He would have preferred to play with his coin collection or dissect a roundworm before bedtime, but Grandmother Fiske, who, he supposed, was responsible for the weird streak in his father, was a great believer in the twentieth century philosopher Joseph Campbell. She thought that children needed myths and fairy tales to inform their lives. She had never understood him, Grandma Fiske. Torkel was an explorer, a womanizer and a developer precisely because he loathed mysteries. He liked everything well explained.
And now he and Satok both would have some explaining to do if they were going to convince the company commission that Petaybee contained secrets valuable enough for them to make the necessary investments to civilize and control the planet. At the moment, all he had to show was one green hunk of copper-bearing rock and one small gold nugget that had rolled out of the crates into a dark corner.
“That was a good trick,” he told the stillfuming Satok. “I don’t know how you treated these rocks to make them appear to be the ores I thought they were, but in this state they’ll never convince the commission.” He knew as well as Satok that the ores had been replaced by Luka and those Kilcoole women, if not by a conspiracy of the whole village of Shannonmouth, but he wanted to force Satok to reveal more. As long as the man kept his secrets to himself, they were of no use to Torkel or the company. “There’s more where those came from!” Satok growled.
“And where, exactly, is that? McGee’s Pass?” The man had said he was shanachie there, so Torkel’s guess wasn’t that wild. Space probes had shown some ores in that general area.
But Satok shook his head. “Nah, that vein’s played out for now. But I got other sources. Only thing is, and the reason I decided to cut the company in, I need supplies. For my method.”
“Like what?”
Satok grinned for the first time since they’d discovered Luka’s treachery. “That’s right, Cap’n. When I tell you what I use, you think you’re gonna have some ideas about my method. And you will have. Only thing is, it’s somethin’ you’ve been using all along. What I need the most is Petraseal. You get some of these boys to load up the shuttle with Petraseal, and I’ll get you some more ore samples within a couple of days.”
“I go with you and you show me,” Torkel said, negotiating, “and I’ll get you all the Petraseal you want.”
But the hairy bastard had the gall to shake his head. “No way. Not till I have a contract with the company patenting my methods and with full claim to my sites.”
“You can’t get that without proof,” Torkel said.
“Well, without my help, man, you can’t get samples of ores you need for proof the planet’s worth something to Intergal, so I guess if you don’t get me my supplies, we’re both out of luck.”
“All right,” Torkel said on a long exasperated sigh. “I’ll release you the Petraseal. But go get those samples ASAP, okay? I’m not sure how long the commission is going to take to come to their conclusions.”
“Then have your boys start loadin’ my shuttle. Oh, and fill ‘er up while you’re at it, will you?”
Torkel agreed, still seeming reluctant for the sake of verisimilitude. Actually, he would go along whether Satok agreed or not. He could easily plant a bug and track the man to his mine. He could even invite the commission along to see the results of the new mining operation first-hand, and learn something of Satok’s secret process while they were at it.
Birdssongbirds, ravens, ducks, geese, hawks, and heronsbrought them, as did relays of rabbits, foxes, wolves, feral cats, tame cats, track-cats, bears, and squirrels. Each bird, each animal, carried in its mouth a cutting, a root, a shoot, of coo-berry bramble. The birds flew directly to the farthest points, to Dead Horse, Savoy, Wellington, Portage, Mirror Lake, Harrison’s Fjord, and McGee’s Pass. Following the cats’ directions, they dropped the shoots near the planet’s portals, the places where humankind could commune with Petaybee. The largest deliveries went to the places where the planet was at its most open and vulnerable, and could be most easily looted. All of these places were caves, and around the entrance of each cave and on the ground above the entrance, and all along the length of the cave, the shoots and roots and cuttings were dropped by birds and buried by the other animals, the badgers, the squirrels, the rabbits, and the foxes. Every quarter of an hour or so for two days, fresh bits of coo-berry bush arrived, supplied by the tireless efforts of Clodagh, Whittaker Fiske, and assistants from the town and the surrounding forests and tundra’s of Kilcoole.