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  Goat-dung knew that she was evil, willful, spiteful, malicious, and would someday, if she didn’t mend her wicked ways, be prey for the creature from the bowels of the planet. She had been told so often enough, as the welts from the Instrument of Goodness impressed the lessons on her backside.

  For her crimes, she usually got the hardest, dirtiest work to do of any girls her age; but when the warming came, melting the ice falls on the sides of the cliffs and turning the floor of the Vale into a great lake, the rest of the community joined her in scrabbling up the sides of the Vale to higher ground, carrying with them the teachings of the Shepherd Howling and all of his sacred implements, plus what food, clothing, and housing materials they could salvage. All of the greenhouse gardens were lost and many of the animals had drowned.

  For days the waters rose up the icy walls of the Vale, creating slush and even mud underfoot and also a steaming mist that made it impossible to see. Goat-dung and the other children, packs strapped to their backs, climbed the walls of the canyon and carried dripping parcels to the adults, then splashed back down in the bright cold water to try to retrieve other articles.

  Bad as she was, even Goat-dung was so used to obeying the will of the community, the will of the Shepherd Howling, that she failed to see the possibilities for escape in the situation.

  She’d just climbed up again after falling three times back into the water. Shivering with cold, muddy, scraped and bruised, half-naked, she huddled by the fire and ate the bowl of thin soup she had at last been permitted to ladle out for herself. The soup was mostly cold, and the fire, a pitiful stinking thing of still-damp animal dung, was nothing but a slightly sultry draft that failed to chase the ache and chill. It didn’t banish the goose bumps, never mind the frigidity in her bones.

  For once, no one else was better off than she, however. The one hundred or so followers of the Shepherd huddled along the rim of the steaming Vale of Tears, their lives and homes inundated by the Great Flood the Shepherd claimed had been sent to try them.

  “The monster seeks to subjugate us to its will in this fashion,” the Shepherd said over and over again. “We shall not succumb. When the waters subside, we’ll return to our Vale and continue to defy that which would corrupt us.”

  The Shepherd, instead of staying within his offices and superior quarters, was now among the flock organizing, counseling, exhorting—and observing. Feeling the disapproving eyes of the rest of the flock on her was bad enough, but twice Goat-dung looked up from her misery to see the Shepherd himself watching her, and his regard made her colder than the waters in the Vale.

  She rested from her last climb, as the short day drew to a close and the mists from the Vale crept up over the edge of the encampment. She heard soft footsteps approach and Concepcion, her belly as flat as it had been before the Shepherd married her and her name was still Swill, squatted beside her.

  “Good news, little sister,” she said.

  Goat-dung said nothing. Until she knew what Concepcion wanted, silence was safest.

  The other girl, a bare four years older than Goat-dung, held forth a piece of metal. “You’ve been chosen,” she said simply, and rose to go.

  Goat-dung stared at the piece in her hand. It was cut into the shape of a heart. The Shepherd had chosen her to be his wife.

  “What? When?” she called after Concepcion.

  “Tonight,” the older girl called back and was lost in the mist

  And that was when she did the worst thing she had ever done in all of her wicked days. She ran.

  The mist covered her trail and the slush muffled the sound of her steps. She ran as hard and as long as her exhausted, undernourished body could. She had no idea where she was going. She had known no other people but her own, though sometimes the Shepherd made allusions to others, outsiders, those who had fallen into error. They were horrible people, the Shepherd said, who would sacrifice girls like her to the Great Monster.

  Better that than be a dutiful wife to the Shepherd, like Swill-Concepcion and Nightsoil, now known as Assumpta. Wives of the Shepherd, though they were no older than children, were given adult names, usually related to the Teaching.

  Assumpta, once a rosy-checked, titian-haired angel of a girl, full of childish agility and grace, was now old at thirteen. She had lost four children to a bleeding disease and had been beaten after losing each one. She no longer walked very well.

  Concepcion, on the other hand, was still barren at fifteen, and she was beaten for that, as well. Their own mother, Ascencion, was another of the wives, and supervised the beatings herself.

  Goat-dung’s mother had also been the Shepherd’s wife, although Goat-dung was not one of his own lambs. One reason she was so wicked, the others told her, was that her parents had been outsiders. She had been too small when her mother died to realize it, but it was said that her mother had been an extremely unrepentant outsider who had not wanted to be the Shepherd’s wife and had been prevailed upon to accept the blessings of union with him only through the firm kindliness of the flock. No one among them had met Goat-dung’s father, who had died in ignorance and error and slavery to the Great Monster.

  Goat-dung ran and ran, splashing through slush, hot with her effort as long as light remained in the sky, then ran to keep from freezing as the night swallowed the planet. The moons came up and she stumbled on by their light. She ran on and on, down and down, as if into another Vale. Looking back, by the moonlight, she saw the peaks of the mountains behind and above her: the monster’s back, its snout, its teeth.

  She dragged herself farther. Down here the slush gave way to mud in places, and a stream ribboning down the mountain steamed just as the water in the valley floor did. As she drew near it, it gave forth warmth, and when she touched it, it was as hot as if it had been heated in a pan and only cooled slightly.

  She eased her way into it. It was deeper than it looked and had quite a current. It buffeted her along, lapping her with warmth, until it ran into a kind of tunnel, carrying her with it.

  She was too tired, too full of lassitude from the water, to avoid being swept into the side of the mountain, and remembered, just before she hit her head on a rock and all became blackness, that the Shepherd taught that this was the very sort of place never to be caught.

  2

  “Well?” Bunny Rourke asked breathlessly as the elders and the company friends of the Petaybeans filed out of the building. She handed the reins of the curlies to each rider. “How’d it go?”

  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 villa
ge, 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, but 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.”

  “Well, sounds to me like we need to do a little campaigning,” Yana said.

  “We will make them songs so they understand,” Clodagh said.

  “Cool,” Diego said. “Just like the old radical songs from Earth. Ah, if only I had a guitar.”

  “What’s that?” Bunny asked.

  “A musical instrument All of the old protest singers had them. There’s some wonderful mining songs in the memory banks back—back at my old place.”

  “I wish you had one then,” Bunny said loyally.

  “Me, too. Except I don’t know how to play.”

  “I bet you could learn,” Bunny told him. “You make better songs than some people who’ve made them all their lives.”

  “Bunka,” Clodagh said sharply. “Each song is a good song if it says what the singer means it to say.”

  “Course it is, Clodagh. I know that. But Diego’s sound better. He says what he means to say so everybody can understand it. That’s all I meant.”

  Clodagh smiled, a slightly bawdy smile, with a wink to Sean and Yana. “That’s all right then, alannah. He does make good songs.”

  In the short distance to Clodagh’s house, they discussed the finer points of what needed to be said to the villages, both those which dissented and those which Clodagh felt sure could be counted upon to support the planet.

  When they reached Clodagh’s, what seemed to be the entire village was waiting outside in her yard. Yana found, looking at the yard, that she missed the snow. The village looked like a garbage dump, with its stores of winter p
rovisions half-thawed in the snow, the trash that had been buried, the salvaged equipment lying around the yard, all of the items that had been lost throughout the long winter. Not to mention the leavings of the various dogs and cats and horses housed in the village. Also, without the snow, the roofs of the houses looked patchy, the siding worn despite its gay pastel colors. And everything and everyone was smeared and splattered with mud.

  This dreary aspect didn’t seem to lessen their regard for each other in the slightest, however, and the villagers crowded as cheerfully as ever into Clodagh’s tiny house and began discussing what was to be done.

  “We need to have another latchkay,” Eamon Intiak said. “We should have one and invite the people who don’t understand. Petaybee would speak to them and then they’d know.”

  “You’d think they’d know already by now,” Sinead Shongili said.

  “Now, Sinead,” her partner Aisling said reasonably, “such things take some folks longer. Their worries about the everyday things in their lives get in the way of understanding what’s here.”

  “We’ll each go away and think about these things and make songs,” Clodagh said. “Then we’ll go talk to the other people. Sinead, you and Sean and the Maloneys must go the farthest because you’re the best travelers. I would like to send Frank with you, Sinead, and young Diego with Liam. Yana, you go with Sean. We need you people who know about the company to make talk with the neighbors who are taken in by the promises, too.”

  With that, everyone began to leave. Yana was ready to leave, too. She was tired. She wanted to rest and eat and bathe in the hot springs and make love to Sean, not necessarily in that order. But Sean laid a restraining hand on her arm and lingered a moment.