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.