The Companions (14 page)

Silently, they disappeared, except for Scramble, who put her nose to my cheek and tongued me along the jaw. Affection? Admonition? I didn't know which, if either, but it was one more bit of evidence that Scramble thought of me as her pup.

“Yu sai wen is 'ime,” she said, or asked.

“I'll tell you at once,” I agreed. “It will be a good place.” I prayed I was right, that it would be a good place.

“Ai no. Yu aways magh ghu ha'van.”

Alas, I only wished always to make good happen. Sometimes I could not make anything happen at all. I hugged Scramble once more and she sat beside me, leaning against me, sharing warmth. Scramble was the oldest of the big dogs. I had known her longer than any of the others, and I would willingly have sat beside her all day, but there was work to do now that I had told the dogs what I had to tell. They were the only ones who needed to know.

I had twelve hours much-needed sleep at the sanctuary, followed by a lavish and delicious breakfast with Shiela, during which Paul linked me and asked me to come home. He sounded shaky but sober and, oddly, he was without any of his usual postspasm resentment.

“Are you going back so soon?” asked Shiela, with raised eyebrows.

I temporized. “Not if there's something you need me for here.”

“My dear, this isn't a matter of my needs, you know that.”

“I'll make a quick visit after work, to see if things are back to normal or not.”

My plan didn't satisfy Shiela, but Paul's abrupt break with pattern had me interested. When I let myself into the apartment late in the afternoon it was obvious that tower housekeeping had made an emergency visit. The postorgy mess had been cleaned up and the broken furniture replaced, though usually I was the one who took care of such matters. The only reason I could imagine for this transformation, and for his almost apologetic link call, was that Paul had received an assignment so important that he had pulled himself out of his mania overnight. He hadn't taken the two or three days necessary to sleep it off, so he must have used moodspray antidote, despite its nauseating side effects.

Evidently he had had time to get over the discomfort, for he greeted me cheerfully in a warm, almost brotherly voice.

“Oh, there you are, Jewel. So glad you're back. I've just made coffee…”

Aha! He was using his charming and reasonable “managing Jewel” voice. Brother dear wanted something, and he was well into his connivance script. The freshly made coffee, the platter of tiny and very expensive cakes from an import shop on Floor 191, the cleanup of the apartment, all intended to distract, to put me off guard.

“How was the sanctuary?” he asked. “Everything going well?”

Anyone who didn't know him as well as I would have thought he was interested. “It's in an uproar, as one might imagine, Paul. The new law will affect us adversely, of course.”

“A pity you're going to be deprived of your work there. Well, I'm glad to have something to tell you that may help make up for the loss! A real challenge, Jewel!”

He poured the coffee. He offered the plate of cakes. I took several. They were only innocent bystanders, no reason not to enjoy them.

“I've been chosen as consultant for a compliance contract! It's for an Earth-like planet, with one large moon in Garr'ugh 290 system…What?”

“Sorry,” I murmured, pouring sloshed coffee back into the cup from my saucer. The system name had surprised me. “My hand slipped.”

He frowned. “As I was saying, it's a…marvelous place.” He tasted a bit of imported pastry while noting how this was being received. I didn't look at him as I concentrated on the flavor and texture of the first cake. Delicious. Quite marvelous. Unearthly, one might say. When eventually I turned widely innocent eyes his way, he went on. “You'll love it, Jewel. It's felicitous in climate, lovely in aspect. Both PPI and ESC are on planet, so we'll be quite safe. It's a primitive world, of course, but the seas are shallow and clear, the
housing is luxurious by Earth standards, there are great trees to sit under and mossy lawns to walk on.” He smiled at me, enjoying the sound of his own voice. “It's a maximum three-year contract, and only a fool would turn down a chance like this…”

I chewed slowly, and swallowed slowly. This was quintessential Paul. He had reached the end of step one, at which point I was either to agree or disagree. I had already agreed, of course. A split second after I heard the name
Garr'ugh 290
, I had decided to go with him for very good reasons of my own, but I kept that intention to myself while taking another slow sip of coffee-14 (which was no improvement over coffee-13 or indeed, if one thought back a decade, coffee-9 or-10), frustrating his strategy by saying nothing while I stared out the nearest window with a totally blank face.

Paul's usual ready cannonade of counterarguments was spiked by my silence. He followed the direction of my eyes. The only view through that window was of the housing tower opposite, an uninteresting grid of windows, some of them framing potted plants. Aside from the tenants and any wandering microorganisms that made it through the decon locks, potted plants were now the only living things in housing towers. On the several occasions when Paul had bought such expensive greenery, however, I had always managed to kill it. Potted plants were not, in my mind, any kind of substitute for warm friends that welcomed one home with soft fur and eager noses.

He shifted slightly, fidgeting.

I caught the almost imperceptible movement and turned to look at him instead of the window. In Paul's script of this encounter, the words “only a fool” had been purposefully used as words at which I might take umbrage. My doing so now would lead him into the usual “in the overall scheme of things, Paul's jobs are more important than Jewel's jobs” argument, with its infinite avenues of digression and ambush. Inevitably, he would needle me until I lost my temper. Then, as would have been his intention from the beginning, he
would retreat into a dungeon of endlessly inventive sulks to lick the traumatic wounds inflicted by his nearest of kin. Being wounded was all the justification he needed for making my life intolerable.

Then, after a lengthy episode of bleak unpleasantness, he would signal me that I might now raise him from the depths by apologizing abjectly and surrendering completely to whatever subordination he was proposing. On occasion I had done so, and in such cases, the clouds had cleared immediately. The moment I agreed, he would be sunny as a summer meadow in a Bonner I wall vista. This pattern had been more or less routine, but this time, and not without a pleasant thrill of malice, I refused the bait and skirted the trap.

“What about my work at the sanctuary, Paul?”

He gaped, thrown only momentarily off stride. “Why…I assume this new law will pretty well wipe out any need for sanctuaries, and if not, someone else in your ca-ninny group can substitute for whatever it is you do there. Dogs could always be left in stasis…”

Ca-ninny. I ignored the prick of the dagger and stood up, saying, “What do you mean, stasis?”

“We'll only be gone three years, maximum.”

“Ten percent brain loss per year…”

“My ass, Jewel, they're not Ph.D.'s. They're dogs!”

“You'll be leaving the concs in stasis?” If housing permitted, he sometimes took them with him on these trips.

He was genuinely startled. “Since it's three years, I'm taking the concs. Besides, as you said, 10 percent mental loss…”

“Ten percent of zero is zero. There'd be no noticeable difference in any of them except Poppy. Once in a great while, Poppy sounds almost sentient, unlike Marigold, Salvia, or Lavender. Particularly Lavender, who has the brain of a virus.”

A curled lip showed I'd hit a nerve, a definite no-no with Paul. He brought out the big guns. “Oh, well, stay on Earth if you like, but you can't go on living here. With your Aunt
Hatty gone off world to her sisters, there's no place waiting for you in Baja, and my priority housing rating goes with me, so this place will be sublet. I have no idea what you'd rate by yourself. Whatever it is, it won't cover space for hobbies.”

What did one politely call concubines if not a hobby! Or was there, indeed, anything one could politely call concubines? “The dogs aren't a hobby, and I have a species preservation license.”

He sneered. “The species in question won't even exist a month from now.”

Which was the absolute truth so far as Earth was concerned, and no less infuriating for that. In any case, it had nothing to do with the present conversation except peeving me enough to ready my sword and execute a graceful turn with my cape.

“I would hate living as a down-dweller on the bottom level of nowhere next to an algae conversion plant while you're gone, Paul.” I paused to ripple the cape. “However, the same goes for residing on Garr'ugh 290 as your unpaid housekeeper as I have done from time to time elsewhere. We both know that the stakes on new planets are enormous; the budget for a compliance mission is huge. I want a fair share, which means a salary and permission to take some dogs and trainers for my own amusement, just as you're taking the concs for yours. Either that, or I'll stay here to accept a recent liaison proposal.”

“Liaison proposal? You?”

The sword had gone home, and he had been wounded. I saw his chagrin at this self-betrayal. “A liaison offer, yes. A fellow preservation enthusiast.”

He was honestly surprised. “I didn't know you were seeing anyone…”

Trust Paul to think of sex first. “I'm speaking of Margaret Olcot. She and I have been friends for years, and she's recently lost her longtime associate. She has an heir-hold on a protected site, over forty acres of trees, which is quite a
temptation. She's asked me to join her for the sake of companionship and affinity.”

At this juncture, he could still decide to charge, snorting and bellowing. Better all around if we could skip another of his rages. I continued, “Quite frankly, I think the liaison might be a better move for me, but you know I enjoy travel, and I'm curious about Garr'ugh 290. When you've decided…”

He turned quite red, pressed his lips tightly together, controlling himself with obvious (and surprising) effort, then took a deep breath, and said, “The general will have a fit.”

The surrender was so abrupt that I hid my face behind my cup, catching up to capitulation. My unfamilial brother was ordinarily willing to risk almost everything to get his way. Either he'd been promised a bonanza for this job, or it was one that could further his career or, more likely, both.

When the pause threatened to become strained, I asked, with careful disinterest, “By
general
, you mean General Manager Brandt of ESC? He gave you the assignment?”

“No, of course not. This kind of thing doesn't require involvement at his level. It's an Earth Enterprises contract, jointly manned by ESC and PPI, and it came through the Enterprises' Contract Division, man named Eigverst. He said hold the requirements down or the general would have a fit.”

“And you'll clear the details with him?”

“No,” he said with an accustomed sneer. “Not if you're going. In that case, you can fight out the damned dog question with Eigverst. My requirements list is on my desk—combine it with yours and cover all the details.”

Which was, of course, what he needed me for. Paul regarded detail and routine as beneath him. Our rent was double what others paid simply because of the extra services he demanded from tower catering and housekeeping. He could not function unless he had someone else to take care of his day-to-day living.

“I'll take care of it,” I said with the slight frown it took to
suppress a triumphant grin, for I would indeed take care of it, right at the top with Gainor Brandt himself. He'd be ecstatic!

Paul was staring at me with a dissatisfied expression. I spoke quickly, before he had a chance to start pawing the ground again. “If we're going to be gone up to three years, I have shopping to do. Where will we be living?”

“In the PPI compound,” he said grudgingly. “ESC has a screened installation on an island just offshore, but one can't very well do linguistics from inside a screen. If one can do linguistics in this case at all!”

If? Paul never said if. “What makes you doubtful? Are the natives shy?”

He shrugged, forefinger stroking the side of his nose as he did unconsciously when he was uncertain about something. “I asked for everything they have on these creatures, but it's clear no one knows what they are. All the ESC people know is what they see. Here's the cube, take a look for yourself.”

The wall screen opened to display a stretch of vaguely green meadow or lawn. Forms moved about on it, flame-shaped, slender, round-bottomed cones that flickered at their tips with frondlike extrusions. The upper half of each cone sparkled with points of light, like sequins. I pointed, questioningly.

“Eyes, maybe,” said Paul. “Light reflecting off the lenses.”

“A hundred eyes?”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure. There are some striated sections below that could conceal mouths or noses. The flat places could be tympani, maybe ears.”

The forms circled the meadow, one at a time, a line of dancers, flailing the fronds at their tops as they went by. They were of different colors, wearing veils of some filmy material that swirled around them.

“Skirts?” I asked, rising to get a closer look.

“Moss. It grows on them. See that belt around their middles? It's a kind of…bark, maybe. Or cartilage. Local greenery grows on it and hangs down. They shed bits of it;
it's been picked up and analyzed, of course, and it's the same stuff that grows on the trees.”

The light grew stronger as we watched.

“Moonrise,” said Paul, as the pictured forms, together with their dancing floor, suddenly rose into the air and vanished in an explosion of soft light. He closed the wall. “There are several more dance sessions recorded, all very much alike. We still know almost nothing about them after almost ten years of observation on the moss world…”

I cringed and staggered.

He stepped toward me, crying “What's the matter?”

I sagged witlessly into a chair, shivering in sudden cold. “No…nothing, Paul. We've been talking about a planet and moon of Garr'ugh 290. But you just now said,
moss world
. Is this planet…? Of course. It's in the same system as the jungle planet, isn't it?” I should have known. I really should have known the jungle world was in Garr'ugh 290, but I hadn't.

He looked momentarily stricken, angry at himself for not having taken this into account. Even through my giddiness, I saw his annoyance. He never liked to overlook things or be taken by surprise.