen small houses, each with a howling red fox-hound on top of it, caroling a greeting to the newcomers.

"Here we are," Bunny said. "And it looks like he's at home, too."

Yana had formed no preconceptions about Bunny's relative, apart from expecting him to vaguely resemble someone of the blood kin she had already met. But Dr. Sean Shongili wasn't like anyone she had ever met, either here on Petaybee or anywhere else in her lifetime-despite the fact that she had the distinct feeling that she had encountered him before.

Bunny had rapped on the door, singing out a cheerful "Slainte, Uncle Sean," a greeting lost in the canine chorus. She urgently beckoned Yana to hurry up, but Yana had to disentangle herself from the furs and the cat before she could stagger to her feet. That long, cold ride in a less-than-comfortable position had stiffened all her joints. She hated to appear less than agile and forced her body to move with something near a semblance of normality.

The door she approached pulled inward, and with snow glare impairing her vision, Yana could distinguish only a medium-sized form, for once not distorted by layers of clothing. The man was actually in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the collar open.

"Uncle Scan, I gotcha home! I've brought Yanaba Maddock to see you. And 1 gotta favor to ask. In Clodagh's name." On those words, Bunny put a hand on Yana's back and propelled her into the house.

Blinking to adjust her eyes, Yana looked about a room that sprouted unusual shapes from every surface, wall and ceiling, a veritable djinni's cave of wonders and a heinz of unassorted utensils, tools, parts, and, as usual, felines. These were six times the size of the one left curled in the sled furs and not a one of them was orange-colored. Fine heads turned, and autocratic amber, yellow, and green eyes assessed her. In a basket near the fire, a black and white bitch with a harlequin face lifted her head, sniffing, moved her foreleg to hide the pups that nursed her, and remained alert the entire time the visitors remained in Scan's cabin. That was the sum of Yana's first impression. Then the man dominated the scene.

Scan Shongili smiled, and his eyes did, too: sparkly silver eyes that looked straight into hers, clever, "seeing" eyes that were bright with an unqualified welcome, a decided change from the superficial social manners that were usually all she was accorded and many degrees more kindly than Colonel Giancarlo. But Giancarlo had a mission for her, and he probably never regarded his mission personnel as remotely human.

Shongili wasn't much taller than she was; a subtle aura of great strength, intelligence, and charm emanated from him, though charm was a quality she had never trusted-until now. He was a lean man, which for starters she liked, with a narrow face, slightly broad at the eyes, which were wide-set and large; cheekbones that were more Magyar than Indian; a generous mouth with finely carved lips, white, even teeth just visible behind them; and a purposeful chin and jaw line. Not a man easily persuaded from his purpose.

"Well, now, so you're Major Maddock," Scan said, and she hurried to pull off her right glove as he extended what looked like an abnormally long-fingered hand. But it was warm and grasped hers just firmly enough for her to sense, again, the unexpected resources in him. In fact, the touch of his skin on hers was slightly electric, stimulating.

Then the silver eyes blinked and something in the altered look made her frown slightly, confused, for all that there didn't seem to be any diminution of his welcome or smile.

"Has everyone on this frozen ball of ice heard of me now?" she asked, slightly petulant. She forced a smile on her lips to make her words seem more of a joke than they had sounded in her own ears.

"Good news travels faster than bad on Petaybee," Scan said. He moved with lithe grace to the ever-present stove of a Petaybee home, pouring three cups from the equally ubiquitous steaming pot. "Actually, I have the only radio link with the town around. Adak at the snocle depot gets downright chatty if anything interesting happens-such as Kilcoole getting a new citizen, and a war hero at that. Here's something to warm your guts after such a long sled ride, Major."

"Thanks," Yana said, ignoring the war hero comment and hoping to restore herself to his good opinion after that flash of aggro. "You're very kind."

His silver eyes glinted as he handed her the cup. "Bunny would skin me alive if I never asked you where your mouth was," he said, and winked with pure mischief before he presented Bunny with her mug.

"Too right, Unk," Bunny said, "and Scan makes a good bev."

Yana clasped it in both hands, to warm numb fingers, taking her time about sipping a liquid she knew would be too hot to drink immediately. The rising steam carried a spicily inviting odor to her nostrils.

"Charlie's gone, I hear," Sean went on, hitching his hips up onto the nearest flat surface.

"Yah! With barely time to say good-byes, and no song," Bunny said, then cocked her head at him, smiling winsomely. "Which is why we wondered if we could have the recorder. The major here knows all about equipment like yours, and she volunteered to help us send him a letter. To make up for his sudden departure, like."

Sean flicked a gaze at Yana, and she quirked her lips in a smile.

"Charlie-boy's not the one to irritate folk," Sean said. "Wonder why they posted him off-planet." But he put his cup down and, with a single fluid movement, spun on one heel to an overburdened wall cabinet from which he unerringly extracted a recording device. Not, Yana realized as she saw the face of it, an obsolete affair but nearly state-of-the-art from the last time she had been issued one. The cabinet was crammed with technological gadgets of all kinds, half of which she couldn't put a name or use to. She watched as Sean negligently pushed back into place equipment that would have been worth a small fortune on any planet, much less a technologically starved one like Petaybee.

"Half of it doesn't work," he said, without seeming to have noticed her attention. "Petaybee's hard on any kind of instrumentation and machinery."

"How do you manage your work then?" she blurted out.

He gave an diffident shrug. "I improvise. We do a lot of that on Petaybee." He handed her the recorder. "Do you understand this type?"

She examined the display keys more closely and nodded, deciding to limit her comments. "Had one almost like this on my last assignment." She slid the thin rectangle into a thigh pocket. Then she nodded at the big cats. "I haven't seen anything like them here."

"Them?" Shongili looked half-surprised, half-amused. "My track-cats. When they're of a mind, they'll even pull a sled."

"They're big enough." Yana moved slightly on her buttocks. She was near enough to the stove to begin to feel the heat. She shrugged her jacket open a little more. "Do they always look at a person like that?"

Scan laughed. "They're always interested in new things."

"Did you design them like that?"

Scan's mobile eyebrows developed a quizzical quirk. "Design them? They designed themselves," he said with a shrug.

"Yes, but I thought you and your . . ."

"Not them. What he did; what I do is check on adaptability, not evolution or even mutation, but something in between as each species makes subtle improvements to survive in conditions their ancestors never had to cope with. Petaybee is a prime example of survival of the fittest."

"He's off," Bunny said with an air of resignation, and let herself fall backward into the chair she had been perched on. There she struggled out of her outer layers, preparing to endure. She shot Yana a grin to quell any apprehension.

"Like cats whose ears are no longer susceptible to frostbite?" Yana asked, remembering Clodagh's offhanded comment.

"Exactly." Scan grinned. But the humor in his silvery gaze held more than acceptance of her statement. He was probing, too, and a lot more deftly than Colonel Giancarlo could.

"Why haven't you done as much for the humans stuck here?" Yana asked, not quite certain she could tease this unusual man, but suspecting she could.

"Ah, them." Sean waved a hand. "We genetic manipulators aren't allowed to help humans. They have to do it the hard way."

"Have they?"

Sean cocked his head, his amusement not one whit diminished. "I'd say there have been . . . adjustments made. Learning what furs, for instance, are most suitable for the purpose of keeping human bodies warm."

"That's intellectual, not biological," Yana said.

"Mankind's intelligence distinguishes us from the animals, my dear major. And allows adjustments much faster than animals can alter their genetic codes."

"Do they? Here on Petaybee?"

"Over the last two hundred years, they'd have to, to survive. Wouldn't they?" He drained his cup. "Of course, the original Admin was sensible about some of the species they sent, which helped."

"Which ones?" Yana asked.

Bunny snorted, obviously knowing the answer.

Scan grinned, a grin of pure unadulterated mischief. "Why, the curly-coats." When Yana cocked her head at him inquiringly, he beckoned to her. "I'll show you."

"They're his pride and joy, Yana. You're in for it," Bunny said, propping her feet up on a footstool and obviously not intending to join Scan and Yana.

"I asked."

"The curly-coats are equines," Sean said, and as he cupped her elbow with his hand, she experienced the same electric shock of contact. "Originally from the Siberian area of the Eastern Hemisphere. They exist comfortably in extreme temperatures, having a spare flap in their nose that closes off frost. They survive on vegetation that wouldn't keep a goat alive. Small, sturdy, able to maneuver on tracks even a sled has trouble running."

He led her down a corridor from the main room, past closed doors, and into a link between the house and a spread of other buildings that she took for research and laboratory facilities. The link passed in front of other closed doors, some with security keypads. She was adept enough at sussing her immediate surroundings without appearing to do so, yet she had the sense that Sean was aware of her automatic scanning. They came to the end of the link, which opened onto a paddock with snow fences keeping the drifts from its surface. In the paddock were a dozen small horses, curly-coated to the point of being shaggy, with long fur icicled under their throats, and long feathers curling down from their sturdy barrels and down their short thick legs. At first she wasn't sure which end was which, since the manes were as long as the tails and just as thick. There were several brown animals, but most were a creamy color; they were all browsing on what looked much like the icicled spines she had seen on the riverside three days before.

"You'd never spot half of them in this terrain" was Yana's first comment.

Sean chuckled, apparently pleased by her remark. "They're survivors!"

"What do you use them for?"

"A variety of things. Their milk we can drink, fresh, frozen, or fermented, or make into a butter which we use in our lamps."

"I have," she said, restraining herself from wrinkling her nose.

"It smells but it's better than nothing. Their coats we can comb and use for wool." Yana thought of the warm soft blanket she had seen in Clodagh's. "We can eat their flesh, drink their blood-" He glanced at her to see if that repulsed her, but she had eaten far worse than curly-coated equines in her time- worse and tougher than these little animals looked. "We can ride them, use them as pack animals, use them as extra blankets if we're caught out in bad weather. They don't object to sleeping with humans . . ."

She looked at him then, for the undertone to his comment was both risible and dogmatic. His silver eyes glinted with the mischief that seemed an essential part of his public self.

"They are amenable to anything we can think up for them to do. And they never complain or balk." Thai seemed to be of A paramount importance. "They've saved many a team from hypothermic death and starvation. In fact, you can bleed them quite a bit before they are weakened."

"Useful."

"Indeed."

"Were they used by the teams that disappeared?"

Sean was surprised at that question and scratched the back of his neck. "Been given a few ghouly stories to keep you awake at night?"

"Not ghouly to me," she said with a shrug. "I've been first-team on a few company planets, a couple where I'd've been glad to have a few curly-coats along."

"Oh?"

She could see interest sparking the glint in his eyes. He leaned back against the plasglas, propping his arms on the wide sills, apparently not affected by contact with the cold surface, whereas she could feel the frost of it oozing into the semi warm link.

She gave a laugh. "Don't get me started on that phase of my life. It's over." She made a cutting gesture with her hands.

"Then it's time to sing about it. You came through."

"Sing? Me?" She ducked her head in denial. "Not me- couldn't carry a tune in a bucket."

Sean smiled-almost challengingly, she thought. "Inuit chants can't be called tunes, not without a stretch of the definition, but they do grab the mind and make audiences listen. I think they'd like to hear your songs."

Yana was not affecting modesty: she just didn't think any of her experiences were worth hearing about, and certainly some of them she wouldn't talk, much less sing, about.

"I'm serious, Yana." He spoke her name with an odd lilt. She shot him a quick look and saw that he was, indeed, serious. Then his expression turned sly. "The spring latchkay's coming up soon.

You'll be coming, and there are some folks hereabout would like to hear a song about Bremport."

"Bremport?" She went rigid.

He laid a light finger on her arm. "You were at Bremport. Charlie picked up on that when he got a copy of your orders and the briefing on your medical history."

"That should have been confidential," she said, feeling less guilty about Charlie than she had the day before.

"Charlie's older brother Donal was at Bremport, too, so it was of more than casual interest to him. So were three other sons of Petaybee and two daughters, and us here knowing nothing about their deaths but that they are dead."

Damn Charlie anyway. Giancarlo had been right to transfer him-the boy's loyalties had been too mixed for him to be an effective company representative here. Still, she couldn't blame him, but-damn. She remembered to exhale then, and swallowed hard on all the things she didn't wish to remember about Bremport.

The swallow was a mistake. Somehow it went down wrong and she started to cough. Hard as she tried to limit it to the one cough, another burst past her lips, and the next thing she knew she was racked by a paroxysm. She fumbled in her coat for her syrup and dragged the bottle out. But she moved too swiftly: it flew from her groping fingers and smashed on the stone floor of the link. As if the loss of the syrup were a signal, the coughing fit intensified. Scan's very strong fingers gripped her arms, supporting her convulsing body and he began to hurry back the way they had come, though she had trouble keeping on her feet. She had to bring her knees almost to her chin to keep the spasms from tearing her abdominal muscles.

"What's the cause, Yana? The gas at Bremport?"

She managed to nod a yes. Then he was assisting her into a laboratory, flicking up lights, and settling her onto a nearby stool before he sprang across the room to the large array of cabinets there. Without fumbling, he poured out a dose of a clear yellow liquid and returned to her side.

"Something of Clodagh's that makes cowardly coughs evaporate on its fumes," he said. "We all take it now and then."

Yana was in no condition to object to anything anyone might consider remedial. Between one spasm and the onset of another, she knocked back the liquid-and rolled her eyes, inhaled, and then exhaled gustily, for the medicine had a kick in it that could only reduce any cough to tatters. And the next spasm didn't materialize.

Surprised, Yana took several short breaths, fully expecting each one to deteriorate into a cough. Scan regarded her with a growing smile curling his lips.

"See? Guaranteed effective."

"What was in it?" she gasped respectfully, still aware of the taste of it in the back of her mouth.

The mischief returned to Scan Shongili's eyes. "Well, now, that I don't know. Clodagh won't pass on the secret of her elixir. She just makes it."

Yana was aware of the plethora of laboratory equipment from slidetrays to electronic microscopes-and not obsolete ones, at that. She waved her hand at them.

"You look as if you could analyze the contents . . ."

"Ah . . ." Sean held up his hands. "It's unethical to plumb the secrets of another professional. I do animals; she does humans."

"But isn't there an overlap somewhere along the line?" Yana asked.

"How so?"

"Those cats of hers. And you've cats that are totally different."

Sean grinned so broadly that Yana knew she would never get an honest answer on that score. "So I do." Then he turned from her and went back to the cabinet. He held up the bottle. "I can spare this since it seems to have been so effective for you."

Yana hesitated. She had had to use up far too much of her personal baggage allowance for enough bottles of the syrup to see her through her recuperation. But there was no question that Clodagh's was more effective. She sighed, cutting that loss and accepting the bottle. Maybe it would suffice to see the cough to an end before she had to go back to the prescription stuff.

"Clodagh makes it up in huge batches every fall to cope with coughs," Sean said, tucking the bottle securely in the inner vest pocket. "You can get more as you need it."

Yana felt another twinge of resentment against a system that did not supply her with enough money for even basic needs, much less medicinal niceties.

"Can you give me a few helpful hints about this place?"

He regarded her in surprise. "Bunny's good at that."

"Yes, but when I ask how I am to repay someone for leaving fuel by my door when I haven't asked for any, or giving me fish I don't know how to cook . . ."

He laughed with kindly amusement at her disgruntlement. "I see what you mean. It's so obvious to her that she doesn't realize how new and confusing it could be for you." He tucked her arm under his and guided her out of the laboratory, firmly clanging the metal door closed behind him. "Well, now, everyone knows you're new, and new to the ways of Petaybee, so they're helping you out. Old custom . . . especially for people they want to like ..."

"Want to like . . ."

The silver eyes glinted. "They like heroes. No, they genuinely do," he amended when she snorted in disgust. "You're worth your weight as a role model . . ." Then he took a second look at her gauntness. "That'll improve," he said kindly. "So they'll sort of ease you into the environment the best way they can. What you do"- He held up one admonitory finger when she started to protest. -"is return the courtesies to the next stranger who arrives on our frozen shores. Or," he said, giving her that sly sideways glance that challenged her, "you compose a song to chant at the next latchkay."

"I don't think they really want to know about Bremport," she said very slowly.

His arm pressed hers encouragingly against his side. "They're tougher people than you realize. And they have a need to know, Yana. As much as you have a need to sing about it, even if you don't know it." His eyes were somber.

"Whatever," she said noncommittally, not willing to accept the truth, or the inevitability, of his suggestion.

They walked the rest of the way back to the main house in silence, a silence that was the most companionable one she had enjoyed in many a year. Scan Shongili was a most unusual man. Where under what sun could she possibly have encountered him before?

Chapter 5

When they reached the house, they almost ran Bunny over: she was in the process of reaching for the door latch just as Scan flipped it up. Seeing her face, Yana knew that something had happened-something bad.

"Message from Adak, Scan. A hunting party found one of the lost teams."

"They did?" Scan took the hands that Bunny had held out in an unconscious appeal for comfort. "And?"

"There are five still alive . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Which five?"

Yana read into that question that he was amazed that anyone had survived.

"Two of theirs this time, three of ours."

He dropped Bunny's hands and started to gather items about the room, cramming them into a pack at the same time he put on outerwear. He was ready in one circuit of the room.

"Where are they?" he asked.

"Clodagh's." As if that should have been a given.

"Drive us there, will you, Bunny?"

"Sure!" And the girl began to shrug into her wraps.

Yana wondered at how lightly Sean Shongili had dressed for a long drive in freezing temperatures. He hadn't even rolled down his sleeves or done up his shirt collar, and the smooth pelted fur jacket he donned wasn't nearly as thick as Bunny's or hers. He grinned as he caught her expression.

"I'll be warm enough."

Then he hurried them out to the sled, where the dogs were already standing in their harness, yapping as if infected by the urgency that possessed the humans.

With deft movements, Scan settled Yana into the sled, bundled the furs about her, ignoring the cat's attempts to get into her lap, and gave her custody of his pack, telling her not to let it fall off.

Then he snugged his hood over his head, tying it under his chin, and shoved his hands in the thick fur mitts that were fastened by thongs to his sleeves.

"Come on, Bunny!" he yelled, and whistled at the team; the dogs strained against their harness even as Bunny wrenched the brake free of the ice and paddled with her foot to set the sled in motion.

The sled bumped forward, Yana clutching the pack for fear it would tumble off her fur-encased lap. If she had thought the outbound trip was fast and jarring, though she knew that Bunny had gone easily for her sake, the inbound journey was another matter. Scan ran beside Maud, the red leader dog, urging her to her best pace, chivying Bunny down steep inclines when she would have taken safer routes.

Yana hung on, determined not to close her eyes when the sled tilted at alarming angles and the landscape seemed to fly past her. She was particularly aware of the increased speed when the sled thudded from one hummock to another, crashing her bones together. Or when the cat, who had somehow crawled back under the rugs, sunk its claws through her pants leg to keep from being thrown about. Stands of hardwoods that had seemed miles apart during the outward journey streaked past her with barely an interval between them.

The abrupt arctic daylight had waned by the time they neared the settlement and saw its lit windows blinking welcomingly through the trees at them. The dogs slowed as they reached Clodagh's, making their way through a welter of other teams parked there. Scan grabbed the pack with a flash of a grateful grin at Yana and charged up the steps, Bunny right behind him as soon as she had hauled on the brake.

Grunting but telling herself that of course she understood their haste, Yana peeled back the furs and extricated herself from the sled. The cat jumped out and disappeared under the pilings. Oddly enough, as Yana straightened up she found that she wasn't nearly as stiff this time. She felt for the bottle of Clodagh's elixir and wondered what it contained. Then, hesitant about intruding, she climbed the steps to the porch. She could hear the subdued buzz of many voices even before she opened the door and slipped inside. The warmth was like a blanket surrounding her, but the press of people almost made her withdraw.

Peering over and around the bodies packed inside the room, she could see no part of the injured survivors, though there was a long clear space in one corner of the room where they might be lying obscured by the crowd. Clodagh's head and hips appeared from time to time, and once she saw what looked like the top of Scan Shongili's head. Bunny was standing by the stove, where she was precariously dribbling coffee into two cups, trying to keep from spilling any as she was repeatedly jostled.

Yana hoped one was for her, and it was: Bunny threaded her way through the throng and offered Yana a cup. She reached eagerly to accept it, for the warmth on her hands as well as her innards. She blew across the surface and at the first careful sip wondered if Scan used Clodagh's recipe or if it was the other way around.

"Could you see? Arc they going to make it?" she asked, nodding toward the corner.

Bunny nodded, her eyes dark with worry.

"Ours'll recover a lot faster'n theirs, so there'll be more questions an' tribunals and inquests and stuff."

Which Bunny felt were irrelevant, Yana decided. "Isn't it just that your people are better acclimated?"

Bunny looked disgusted. "Of course they are and we try to explain that to them, but they"-the pronoun was used in contempt-"never admit the fact. Their people should somehow be better able to cope when most of 'em's never lived outside at all. And," she added with perplexity in her voice, "that's not the real problem anyway. The real problem is that they think they have to know everything about everything, and they don't. Even we who live here don't. But we know enough to pay attention to what the planet tells us, and they don't seem to pay attention to nothin'."

Yana sipped, letting the warmth thaw the ice in her blood. Maybe she would do better if she ran like the others did. She had done nothing but sit, and she was whacked-whereas Bunny's face was ruddy with stimulation, and Sean hadn't even looked puffed when he had grabbed the pack off her lap. Everyone in the room had settled down to what might be a long wait, one of many they endured with great patience. Yana felt her own running out, complicated by a growing sense of claustrophobia in a room packed with folk she didn't know well enough to wait equably with. She shifted her feet restlessly, wondering if she could withdraw without giving offense. Not that that was so much a problem, since she doubted anyone would notice one less body in the room except with gratitude. A more realistic concern was whether she could make it through this bunch to the door. And if and when she did, what would she do then, back at her cold and lonely cabin? That half hour in Scan's company had emphasized the disadvantages of solitude. She had felt oddly alive and on the alert in his company, the first time she had felt that way since Bry.

"Look, this might take hours," Bunny said, and Yana glanced sharply at her. "I've got to tend the dogs."