The Companions (31 page)

I said, “That brings me to the personal things I'd like to know. Have you made a search for survivors from those Hessing ships? I mean, of course, descendants of survivors.”

They looked at one another, shaking their heads. No.

Lethe said, “You know the primary objective of any resident program is to find, identify, and categorize native intelligent life, then all other life. The creatures we call the Mossen showed up early, here and there, a half dozen, twenty in a row, elusive as shadows, and they were as they are now, discrete mobile forms that moved in orderly ways. Whether that signifies intelligence toward the mouse level, or
intelligence toward the man level, or toward any intelligence at all hasn't been determined. Not long ago, they started dancing on the meadow over there. Subsequent to that, PPI claims it received a message. You can't prove it by us.”

“You haven't seen the message?”

“We have not. ESC doesn't take risks, and as a result we've lost no personnel. Our job is to wait, to weigh, to infer, to describe. Ordinarily, by this time we'd at least have had some opinion as to the intelligence of what we're studying, but on this world we've reached no conclusion at all. We have lots of records; we've tried the usual protocols; we've watched one group closely to see what it does, then compared that with what other groups do, trying to distinguish between instinctive and learned behaviors. On Moss, who knows? We see them dancing, but they all dance. What do they do when they aren't dancing? Haven't a notion because we've never seen one not dancing.

“We assumed they have some other life in the forest, when they're unobserved. So, we programmed fish to record sounds from the forest, hoping they would pick up something from the Mossen we couldn't see. We got a wide variety of what we'd call nonindigenous noises. Hammering. Bells ringing. Occasional complex sounds that were almost words. Derac noises—at times when the Derac were nowhere near. Women's voices. Children's voices…

I said thoughtfully, “Children's voices?”

“That's what I said,” snapped Burrow.

I smiled. “All the other noises could have been mimicked in the time since you and PPI got here, but you've never had any children here, have you?”

Lethe opened his mouth and forgot to close it.

Wyatt said, “No, we haven't.”

I let the smile become a grin. “So the creatures couldn't have heard children's voices unless those Hessing ships had survivors.”

They stared at one another. Finally, Wyatt said, “And if so?”

“So, if the sounds are made by Mossen in the forest, or by anything else, they may be nothing but pure mimicry.”

“Why?” asked Lethe, almost angrily. “Why mimic human speech?”

I shrugged. “I don't know, though I suppose it could be evolutionary and totally unconscious. Like some mutated butterfly being hatched with spots on its wings that look like bird eyes; birds don't try to eat it, it has offspring with the same spots who also don't get eaten. The mimicry of sounds might be something like that. Mimic the sound of the thing that might eat you…”

Lethe said slowly, “More likely the thing that might eat the thing that eats you. Or even, the thing you'd like to eat. On Earth, people used to go hunting for water birds, and they'd make the sound of the bird they were hunting to attract the prey.”

I nodded. “Sounds logical.”

“What's a butterfly?” asked Wyatt.

I said, “An insect that used to live on Earth, with beautifully colored wings…

“Ah. I'm sorry. I'm not an Earth native, and while I support the preservation effort philosophically, I know very little about Earth fauna.”

“There's damned little to know, these days.” I stood up, suddenly decisive. “I can't keep that poor PPI man waiting on the pier any longer. Will you report this to ESC, or shall I?”

Lethe said, “We'll draft a complete message from you and us, copy to you, adding our study results, such as they are.”

“Now that I have a boat to use, I'll drop over in the next few days. Link me if anything happens.”

Sybil Wyatt came with me to the lock, scuffing her feet on the path, looking down at her shoes, murmuring, half to herself, “You must think we're completely oblivious, not wondering about the presence of children's voices or knowing about people disappearing from PPI…”

“Why should you? It's not part of your directives to keep track of PPI, is it?”

“Not since Jungle. There, they were based in our space, and we were supposed to protect them. Which we couldn't do once they went out in the tangle. Since then, ESC has refused all responsibility for PPI contingents.”

I stopped short. “You were there?”

“On Jungle? Yes. All three of us were. It was Lethe's first command. Why?”

“One of those who vanished was Witt Hessing. He and I were liaised. He was…very important to me…”

I don't know why I felt it necessary to add that last. Surely the fact we were liaised was enough to legitimize my concern. We stared at one another, my anger confronting her pity, inconsequential as a rock hitting a pillow. Something moved in her pocket, and she patted it until a tiny face peeked out.

“Gixit,” she said, as explanation. “We were the only two things left…”

“On Holme's World,” I said. “I know. But that was years ago. Small animals don't usually…”

“This one seems to have a long life span,” she said, as the little beasty leapt out of the pocket onto her shoulder, large eyes watching me with intent curiosity, all four hands busy holding on, wide ears pricked.

“You mentioned the attack on Holme's World. That's what it was like on Jungle. There was nothing wrong there on Holme's World. One minute we were all celebrating the final stage of terraforming, the next minute everything on the world was dead but me and Gixit. There was nothing wrong on Jungle. One minute everything was fine, the next minute eleven men were gone.

“Gixit came with me back to Earth. When I was a lot older, working for ESC, I got hold of the genetic material saved before terraforming and created several more of his kind, male and female, hoping I could find somewhere to turn them loose. Moss is the best bet I've seen so far, but that's not important…”

“You have the others here?”

“Oh, yes. Most ESC staffers have some kind of pet or hobby. Living inside a force field isn't terribly fulfilling. Anyhow, that's beside the point, which is that we don't know why Holme's World was hit, and we don't know what happened on Jungle.”

I said firmly, “We may not know why, but there are Hessing ships on the plateau, so we know people have disappeared from up there, too. All of which says this system needs to be investigated. I don't care what the IC protocols say about surveys, intrusive or otherwise. We've got to get PPI off dead center.”

“Lethe said we'd report to General Manager Brandt.”

“Wrap it and put a bow on it for him. Tell Gainor Brandt if we're to save the PPI contingent, it will have to be quick, and the orders will have to come from outside. Please don't just wait and weigh about this one, Sybil. Try to get some action.”

 

During the Mossen dances over the next several days, I went on listing the colors and the order of the dance; daytimes I took the dogs on long walks in the forest; and Paul fed his computers with everything he could think of, concentrating on the sounds the fish had picked up in the forest. Early on the fifth morning, when I happened upon him in the kitchen, he was beginning to snarl.

“I was talking to one of the PPI kitchen people the other day,” lied I. “He's a hobbyist, extinct fauna. He happened to mention protective mimicry among prey creatures. It got me wondering, if those sounds are made by the Mossen, could they be protective mimicry?”

Paul stopped what he was doing and became very still. “In what way, protective?”

“Well, mankind can be dangerous. Perhaps by assuming our sounds, the Mossen are less exposed to predation by something else.”

“PPI hasn't found any predators.”

“I know. But they haven't really looked at much of the planet, either.”

“Besides, mankind has only been on the planet a short while. Wouldn't these creatures have needed much more time to evolve…”

“It could be like birds. The organs required for singing probably took a long time to evolve, but once they could do it, new songs might take no time at all. There used to be birds on Earth that could spontaneously mimic whatever they heard, voices or bells or sirens.”

“In which case,” Paul said in a deadly tone, “my work on the sounds these creatures make would be totally wasted.”

I cursed myself silently. “Oh, I doubt that, Paul. I just thought it was an interesting idea. Probably nothing in it at all.”

As there probably wasn't. Any more than my report to Gainor Brandt had anything real in it. Surely ESC wouldn't simply let the entire PPI contingent kill itself off! Unless Botrin Prime had kicked up a fuss and demanded Gainor keep hands off. Which wasn't impossible. Assuming that might be the case, and even though it broke protocol rather seriously, I decided to talk to Drom himself!

I found him before his console in the headquarters building. Lukha's chair—at least I supposed it had been Lukha's chair—was empty. Drom himself looked more troubled but slightly less ill than when I had seen him last. I pulled a chair over and sat down beside him. When he pretended to ignore me, I pulled his chair back and faced him, saying, “You have forty-seven live PPI people left on the planet. Did you know that?”

His shocked dismay told me he had not. “Out in the mosses…” he whispered.

“No, you don't have eighty people wandering around out in the mosses. Many if not all of them are dead. What's going on here, Duras? Why did all the oldsters come here? Was it to die?”

He turned away from me to bend over his console, almost resting his forehead on the work surface, taking a breath like a sob. “Most of them.”

“Why?”

He knotted his hands together, clenching his teeth, almost shuddering from the effort to control himself Then he took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and said, “You probably won't understand. People don't, not unless they're…PPI. It's a tradition with us, we've always done it. My own father. His father…” His knotted hands beat his knees, punishingly.

“Talk to me,” I urged. “You've got to talk to someone.”

He took another shuddering breath. “I know. I told myself that, some time ago…”

“What has PPI always done?”

“When we get too old to do the work, when we look at retirement, being planetbound…it's fine for some people, some even look forward to it, but a lot of us can't face it. We want to go on doing what we've done all our lives. See new places. Learn new places. We don't want to live shut up in four hundred square feet of an anthill on Earth, we don't want to die like that.”

“So. You say ‘always'?”

He took a deep breath, stood up, walked away from me to stare out the nearest window. “There've always been planets or moons where it was easy to die…”

“Dangerous planets.”

“I didn't say easy to get killed on. I said easy to die on. Go to Borderland 13, sleep out in the open, you don't wake up in the morning. Flying night creatures come to suck your blood, but they do it without your feeling it, and they inject a chemical that gives you lovely, euphoric dreams while they're doing it. It's painless. Easy. Nice, if death can be nice. The largest moon of Chime 30 is a lovely place, beautiful views, light gravity, easy on old bones, old hearts, and a kind of happiness in the air. You wander, feeling happy, not even tired. About fifty, sixty days after you arrive, you've forgotten everything except the inclination to wander. You don't eat, or drink, you just walk and chuckle and walk and chuckle until eventually you fall down dead. There's a spore floating in the air that settles in the brain. That's all it takes.

“PPI men, they know these places. The word gets around, just like it did about this one. I've lost fifteen people from my original crew out there. Some of the retirees have filled in behind them, the ones who're still in good enough shape that they'd rather work than die. The three you met—Maywool had an ET disease, one we can't cure yet. Lackayst was within two weeks of retirement. Lukha…he just got in too deep, that's all…”

“Lukha died with a woman. I saw it.”

He turned toward me, shaking his head. “It isn't sex. I did it enough to know it isn't sex. That's not what it's like at all. If you lie on the moss with someone else, you seem to dissolve into one another. You have a whole new world in your mind, another person, memories, ideas…”

“You did the redmoss?” I asked.

“I was an addict,” he said stiffly. “But I broke the addiction when we decided to send for…for someone. I got all the crew together. We identified the users, including me. We used the med machines to fight the addiction. I figured when the linguist we asked for arrived, it'd get reported, and besides, it was interfering with my job. I like my job. I'm not ready to die yet.”

“No more addicts among the people here?”

“A few recovering from it, like me. We did a general warning. If I see any sign of it in people, or they see any sign of it in me, a med-modifier gets installed until the next ship, then out. The warning couldn't apply to Lukha and the others like him because they were already too far gone. It didn't apply to the temporary duty people, oldsters who didn't want to go back to Earth. I wasn't about to sentence them to that. The moss was the only good road left for them.”

“Didn't want to go back to Earth? Did they come from there?”

“No. But they came from planets that get rid of anyone over eighty-five. Most of the men and women who came here were close to that. They couldn't face fifteen or twenty years of pensioned-off hell!”