Power Lines
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Скарборо Элизабет
- Серия: Petaybee #2
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Power Lines». Краткое содержание книги:
Only solid evidence would convince the company to leave the planet alone, and for all its sentience, Petaybee's communications were highly subjective; indeed, some outsiders seemed entirely immune to its voice. So Yana and her friends would have to find some other way to prove that the planet was worth more to the company alive than dead...
Clodagh shrugged. "Like usual. They pretended we weren't there, and if we were, that we'd nothin' sensible to say. They're sendin' down more investigators."
Yana sighed. She'd known it wouldn't be easy, but something else was disturbing her. As they rode back through the woods to Kilcoole, she asked, "I don't get it. Torkel was with us. He felt the planet, too. He knows about it. If he had really rejected it, he'd be like Frank Metaxos was."
"Denial," Diego said, drawing on his own counseling experience. "He knows, okay, he just can't stand to admit it. He's not a complete creep, after all. You and he used to be friends, didn't you, Yana?"
"Friendly, at least," Yana said. "Or I thought so. But he's been so unreasonable…"
"Maybe irrational's a better word," Sean said. "He might not have had the reaction Frank did, but it strikes me that Fiske isn't sledding on both runners anymore, if he ever was. Maybe his unwilling contact with the planet has done him more harm than shows on the surface."
"At least it's that lady coming to investigate," Moira Rourke said with some relief.
"Yes, but I don't like the look of that bald fella," Clodagh said.
"Nor do I," Yana agreed. "At the risk of sounding like the conspirator Torkel thinks me to be, I suggest that all of you avoid any direct contact with Luzon and save your explanations strictly for Madame Marmion. He is known to… twist… anything he's told."
As they neared the village, they were met by a pride of cats, all of them striped bright rusty orange and all of them meowing and purring and twining dangerously around the large snowshoe-sized hooves of the shaggy, curly-coated horses.
"What a welcoming committee!" Yana said as Marduk, or at least she assumed it was he, hopped up behind her and rubbed his head against her back briefly before hopping down again. "Did you call them, Clodagh?"
Clodagh shook her head. "No, but I was worried, before we left, about how committed the other villages were to the planet. So far the PTBs have only questioned us, but I figured they'd get around to asking some of the others sometime soon. These little ones scattered as soon as we left, and here they are back again." She tilted her head as she looked down at the cats.
"What's got 'em so antsy?" Bunny asked.
Clodagh reined her curly-coat to a halt. Immediately the cats converged on her, stropping the legs of the pony, who regarded this activity with mild surprise and didn't so much as twitch a muscle.
"You'll get muddy doing that," she told the cats, since the pony was coated up to and including his belly with good Petaybean wet earth. With a groan, she heaved one leg over the saddle and dismounted, ignoring the fact that her skirts immediately became as dirty as the pony's legs. "Now, what's all this?" she asked, hands on her hips, looking from one upturned cat face to the next.
Clodagh's special relationship with her cats was known-or at least suspected-by everyone in Kilcoole. So the other villagers, except for Sean, Bunny, and Yana, rode politely around the cats and pretended not to notice anything more than a woman being greeted by overly fond pets.
Frank Metaxos, in whose healing process the cats had had a rather unusual role, remained behind, too, along with his son Diego. The two were returning to Kilcoole without Frank's partner, Steve Margolies, who, still on the company's payroll, had stayed on at SpaceBase.
Both cats and Clodagh waited for the rest of the village to parade past before the mewing and chirruping began.
Ordinarily the cats would have sat down to impart what was evidently a long story, but the mud offended their dignity. So they prowled around her, twitching their tails high, as they communicated their messages. The humans waited patiently.
Sparks of uncharacteristic anger flickered in Clodagh's eyes as she looked up at Sean and Yana "We got all kinds of trouble now." She gave a disgusted snort. "Seems like some villages want Intergal to come down and mine, while the mining's good and they can get paid for working."
Sean frowned and Yana told her heart to stop racing. "How many dissidents? she asked.
"Four towns that the cats know of." Clodagh's usually merry face was solemn.
"Which ones?"
"Deadhorse, McGee's Pass, Wellington, and Savoy."
Sean let out a burst of sour laughter. That figures." Clodagh had named villages which in recent years spurned contact with the others. He sighed deeply. "Have the cats any good news?"
"Yes, out the bad news is they haven't had a chance to check everyone out. If four villages oppose us…"
"How many more might be disaffected and looking to please Intergal for the sake of wampum? Sean asked.
"So, the good news? Yana prompted with a sigh.
"Well, we do have at least twelve communities behind us solid. Tanana Bay, Shannonmouth, New Barrow, Twin Moon Village, Little Dublin, Oslo Inlet, Harrison's Fjord, Kabul, Bogota, Machu Picchu, Kathmandu, and Sierra Padre."
"Most of the closest ones," Sinead said, looking encouraged.
"And the ones," Clodagh went on with a pessimistic expression, "that have the most Petaybean boys and girls in company service."
"What bothers you about that?" Yana asked. "Wouldn't they be on their folks' side in this?"
"Might be, if they weren't required to lean on their folks to do what the company asks," Clodagh said gloomily.
"Oh!" Yana sighed Dirty tricks department Farringer Ball and Matthew Luzon would pull every one they needed out of storage to see that their interpretation became the official one. "Could you be wrong about which side of the blanket the Petaybean troops would fall on? The pilots, O'Shay and Greene in particular, gave us some support during the volcanic crisis."
Clodagh shrugged her broad shoulders. "You can always be wrong about anything. Sure, I think a lot of them would feel loyalty for us and for the planet. But they've been out there"-she nodded toward the heavens-"for a long time. They're used to the kind of stuff you're used to. Some of 'em have prob'ly forgot how to cook, too, like you, and how to hunt. How to take care of themselves. And if the company decided to punish them and us by dumping them here and pulling out support, well, that'd be pretty hard on them, pretty hard on us, and pretty hard on the planet. I figure if all the Petaybee troops still working for Intergal got sent back here, it'd triple our population. At the least! I don't know how many kids those troops have had. Course they'd be welcome and the planet would provide, but it might be as hard on it as some kinds of mining operations."
Frank cleared his throat. The ecosystem in these icy regions is quite fragile."
"You know it and I know it, but Intergal seems oblivious to the fact," Sean said.
"Are those villages one hundred percent in favor of selling out? Yana asked.
Clodagh smiled patiently. "Now, Yana. You've been around the universe a few times. When did you ever meet any group of people who were one hundred percent in favor of anything?"
"Exactly. So presumably there are some people there who aren't in favor of the mining. And probably, in the remaining villages, a few who are. I think we need to know who's fer us and who's agin us, as they say in the Wild West vids, and maybe try to convert some of the unaffiliated. I thought everybody had the relationship with the planet you do."
Clodagh shook her head. "Not everybody wants to. Those who have enough respect to follow the rules and live wisely survive better though, so even if they don't acknowledge the presence of the planet, they get by as long as they keep out of the special places. The others, the foolish ones, don't live so well or so long. Those people would much rather try to please the bosses than forces they don't want to understand Fortunately though, around here there's not much to do except pay attention, so the planet gets through to most folks."