The Companions (51 page)

The dormitory beds were far more comfortable than the
pads in the kennel. Though we all wore collars, I had seen no one leashed thus far. From their talk, everyone knew what he or she was supposed to do, and everyone spent their days doing it. After supper, we had storytelling and dancing of a crude kind, and music also of a crude kind, though from the quality of some voices, they were capable of better. Everyone went to sleep early. Witt stayed away from me.

The following morning, after a quick meal, the people went off in different directions, and I was shown through a locked gate into the Phaina's garden. A stone-built toolshed contained everything I needed, and I worked up a considerable sweat (smell vocab: present tense. to work.) loosening the moist, loamy-smelling earth around trees (vocab: to dig), transplanting creepers into bare spots (vocab: no smell detected?), harvesting seeds (fragrant shells, various. vocab: to gather? or to ripen?), and putting aromatic seed (smell) in the ground (plus smell) (vocab: to plant). The creepers were obviously an edging plant, separating grasslike plants from decorative ones. The lack of smell…No. It came to me suddenly that wasn't lack. It was negation. Nonsmell. Separation. An undetectable odor eraser? Like the one Gavi had used on me?

I gradually worked my way along the side of the structure. At what felt like midmorning, I took a break and walked around the nearest corner of the rambling building to look across the garden. It was huge, and no one else was working in it, so the work would occupy me forever, which at that moment seemed a blessing. If there was no hope of being rescued, at least I would be employed in an enjoyable way. Also, once I had established what my hands should be doing, my mind was free to think things through, starting with yesterday's conversation between Behemoth and Scramble.

The first smell had been a milk smell. The “speaker” had to have been Scramble, and milk smell no doubt signified puppies. Next came the odor of Matty's perfume, one I wore from time to time. Scramble had never known Matty, so that smell had to be her word for me. Then there'd been a retreat
ing smell, which meant, according to Gavi, going somewhere. And the last smell had been the milk smell and my smell combined.

No matter how I linked them, they came out to mean one thing. Jewel should go get the puppies or go be with the puppies.

Behemoth didn't agree. He had emitted the smell of the stuff Gainor used on his hair, then a nasty, “you must” smell. Then a coming forward smell of the hair stuff coupled with the puppy smell. Gainor has to bring the puppies or…blood smell and Matty's perfume again. Gainor bring the puppies or we'll kill Jewel.

I sat down with a shock. I don't faint, as some people are said to do, but I came close. How was Gainor supposed to get this threat? Some kind of ransom note, delivered how?

That hadn't been the end of the conversation. Scramble had said blood odor, plus dog odor. Which dog? I didn't know. Was she threatening to kill Behemoth if he injured me? Or threatening to kill me if I injured a puppy? Or telling Behemoth his way would get puppies killed? Or, kill herself? Behemoth considered himself mated for life. If Scramble was gone, he'd be a nonbreeder, a virtual eunuch, so Scramble's absence might have been a real threat to his primacy.

My stomach told me it was noon just moments before one of the kitchen people showed up with a bowl of food and a bottle of water. She told me to bring the bowl and bottle with me when I came back to the dormitory.

“When?” I asked her. “Is there a bell?”

“When the light starts to dim,” she said. “This place has the same-length days all the time. Three meals a day. First light, middle light, when it's brightest, then when it starts to dim. Then's when you come in. Later, when it's dark, some really big predators wander around loose.”

For the first time since I'd been in the place I realized the sky shone with an utterly sourceless light. No sun threw a shadow, though there was shade where the trees were dense
and encircling. I sat down on a bench with my bottle and bowl, thinking my way through Scramble's conversation once more. Reconsideration yielded nothing new or fresh. Scramble wanted me to get the pups, Behemoth wanted Gainor to bring them, there was some bad consequence threatened on someone by someone.

I was hunched over the bowl. The splatting of tears onto my spoon was the first inkling I had that I was crying. Over Scramble, of course. And Behemoth. All those years spent working for them, making a future for them. Had they been reached by the Simusi while we were still on Earth? Were they told then that they were Simusi? If not, when did they find out? Had the odor messages on Moss told them much, much more than the odors had told Gavi?

And what about Moss itself, the world of! Was it also Simusi? Owned by, managed by? Or was it just a nice little world trying to do its best for its inhabitants, rather in the same way Gainor and Shiela and I had tried to do the best for dogs and cats and any other life-form we could protect?

So I sat there, grieving over the loss of my lovely dogs, grieving over the fact that I couldn't care about Witt anymore, grieving over being separated from Mag, and from Gavi, and Gainor, of course. Even Drom and Sybil. What was going to happen to them? And Paul. Was he plowing along on the language? All these wonders, rages, and griefs had me astir when I heard a familiar sound, liquidly sweet, the music of a Phaina's voice, followed by the equally soft-toned translation by a lingui-pute.

“Why do you shed tears?”

“For the loss of my friends, the dogs,” I said, without even thinking.

“But they are not wholly dogs,” she said.

This was annoying. “Then I'm not crying for the part that isn't. I grieve for the idea of the dogs I believed they were. Not Simusi, but my friends.” I dried my face with the backs of my hands. “And even if these dogs aren't wholly dogs,
there are other whole dogs we are trying desperately to protect. I am ashamed to have wasted my time so misguidedly on these if they do not merit it.”

“Ah,” she said, sitting down beside me. It was the first time I had seen a Phaina seated. On Tsaliphor, we had always walked in open places where there were no seats. Her legs stretched a long way onto the path, and her head was far above mine.

“So you have real dogs you wish to protect. Why, then, were these not left to be merely real dogs?”

“Real dogs had short life spans, they had health problems. The arkists started out trying to breed them back to their ancestral form, their natural form, to get rid of the bone and breathing problems, but their life spans were still very short. The arkists thought…think that longer life spans would allow more learning to be passed on to future generations, and that, in turn, would result in a better survival rate. Someone, I don't know who, must have decided to use Zhaar technology. I don't even know when or who or how they got hold of it! It must have been done in utero. I wish they hadn't.”

She asked, “Is the pack leader hostile toward you.”

“Behemoth? Now? I think so,” I confessed. “He wasn't before, though, so why is he now?”

“He was told he was Simusi, that you knew and had kept it from him. Unfortunately, he will soon discover this is untrue. He is a superior dog, but far inferior to Simusi. He will not be pleased to learn of his true status. He can understand their odor language, he can even speak it, as a child speaks, but he will never be able to emit it eloquently. True Simusi have maraquar of experience in telling heroic tales about their past, reciting epics, and sniffing the stories and sagas of others. It is how they spend most of their time. Behemoth will never be able to do that well.”

I thought of Walky's poems, “The Simusi must be like Walking Sunshine.”

She asked me what I meant, and I told her about the
willog who wrote poetry, and how delighted he was to have eyes and ears.

“On the planet?” she asked. Lingui-putes cannot convey tone of voice, but I could hear her tone before I heard what the words meant. She was astonished. “Where they brought you from?”

“Yes. I was just getting to know the place. It's very beautiful. If the willog is any indication, it has wonderful creatures on it. We must leave it, you know. It belongs to itself, not to us.”

The great torso beside me tensed. “If a planet belongs to its own creatures, you let it alone?”

I thought about her question for a time, trying to frame an honest answer that wouldn't convict us in her eyes. “The Interstellar Confederation says if a planet is occupied by intelligent creatures, it belongs to those creatures. And usually, any creature with a language is considered to be intelligent. That's what was hard about Moss. The language is one of smells, like the Simusi, but we'd never encountered that before. We know about sign languages and vocal languages, but it may be there are many other languages that have missed being identified simply because they aren't spoken or visual.”

“So you will leave the planet alone. And the Derac?”

“PPI is committed to noninterference, Earth will leave it alone. The Derac will be required by IC to leave it alone, though they have a history of cheating when they can get away with it. The humans who came there by accident, several hundred years ago, will be required to leave also, unless the World asks them to stay.”

She was silent for a long moment. “The World?”

“I think it's all one being, the whole world. Everything is all tied together, with one mind running everything…”

She made a strange, high, tinkling sound. Laughter? Or pity? “But, that is always so.”

I stared at her, knowing full well what she meant. “Yes,
Sannasee, it is always so, as we know to our sorrow, but in most worlds the planetary mind is…or seems to be unconscious. My brother says transmission and response equals protolanguage, but in most worlds it takes years and years for response to occur. Because life spans are short, and the response is so late in arriving, the living things who detect it don't know it has anything to do with them.”

“I do not understand.”

“We are accustomed to conversations that are proximate in time. I say to you, you respond to me. Our World responds, but not for years or even centuries. When it does respond, we do not realize it is replying to something our grandfathers did; we do not recognize that it is speaking! On Moss, though the feedback is slow compared to any language we're familiar with, it's a lot quicker than we've ever known to occur at a planetary level, quick enough to tell us the Moss mind is obviously conscious. It feels what happens. It directs response. It actually speaks.”

“I must go there,” she said, making the high, tinkling sound once more. “I must go there soon. Will you go with me?”

“Of course,” I said. “I would do anything to help you, Sannasee. You know that.”

She regarded me again with that ring of eyes, fluttering open and closed, as though some looked at my skin and others at my heart. “Will you do it without telling anyone?”

Again, I heard the emotion in her voice before the machine translated it. It was a combination of eagerness and fear. As though she had been invited to meet God, personally, and was uncertain where she stood.

I said very softly, “Someone would not want you to go?”

Her great, oval head nodded, a very human-looking nod, and the eyes around her brow fluttered at me sequentially, like fingers waving hello or good-bye. “Our people are very conservative. They would not forbid, but they would…look askance. You will say of this…”

“I will say of this nothing,” I told her. “What is there to say?”

We sat there a time longer. I asked about Splendor, and she told me a little of its discovery, of the determination of the elder races to keep it unspoiled, to keep the riffraff out of it. She said almost nothing about the place, or places, the people or peoples who lived there, if, indeed, anyone did. It could have been a marvelous vacancy for all the description she permitted herself, though she did speak of all living creatures doing well in Splendor.

When she finally departed, I went on with the garden. Gradually, as the day wore away, I grew a little achy, more than a little tired, but also relaxed and tranquil. My wanders on Moss had not been strenuous. This was the first real exercise I'd had in a very long time, and it was therapeutic.

When the light dimmed around me, I cleaned and put away my tools before returning to quarters. Witt was there. He came to sit beside me at the table and tell me he wanted to come sleep with me that night. I felt only a mild revulsion. I remarked that I had been doing hard, physical labor all day, which had made me too tired to want company.

His face wrinkled like a child who's been slapped. “But I only have tonight. My master only let me come for two days. I told him we were liaised…”

I gritted my teeth, reaching for the right tone. “It was very kind of your master to let you come, Witt. Be sure to tell him how grateful we are for his kindness, but our liaison expired more than seven years ago. We aren't liaised anymore, and I prefer to keep to Earth law, as I'm accustomed to that.”

Besides, thought I, he may have been fixed, but I didn't know that for sure, and I did know I hadn't been. I did not want to make that mistake again.

He didn't argue, just dropped his head and looked pathetic. I wanted to say, “Now you need a good night's rest so you can be a good doggy tomorrow,” but I took his hand instead, pressed it with a sad little smile that was intended to look regretful, and left him sitting there. I don't know where he went. Off, somewhere. All that charm, the poise, the knowledgeability that had made him seem so wonderful to
me at eighteen had been only a well-practiced social facade. If I had not been so young, if I had had more experience of people, perhaps I would not have been so impressed by the veneer. Facing hardship, without the pedestal of money and family, he was lost.