The Companions (28 page)

Adam, Clare, Frank, and I went outside to find Paul awaiting us, escorted by two prancing, giggling concs. I waved the trainers on, waiting until they were out of earshot before saying, “Concs aren't allowed anywhere in the compound except their own quarters, Paul. Neither concs nor dogs are allowed in the commissary. Also, conc quarters are off-limits to PPI stewards, so you'll have to clean up after them yourself.”

He turned red. “They have no right…”

“It's in the regulations, Paul. I don't recall that you've ever stayed inside a PPI installation before. Concs are not allowed on PPI installations, period. Since you're a private contractor, so long as they're in your quarters, technically, they're not on the installation. They'll have to spend their time in the cases or with you.”

“Who told you? About concs being off-limits?”

“It was in the briefing material.” I had checked, and it was. Paul still looked doubtful, angry, or both, so I went on. “Drom reinforced the information when he saw the dogs and the conc cases.”

He stalked furiously back into his quarters, Poppy crying, “Whassa madda, Pow-ie? Can' we go have din-din?”

I followed him to his door. “The conc protein rations are stored in their dormitory, Paul. Commissary meals are pretty much time-dependent. Try not to be too late.”

“I'm not coming,” he said sulkily, his face still red.

I gritted my teeth. “Well, there are also prepared meals in stasis storage in the kitchen. And if you're not going out, you can sort out your materials and put them where you want them before someone from PPI puts them in the wrong places.” I left in a hurry, before he could reply. Whenever he was determined to be angry, I always tried to give him as many different things as possible to be furious at. A broad field of complaint diluted his concentration of fire.

The commissary staff was entirely mech except for two
middle-aged female supervisors, neither of them at all vacant-eyed. I'd expected the food to be at best slightly better than Earth food, but it was astonishingly good! Fresh vegetables and fruits, newly baked bread, real butter! There was a fluffy dessert made of real chocolate with real cream, flavored with something wonderful! The meal alone was worth the trip, though the trainers and I made no progress in getting to know the PPI contingent. The twenty or so staffers in the room studiously ignored us, and Drom wasn't there. I noticed that only a few of the people at the tables showed the same symptoms as the three men who had greeted me, all to a much lesser degree. Whatever it was, some had it and some didn't. Or some had had it and were getting over it.

By the time the four of us returned from our meal, it was well after dusk. Paul had returned the concs to their cases and was busy with his equipment at the meadow's edge. My contingent gathered on the east side of the building, Adam and I with glasses of wine from the storage unit, Clare and Frank drinking beer, real beer from the commissary, not Earth-stuff. The dogs lay behind us, chewing tough strands of flavored tooth cleaner, the next best thing to bones.

The lopsided moon bulged up from behind the tree line, its greenish light softening the forest. The dogs' noses twitched constantly, as did the trainers', though less obviously. I'd had more practice at keeping my nostrils quiet than they had. Paul was so busy setting his devices to record whatever was going to happen that he had no time to see or smell anything.

I didn't see the Mossen until Scramble nudged me. Following the direction of her gaze, I located a pallid blur against the darker forest. One blur became several, then turned into cone-shaped pearls of light, softly blue, only a few at first, then more, and more and more, necklaces of light-bubbles, gently glowing as they flowed from among the trees, strands of green-blue, blue-gray, gray-silver, silver-green, an ashen glimmer in Treasurelight. Someone in the
compound turned on lights that had been hung in the surrounding trees, and what had been shadowy became bright, the creatures blazing with color as they massed in the center of their dancing space, the sequin lenses on their bodies flashing fractured light in all directions as they whirled and turned and milled about before unspooling themselves from the central grouping to move along the edges, lines of them traveling clockwise around the perimeter of the meadow. As each one passed, I murmured into my recorder its predominant color:…orange-yellow, red, aqua toward the green, aqua toward the blue, deep purple, light fuchsia…

The line returned to the center, then parts of it emerged again, keeping the same order…aqua toward the blue, deep purple, light fuschia, pale green, citron, light pink, grayed purple…Sometimes the circle included all the Mossen in a single line. Other times, the lines were short, composed of ten or twenty Mossen, circling the edge while the others whirled in the middle. For a time, I went on listing all the colors I could see…grayed purple, six separate shades of yellow in sequence light to bright, then orange-yellow, red, lavender, harsh lime green…

When I had listed more than seventy colors, I gave up on it, no longer sure I was distinguishing individual shades, tints, or hues. The dance went on and on. For a time I closed my eyes, letting the odors from the surrounding forest summon up their own visions: a garden of fragrant blooms, a gardener's manure barrow, lavender, a shipboard pest killer, sage and marjoram, sweat, fresh dung. There were as many stenches as floral and fruit odors, lots of woodsy and herbal smells, some that were resinous or cheesy. No help there. I opened my eyes and peered at the dancers once more.

It grew cooler. A little wind came up. The moss edges of the meadow fluttered, the fluttering grew stronger, the wind went deeper, moving rapidly toward the center of the meadow to heave up the entire carpet of moss, curling its edges into flight. A single gust whirled the whole assem
blage, moss carpet and dancing Mossen, high above our heads, where it simply disintegrated, silently, into pale fragments. Around us something pattered like a fall of rain.

The Mossen were gone. Flown away? Moved into the branches of the trees, while hidden from view? Blown by the wind to some other location?

I yawned gapingly, aware of weariness. The trainers and the dogs straggled behind me into the house. Within minutes all the human ones of us were in bed, three very soundly asleep. Not so the dogs. Through my open door and the window that opened into their pen, I heard them wandering in and out, over the fence and back, lying down, sniffing the air, getting up to get a better sniff, lying down again. Something was out there. Something they were not frightened of, not exactly, but something they very much wanted to know about.

Deep in the night I wakened to another presence in my bed. Scramble. She was lying with her back against my belly, and my arm was across her wide chest. She had done this on the ship a few times, seeking my company. I didn't know whether it was because she liked my bed better than her own, or simply wanted nondog company. I stroked down her side, murmuring something fond, and she sighed, her hide rippling. Then I fell really asleep and did not stir until morning.

Once when Gavi Norchis had been about twelve or thirteen, she had become disoriented on a return trip from the lands below to the plateau. She had walked a considerable distance in the wrong direction before catching herself and retracing her steps. When sunset came, however, she was still far from her own trail up the escarpment, though a group of caverns she had previously explored lay nearby. With night coming on there were certain dangers she preferred not to meet in the open, so she cut enough moss to make a bed and carried it well back into the coziest cavern, where she found a little side niche with a tiny steam vent and a narrow entrance she could block with a stone.

She gathered dry wood for a fire, an easy task since a tall scaffold tree had recently fallen nearby. She plugged the cracks with moss to keep the drafts at a reasonable level and lay down wearily, only to find something digging into her back.

A few moments exploration with her hands found the thing, a manufactured thing, stuck in the crack beneath her bed and protruding just enough to dig into her. She got it out, with some effort, feeling it to be a small cylinder with a button on one side. When pushed, the button clicked, a light came on in the cylinder, and on the rock wall before her appeared a young woman smiling and waving. She had yellow hair and very green eyes, and she stood in a window which
looked out at…towers and towers and more towers. The Loam Clan had many scenes of old Earth, but none like this. The Loam Clan people did not dress as this woman did, or as the man did who now joined her to turn and wave at the person recording the event. And what were they doing? Some kind of ritual?

Perhaps a harvest ritual, for now they stood beside a great pile of pastry, feeding bites to one another. Yes. Either a harvest ritual or a new year's ritual, when people wished sweetness upon one another. The pictures ended with the two of them in one another's arms, looking out across a city in the dusk.

That was all. Since the pictures did not look like the world her people had left, Gavi thought they had been made somewhere else. Everyone in the tribes came from Jardinconnu, the fragrance planet, and they had no places like these pictured ones. If this thing was human, then other humans had left it here. But no other humans except the tribes had been on this world until the Derac and humans came, a few years ago, and even they had not come
here
, to this particular place. One ship had landed on the plateau near the old ships, to release devices that swam in the air, no doubt reporting what they saw to another device, far away. Which meant…what?

It was too dark to make out the device in detail, though her fingers told her it was etched on the outside with words or a design of some kind. She put the thing in her bag and lay down, falling asleep almost at once. In the night, however, she awoke to a strange, humming tone that seemed to emanate from the stones around her. She peered at the openings into her den, into this crack and that one, tracing the sound to a crack halfway up the wall, one she had stuffed with moss. She pulled the stuffing away to see a light. People were passing to and fro. She could see their legs and the tops of their feet. The odd thing was the legs weren't moving. The people were gliding, and she could hear their voices.

“Along here somewhere…” A troubled voice, almost whining.

“…been so stupid…told you a thousand times…” An angry voice.

“Forget it…probably not important anymore…” The first voice, almost as though it were weeping.

The light drifted to one side and went out suddenly. She returned to her bed as she might have done after a dream, falling into sleep and staying that way, untroubled for the rest of the night. In the morning, she woke with a most un-dreamlike memory of the incident, which only strengthened as she rose and went to the crack where the stuffing moss lay on the floor. Dark in there. She put her arm into the crack and her fingers touched the back of the fissure: stone. The crack did not open into space. It didn't open into anything. There was no way people could have walked past inside the rock.

So she had dreamed it. Either that or a place was there at night which was not there at other times. Either that or she was losing her mind.

She kept the device in her secrets bag: a finger-long tube, lettered on the outside with the words
Forever and a day.
Alone at night she sometimes looked at the images. The two people were in love. She knew of love, had read of it at least. She had seen none of it during her early years and little enough of it among the tribes, and that mostly in the lower classes, where it wasn't complicated by politics. She knew one provisioner and his wife who were happy as bugs on a branch in each other's company. It would be wonderful to be in love like that. Or, so she supposed. She could arrange it, of course. Arrange it for herself and someone, if she liked. It needn't be anyone who liked her, they would like her well enough after the ceremony.

Or perhaps she should grant the gift of love to those who found it hard to find? That sweet young woman who wove the beautiful tapestries, Gemma. The one with the squint, the voice like a frog, the horrible teeth, and the nose that
went a little sideways. Her body was slender and strong, her hair was lovely, and her manner. She had a sweet sense of humor. Why shouldn't she have the gift of love as well as any other?

What person should she pick for Gemma? Someone she really liked. None of the official Loamers. Unfortunately, she could not think of a man she really did like. The only person she greatly liked among the Loamers was Chief Larign's daughter, Lailia, the one they called Brightfoot. Gavi's fascination began with the name, which flowed like water: lah-EEL-ee-yah. And then, there was the look of her, slender and graceful, yes, like most women who carry water on their heads, but with something else, like pride or natural elegance or…like music, as though she were dancing to music that only she heard.

Naturally, since anyone would love Lailia, given half a chance, her father chose to mate her to a man she would be unable to love at all. Balnor of Burrow, son of Chief Belthos, as egocentric as his father had ever been, and even more arrogant and cruel. It had been Belthos, then about ten or twelve, who had pursued the infant Gavi into the depths of the Abyss some twenty-six or-seven years ago. He had loved chasing things, killing things, it didn't matter much what. Now he loved ruling over people, pushing them to see how far he could do it without their pushing back. Perhaps it was time she had her revenge on Belthos…

Situated not far from the retired ships of the G'tach was the Derac breeding facility to which Tachstucha, son of Gahcha, had been summoned for the choosing ceremony. The young hatched from his last mating had been brought to the Ground of Ghassifec for selection. Tachstucha went there, stopping first at the retirement ships to visit his father, then going this place and that to pass out ceremony money from his fasgi pouch, paying local residents for their good thoughts during the selection process.

He was wearing an ancestral brood apron, one with five pockets. It was unusual for a father to choose more than two young. Three was an expression of pride, four of arrogance, but five was a signal of Ghassifec's regard. No Derac would choose five without a specific say-so from God. Ten years ago Tachstucha had chosen five at his last breeding time, and he could afford to do it again if he skipped a few mating seasons in the future. Some Derac wouldn't do that. They found the breeding enjoyable, so they did it, picked one or none of the offspring, and let it go at that. Tachstucha preferred to spread out his breeding and take all who were worth raising.

He hissed politely at the keeper of the shrine and went into the warm, brood-smelling interior, finding the nest as
much by smell as by sight. There were eleven squirmlings, a goodly number, some already turning green, several with nose horns breaking the skin among the nostrils.

He opened the shuttered window above the nest and took the first male youngster in his hands. Quite active, green, eyes showing a fine opalescent sheen, tail limber and strong. Provisionally, he dropped the little fellow into one of the apron pockets, where it rolled itself into a ball and was quiet. Two more followed, each of a generous size. The eight remaining were smaller. He sifted through them, looking for any that might show signs of excellence, but there were none. Two were males, but very small. The others were quite pale, which meant they were probably female.

He left the shrine, telling the worker at the door to dispose of the rest. Some fathers ate them, but Tachstucha did not. When he was halfway to the gate, he reached for his fasgi bag, suddenly recalling that he had left it inside. He turned back the way he had come, entered the room, and came silently up behind the worker who had one of the young in one hand and a sharp instrument in another. The two males lay dead in the nest, but as Tachstucha watched, fascinated, the worker punctured the skull of the small Derac he was holding, then placed it, still quite alive, in a carrying box before picking up another.

“What are you doing?” Tachstucha asked.

The worker turned, paled, dropped the instrument, and thrust the young behind him.

Tachstucha felt his neck swelling, the membranes around his face filling redly with blood. “I asked, what are you doing?”

The worker mumbled something, stuttered, finally said, “They will kill me.”

“Who will kill you?”

“The breeders. The breeders will kill me.”

“You're taking my little ones to the breeders? Which breeders?”

“The K'khassa Breeding Farms. The female breeders.”

“Don't they have enough young? They need more?”

“They like…many. They like doing it. They…we've always taken the females if the fathers don't eat them.”

“And what was that instrument you were using? What were you doing with that?”

“Fixing them, Explorer. Fixing them. So they wouldn't care. So they don't…think. We fix all the females so they can't think. We make them mindless. Don't say. Please. They'll kill me.”

“I won't say. I won't say anything.” As he wouldn't, for he was too confused to say anything. He had always known the rejected young were destroyed, which was sensible, though not something he cared to do himself. Natural predation had taken care of Derac young in the long ago, but there were no longer any predators, so the Derac took care of it themselves. Regrettable but over and done with, as the humans said. Forgettable. But this, this business of keeping the female ones. Not only that. What had the worker said? That he was piercing their skulls so they couldn't think? Or care? Females never thought or cared! They were genetically incapable of thinking or caring! They were mindless. He had mated often enough to know that!

Tachstucha went directly from the breeding ground to the G'tach of his father, found his father sprawled among company on the warm ground, whispered to him that he had information of a private nature to impart, and retired with him to his own sand bed in the retirement ship. There Tachstucha told what he had seen.

“Make them mindless? You're sure that's what the worker said? Make them mindless?”

“I repeat exactly, Honored Father.”

“What sort of instrument?”

“A sharply pointed one. Like a claw. And he stuck it into the little one's head, through the skull.”

“And he said they were sent to the K'khassa Breeding Farms?”

“He did. Because, he said, they, the farmers, like doing it.”

“Breeding, he meant.”

“So I thought.”

“Ah. So, since it is the K'khassa Breeding Farms that supply females for the breeding of our shipclan, may we presume that some of those we breed may be our own sisters? Our own mothers?”

Tachstucha paled. “Ghassifec forfend!” The Derac had strong tabus against incest.

“Indeed. We have always been told that the females were bred from special lineages, that we were provided with ones unrelated to the rest of our population.”

Tachstucha nodded miserably. That was indeed what everyone believed, what he himself believed. He well remembered his first episode at the breeding farm. An enclosure had been prepared for him, one with three females in it. He had engaged in the dominance activities of his race, subduing all three, then he had killed one and eaten some of it before breeding with the other two. He had not thought of them as Derac, but merely as vessels for his procreative function. Exciting vessels, truly, but that was merely a matter of smell and action and the sounds they made. If they had been able to speak, to think, to cry out words instead of mere whimpers of pain…Would he have killed that one?

It was hard to think about that. Each time the thought came, it slid away from him, leaving discomfort behind. He told his father so.

“Then do not think about it, my son.” Gahcha had no intention of telling his son about the Orskimi and their plans, particularly inasmuch as it seemed the Orskimi had misled the G'tach G'gh'hagh, the Derac High Council. He would not even speak of this deceit on his own sprawling ground, for there were some among the retirees in that circle who had not left youthful unmindfulness behind them

“My son,” he said to Tachstucha, “you must obey me in one thing. You must not speak of this to anyone. I will take it up with those in power, but it must be done with absolute discretion.”

Seeing that Tachstucha regarded him with only partial
comprehension, he tried again. “Do not mention this to anyone.”

“Only my shipclan,” replied his son. “Yes, Father.”

“Not your shipclan,” said Gahcha, angrily. “Not anyone!”

“But, Father, shipclans share everything.”

“They do not share this! This is something you must forget you ever saw.”

Tachstucha thought about forgetting. The more he thought about forgetting the more vividly the memory presented itself in all its details. The squirmling had made a sound of pain. The squirmling was his very own, and they had hurt it. Of course, if he had eaten it, it would probably have felt pain, too, but that had the sanction of tradition. “Father, I do not think I can forget it, but I will try not to tell anyone.” He drew himself up with resolution. “I will try not to forget not to tell anyone.”

Gahcha regarded him closely. Even for a youth, Tachstucha was not very bright. “Come closer, my son,” said Gahcha. “Lean down to hear what I am saying…”

When the young Derac leaned down, Gahcha bit him through the spine, just at the skull, and held him tenderly for the few moments it took him to die. The ship was empty of other Derac, and its fusion furnaces were still functioning. Though it took Gahcha some time, he managed to lug the lifeless body to the door of the furnace, and it was then he saw the movement in the pocket of the brood apron. Before loading the corpse into the furnace, he removed the apron, chiding himself for the sentimentality of the gesture. Retired communities, however, could rear young ones just as well as shipclans could. He would foster them himself.

He took the squirmlings from the apron, admiring their strength, their flexibility, the intense green of their skins, the adorable buttons of the nose horns that sprouted below the protruding topaz eyes. Ah, well. By Great Scaly Caough, they would be a good souvenir of his dear, dead Tachstucha.