The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He had no intention of suggesting it. He would simply forward the report. Let the higher-ups suggest whatever they wanted to. His soul told him this world should be left to the creatures who occupied it, but he could find no hard evidence of intelligent life. He had only one concrete fact to use as a bar against this planet being opened up, visited, utilized, colonized, destroyed, but he did not wish to mention that one thing.

  Still, despite all the earlier protestations of patience, Exploration and Survey Corps was growing itchy. Taking time was one thing, they said. Taking forever was another. ESC didn’t get paid until something definitive happened. Several days ago Earth Enterprises had demanded a report, a preliminary judgment, a few words to indicate what was going on. Either that, or they’d pull their people out, contract or no contract.

  This directive in hand, Drom had gone to his mirror to consult with himself, there being no one else of appropriate status left to consult. His consciousness hovered between two sets of identically accusatory eyes, himself glaring at himself reflected; himself, head of station; accountable to no one but himself; knowing himself to have willingly succumbed to the delirium of Moss, to have repeatedly indulged himself and, yes, others, in behavior that PPI HQ would consider…no! That he himself considered improper.

  The only remedy for this infraction was to stay out of the forest, to confine himself to quarters. The PPI team could not possibly decide anything sensibly when too many people in it, including Drom himself, were consistently guilty of delight, guilty of spending seasons at a time lying half-buried in mossy softness, frittering away years while smelling joy in the air as though each moment were eternal!

  Oh, yes. PPI had disported itself, at least those given to disporting had done so, and when certain puritans among them had questioned this nonchalance toward duty, Drom himself had allowed it to go on. Hadn’t he commanded and hadn’t they served as the PPI team on Jungle, twelve years ago, when eleven of their fellows had vanished into that overgrown weed patch leaving no sign, no signal, no nothing to mark where they had gone or what had taken them? Hadn’t they had nightmares afterward, as though from a lasting poison that affected only the sleeping mind? Hadn’t they gone directly from Jungle to Stone, where they’d been daily dust-dazzled, sun-staggered, half-melted by the heat? On Stone, even PPI personnel could not touch the surface or allow the surface to touch them, but it was a great-grandmother lode of rare ores, the most profitable new world found in a century. Still, living things had been found in stranger environments, and years had spun by in baking chaos and a madness of mining machines, while PPI went through the motions of searching for indigenous life so that no one, no people could accuse them of slacking their duty.

  After all that, didn’t they have some pleasure coming, some relaxation? He had thought so, said so, though what they had earned and what was appropriate were two different things. The truth was they would not be allowed to remain on Moss no matter what they reported or found or believed. Those who didn’t die here would be sent somewhere else quite shortly. Where that place might be and how well or badly they would live there could depend significantly on the overall profit or loss coming from these three planets. Profit or loss, defeat or victory, fines or bonus pay hinged upon what was found here, in this system. Jungle had been a total loss; Stone a bonanza; and Moss was an enigma. Finding an intelligent race on this planet, or, if there was none, being able to say so definitively would make the planet bankable. It would put them on the high plus side, the very high plus side. Everyone knew that, but even now, after all this time on Moss, that basic question remained unanswered. Until it was answered, what was the place good for?

  Nothing that made money. Retirement, perhaps. Several of the PPI people originally assigned to Moss had been old-timers. They had communicated with colleagues near retirement, and some of the oldsters had arrived, “assigned to temporary duty,” and they had been followed by others yet. The installation had been enlarged, at first, to house additional personnel, though no additions had been needed recently. The PPI contingent roll was three or four times longer than the rolls of those surveying any other known world. Of course, the rolls were only paper. The people, bodily, were seldom to be found.

  Was there an intelligent race on Moss?

  “…if the flame folk are intelligent, there’s a bonus,” he said, dreaming into the silence of the room.

  “I know,” said the young lieutenant from his seat before a bank of monitors. “That’s what the ESC expert said. If they’re intelligent, we profit.”

  “An intelligent race is a market,” Drom mused. “And a new market is worth money, once you find out what it wants and needs.”

  Bar Lukha considered this through long moments of silence, saying at last, “But the Mossen don’t need anything.”

  “How do we know?” Drom asked. “The Mossen don’t talk. They don’t do anything but dance.”

  “Right.” The word drawled out, spinning itself into something more than mere agreement. Into connivance. Into complicity.

  Drom said desperately, “Even if they’re people, if they don’t talk or interact in some way, we can’t establish intelligence. If there’s no intelligence, we have to leave and let the real estate guys take over.”

  Lukha kept his eyes fixed on his monitors, which were dancing for no reason. He had not been able to find out what was happening. For days now, the monitors had been dancing to sounds he couldn’t hear, electromagnetic activity he couldn’t locate. He had finally decided the dials were doing it because they liked it, because it was more fun than standing still.

  “We’d stay if they—you know, them. If they wanted emergence,” he remarked, in a preoccupied voice.

  “If they wanted emergence, yes.” More than anything, Drom wanted to stay here, to do what he had spent years doing before he had sentenced himself to confinement: take off his clothes, wander off into the mosses, eat the sweet bulbs of dew that formed on the stems of the blue, lie deep in the scent of the violet, thrust himself against the velvet of the scarlet, feeling his skin prickle and burn and then flare in ecstasy that went on for a seeming eternity. Maybe ask one of the women if she’d like to do the scarlet with him. Oh, yes, he wanted to stay here.

  “Maybe the flame folk want to meet other people,” murmured Lukha.

  “Prove it,” challenged Drom.

  “Well, they don’t talk to us. Maybe they write.” Bar Lukha hummed to himself. “Maybe…we’ve found a message they left us.”

  Drom looked up in disbelief. The flame people of Moss didn’t even acknowledge that men were there! How in heaven’s name would they send any kind of…message? “It’s a mystery to me how they’d do that!”

  “Mystery…is the message,” Lukha went on, as though entranced. “I think it was on a piece of that flat, gray moss that wraps around the trees. I think they wrote with some of the red juice of those berry kind of things.”

  His voice was intent, speaking of something he had obviously thought about, wondered about: the enigmatic Mossen leaving a message.

  Drom considered the idea of a message. Would it be in the Earth language?

  “In Earth-tongue,” Lukha answered the unspoken question, half-singing it. “Oh, yes. They wrote it in our language and left it where I would find it. I read their message. It said, they wanted to meet other people. From beyond the stars.”

  “How did they learn our language?” Drom whispered, not wanting to break the spell.

  “Listening to us, Chief. Listening to us. Reading our bulletin board. Looking at our papers…”

  “And they want to meet other people, from beyond the stars.”

  “That’s what the message said. The message I read.”

  “Where is it, Lieutenant? This message.”

  Now Lukha was, in fact, crooning the words. “I’ll look for it, Chief. I had it. I know I put it somewhere…”

  “We’d need a linguist,” breathed Drom. “I’ll ask them for a linguist.” And also, he told him
self, he would ask them for a team to look at those abandoned ships. Since they were Hargess ships, they’d have to send someone. And meantime, he really would stay out of the mosses.

  THE LINGUIST’S SISTER: JEWEL DELIS

  Eventually, the Planetary Protection Institute mission on Garr’ugh 290 requested a linguist. The matter was referred to someone in Exploration and Survey Corps who attempted to link Paul Delis, my half brother. At the time, Paul was deeply involved in quite another activity: a session of manic and escalating eroticism that had driven me to take refuge behind the locked door of my room, where I sat stewing, my annoyance not at all ameliorated by familial affection. Affection for Paul, familial or otherwise, had been eroding for years.

  Prior experience with similar situations suggested that Paul would soon propose to his concs, Poppy, Marigold, Salvia, and Lavender, that it would be fun to get sister Jewel involved in their games. Foreseeing this, I’d done what I could to minimize damage by putting away everything breakable during a temporary lull the night before. I’d packed an overnight bag and readied my street robe and veil by the door. An hour ago, I’d linked Shiela Alred to say that I’d be coming over to the sanctuary as soon as I could escape unnoticed.

  Shiela had said a few pointed words about people who made the same mistake a lot more than twice, which I chose to ignore. My boss, not Shiela, my real boss, Gainor Brandt, had asked me to continue living with Paul if I could bear it. Thus far I had found it bearable, barely. When Paul was working, as he usually was, he was civil, if arrogant, and living with him gave me a lot more breathing room than any space I could have afforded on my own. It was only during these libidinous fits of his that he took all four of the concs out of their cases, overdosed them and himself on moodsprays, and mindlessly metamorphosed into an idiot satyr, ecstatically disregarding the wreckage he was causing. Each time it happened, I prayed that someone, somewhere, would be in such desperate need of a linguist they’d overlook Paul’s extortionate fees and hire him for a long, long-term project off planet. This time it hadn’t happened, but the blind hope had persuaded me to overstay a sensible departure time. Now noises offstage indicated the culminating incident was imminent.

  “Jooo-ell,” came a happy little voice through the door. “Come out, Jooo-ell.” This was followed by a wild giggle, then a crash, then another voice, “Jooo-ell-ee. Pow-ie wans you in on the funzies. Jooo-ell-ee.”

  Concs were a familiar sight on the podways, but none I had seen elsewhere talked like willful children. Concs had limited vocabularies, true, and their voices were quite high, but they were not prattling and manic in the way Paul’s concs inevitably were. I could only suppose that concs, who were said to be infinitely adaptable, had responded to Paul’s preference for feral childishness that could in an instant become dangerous. Now, though the wee conc voices were still nonthreatening, I knew the next step would be an assault on my door in which the concs would join wholeheartedly. Not that they had hearts. On several such occasions I’d had to call security to get me out of the apartment intact. Each time Paul had regarded this as an act of “disloyalty,” which he wasn’t quick to forgive.

  “Jooo-ell,” Lavender cried again. “Tum tum ow-oot wif us.”

  Reason would do no good, so I resorted to duplicity. With my robe on and veil over my head, I tapped my link into ready, and spoke the code for Paul’s library, his “work” room, at the far end of our apartment. He never let a call to that link go unanswered, even when, as in this case, he had trouble remembering where it was. The summoner screeched insistently over the pattering of androgynous little feet accompanying the arrhythmic thuds of Paul caroming from wall to wall.

  When he answered, I would pretend the call was from some VIP and ask him to hold. While he did so, I’d get out through the service door by the food service core.

  I put the link to my ear and heard his strangled bellow: “Wha…Paw…Paul Delis here…”

  It took a moment to realize I’d heard it through the door, not through the link. Someone else had reached him first. I didn’t wait to find out who before grabbing my bag and scooting down the hall in the opposite direction, wondering why I hadn’t left two days ago while things were still relatively sane. It was probably mere stubbornness on my part. In a thirteen-mile-square urb with over a billion people in it, one didn’t give up one’s living space without a fight.

  Outside the apartment, I followed the flow arrows of the hallway traffic lane to “Local 53,” my transport hub, one of the sixty-four locals on my floor. There I joined a clutch of other anonymous robes and veils in boarding the lift, one at a time, each one of us taking position inside the painted grid that divided the floor into person-sized squares. Though out-planet visitors claim to find our separation conventions strange, all our robes and veils, our painted grids, our flow arrows, and the section marks on moving walkways are what keep us sane in public areas. They are more than mere customs. They’re the walls between survival and chaos.

  The lift dropped four floors to the 141st floor, which is the mercantile floor of my Tier, a Tier being ten floors: eight residential floors above one park floor and one mercantile floor that also serves as a transport center. From near the lifts, I boarded Intersection-Diagonal NW, which took me to the nearest sector hub, where I switched to a sector-diagonal and got off at NE Quadrant hub. Since my ultimate destination was above the 200th floor, I boarded the quadrant express lift to the NE Quadrant Transport Area on the 200th floor and took the Quadrant-Diagonal NE to the pod lobby at the corner of Tower 29. The sanctuary was in Tower 69, four towers east, and I caught a pod moving in that direction.

  Telling it makes it sound complicated, but the trip was habitual and quick. I paid as little attention as possible to my surroundings, seeing only what was necessary, keeping arms and hands close to my body, staying in the middle of my square on the walkways, in the middle of my seat on the pod, my head tilted forward and my veil down so as not to offend by appearing to stare at anyone. In the years before grids were established, before all citizens started wearing robes and veils, staring, bumping, and shoving had been the rule, along with a good deal of retaliatory rage. Back then, the annual death toll from gang assaults and crowd rage had been over a million in this urb alone. After tests in a few urbs proved that anonymity worked, rage had been forestalled by edict. No more affiliation buttons; no more gang colors; no more tower or sector IDs. Good citizens wore veils and robes with no distinguishing marks; they kept their heads down, their hands folded, and pretended they were all alone in the world.

  Once in Tower 69, I pulled off the veil in the private express lift to the sanctuary on Floor 259. My putative fundraising office was there, as was the little suite I used when I was working late or avoiding Paul. Eventually, he’d exhaust himself, and I would go home again to be greeted with sneers and resentment, as though failing to join in his games was some sort of familial impropriety. I’d learned to ignore that stage of things. It would eventually pass, just as each of his concs eventually passed, to be mysteriously replaced by another. I never knew where he found them, though on occasions I had asked some superficially innocent question such as, “What happened to Vanilla? I haven’t seen it…”

  “Her,” he corrected.

  “…her around for some time.”

  “I got tired of her.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Got a new one.”

  Eventually, he always got tired of them, or misused them, or destroyed them. Though concs were reputed to be excellent sensual partners for men or women or any combination of them, Paul was never contented with mere excellence. He always pushed the limits toward meltdown and obliteration. Afterward, his easiest out was to blame the concs or blame me. I often thought Paul valued me more for my role as scapegoat than he did for any reason of kinship.

  The lift doors opened on a floating cloud of violet draperies and improbable hair: Shiela Alred in her usual monochromatic flurry. She tilted her lavender coif, grabbed bo
th my hands in hers, and looked up at me as she cried in a panicky voice: “You’ve heard the news then, Jewel?”

  Shiela usually sailed along on a sea of aristocratic aplomb, but today her voice rasped and her hands gripped mine like talons.

  “No, Shiela, I’ve been…sort of closeted today.”

  “Dreadful, my dear, dreadful. Those hateful IGI-HFO people! I’ve been on the link all morning, helping various of our friends plan what to do next. So stupid, this whole thing. It makes me so furious!”

  Red spots burned on her cheeks. The flesh around her eyes was wet and swollen. My mouth went dry. I asked, “What have the iggy-huffos done now, Shiela?”

  She had to clear her throat before she could get it out. “The final straw, really. In thirty days, all sanctuaries are to be closed. Cleaned out, is the way they put it. My God, if it weren’t for the arkers, we’d have no hope at all!”

  “Thirty days?” I felt I was choking. The walls tilted nauseatingly. I managed to gargle, “Only thirty days?”

  “That terrible man, you know, the head of IGI-HFO? Evil One Moore!”

  It was her usual joke. “Evolun Moore, yes.”

  “He threatens riots among the down-dwellers unless Worldkeeper puts a final end to all animal life on Earth.” She laughed half-hysterically. “According to Moore, animals use too much water and air. Naturally, he says nothing about the billions of concs living wherever they like, using up a lot more of everything than animals do.”

  I managed to ask, “Who made the announcement?”

  “Evil One himself, of course. Though Worldkeeper immediately verified it, speaking for who knows what anonymous bureaucrats! Claiming it’s only a temporary measure! Only until the death rate increases, they say. Only until ET colonies stop sending people back here by the millions under the Law of Return…”

  I snarled, “Only until all the dogs, cats, and canary birds are dead and the down-dwellers find they don’t have any more space, air, or water than they have right now.”