The Companions (50 page)

He'd made a subtle emphasis on the word
almost
. I thought of the dognose I'd been given when I was sixteen. In the light of everything I'd seen here, it, too, had probably been Zhaar-modified. “And if not enough matrix was used?” It came out sounding almost as casual as I'd intended it to.

“You end up with a hybrid. The Simusi kill any of those they find, unless they can use them for something. The Orskimi use a lot of Zhaar tech, not to change themselves,
though. They use it to change other creatures they can use as symbiotes.”

“The Orskimi are trying to wipe out the human worlds.”

He snorted. “The Simusi would approve of that.”

We were strolling along a path through light-dappled woodlands. On any other occasion, I'd have enjoyed such a walk. The day was warm, the air was sweet with slightly resinous odors; to either side I could see Simusi moving about, singly or in small groups, and they were gorgeous to look at. Graceful, gleaming, regal. Four very young pups were playing in a clearing. They were still a little wobbly on their legs, and they were being supervised by a human with a collar.

“Baby-sitter?” I asked.

Oskar glanced that way. “More like nanny. It's one way for us to gain a better life here. If the pups grow attached to their nanny, they'll be less likely to dispose of her, or him, over some small failing later on.” His steps had slowed somewhat, and he was limping more heavily than before.

“How far are we going?” I said, glancing at his legs.

He grimaced. “A couple of miles. Don't worry about me. I'll make it.”

We fell silent. I was still trying to correlate everything I knew or had heard about the Simusi. “If the Simusi would approve of wiping out the human race, out there in normal space, and if we're all nonbreeders here in Splendor, what will the Simusi do for nannies and kennel-keepers when we're gone?”

He stopped, staring at the sky, his mouth twisted with anger or pain. “I don't know. The matter has never come up!” Angrily, he jerked me off-balance with the leash and stumped along with me running to keep up.

I gave him a while to settle down. “What's their real objection to us, aside from our being vermin?”

“We're not much worse than most other creatures. It's just that with Simusi, you're either more powerful, like the Phain or the Yizzang, or you're nothing. There's no category in be
tween.” He chewed his lips for a moment, thinking. “The Simusi do hate humans particularly, though.”

“Why?”

“Because humans have dogs as…pets. Dogs share the holy shape. That makes humans guilty of blasphemy.”

“Do you speak Simusi?” I asked.

He laughed. “No. I'm not a noser. The Simusi have odor-generating cells in their mouths and throats. They exhale their messages, except for the few bark-name words they use with us and the Gixit and the other creatures…”

“Who are also slaves?”

“Not the Gixit, no. They lived on some world that was damaged by humans, and only a few of them survived. They were brought here by the Phain to be safe, and a few of them seem to like being with the Simusi. It's the Phain who object to us most. If we all went to a sterile moon and drilled it out like an ant nest and populated the entire moon with human beings to the depth of miles, they wouldn't care. It's the terraforming they hate, because it involves killing the native plants and animals.”

“I wonder if this is where Moss got its odor language from,” I mused. “Through the spacial interface with the Simusi world.”

“An odor language outside? Really!” He became animated. “That's interesting! I didn't know there were odor languages anywhere else…”

“There are odor languages on Earth,” I said. “Or were. Toward the end of the twentieth century, scientists discovered that plants communicate with one another, and with other living things, through the exchange of odor molecules. If one plant gets eaten by a beetle, it sends a signal into the air, and similar plants downwind accelerate the manufacture of their natural insecticide. One plant gets invaded by a fungus, the ones around it increase production of fungicide.”

“Rather primitive,” he said.

“Nonetheless, it worked. A transmission and a response
constitute a language, at least so my brother says. It's probably the way the odor language on Moss got started.”

Either he could think of nothing else to say, or he was feeling too much pain to talk. His face was set in grim determination, and the farther we went, the more he limped. We came to the dike he'd mentioned, a heavily overgrown wall of stone that stretched across our trail as far as I could see on either side.

“Simusi territory on this side of the wall,” Oskar said. “Guardian territory on the other.”

Only a narrow defile led through the dike. Once we were past it, the woods thinned and gave way to grasslands. Oskar was dragging his leg by the time we came to a stretch of meadow that was being grazed by some large, six-legged, blue-skinned herbivores. The herd was between us and a structure across the grassland.

“Your friend is here, temporarily,” Oskar said.

“Gavi?”

“Not the woman. The Simusi took her…”

“Took Gavi?” I cried.

“I don't know who the woman was. But this one is a man. Says he's your husband, from Earth.”

I stopped short. “Oskar. Please. I'd rather be somewhere else…”

He looked me in the eye, really looked, then said sympathetically, “No, you wouldn't. If you don't want to have anything to do with him, then don't, but you don't want to pass up this chance. This is a Phain farm, you speak a little Phain-ildar, and the Sannasee has picked you from among the new ones. The Phain have first choice, you see, and the Simusi don't interfere with the Phain. They don't hunt here, because the Phain forbid it. This is the safest place you could be right now.”

The idea of meeting Witt again was depressing, but I couldn't argue about the rest of it. We moved across the meadow, keeping well clear of the big, blue-skinned creatures. I had seen them before, on Tsaliphor, but only at a dis
tance. As we came nearer to the building, Oskar stopped and drew in a shuddering breath. I followed his eyes and saw a pair of P'narg headed in our direction. Oskar's fingers grew lax on the leash. His face was ashen. I pulled the leash from his fingers and moved toward the P'narg. When I was within hearing distance, I bowed, and said in Phain-ildar, as I had said on Tsaliphor, “I greet you and wish you well.”

The P'narg snuffled between themselves, then turned and shuffled toward a patch of woods at the top of a low hill. I turned, catching a glimpse of a Phaina standing in the door of a long, ramified structure. When I returned to Oskar and handed him my leash, he was still very pale.

“They're not supposed to be out loose,” he rasped.

“When I knew them on Tsaliphor, they were always out loose.”

“That's a Phain planet.”

“I lived there for almost a year.”

“And those things walked around loose?”

“They lived there,” I said. “It was their home. I imagine this is also their home. The Phain don't cage animals.”

“Maybe not, but when we're coming or going, they're supposed to get the dangerous ones out of our way, so we don't get killed. What did you say to them?”

“I just greeted them, that's all.”

Now he looked angry, and I decided it wasn't the time to go into a discussion of whether or not the P'narg were dangerous or whether talking to them was inappropriate. He obviously thought so in both cases, and he was unlikely to be convinced otherwise. Besides, I had no real way of knowing that the P'narg wouldn't eat him. They might, for all I knew.

Oskar indicated the sprawling structure we were approaching. “That's the Guardian House.”

We veered around one end of the building to enter a long, low annex at the back, going through a refectory with tables and chairs to a dormitory with rows of cots and storage units for clothes. Witt sat expectantly on one of the cots, obviously waiting for me. I gritted my teeth, introduced him to
Oskar, and left the two of them talking to one another while I looked around.

Behind the dormitory were the doors to sanitary areas with toilets and showers, one for women, one for men. All in all, a considerable improvement over the kennel.

When I heard a third voice speaking, and then Oskar, saying, “She does not!” I returned to the dormitory. Oskar was very pale and obviously upset, staring after a man headed out the door.

Witt said, “The Phaina sent someone to tell you she wants you to work in the garden here. The house garden. And she says, you already know what to do.”

Oskar challenged this angrily. “How could you possibly? I always have to tell the new ones what to do!”

I summoned up my Paul-soothing voice. “I worked on a garden on Tsaliphor. This Phaina may know of that, may actually have seen me there. I'm not an expert on Phain gardens, by any means, so what she probably means is that I can do the weeding without supervision.”

Oskar took a deep breath, lips twisted in…what? Defeat? Discouragement? “Oh, well, possibly that's it. Yes. Well then. If you don't need me for anything…”

Then I caught on. The poor man wanted to stay here, at least for a while. He needed an excuse to rest somewhere before attempting the long walk back.

“Please, stay,” I begged. “There will be other things I need to know before you leave.”

He demurred without conviction, and I insisted. In the end, he lay down on one of the cots and promptly fell asleep.

I stretched out on another cot with every intention of resting, but Witt ignored the pillow I placed over my eyes and recited a long litany of complaint, ending with, “He said the P'narg were out. They're not supposed to be out when we're around. They eat us.”

If I had hoped for a change in Witt, I was disappointed. He was still aggrieved and at a loss for a remedy, stuck where he
had been for the last twelve years, I supposed. Rather than make me feel sympathetic, his whining annoyed me.

“They may well eat you,” I said in a voice that sounded aggressive, even to me. “They won't eat me.” I wasn't at all sure they wouldn't, but the P'narg, once greeted, hadn't made a move toward me, and I thought it very unlikely they ever would. Witt gave me a hurt look and went away. I didn't see him again until evening, when the dormitory filled up with workers, most of them able to communicate in common speech and a few able to translate for those who didn't. There were about thirty of us, soon joined by another eight or ten who came into the refectory bearing bowls and platters of food. It was all vegetable, no meat: something very like mild cheese, though the smell made me think it was probably a fungus; sections of an aromatic and sweet white root; greens, cooked and raw; fruits, cooked and raw; several dishes of mixed grain and legumes, cooked with various savory additives. Everything tasted better than Earth food, and there was plenty of it. Oskar sat near me, telling me the names of the foods and the plants they came from while eating more than I would have thought possible, another reason he had wanted to stay. The poor man was aging, tired, hungry, and in pain. At the moment, I was unable to be helpful, but I made a mental note to keep him in mind, to help if and when I could. He reminded me a great deal of Jon Point, with something of the same indomitability about him.

The people asked many questions about how I'd been caught, and where, and so forth, responding with their own stories. Six of the men had been among the eleven men “harvested” on Jungle. Since PPI operated under noninterference directives, it made sense that the six of them were here, for the Phaina no doubt approved of noninterference. They told me that the other five taken on Jungle had been new recruits to PPI. One of the five had been Witt, of course, though the others taken from Jungle rather ignored him during the meal. The others had gone crazy, Oskar whispered, so they'd been taken to the Simusi food pens.

Someone asked what I was going to be doing, and I said working in the Phaina's garden. That prompted a long silence.

“What?” I asked. “Is there something bad about that?”

“The Phaina doesn't let any of us in her garden.”

Oskar spoke up, importantly. “Jewel was on a Phain planet once, where she worked on a Phain garden, and she'll only be doing the weeding.”

They seemed to accept his explanation, but to avoid further problems I began asking questions of my own. Some had been harvested from spaceships, some from planets they were visiting, a few from Earth itself, or from Earth colony planets. When they had arrived, all those chosen had been questioned for many days by an agent of the Phaina.

I asked what they'd been questioned about.

One woman spoke up. “What were we doing on the planet, where were we going in the ship, why were we sending all our old people back to Earth, why were we having so many children, and why had we killed this bacteria or that weed, or that animal, or that insect?”

A man spoke. “They got me on a colony planet, they showed us a picture of this thing, and they asked how long we'd studied this kind of half animal half plant thing they called a fromfis. I told them we hadn't studied the things at all, we weren't supposed to, we were there to do research on a cure for Ban-Atkins Disease. So then this Phain told me this fromfis thing had a microbe growing in its gut that would have cured the Ban-Atkins Disease, so it was a pity we'd killed them all, and that really upset me. Maybe they were just jerking us around.”

“No,” I said firmly. “The Phain don't do that. If a Phain said that, it was the truth.”

He turned even paler, if that were possible, and gave me a resentful look while I cautioned myself to keep my judgments to myself. Doubtless most of the captives had comforting ideas of victimhood and would become angry if contradicted.