Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [40]
“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 snarled.
“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 favored . . .”
“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 added, nodding to Portia and Bill, “you can have any medicine you need and welcome to it.”
“They’ll Analyze 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 learned 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, as if she were 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 coo-brambles 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, neither.”
“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
Gal Three repair bay
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