Torkel shook his head, half denying, half agreeing. “That’s not enough for me, Shongili. What happened to us in there? It wasn’t brainwashing-not as I know it,” he added, puzzled.
“The planet was telling you how it felt about what you’ve been doing to it,” Scan said.
Torkel twitched, grimacing, seemingly unable yet to accept that explanation. “Well, I still don’t understand how you got the planet to do what it’s been doing over the past few days. Starting volcanoes, earthquakes, breaking up the rivers six weeks too soon …”
Scan shrugged. “I didn’t get it to do anything, Fiske. It planned its own defense. I’ve done nothing but see that its messages are delivered.”
“Which only you can interpret?”
Scan shook his head. “You and I had the same experience there in the cavern, Fiske. You can interpret it as well as I can, if you just stop trying to deny what you felt. You can’t deny what you personally experienced, can you? If you had rejected it as completely as you’re trying to, you’d be in the same shape as Frank Metaxos. All I did-all any of us did-was to try to protect you from your own stubborn idiocy and put the right people in the right place at the right time for Petaybee to deliver its own message. It did that in the cave.”
“And what, exactly, was the message that we both received, as you understand it?” Whittaker Fiske asked, his face full of lively curiosity rather than challenge.
“The message is that Petaybee is a living and sentient entity, Dr. Fiske,” Scan answered imperturbably. “It does not wish to have its skin blown open, its flesh dug and taken away, its substance reduced, its children hunted, harried, or removed against their will. It is pleased to have been awakened, and it is more than willing to share itself: including, I might add, some valuable processes, which can benefit you and your superiors, that you’re not even aware exist on this planet.”
“Like Clodagh’s medicines,” Yana chimed in. “I’d think the company would have a lot of use for a cough medicine that can actually heal lungs as badly damaged as mine were.”
Torkel regarded her with surprise, then turned thoughtful while his father nodded sagely.
“Not to mention that boneset stuff,” Dr. Fiske added, running his fingers across the hardened cast. “Simple things that have multiple applications and no side effects. Go on, Shongili.”
“Petaybee has been particularly distressed,” Sean said, “by the increase of traffic at the SpaceBase. The planet was able to buffer the area under SpaceBase to allow a certain amount of necessary comings and goings, but that amount has now exceeded the safety margin and must cease. Petaybee does not wish to have to feed and supply the numbers now massing in the SpaceBase, as these numbers would be a burden on its resources, especially this time of year, before the growing season.”
“It was glad to see that some of us who left here as kids have come home, at least to visit, though,” John Greene said. He and O’Shay had been wolfing down a casserole Aisling brought over earlier. “I was given a real welcome in the cave. Didn’t know it remembered me.”
“You and O’Shay have a lot to answer for, Captain,” Torkel said. “Like why you didn’t place everyone under arrest when you saw that we were being detained in the cavern.”
O’Shay shrugged. “Like the man says, Cap’n, we’re native-born. We got more sense than to interfere when a latchkay’s starting.”
“You’re natives?” Torkel stared at them. “No wonder I didn’t get the support I required.” He rounded on Sean then with a resurgence of his old belligerence. “Did you arrange that, too, Shongili?”
Sean shrugged. “You give me more credit than I deserve. The presence of Captains Greene and O’Shay is pure serendipity, Fiske. No harm’s come to you, so I don’t see that the personnel involved matters.”
“I don’t put anything past you, Shongili,” Torkel said, and striding to the door, he opened it and beckoned a guard inside. “I want one of those portable comm links from headquarters. Bring it here on the double. We’ll just check out a thing or two about the disposition of Petaybeans on this project.”