The easiest place to give the distraught Portia and Guthrie a dry bramble-free place to sit while washing and treating their wounds was the inside of the cave. The 'rock flock', as Clodagh was beginning to think of the white-robed pilgrims, eagerly assisted in 'ministering' as they called it.
‘What did you want samples of anyway?' Clodagh asked Portia Porter-Pendergrass, just to distract her from screeching in the ear of her rescuers whenever Clodagh daubed a little sting-bush leaf on a scratch.
‘That stuff you're putting on me now, for starters,' she said. Her face and hands were a mess and one thorn had narrowly missed her left eye. Clodagh felt bad for her.
‘That's OK then, alannah,' she said as if to a child, being as gentle as she could with a very deep scratch on the leg. 'You can have the rest of this when we're done here. You'll need it anyway to make those scratches go away.’
‘How about me?' Bill Guthrie asked plaintively.
‘You too,' Clodagh said, patting his knee. 'Just be brave and hold on till I'm finished here and I'll gather some more for you to take home.’
‘And that cough medicine you gave Yanaba Maddock?' Portia asked.
‘Why? You got a cough?’
‘Oh yes,' she said, giving a forced hack.
‘Me too,' Bill Guthrie said.
‘That stuff you sprayed on the bushes,' Portia said as pitifully as she could.
But before Bill Guthrie could chime in again, Sister Agate threw herself between the two coobramble victims and Clodagh.
‘Do not harken to the false words of these infidels, Mother Clodagh…’
‘I told you, I'm not your mother…’
‘Clodagh, she's right,' Brother Shale said, taking her shoulders and attempting to pull her away from the pharmaceutical reps. 'These people are out only to exploit the Beneficence. They want to strip it of its miracles and synthesize its wonders for base motives of pecuniary profit.’
‘They'll desecrate the Beneficence,' Sister Igneous Rock howled.
‘Be quiet,' Clodagh said.
‘You mustn't…' Sister Agate began.
‘They're crazy…' Bill Guthrie said, shaking off Brother Shale.
But both were drowned out by a booming echo of Clodagh's voice, rebounding through the cave. 'QUIET! QUIET! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Et! Et! Et. Et…’
‘It spoke!' Sister Igneous Rock whispered, clasping her heart.
‘That was an echo, you idiot!' Portia Porter-Pendergrass said with a snarl.
‘QUIET, IDIOT!' the echo said just once. And this time nobody spoke.
Finally, Clodagh said, 'You people quit fighting and stop being so silly. You lot,' she nodded at the rock flock,' the planet isn't a Creator any more than any of you. It's part of creation. The powers that be at Intergal even helped make it how it is now, though they only woke it up, they didn't create its life.’
‘But how do you know, Clodagh,' Brother Agate asked. 'You are but a mere mortal, though favoured…
‘I know 'cause the planet told me so, of course,' she said. 'And if you want it to tell you anything, you're gonna have to get rid of some of your funny ideas long enough to make room for what it's got to say. As for you folks,' she nodded to Portia and Bill, 'you can have any medicine you need and welcome to it.’
‘They'll Analyse it,' Sister Agate moaned.
‘They'll Synthesize it,' Brother Shale groaned.
‘So?' Clodagh asked. 'If there's sick folks needing medicine and they can make up stuff like we got here to cure them, that's a good thing.’
‘You don't understand!' Sister Igneous Rock wailed. 'We've seen it happen before on other worlds! Our own worlds! We even aided in the desecration, may the Beneficence forgive us, before we realized what we had wrought and saw the light. Brother Shale was a geologist for the intergalactic energy rapists and I myself engineered plants with which they could steal the treasures of other worlds. Even when I learnt there were Better Ways I could not convince my masters. They want only to destroy. Oh, believe me, Clodagh, for I have seen how they work. We have all seen it.
They'll build factories here and pollute the waters, clog the voice of the Bene - the planet, they'll strip it bare of its healing plants and minerals!’
‘It'd just be a small factory,' Bill Guthrie said, holding up his thumb and forefinger with an inch spread between them to show how small the factory would be.
‘And if we took all of the mature plants, well, they're plants, they'll grow back, right? We call it a renewable resource, Clodagh,' Portia said like she was talking to someone dumb enough to go out in midwinter without a coat on. 'It's a growing thing.’
‘So's your skin,' Clodagh said, shaking her head. 'But if the coobrambles stripped it all off you, it wouldn't grow back - at least not fast enough to keep you alive. Petaybee's just like you. You take off its skin and it'll be back to what it was - not dead maybe, but not awake either.’
‘But, don't you see, there are real lives, human lives, being wasted for want of the cures Petaybee has to offer. You owe it to them…' As if in support of that argument, the cave began to echo with the cry, 'Help! Help, please! Somebody help us.’
10
Bunny tried to get the ship's computer to sound an alert while Diego attempted to persuade the hatch to reopen. His bracelet didn't do the job, nor did any amount of trying different button combinations on the pad located beneath a smooth metal panel. Finally, something clicked, he wasn't sure what, and the panel irised open. He heard footsteps in the corridor and looked to see where they were coming from.
‘Bunny, quick, we've got to hide!' he said. 'The white suits are coming back. They're carrying things. More bodies it looks like.’
‘Can we run for it?’
‘You can't outrun a laser.’
‘Diego, they've all got pressure suits on. If they open the outer hatch while we're here, we're goners.’
‘That, too, although with them carrying stuff, they aren't likely to have free hands to pull the lasers on us.’
‘Come on, Diego. If we stand here arguing about it, we're goners for sure.’
‘They're too close!' he said. He saw them clearly now, the white-suited figures, carrying two women -Yana and Marmie! One of the figures, a tall man, wore the helmet but no white suit. Diego was pretty sure he hadn't been with them earlier.
‘Let's go,' she said, and pushed him out the door.
They were halfway down the corridor when a cloud of sweet-smelling pink gas overtook them.
Yana awoke coughing so hard she thought for a moment her life of the last few months had been a dream and she was still in the infirmary following the Bremport massacre. She had a sickly sweet taste in her mouth and a constriction about her chest, which she found, when she stopped coughing, was caused by another body lying across her. She reached out and her hand was full of face - smooth, unlined face and a tangle of hair.
A chorus of coughing, not as violent as her own, erupted all around her and then Bunny's voice grumbled in a sleepy-headed childish tone, 'Ouch, your finger's in my eye.’
‘Sorry,' Yana muttered and Bunny wriggled away, provoking another'sorry' from whomever she rolled into in giving Yana more space: Diego, in fact.
‘Sorry, Diego,' Bunny said. 'It's a little crowded in here.’
‘Yana,' Marmion's voice was faintly slurred, and she too began coughing, but daintily. 'Was that party of Ples's much better than I thought it was?’