The Companions (6 page)

“I'll bet your mother had a fit about your moving out.”

He shrugged. “Well, yes, but it's customary for students to live there, and Father told her to quit fussing about it. Many of the students are liaised…”

That surprised me, and I said so.

“No concs in the University Tower,” he said. “As I said, people our age need companionship.”

“My inheritance is tied up in the liaison contract for two more years, until Tad's eighteen!”

“It doesn't matter. If we're living there, you can find
something you'd like to study, and we can get by on my trust funds.”

“Your mother will say you're too young.”

“We're both young, sure, but a cohabitation liaison is only a five-year contract.” He took my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. “If you had something you wanted to do, something that didn't include me, I wouldn't have asked…”

“No,” I said, breathless at the sudden simplicity of it all. Liaising with Witt would get me away from Paul! Perhaps this was simply meant to be. “Of course I don't have other plans!”

It was only at home, later, as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered what he'd said. No concs in university towers. As though his proposal might have been based on that. No. I set the idea aside. Witt was too…well, too mannerly even to think anything like that. At that moment I also realized that he hadn't said he loved me, but then, I hadn't said I loved him, either.

I don't think about Mars when I'm awake, but when I'm half-asleep, I often dream about it: caverns and canyons so huge they could swallow the moon, airlocks everywhere, XT suits for people moving between caverns or outside. XT suits are very expensive. I got Paul's old suits when he outgrew them, and Taddeus got the ones I'd outgrown. Sometimes I dream about Tad and Matty and me, but mostly I dream about space. I dream of being alone, with no one else around, just wonderful emptiness going on and on forever.

On Mars, almost everyone lives in caverns cut in the sides of the big canyons, where it's warmer and wetter—well, damper, at least. When I was there, Earth embassy was in one of the smaller caverns that housed only a few hundred people. Our home cave was next to the embassy, fairly large, with a room for each of us and a studio for Matty. When I was little, I thought all mothers had studios and made sensories.

Mars food was imported or hydroponic. During a dust storm, dust got through a filter that had been made on Earthmoon by Earth Enterprises, and all the food died. The people got so hungry they rioted against Earth. My father tried to calm them down, which was a mistake. Someone cut his air hose and he died. That was the Great Mars Riot, when I wasn't even a year old, so I don't remember my father, Victor Delis, at all. Matty told me he was a savant, and he spoke
fifty languages including Zhaar, which was either a fib or an exaggeration because nobody spoke Zhaar except the Zhaar themselves, and none of them were left.

Almost everyone knows the name Joram Bonner. If someone wants to see and hear and smell a windblown willow dropping leaves in rippling water, he buys Joram Bonner the Elder's “Brook Series” Vista Replication Wall-view, VRW. If someone wants to see the Grand Canyon, hear the shriek of an eagle, see the waterfalls plunging over the rimrock, it's all there in Joram Bonner II's VRW no. 39,
Canyon Suites
. Vista-reps are partly on-site records and partly reconstructions from other sources including substantive records of similar things on other planets. The VRWs made by our Joram Bonner III, or his father, Joram II, or his grandfather, Joram the Elder, are the only record we have of old forests, lost rivers, vanished prairies; they're all we have of old Earth and all most of us will ever see of the far-off worlds. Almost everyone on Earth has at least one vista made by a Bonner, to keep them sane.

Matty had known Joram Bonner since they were children, and they'd studied art together. Matty's work was very different from Joram's, less realistic, more interpretive and based on her explorations of the Martian gorges. She recorded changes of light and the sounds of wind, then ran them both through a synthesizer, augmenting the wind sounds with vocals and instrumentals, the views with actors, dancers, and special effects. The final result was a work of art that was greater than the sum of its parts, or so the critics were fond of saying. She loved caverns and was never so happy as when she was wandering into the unexplored, leaving a trail of relay transmitters behind her to bounce every nuance of the experience to the waiting recorders in her desert car above. Her last abyss, the one that kept her busy for almost a year in its honeycombed caverns, turned out to be where the last Martians had died a very long time before.

Of course, Matty had no idea she was going to find remnants of a lost people, their bones, their pictures, their words
on the walls. She was just going into the darkness the way she usually did. I always carry my copy of her original recording of that cavern. I watch it whenever I'm lonely for her, from the first transmission in the outer cavern as she fingers the control wand of her light-helmet to make narrow beams, like brushes full of starshine to glisten the dark walls, then hard, sun-amber chisels to shatter the shadows, and at last wide-flung sprays of blood and sunset to blush the cold stone into life. Farther in, she uses waves of baffling, beautiful blues, shading every hollow, caressing tall columns with amethyst wavelets until watery light pours across the arched ceiling and runs down the sides to fill the cavern with opalescent foam. When she wades through it, her feet raise pygmy fountains of gilded dust, every step an iridescent spout of glory, a fire-dotted line that follows her farther in and farther in and farther down and farther down…

She passes a series of dead ends, pockets leading nowhere. Then she finds a perplexing passageway along a narrow shelf that towers on one side and plummets on the other, ramifying into side trails dark as pits. The shelf becomes a narrow bridge over a bottomless gulf where the wind comes up moaning, full of lost voices, and I watch her going across it like a glowing spider, weaving a web of tenuous tints as she goes, feeling her way, silent as a wraith over that narrow slab, then along another ledge no wider than her shoulders that leads to a long, horridly twisted way full of spiked stones. The narrow path weaves among them into the final place, the fanged mouth of a bubble with one way in and no other way out, the end of the journey.

Over and over I watch her stop just inside the bubble, a single beam reaching from her helmet, a finger probing the dark. The light touches a wall with a difference, taps it once, veers away in surprise, then snuffles its way back like an animal to an enticing but unfamiliar smell, whiskering it gently, nose wrinkling, before exploding into a radiance that illumines the entire cavern with all its carvings, pictures, people, creatures, words…Glory! Wonder! Marvel!

How she moved that day is still as clear and familiar to me as her face. I always carry her original record of the exploration and the album she made from it. They're half the size of the palm of my hand. It's hard to believe such little things can hold all that glory. Touch the button on the side and all the marvels hover in the air: the winding cavern, the awful bridge over darkness, the twisting channel, and, finally, the curving walls of the Room of Witness, as Matty named it, carved all over with words and pictures. The pictures show two sorts of creatures, tall and short, biped and quadruped, both sorts always in company, walking, running, leaping…

I was with her that day, oh, not down in the caverns, but I was in the desert car. I liked to sit there, waiting for her, fascinated by the recording screen, seeing what she saw. I was waiting there when she came up from the cavern, and I've never seen such happiness and awe on anyone's face, before or since. I was only six, but I still remember her face as I watch the recording, Matty dancing blissfully from one section of the wall to another, here, there, everywhere, before she finally settled into the methodical, meticulous work that produced the final album.

My original recording includes her voice describing the music she intends to set to each sequence, mentioning the Sono-Visual artist whose augmented vocals should accompany the wind sounds; mentioning the dancers to be costumed as the lost Martians; the creature artist who will animate the other beings.

When we got home, she was still ecstatic. As soon as we were out of our XT suits, she pulled me into her arms and held me, whispering into my ear. “They had dogs, Joosie! Imagine that! They had dogs! Or something like.”

“Like my Faithful Doggy, Matty? Like in the Animal Book?”

“Just like in the Animal Book. ‘Dutiful and diligent, man-friend, dog.'”

I hadn't seen them on the screen, for their bones were deep in dust. She didn't describe them to me until later. Peo
ple bones. Dog bones. Not exactly like people now or dogs now, but very similar, lying near the carvings, the people's arms around the dog bones, their heads laid close, the way I slept with my Faithful Dog at night when I needed comforting. The cavern was the only evidence anyone has ever found of the Martians, the last ones, the few thousand of them in the cavern possibly all there were, gathered into that place to die together.

Though it had seemed a short time to both of us, Matty had stayed down there long enough for cavern air to leak through a fault in her XT suit. It carried a virus with it, something unknown, something fatal. Later on it turned out that Matty hadn't actually discovered the caverns, she'd just rediscovered them. When the experts magnified the wall scans they saw faint Zhaar seals on the wall, which meant the Zhaar had been there, long, long ago. Matty just laughed, and said it didn't matter, discover or rediscover. Old things often became new things.

She paid a researcher to do a search of Interstellar Confederation Archives for any records the Zhaar might have left concerning the cavern. The researcher found a pictorial record of the Martian carvings, done some fifty thousand years ago or so, along with a translation into Panqoin, written well before humans were painting horses on cave walls. The Panqoin had been allies of the Tsifis, a people who left our galaxy when we were in the middle Stone Age, and the archives had Panqoin-Tsifis transliterations. The Tsifis had in turn mentored the Gendeber, a race now extinct but contemporary with early Bronze Age man. In the Gendebers' last years they had been visited by the Phain, and the Phain were still alive. So, the researcher translated the Panqoin to Tsifis, the Tisifis to Gendeber, and the Gendeber to Phainic, and from Phainic to Earthian common speech so Matty could get her translation and make songs out of it.

Joram used to tease her: “It started out as roast beef, became hash, then stew, then soup, and God knows how the final broth resembles the original menu.”

Matty just laughed at him. “I'm sure the translation is close enough, Joram. I recognize the music.”

The song Matty sang when she was dying was the death song of a dying people, Joram said, though he didn't say it in front of Matty. By the time she died, she had most of the visuals and all the music finished, and she left enough notes that Joram could complete the visuals for her. It's known as Lipkin Symphony no. 7, the
Cavern
Symphony, in three movements based on the colors and glories of the great cavern; the wind voices accompanying that long, perilously dark passage; and finally, an ecstatic chorale-ballet that accompanies the final wall. It comes to life and dances its own farewell before remounting the cavern wall and changing back into carvings. At the premiere they called it the artistic event of the century. Matty would have loved that.

She loved those caverns, too, even after she knew they had killed her. Until Matty died, I didn't know that things you love can kill you.

On Earth, liaison contracts are required for every human interaction that involves rights, responsibilities, and money. Every item in a liaison is enforceable by law. If Jane Somebody conceives a child outside a liaison contract, she has two months to get an ex post facto coparent, or the child becomes the property of the state as soon as it's born and is sold to some off-world settlement where young people are in demand. People can have whatever religious or cultural ceremonies or commitments they like, but only the civil contracts are enforceable.

Our contract was simple. Our identichips knew almost everything about us, and our Worldkeeper files knew whatever the identichips didn't. We were rated R, which meant “Authorized to reproduce.” Ours was the usual five-year cohabitation contract with a coparenting option. Once we were liaised, we could have a baby, or we could create embryos to be stored and born later. Many young people did this, because young ova and young sperm are healthier but mature people are better parents. Every liaison contract specifies who owns any resultant embryos or has custody of any resultant children. I guess in the past people got into real wrangles about who had the right to stored embryos.

I took my belongings to the University Tower where Witt had already put both our names in the directory. Paul was off world on some kind of fellowship (thank heaven), but we invited Taddeus to our celebration at the new sanctuary, with
Shiela Alred as hostess and a few of our friends as guests. Taddeus used a pocket album to record the festivities, then he gave it to us as a wedding gift. Registering a cohabitation liaison is called simply “recording a contract,” but if people are invited to celebrate the event, that celebration is still called a wedding.

Our honeymoon consisted of splurging at ET restaurants and buying one another silly wedding presents in shops I'd never seen before, making up private jokes and experimenting with sex. Most young people experiment with concs, but I never had. They affected me deep down, like snakes affect some people who've never seen a snake before. I knew Witt had had concs, because he'd mentioned them, though we never discussed it. The sexual part of our relationship was agreeable though awkward, as though Witt kept having to remind himself I was there.

We had ten days of cohabitation, and for that little time I was really quite happy, and everything seemed open and new, as though all our dreams could come true. When reality returned, it came like a monster from under the bed! That's how it felt, even though it was only a summons from Witt's mother. He answered the link, said yes, no, right away, got dressed and went. I stayed home and fixed breakfast. Time went by, almost noon, and he came home looking as though he'd been beaten. His face was blotchy and strained, totally unlike himself, and his voice shook.

“Mother the Dame found out we're liaised.”

“Hadn't you told her?” I was surprised, a little stunned.

“She went on and on about your being nobody, even after I told her who you were, who your parents were, that Shiela Alred thinks the world of you!”

“Sit down, Witt. Take a deep breath…”

“I can't! So then the Dame demanded to know if you were pregnant, and I told her you weren't. She said that meant there'd be no barrier to my going on this expedition.”

“Expedition?” I cried, not believing any of this. “What expedition?”

“Just listen. Her cousin is with Planetary Protection Institute, and PPI is certifying a newly discovered planetary system, and the contract provides profit sharing to the members of the certification team…”

“You don't know anything about planet certification!”

“That's what I told her, that I knew nothing about it, that I wanted to stay and finish school. And Mother said I would need something to live on, which this expedition would pay me. I said I had enough income, and she dropped the sky on me.”

“Oh, Witt. Don't tell me…”

“Oh, yes. She told me I
had
an income, but the trust is in her keeping, and because I entered into a cohabitation liaison without her permission, I don't get the income anymore, or the principal until I'm thirty.”

“Is that legal?”

He almost screamed. “Of course it's not legal! I'm of age. I could prove she has no right if I had ten years' time and a million Earth-creds to spend in court!” Witt's head dropped into his hands, and he ran his pale, tapered fingers through his dark mane of hair, over and over. “Which she pointed out at some length, just in case I'd thought of trying it! As of this morning, we have no income. We can't even break the liaison contract for five years, so she really can starve us if she likes.”

Can't break the contract!
I'd been getting angrier by the moment, mostly at his mother, but at the way he was acting, too. I tried to keep that under control, as I said, “Witt, we're well enough educated to hold jobs.” We were. Either of us was quite capable of holding down any number of boring but paying jobs. I knew, because I'd been checking what jobs were available just in case the sanctuary thing didn't work out.

“This isn't the twenty-second century, Jewel. People can't take a false name and pretend to be someone else. Identichips make that sort of thing impossible. And there's not a job anywhere on Earth she can't prevent our getting or get
us fired from if she finds out about it, and she will. I hoped…I hoped she'd let me be! She won't. If we don't split up, she'll see that we end up down-dwellers, with minimum I-chip credit, living in a sublevel hole.”

“I don't believe that, but if it's true, we'll sign up for a colony and go off world!”

“You think she couldn't stop us? You think she couldn't block emigration permits?”

I was talking to a crazy stranger, someone I didn't even recognize. I knew we could get off planet without an emigration permit! Whenever Joram came home to visit, he told us stories about his travels, including all the tricks he used to get from this impossible place to that impossible place!

I said, very calmly, “Just because she's punishing you, you don't have to go along with it, Witt. As you said, you're of age. There are other ways…”

He shook his head at me, raising his hands as though to fend me off. “If we're going to live, I'll have to go. She'll make an allowance for you to live on while I'm gone, I got her to promise that much…”

“While you're gone? When?”

“Tomorrow. Oh, God, don't look at me like that, Jewel. It's only three years. We'll…we'll have plenty of time when it's over…” He said this last as though he'd been told it, not as though he'd thought it out, his mother's words coming from his mouth.

Stubbornly, I went on trying to discuss alternatives. Every possibility I raised, he said it was impossible, and he got more and more frantic and hysterical the harder I tried. He couldn't even hear me. I knew I could convince him if only I had a little time, but he had no time to consider anything except his own confusion, and my attempts to change his mind were only making it worse.

I stopped arguing. He made a frantic attempt at lovemaking that wasn't about love at all; we had an hour getting things together and a flit ride together to the shuttleport. On the way, Witt used his link to drain his credit account, pay
ing the rent a year in advance and giving me what little was left. I put the wedding photo album that Tad had given us into his pocket as a keepsake and kissed him good-bye, like kissing clammy stone. Total time of our cohabitation liaison: eleven days.

By noon I was sitting in the windowless three-hundred-square-foot cell the university allotted to couples. The bedroom was three paces each way when the bed was pushed into the wall under the closet. The living room was three paces by four. The kitchen extended the living room by another pace and a half, the bathroom was just big enough for the fixtures in it. The storage closet, half as large as the bedroom, was packed with Witt's belongings. He had taken almost nothing with him.

I forced myself to make tea and sit down to drink it slowly while thinking my way through my immediate future. I had a place to sleep; the University Tower was number 27, two down and four over from the new sanctuary in Tower 69, an easy commute. I had the job at the sanctuary, which would pay me enough to live on so long as I didn't have to pay rent. Paul and Taddeus's place had already been reconfigured so I couldn't rejoin them unless contiguous space opened up again, which it might never do. I was still entitled to eat with them, however, so I wouldn't go hungry. So long as I slept in this apartment at least half time to maintain my tenancy, I could spend a lot of time at the sanctuary. Moving around might help me keep the walls from closing in. I already felt smothered, but I could do it. By the time the rent on Witt's place ran out, the sanctuary might be settled enough that I could have a room there as Jon did. Then…

I jumped to my feet, my hands over my ears to shut out a deafening shriek, and another, another! In the interval between shrieks, I figured out what it was. The door alarm. No one ever triggers a door alarm. No one ever visits an apartment without linking first, to be sure someone is there, or to get a route clearance! Nobody came unannounced except
tower management! Was Witt mistaken about having paid in advance?

I gritted my teeth, smoothed my trousers over my hips, ran my fingers through my hair, tangled, as usual, and went to the door, where I was confronted by an imposing woman made taller by six-inch soles on her boots and a hairdo that went up another foot or two. She was accompanied by a faceless servant, a Quondan. Oh, they have faces, but you can't see them.

“Jewel Delis,” the woman said, sneering the name. “I am Dame Cecelia Hessing. I've come to give you the charity my son begged me to provide you during his absence.”

My mind was absolutely blank, vacant. All that was in my head were echoes. This was…this was Witt's mother, the Dame.

She pushed into the tiny room, leaving the door open as she dipped into her pockets, coming out with handfuls of the little podfare coins that people carry to buy a pod lobby snack or throw to a transit musician, a spill of silver, gold, and blue discs spinning away into corners: twentieths and tenths and quarters of credits, bright constellations in the shadows.

She yelled at me. “You know you are ruining my son's life!” She grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me. “You liaised with him for his money, I know that. Pretended to be pregnant, so you could get him for his money. Well, he's out away from your lies now. He'll be gone for three years. And by the time he gets back, we will have reached an understanding, you and I.”

“I don't need charity,” I gasped, totally astonished, still unable to admit to myself what was going on. “I don't want it.”

“Oh, people like you always want it! And I shall leave you to scramble for it, like the beggar you are. I'll be back, every few days, so get used to getting down on your knees. Looking around here, you're probably already used to it, living like this…”

“This is Witt's apartment,” I cried, furious. “He took it so he could get away from you!”

“…and you'd better be here to get your handout, for I won't make it up if you aren't!”

And with that she was out the door and off down the corridor, heavy shoes clomping like hammers, the servant two steps behind. I shut the door and leaned against it. Dame Cecelia. Bizarre! Insane! Even Paul never acted like that! No one acted like that! No wonder Witt hadn't wanted to introduce her. And that ridiculous strewing of podfare coins, the only money that existed outside the identichip system, so I'd have to stoop to pick them up. Her way of punishing the beggar girl who had inveigled the young lord into a liaison? The woman was living in a fairy tale!

I wasn't weeping or grieving, I was just furiously, ragingly angry. Well, I would not be around for a repeat visit. Since the woman could get into the residential floors of the university without a pass, I would become a moving target, just as I had when I was a child, evading Paul's attentions. I'd ride the podways and be constantly elsewhere!

I ate something. Five minutes later I couldn't remember what, not that it mattered. I went to work. Shiela Alred wasn't there, but she had left me a list of things that had to be done. Jon was there, supervising the planning of apartments for trainers, runs for dogs. Shiela had said there was to be a laboratory, a veterinary hospital. When Jon was free, I told him about Dame Cecelia's visit, between laughter and furious tears.

Jon asked, “Whyn't you just let the old bitch come drop money on you?”

“Don't use that word for her, Jon! It insults the dogs! I won't do it because that would convince her she's right! I didn't liaise with Witt because he's wealthy. He's the one who asked me, not me him. I never even thought of it until he asked me.” The thought of my recent humiliation bent me double with fury. My head pounded so that I had to sit down
for a moment. As a child, whenever I'd been this angry, Matty had washed my face, washed the anger away, along with the sorrows. I got to my feet and into the washroom, where I made firm resolutions behind a steaming towel. It would keep me busy just being evasive.

Six slippery weeks went by after that. I disabled the door alarm, using a method Joram had described. I pod-hopped my way to and from. I went to work. I came home late. She caught me twice, once going in, once out, and both times I just stood there, enduring the shower of coins and the repetitive rage. During the third visit, Dame Cecelia noticed the coins were still on the floor, and that seemed to push her fury up a notch.

Then, suddenly, the visits stopped. I held my breath for several days, gradually relaxing though I wasn't certain enough to let the floorbot suck up the coins.

“She finally got tired of it,” I told Shiela Alred, who had had to be told about it, just in case I didn't show up for work on time. Or at all.