Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [39]
After genuflecting six or seven times, Sister Igneous Rock threw her outstretched arms into the air and cried, “Speak to us, O Beneficence . . .”
All they got was an echo, not of the last word, but of the O. It sounded like, “No, no, no . . .”
“Tell us what you would have us do! How can we dedicate our miserable lives to your service? How can we redeem the error of humankind to your greater glory? How can we demonstrate that, though unworthy, we are more than willing to do your bidding? How can we convince you to show us your will?”
“How?” echoed the others. “Tell us how.”
Clodagh sighed. They could start by shutting up. Even if it had something to say today, which it apparently didn’t, not even the planet could get a word in edgewise the way these folks carried on.
After a time, they did stop babbling. Clodagh had half fallen asleep by then.
Lazily, she roused herself. “You all done now?”
But just then, Brother Schist collapsed back down to his knees and yelled, “Halleluja! I just heard voices!”
“What? Where? Why should it talk to you and not to the rest of us? What did it reveal to you?” cried Sister Agate.
“It said, ‘Fraggitall, these things have thorns.’ ”
“Uh huh,” Clodagh said, and stepped over them to the cave’s entrance, sliding between the waterfall and the cliff face.
Portia Porter-Pendergrass and Bill Guthrie were tangling themselves to shreds in coo-brambles.
Clodagh took her spray-mist bottle from her apron pocket, spritzed her way to them, and tried to help.
“Get away from me!” Portia shrieked. “Guthrie, what kind of a man are you? Make this—this witch—let go of me!”
“I thought you came to talk to me,” Clodagh said, genuinely puzzled. “Sean said you folks wanted to.”
“Pay no attention to her, Dama,” Bill Guthrie said. “She’s hysterical. She became addicted to one of her company’s own tranquilizers—sad case, really. I wanted to talk to you about the pharmaceutical potential of some of the materia medica you have discovered on your charming planet, but Portia thought we should just begin taking samples. Unfortunately, the samples seem to have taken us.”
“Sure looks that way,” Clodagh said. “Dama, if you just stand up and pick off the ones stuck to your clothes, I think you’re free now. It’s startin’ to snow anyway. Coo-brambles shrink when it snows. Come on over to the spring and let’s wash and treat those scratches. You got some pretty deep ones.”
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 okay 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 began as pitifully as she could.
But she got no further, for Sister Agate threw herself between the two coo-bramble 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