Sinead gave a merry laugh. “You’ve got to be joking.”
Clodagh said, more gently, “Oh, no, dear, that’s not for the likes of us, goodness me no. Nobody here in Kilcoole has such a thing. We’re just poor ignorant ips you know, and the PTBs like it that way.”
“Ips?”
“The inconvenient people,” Aisling elaborated. “That’s who they got to colonize this place. They wanted our land on Earth, you see, and promised us a new place in exchange. Frankly, we had nothing to say about it. Evicted, we were. No one could afford to own land anymore. So we came here, as they intended.” Her eyes dropped as she finished the statement; then she turned an apologetic look to Clodagh. “Sorry. It doesn’t do to get me started. And we should be going now. We didn’t really mean to interrupt supper. We just came to see if there was anything we could do to help.” She nodded in Yana’s direction.
“Thanks,” Yana said, and Clodagh showed them to the door, Sinead darting three steps forward and two back for each measure of her partner’s statelier progress.
When they left, Clodagh pulled a bottle and some cups from the shelf over the cloth-draped cabinets along one wall and asked, “Will you be havin’ a drop with your supper, dear?”
“Pardon?”
“Clodagh’s home brew,” Bunny said. “It’s good. Gives you good dreams.”
“I don’t know. With all the medicine I’ve had lately …”
“It’ll do you good,” Clodagh said. “Has medicinal properties. You can’t get sick drunk on the stuff-just a little pleasantly blurred. You look as though you need blurring, my dear.”
“Clodagh’s the local healer, so you can trust her on that score,” Bunny told Yana.
“Just a little then,” Yana agreed. The spicy smells from the stove were making her long to put something in her mouth. If not food, then drink was not a bad alternative.
But with the drink came a heaping bowl of some sort of noodles and a red meat sauce, accompanied by hot, crusty bread. She burned her lip on the first mouthful, something she had never done with prefab ship food.
“This is delicious,” she said when she had had a few cooler bites. “What is it?”
“Moose spaghetti,” Clodagh told her.
There was another knock at the door. Bunny hopped up, slurping in a strand of spaghetti, and opened it. A rush of cold air and a parka-clad figure entered the room at the same time.
The person, a woman, pointedly did not look at Yana as she unbuttoned her coat.
“Sedna, how’s it going?” Clodagh asked her.
“Oh, fine. Just wondered if you had some mare’s butter I could have. We’re about out.”
“No problem. Say, Sedna, have you met Major Maddock yet?” Clodagh asked.
Sedna shook her blond curls and then allowed herself to look squarely at Yana, a look which told Yana that meeting her was more the point of the visit than the mare’s milk. She thought she vaguely recognized the woman from Charlie Demintieff’s send-off earlier that morning.
“Major Maddock,” Clodagh began.
“Yanaba, please, Clodagh, or just Yana,” she said.
“Yana, this is Sedna Quinn. How’s your boy’s earache, Sedna?”
“Better, Clodagh, since you made up that poultice.”
“You got time to eat?”
“Nah, I got to get back and help Im scrape that moose hide. I’ll bring you some-”
“Well, say, if you’re that busy, why don’t you take some of this moose spaghetti home for supper? That way you won’t have to fuss.”
So Sedna sat at the edge of her chair with her coat half-buttoned while Clodagh dished up a containerful of the pasta.
“So, Bunny, pretty sad about Charlie, huh?” Sedna asked.
“Yeah, too bad. I hope he’s gonna be all right. It’ll be lonesome up there, I bet. I wish they’d given us time to send him off good, make a song for him. He’ll miss the breakup latchkay and everything.”
“I’ll make a song for him, even if he won’t hear it” Clodagh said.
“Maybe you could record it or write it down and Bunny could take it in when she’s back at SpaceBase,” Yana suggested.
Sedna straightened her back, gave Yana a pitying look, and said primly, “A song has to be sung from one person to the other to be any good.”