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?"