Her lungs took in the spring-crisp air in great gulps. She was almost dizzy with the intoxication of undeniably fresh air.
"Oh, my word, air! Give me air like this wherever I go," she said dramatically, one hand on her heaving chest.
Matthew shot her a disgusted glance. "Marmion, the air may appear to be fresh, but you cannot be sure it isn't filled with bacteria and microbes that will have a deleterious effect on your health. Which we must preserve!" he added with that dreadful smile he affected when he was pretending to be solicitous while really hoping the person he was talking to would fall over dead.
By quickly linking her arm in Faber's, she neatly avoided contact as Matthew held out a hand to help her down the scrupulously clean stairs. Faber escorted her deftly to the ground, but Sally and Millard had to wait until Matthew and his minions had disembarked. Maybe Sally would be able to make some sort of impression on one of the handsome, physically fit young assistants. She usually managed. She'd have to be very clever with Matthew's boys, but that's what Sally was: clever, astute, discreet, and exceedingly intelligent.
Once more into the fray, dear friends, Marmion thought as she observed Captain Torkel Fiske in full flash uniform, standing just slightly ahead of his father-rather naughty of Torkel, she thought. Whittaker was dressed far more casually, but she'd never seen him look so fit and happy. Happy, she thought, wondering that that adjective should spring to mind. Who had time to be "happy" in the Intergalactic society of which she, Whittaker, and Matthew were part? In any event, she smiled at Whittaker, as he neatly elbowed his son out of the way to be first to greet her.
"Is your arm all healed? And the leg wound?'' she asked solicitously as they embraced. He wore a support bandage on his arm and she'd noticed just the faintest hint of a limp as he moved.
"Of course, Marmie. You can't keep an old dog like me down. I not only had Intergal's best medicos working on me, but the best immediate and convalescent medical care available here. I'll say that for this planet-good for your health," Whittaker said. Releasing her-a trifle reluctantly, she felt-he turned to shake hands, showing just the right deference and enthusiasm, with Matthew. "You are welcome, Matthew. Your input will be invaluable."
Liar, Marmion thought, but she smiled vacuously as the two men went through the courtesies.
Matthew introduced his gaggle of ganders to Whittaker, adding the provenance of each and their area of expertise. That is, he introduced all but poor Adam's Apple.
"And this is Braddock Makem," she said, smiling brightly first at Matthew, then at Whit, and finally at poor startled Makem. "You remember Sally, I'm sure, Whit. And Millard and Faber, who are my staunch henchmen."
Whit shook hands with her assistants and then waved everyone to the waiting vehicles. The travel bags had already been unloaded and were on their way to whatever accommodations this depressing place might have for people of her and Matthew's prestige.
"We've laid on a fine meal for you, Marmie," Whit said, making sure he sat beside her in the large personnel transport. Its seats, hard as they were, had been re-covered with rather fine furs.
"How kind of you," Marmion replied, and then, feeling the soft texture of the covers, she said, "And are these locally produced?" She did not have to pretend her enthusiasm, for she had seldom felt such beautifully cured natural pelts.
"Yes," Torkel Fiske answered from the double seat behind her. "It's the one thing they do very well here."
"Really?" she asked, managing to keep the irony out of her rejoinder. "How interesting! You must show me more," she said languidly. "I really could use some new stoles. Maybe a muff or two for when I have to stand in freezing airlocks and transfer stations."
"Better let young Fiske buy for you, Marmion," Matthew said. "The moment they heard your off world accent, they'd quadruple the price."
"No, we do that!" Whittaker said at his drollest.
Marmion snuggled against him, wrapping her fingers about his arm and squeezing them slightly. "It's so good to see you, Whit! Whatever's been going on down here, it's really brightened you up. I do believe you were getting office-bound."
Whittaker chuckled and jerked his head at the very upright, disapproving back of Matthew Luzon sitting in front of them.
Marmion squeezed his arm again. "A field trip is what we've all needed to get the juices flowing and the lungs filling with good clean air." Luzon's shoulders twitched, and Marmion felt Whittaker's ribs moving in silent laughter. "We'll all put our minds to this little problem and sort it out in next to no time. Won't we, Matthew?"
His terse answer was lost in a screech of badly worn brake pads, as the carrier halted in front of a building, freshly painted in an aggressively bright yellow.
"Sorry about the color, Marmion," Whittaker said when he saw her wince. "All that's left in Stores, but at least it's clean and bright."
This time Matthew's snort of disgust was plainly audible. As he walked to the door, his body language spoke of displeasure, resentment, and aggravation.
"Oh, dear, we're in for it," Marmion murmured so that only Whittaker heard her. "I believe we are," he responded as quietly.
"Fore warned is fore armed," she added, and then rose to walk as gracefully as ever down the aisle and up the steps and into the incredibly yellow building.
Chapter 6.
The long multi-segmented caravan divided, then subdivided, and subdivided again. The first to leave were Sinead and Aisling, who went visiting Shannonmouth, closest to Kilcoole of the three villages on the route. Although Sinead could ride all day, Aisling did not travel as well, especially on horseback. Most of the time she preferred to walk and lead her curly-horse, chatting to the mare as frequently as she addressed Sinead, Sean, Yana, Bunny, or Diego. The mare seemed oblivious to the burdens she carried: bundles of blankets, sewing things, and decorating materials, as well as a back pack and a bale of finely tanned furs from Sinead's winter hunt.
Bunny thought it was aces traveling with this particular group. She was so used to Diego now, she'd be lost without his company, and she had liked Yana Maddock since Day One and looked forward to having her as an auntie when she and Sean got hitched. And both Sinead and Sean knew all sorts of special places where they could sleep under cover. With the people traveled Alice B, Sinead and Aisling's lead dog; Nanook, one of the track-cats who lived out at Sean's lab; and Dinah, the Maloneys' lead dog, who had taken such a shine to Diego that she preferred his company to Liam's. She also liked Bunny: when Bunny stroked her, she could even receive Dinah's somewhat frenetic communications.
After leaving Sinead and Aisling in Shannonmouth, the group continued on, following the river that snaked uphill past McGee's Pass. There the river was joined by the Iffy, so called because it was iffy if it ran or not, depending on the season, and how frozen it was or how dry the weather had been. The Iffy was in full spate now, pouring its glacial white waters into the clear Shannon; the two mingled murkily all the way to Harrison's Fjord.
As Bunny and Diego parted from Sean and Yana, Sean said, "Listen, you two. By all means, visit the Connellys and, if you can do so, find out what's going on. But, if feeling is very strong in favor of the mines, leave and come find us, and we'll all do it together. I want you to meet us at Harrison's Fjord in three days' time. It's only a day to the Fjord, so that gives you two days to suss things out.
Okay? I'd like to have more time, but with the PTBs arriving soon, Yana and I have got to catch a ride down under as soon as we've finished our business and Johnny or Rick are free."
"Can we go down under, too?" Bunny asked.
"I doubt if the aircraft will be big enough to hold four passengers," Yana said. "Using one of the smaller copters is wisest. Now, get going so you'll reach the Connellys in time to be invited for supper. Sean and I have a ways to go yet."
Later, when the adults disappeared around the base of the next hill and Bunny and Diego steered their curlies toward the pass, Bunny said, "Did you hear? They didn't say no! We might get to go down under, Diego!"
"What's it like?" he asked.
"I don't know. Never been. Different from here though I think. I've never heard of anyone coming up from the southern pole. You have to cross a whole big ocean, and that just isn't smart to do in our little boats. I guess they don't have any bigger ones down there or we'd see more of them up here. My parents were trying to prove a theory about an undersea passage from the caves near Harrison's Fjord when they disappeared. Hey! What if they got through and the passage-you know, something went wrong with it, so they couldn't come home, but when we get down there we'll find them!"
"I wouldn't get my hopes up," Diego said. "It's been how many years now?"
"I dunno. Over ten. I was real little when they left."
"I'd think in all that time they'd have found somebody to bring word back, knowing how worried everybody would be. Of course, if it was my mom," he added, his tone turning wry, "she'd get so involved with her work she'd never notice she forgot to bring me with her, but you people aren't like that."
"Well, thanks a lot. But I prefer to hope, if it's all the same to you. Or isn't anybody else supposed to? You got your father back. I guess that's all that matters."
"I didn't mean for you to take it that way, Bunny. I wouldn't have got my dad back if it wasn't for you and Clodagh and everybody, and sure I hope there's people who will help your folks down under. I'd just hate to see you get all excited and be disappointed."
"I'll be excited if I want to," she said tartly. "And I've been disappointed before."
Diego didn't say anything, and Bunny regretted being so sharp with him. He was probably just showing how much he cared about her, as Aisling would say. But he was only two years older than she was, and he shouldn't treat her like a kid.
So after that, they rode in silence until they rounded the bend at the foot of the pass and were greeted by a roaring wind funneling through the cleft and almost blowing them back down to the Shannon.
Flattening themselves against the necks of the curlies, they trudged up the trail, which was some what less muddy than the flatlands. The air was also noticeably chillier. Dinah dropped behind the horses and padded along in the shelter of their sturdy bodies.
McGee's Pass wasn't very big. Not even as big as Kilcoole, Bunny thought with surprise as they rode between the first pair of houses. There were only about eight houses, situated fairly close together, lining the wide spot in the trail that passed for a road. The road was heavily churned up and tracked into ruts, ridges, and pockmarks lightly covered with a recent sprinkling of snow, making the footing extremely slippery and uneven.
The houses were unimproved original company issue, shored up with pieces of timber, stones, mud bricks, plascrete, hides, and whatever else was handy. As in Kilcoole, the ground was littered with the refuse of many long winters and warm seasons not quite warm enough to melt the snows.
"Everybody must be inside having lunch," Bunny said of the deserted streets.
But that didn't explain the quiet. She saw no dogs, no curlies, nothing except one lone marmalade cat trying to catch what warmth it could on a plascrete roof.
Dinah wandered from house to house, object to object, sniffing and whining, barking once or twice, and sniffing and whining some more. At one place, she paused to urinate near a doorstep.
The cat looked down at her as if considering jumping on her back for a ride. Dinah jumped up, pawing the house, and barked sharply. The cat rose and stretched itself, and jumped lightly down from the roof onto a barrel and then to the ground.
After a mutual sniff, the cat sauntered up the street, its tail describing arches in the air above its back, while Dinah struggled not to run over the creature in her haste to go wherever the cat was going.
Bunny and Diego followed the dog. The cat walked out of town, which wasn't all that far to go, and up toward the pass, and then abruptly disappeared into a bush beside the trail.
Bunny and Diego dismounted. A voice came from behind the bush, then suddenly, many voices, and then the bush moved aside and a person appeared in what turned out to be the entrance to a cave.
The person, a man who looked a bit like Bunny's uncle Adak, seemed startled to see them. "Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want? he demanded, blocking the entrance to the cave.
"Slainte," Bunny said as normally as possible. After all, if these people were supporting the company instead of the planet, she wasn't surprised that they might be a little defensive. "I was looking for the Connelly family. I thought they lived around here."
"Who is it askin' after the Connellys?" a woman's voice asked from behind the man. "Krilerneg O'Malley, will you move your ass so the rest of us can get out."
"Is that you, Iva?" Bunny asked. As O'Malley did as he was bid, she saw that it was indeed Iva Connelly, or someone who looked very much like her, coming out into the daylight.
Unlike the unmannerly O'Malley, the woman cleared the doorway and came over to the horses, allowing a stream of men, women, and children to emerge behind her.
"What is it, Ma?" a boy asked. He was a tall boy, not dark like most of the people Bunny knew, but fair-haired and blue-eyed.
The woman looked puzzled herself, and for a moment Bunny was afraid she'd got the wrong person.
"Slainte, dama," she said again. "I don't know if you remember me or not, but I'm Buneka Rourke, the snocle driver from Kilcoole. This is my friend Diego Metaxos."
"That's not a Kilcoole name," the boy said in a suspicious mutter.
"Never mind that, Krisuk," the woman said. "You've had a long journey, Bunka. You must be tired and hungry."
The people parted in front of another man now, this one dressed in skins and furs, all ornamented with beads the way Aisling did the latchkay blouses. More striking than his clothing, however, was his physical appearance. He was a very large man and very handsome, his hair worn in a black mane, with a trim black beard covering his chin and a heavy black mustache guarding his mouth.
"The others not only let him pass but actually shrank from him. He carried a staff with the skull of some small animal-a squirrel perhaps, although it looked more like . . . No, it couldn't be a cat's skull! Nobody would do anything so gruesome as to display the skull of a cat.
She did notice, however, that the marmalade cat, who had been there a moment before, had completely disappeared.
"Iva, my child, of course this lovely creature and her friend are tired and hungry. You must bring them to my house to eat and rest." He turned to Bunny and gave her a smile that invited her to admire him, and extended his hand less to shake hers than to sign a blessing at her. "I am Satok, the shanachie. Welcome to my village."
"Slainte, Satok," Bunny said. "And thanks for the invitation. I just came bringing greetings to the Connellys from our healer, Clodagh Senungatuk, but she has spoken of you and I know she will be glad to hear that I met you."
Iva Connelly spoke to the shanachie, and Bunny thought her manner unusually timorous for someone speaking to the town's rememberer and chief singer and storyteller. "Bunka is an important woman in Kilcoole, shanachie. She is one of two people permitted to drive the company's snocles. On her mother's side she is descended from the Shongili scientists. Her uncle is Sean himself, and she was all but raised by Clodagh, the healer."
The speech would normally have embarrassed Bunny, except that she had the oddest feeling that Iva was presenting her credentials, to show that Bunny was a person worthy of respect and under the protection of important and powerful people. Satok, apparently, took the speech as an advertisement for her-her charms? He was looking at her in the way of men who were courting, except more boldly and without deference.
"Fine recommendations indeed," he said, grasping her hand. "I am so honored that you have come to my village."
"We-uh-we brought a song to the Connellys from their friends in Kilcoole," Diego said rather sharply. "Come on, Bunny. Maybe we can visit the shanachie later, if there's time. We're on kind of a tight schedule. We're being expected soon, elsewhere."
Bunny, uneasy at the burning look she was getting from the shanachie, did not mind Diego intervening in her affairs this time. Iva Connelly shot them a relieved glance and one that was apologetic to the shanachie before she hustled them, the boy, and a passel of other relatives back to a house no bigger than Clodagh's.
Iva, her husband Miuk, and their own children and grandchildren, including the blond-haired boy, all lived under this roof. It smelled musky, of closeness and constant occupation. Except for six beds and a table, the furnishings were few and the food stores did not appear to be many.
"We brought our own supplies," Bunny told Iva. "And some seedlings from Clodagh. She and Sean both think this will be an unusually long growing season."
Iva did not respond to her remark at once. "Niambh," she said to one of the granddaughters. "Put the kettle on for our guests."
She sat herself down on one bed and motioned to Diego and Bunny to sit on another. The rest of the Connellys surrounded them closely. The youngest ones had to be deflected from the saddlebags, which intrigued them.
"That was kind of Clodagh, but I doubt we'll plant much this year," Miuk said. "We'll be busy helping Intergal at the new mine sites."
Bunny tried not to act surprised. The cats' information, after all, was accurate. That marmalade rascal who had led them to the meeting cave was no doubt a useful informant.
Diego surprised her. He usually hung back in discussions, but now he leaned forward and gave Iva a penetrating look.
"And how," he asked, "does your shanachie feel about the possibility of newly opened mine sites?"
"Why, he thinks it's about time, of course. He says the planet is very offended that we refuse to accept all of its gifts. That's why the planet won't communicate with any of us anymore, but speaks only to Satok."
"What?" Bunny cried.
"Just as she says, girl, are you deaf?" Miuk said. "The planet now communicates its needs and we communicate ours to it only through Satok."
"Why? Isn't the planet 'mad' at him, too?" Diego asked, just managing not to sneer.
"You don't understand,-" Iva said. "You've had Clodagh to guide you, to keep you whole. But McConachie was old and not right in the head for a long time before he died. And no one else came forward for years. We-we lost touch. We misinterpreted things. We did wrong things. Offensive things. Until Satok came to interpret, everything got harder and harder for us. Animals didn't come to the dying places. The river didn't thaw for three summers. We couldn't grow gardens. Not until Satok came did we know what the problem was. We had angered the planet by not cooperating with the company when it wished our help to make its explorations."
"Which explorations?" Bunny asked. She wasn't aware that help had been recruited further afield than Kilcoole.
"There was one last year. Some fellas came looking for guides. They landed in a shuttle. I don't think they even went to SpaceBase. They said there was some kinda special minerals we were supposed to have here that they were lookin' for."
"There were others, too," Miuk said. "Ask Clodagh. Sometimes if what the company wanted was near Shannonmouth, people from Kilcoole would just send them on, or bring them this far and no farther. My brother Upik guided one group, but we never saw him again."
"I went out with my father and Lavelle Maloney with a group," Diego said in a quiet, intense voice. "We got into a white out. But we took refuge inside the planet. My father . . . well, he was bad for a while and almost died from the shock but Clodagh and Bunny and the others helped him and now he's better. That sort of thing seems to happen to a lot of company teams."
Iva shook her head. "They did not ask permission then.
As Satok says, we used to do it all wrong. He says that Miuk's brother and our other folks killed the company teams and the planet punished them-and us-because of it.
"Why does he tell you such lies?" Bunny asked. She had restrained herself long enough. Now she was really mad.
"He doesn't lie. As long as we've done what he says, made the payments he wants, things have been better."
"Payments?" Diego asked incredulously, sticking his jaw out.
"Just little things. Food, furs, some sewing for him, the best pups from the litters, and the best lead dog to train them."