Powers That Be by Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

long wait, one of many they endured with great patience. Yana felt her own running out, complicated by a growing sense of claustrophobia in a room packed with folk she didn’t know well enough to wait equably with. She shifted her feet restlessly, wondering if she could withdraw without giving offense. Not that that was so much a problem, since she doubted anyone would notice one less body in the room except with gratitude. A more realistic concern was whether she
could
make it through this bunch to the door. And if and when she did, what would she do then, back at her cold and lonely cabin? That half hour in Sean’s company had emphasized the disadvantages of solitude. She had felt oddly alive and on the alert in his company, the first time she had felt that way since Bry.
    “Look, this might take hours,” Bunny said, and Yana glanced sharply at her. “I’ve got to tend the dogs.”
    “Could I help, so I’ll know something about their care?” Yana asked, hoping to delay the onset of bleaker hours alone.
    “Sure.” Bunny grinned, pleased at her offer. “It’s not all that hard.”
    “If you say so,” Yana said, and bundled back up in her winter gear to walk beside the team as Bunny drove it back over to the kennels at her Aunt Moira’s.
    It wasn’t hard, exactly, but it required Yana to concentrate as she followed Bunny’s example in removing the harness, checking it for wear, oiling it, and hanging it up properly, then checking the dogs’ paw pads for any cuts and applying an ointment concoction of Clodagh’s between the toes before chaining the animals up.
    “You’re lucky,” Bunny told her. “I cleaned the dog yard and put down fresh straw this morning already, so you don’t have to do that part.”
    Having shown her what to do, Bunny retrieved some prechopped chunks of fish and other meat from a barrel outside her door and went into the house. When Yana had finished the dogs, she went inside and saw that Bunny was boiling the preboned meat, mixing with it what looked like hardened bread dough and fat. She finally crumbled up some suspiciously familiar pink-and-green tablets that looked like vitamin-mineral supplements of the kind issued to company troops. While the mixture heated, Bunny thawed snow on the back of the stove. Once it was melted, she and Yana used the same container to water each of the dogs in turn. By then the mixture was cooked to Bunny’s liking, and they distributed it to the hungry animals.
    Some of the dogs picked at their food like company diplomats at a high-level formal dinner; others wolfed it down with great gusto, growling over it, their jaws snapping as they ate.
    “They—uh—seem to enjoy their food,” Yana observed as the dog nearest her savagely gulped down his carefully prepared meal as if it were a bear, just-killed.
    Bunny shrugged, grinning at the vagaries of her charges. “They do, right enough. And if one doesn’t get it down fast, another’ll try to snag it. That’s one reason we chain them apart. Cuts down on meal fights.”
    “That cat of Clodagh’s that followed me home seemed to want to eat the fish Seamus gave me frozen solid,” Yana said.
    “Nah! He might bat it around a little and gnaw at the edges, but he’ll wait for it to thaw, or better yet, for you to cook it for him.”
    “The same way you cook for the dogs?”
    “Of course not. The same way you cook for yourself.”
    “I don’t,” Yana admitted. “I’m ship-bred, you know. Food supplements and healthful nutrient bars for rations. Occasionally we get something else, but only the crew members assigned to cook for special functions learn to cook. So, how would
you
cook it to feed yourself and, uh, guests?”
    Bunny grinned at the folly of the people who ran her world but didn’t know how to feed themselves, then patted Yana on the hand and said, “Don’t worry. It’s not hard. I just stew it with a handful of my aunt’s herbs and it makes right good eating.”
    Yana thought