Power Lines Part 20

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

"Captain Torkel Fiske requests that all council members get in touch with him immediately. He is currently tracking the activities of the shanachie of McGee's Pa.s.s."

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

"Take us directly to McGee's Pa.s.s, pilot," he ordered, and the man gave him a thumbs-up signal and headed up the coast.

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

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

"Set it down anywhere, man!" Matthew commanded. "The plants'll cus.h.i.+on the skids."

The pilot sounded doubtful as he said, "Well, okay. You're the boss, Dr. Luzon."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For pity's sake, man, it's no great monster, just some sort of vine!'' Matthew screeched. "Help!-"

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

"Get us out of here!" Matthew demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You heard him, sir. Let's get out of here," Braddock whined.

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

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

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

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

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

"You will be rewarded by the company, my son," Shepherd Howling said, pus.h.i.+ng Matthew aside to sprint over the stones with the agility of a mountain goat. The speed with which he took advantage of the temporary path and his nimbleness in avoiding questing bramble tendrils caused Matthew to re-evaluate the man's degree of insanity.

Matthew followed quickly, Braddock somewhat more reluctantly. The pilot opted to remain with his s.h.i.+p.

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

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

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

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

"That's where you are, sir," said the woman of the house, undoubtedly the boy's mother, pus.h.i.+ng herself to the front. "And the best way to explain, sir, is by singing you the song we made."

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

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

"We were all duped, he means," the boy said.

A 1ittle girl said, "All but Krisuk. He wasn't fooled."

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

"You start, Krisuk," the mother said.

The boy stood stock-still, arms at his sides, not a foot from Matthew, and began to chant in an eerie singsong style: "One day the roof of the world fell It killed our friends, our cousins It killed the heir to its wisdom For days we dug, too numb to cry.

Our world had ended.

Aijija!"

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

"A stranger came among us to dig He came among us, he said, to teach Sure he was.

Strong he was.

He knew what to do.

He knew where to dig.

The world still spoke to him, He said.

Aijija!

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

He said if my sister lay with him she would be one with creation She went with him He said if we gave him the best pups of the litter His team would carry the spirit of our village to the world's corners And it would know us once more We gave him the pups He said that the planet's orange feet carried tales against us to other villages He said if we were to heal, the feet must be killed.

This, to our shame, we allowed. "

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

"To our shame we didn't hide them To our shame we didn't feed them To our shame we heard his blows To our shame we heard their cries To our shame we did nothing Until only Shush Shush the silent and swift Survived. Shush who led us back into the world Shush who brought our neighbors to us Shush who left us at last Footless in a world Whose voice had been strangled Whose tongue had been blown away By the one we called Satok shanachie.

Where is our sister now?

Gone to a bad man in a distant village.

Where are our best pups?

Starved and broken in spirit.

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

No longer walking, bones except for Shush And when our world speaks to us again as we have Hoped and dreamed?

It screams.

Aijija."

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

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

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

Howling's lips twitched with a smile. "That's what comes of trafficking with monsters."

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

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

"I'd be honored, sir," the boy said, although he sounded puzzled and wary.

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

Satok landed the shuttle, loaded with barrels of Petraseal, at Savoy. His three a.s.sistant "shanachies" were still there, drinking and talking.

"Where's Luka?" Reilly asked.

"Ran off," Satok replied. "Don't worry. I'll get her back, and when I do, I'll make her sorry she was ever born. The fraggin' b.i.t.c.h stole the ore samples and put rocks in their place."

"So you didn't get to make a deal with the company?"

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

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

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

"s.h.i.+t! I hate doing that," Soyuk grumbled. "d.a.m.n caves give me the creeps."

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

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

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

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

"Not enough time. The fraggin' cave would fill with smoke and we'd never get at the ore."

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

"No, h.e.l.l, we'll hack 'em back and splash 'em with Petraseal as we go. We only need to get inside the cave."

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

"Just hack this c.r.a.p away from the front here, and it'll all be clear back where the Petraseal is, boys," Satok directed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Reilly!" he hollered. "Soyuk!"

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