The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “It’ll be too late then.” Shiela took my arm and tugged me toward the security checkpoint at the sanctuary door. “I’ve already called Gainor Brandt. He says he’s negotiating an extension on enforcement of the edict on the grounds that our research is vital to planetary security.”

  Gainor Brandt’s public job was as the general manager of Earth Enterprises, which meant he also controlled the Exploration and Survey Corps. Covertly, he was one of the mainstays of the preservationist movement, the “arkists,” small letters, no emphasis, hush, don’t mention it.

  Shiela babbled on. “I’ve also spoken with arkist headquarters. They have some arks ready…well not totally, but they will support life. Oh, Jewel! Have I ever said what a saint you are to us! Living with Paul must be quite horrid, but we would never have had so many arks if you hadn’t been with him here and there…”

  I laughed, not because it was funny. “Well I’m not there, Shiela.”

  “I presume he’s on one of his conc orgies?”

  “Oh my, yes.”

  “Does he know you’re gone?”

  “I’m the last thing he’s thinking of.”

  “Can I offer you some supper? You look just as hungry as you do tired.”

  Since I’d had limited access to the food service core for the last couple of days, I told her I’d love some supper.

  She babbled on: “When you linked, my dear, I thought you might be coming because you’d heard the bad news. Just as you did the first time we met. It was old Evil One back then, too, wasn’t it. Terrible man. His face on the news screens, baying like some great, prehistoric…crocodile! Ten years ago?”

  I suppressed a grimace. “Nearer twelve, Shiela.”

  “You’re right. Of course! It was 2700, the year we started the sanctuary. You were only, what? Eighteen? Dear Witt brought you. I remember your face was all swollen from crying, you’d gotten to Jon Point just in time to keep him from…”

  She was headed down a painful road that I refused to travel just then. “I’ll just go put these things away, Shiela.”

  “Oh, of course dear, you do that. Go settle in. I’ll let you know when to come down for supper.”

  Shiela fluttered off toward her private lift to her residence on the floor below. She had cued a painful spasm of reminiscence, though by now the memory was so worn around the edges that it didn’t stop my breathing as it used to do. The memories seemed more like a part I’d played, a role I’d put on like a garment rather than an event I’d lived through as a person. Most days it was hard to believe I could ever have been as stupid as I had been at eighteen.

  The sanctuary residential suites were in the opposite direction from the one Shiela had gone, and the hallway was as blessedly quiet as the caverns of Mars I remembered from childhood. Even the full quota of staff and visitors never filled it, much less crowded it, and the space made me feel as though I expanded, like a warmed balloon, slowly pressing out into the light and air.

  In my suite—a bedroom, bath, and small sitting room—I shelved the few items I’d brought then washed my hands and face. Matty, my mother, had always insisted I wash up whenever I came into private space. “People in masses are poisonous,” she used to say, her serious tone belied by the sparkle in her eyes. “Whenever we come into private space, we should wash them off.”

  “I don’t see anything, Mama.”

  “It’s invisible effluvium,” Matty told me. “The sorrows and anxieties of too many people.”

  Back then, I’d been sure I could see the sorrows dissolving in the water, washing down the drain. The sorrows were part of a Mars song Matty used to sing:

  “Our coats are thin as mist, our heels are horn,

  beneath our eyes old sorrows build their nest…”

  When she became too weak to hold a mirror, Matty asked me to hold it for her, so she could make sure there were no sorrow nests under her eyes.

  “We here kept faith alive, but all the rest,

  the wisest and the bravest we have borne,

  left faith behind to go out, seeking splendor…”

  “Who did, Matty?” I asked her. “Who went off seeking splendor? What is splendor?”

  “No one knows,” she said. “No one knows who stayed and who went, or where. The Zhaar, maybe, but they didn’t leave the directions behind…”

  I didn’t know Matty was famous until years after she died. I knew she made pictures and music about the weird stony places on Mars. My father was Victor Delis, the Earthian ambassador to Mars. Paul was his son by his first wife, a very rich, spoiled, willful woman who killed herself doing something that every sane person in the vicinity had told her not to. Paul inherited most of her money because, so my mother said, he was just like her.

  After Victor died, Matty got together with a childhood friend, the artist Joram Bonner III. Paul would never call Joram “Father,” of course, any more than he would call Matty “Mother.” He called her Matty, so I got in the habit of doing that, too, except when I was alone with her and baby Tad. Tad came along when I was two and Paul was four, Taddeus Joram Bonner, Joram Bonner IV.

  Right around my sixth birthday Matty got sick. Nobody on Mars could help her, so Joram brought us all back to Earth. While the doctors tried to cure Matty, Joram found us a place to live on Floor 145, Tower 29 in Northwest Urb 15, the same apartment Paul and I were still “sharing.” Joram said it was a prestige location because it had windows, even though there was nothing to see except the tower across the street. It wasn’t a street, really. It was more like a chasm, the bottom of it stuffed with roaring stacks of dark, dirty freight tunnels and catacombs where the down-dwellers live.

  Earth scared me at first. The towers were huge, each a mile square and more than two hundred stories high. Podways ran along every tenth floor, north on the east side of each tower and south on the west side. Up one level, they went west on the north side and east on the south side. They stopped at the pod lobbies on each corner, so when you were on one, it went woahmp-clatter, rhmmm, woahmp-clatter, whoosh. That’s a pod-lobby stop, a slow trip across the street, another pod-lobby stop, then a mile-long whoosh, very fast. The pod-lobbies were full of people, too, and that’s the clatter part, the scary part. Taddeus and I saw more people in one pod-lobby than we’d ever seen together anywhere on Mars, and many of them were dressed in fight colors: Tower 59 against Tower 58, Sector 12 against Sector 13, all of them pushing and shoving and tripping over each other. Often they got into fights or screaming fits. It took us a while to figure out how to dodge them and keep out of their way, but when we got good at it, it turned into a kind of game, and we rode the podways for fun. It was a lot safer than it sounds, because there are so many monitors on the pods that people are afraid to do anything really wicked unless they’re over the edge. Tad and I thought part of the fun was spotting people that were about to go over the edge. We could almost always tell.

  Paul and Taddeus and I started school at the Tower Academy while we were waiting for Matty to get better. Matty would improve, then she’d relapse, then she’d improve. The disease attacked her nerves, so she was in dreadful pain, and finally it got into her muscles so she couldn’t move. After that, she didn’t improve anymore. She got weaker and weaker and finally just faded away and died. Joram and I were with her. Joram said Taddeus was too young for a deathwatch, and Paul said she was no kin of his, not that it made any difference. If she’d been kin, he’d probably have acted the same way.

  After Matty died, things got complicated. Paul was ten, and he refused to go back to Mars, and Paul always did exactly what he wanted to do, no matter what anyone said. Since he had lots of money from his mother, and I had some from my father, we each had what’s called an NCC, a non-coparenting certificate, which meant we didn’t have to have coparents under Earth law so long as Joram arranged for us to be properly cared for. Taddeus hadn’t inherited any money, and Joram was his only living parent, so he needed a coparent.

  Joram was a vista preservation artis
t, and Earth had no vistas left to preserve. Joram’s grandfather had scanned the last few: Antarctica before it thawed; Ayers Rock before they broke it up; the pyramids, just before they tore them down for landfill. Joram couldn’t do his work if he stayed on Earth to parent us, so he decided to make a liaison contract among himself, us three kids, and a Licensed Child Custodian named Luth Fannett LCC. Both my trust fund and Paul’s paid something in every year, and Joram sent money for Taddeus, so while Joram was off God-knows-where, we three kids and Luth lived in the apartment with the prestige windows we couldn’t see anything out of.

  Even at ten, Paul was very proud. He was proud of his mind and of the way he could learn languages so easily and proud of being a Delis and proud of having his mother’s money. When he was twelve, Paul told me that Victor Delis had begotten me on purpose so I could be Paul’s assistant when we grew up. “Because you’ll be smart enough to help me but not smart enough to do anything significant on your own.”

  I don’t know where Paul got that idea. He was only three when our father was killed, and people don’t remember things that far back. Besides, I don’t think Victor Delis would have said any such thing. He was an ambassador, and they’re supposed to be tactful. Paul certainly wasn’t tactful. He was just plain nasty a lot of the time, which is why Tad and I spent a lot of time on the podways.

  Podfare was almost nothing. We could ride all week on our allowance of pocket money. We’d go across the urb and back again. Sometimes we’d go up to the 200th floor and take express pods that went outside the urb. We’d watch people and make up stories about them and eat pod-lobby food like sizzlejuice and crunch-a-muncheese. One particular day when I was off school, Paul started the morning making me miserable. Tad wasn’t home. I couldn’t lock myself in my own room because Luth wouldn’t let me have a lock. So I just left and went pod-hopping by myself. I found a corner seat on a multipod and rode it back and forth, watching people. That was before people wore veils, so you could really look at people so long as you didn’t stare. After a while, I switched podways and rode the expresses, and finally I depodded at a funny-looking tower I’d already passed half a dozen times, trying to decide whether to cross the street to go north or up one floor to go west, and I noticed the glass doors leading into the park floor of the tower.

  Every floor ending in a 0 is a park floor, but these doors didn’t look like ordinary park floor doors. They were painted all over with tall red letters: DERELICT. DANGER. DO NOT ENTER. I put my nose against the glass, my hands shadowing my eyes. Nothing out there! Except that nothing was something, so far as I was concerned! Space. Real space. Without people in it!

  I edged to the crack in the door, where it was chained almost shut, but not so tight I couldn’t squeeze through. Right inside, staring into my face, were a pair of strange eyes. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me, but everybody had already gone up or down or across to connect with another podway, so I pushed the door as far as it would go and scrunched through. No one bigger than I was could have done it; only someone like me, as Paul said, all bones.

  Inside, when my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw the creature of the eyes staring at me, so I went toward it. It backed up, and I followed it. It was moving through the dark toward a faint light at the center of the floor. The walls were all crumbled into piles of trash with hairy bits of wiring sticking out, like disintegrating monsters. Broken pipes were hanging from the collapsing ceiling, and way off at the edges of the floor, daylight leaked in where the outside walls had fallen.

  The creature was still ahead of me, a darker shadow against the inside walls where the core services had been. It slipped through an open door and into a lighted space, then turned to look at me. Once I’d seen it in the light, I knew what it was, even though I’d never really seen a live one, because Matty had talked about them, over and over, and she’d found the remains of them on Mars, and she’d had one when she was little and I’d had one, a stuffed one, when I was just a baby. It was a Faithful Dog, just like the pictures she’d shown me only bigger. It stepped into a kind of basket thing and nosed around, and when I got close I saw the basket was full of little ones. Seven squirmy, fat sausages with their eyes shut. When the big dog lay down, the little ones started sucking on her, and I made the connection. Those were her mammaries. Like breasts, so she was kind of my cousin, because I was a mammal, too.

  I crouched down by the basket and stroked the puppies while they were eating. It was a feeling…I’d never had that feeling before. They were warm and soft. Their mother was watching me, her eyes told me to be careful, but she didn’t mind if I touched them. She was a man-friend, and I was trying to remember anything I’d ever heard about man-friends in the “Litany of Animals” that Matty taught me and the pictures I’d seen in baby books with animal alphabets, from aardvarks to zebras. D was always Dog. In olden times men had dogs as pets, friends, companions, workers, too, I guess. They pulled wagons and herded sheep and all sorts of things. Oh, yes, they’d been eyes for blind people, too, before we could put artificial or cloned eyes in, but mostly they’d been cures for loneliness. All this was bubbling up in my mind while a feeling was rising up my arm like warm honey: softness, friendliness, someone saying, “Hello, other thing.” I was the other thing, and this one needed me…

  Then, from behind me, I heard a surprised grunt, and someone said, “What the bloomin’ oompah’re you doin’ here?”

  He was a big old man with a whitish beard and woolly eyebrows. His face was full of lines, and his hands and fingers were thick and bumpy. I could see them very well because he had hold of me by the arms and was sort of shaking me, not to hurt, just as though he wondered what kind of thing I was. I told him my name.

  “Jewel Delis! Now, isn’t that somethin’. You any relation to that Ambassador Delis got killed on Mars?”

  I said he was my father.

  “Poor man. Wrong place at wrong time, so they say. So what’s Delis’s daughter doing here all alone midst all this ruin an’ wreckage, droppin’ in on Jon Point and his dogs?”

  I said, “I’ve never seen a real one before.”

  “Don’t have dogs on Mars?”

  “No, sir. There’s not enough air or water for anything except necessities. ‘Hydroponics first, people second, and there is no third.’ That’s what they say.”

  He laughed about that, and he offered me some algae crackers, not the good kind but the light green ones that taste funny. I still took one, to be polite. We talked, and he showed me his dogs, and I stayed there most of the day. When I got home, Luth was furious with me until I told her Paul had started in on me, so I’d been pod-hopping. She knew Paul as well as I did, and she didn’t blame me. Besides, all sorts of people pod-hopped, and nobody would hurt you because everybody was identichipped, and nobody could get away with really hurting anybody without being stun-gunned by the automatic monitors.

  I didn’t tell Luth about Jon Point or the dogs. I didn’t tell Paul, either. From then on, I had two families. I had Paul and Luth and Tad on the 145th floor of Tower 29 and I had Jon Point and several kinds of dogs on the 10th floor of Tower 91. The first family was the one I lived with, but—except for Tad—the other family was the one I cared most about. The dogs needed me. They really did because Jon Point’s wife had died, his son had gone off planet, and Jon claimed to be “A vastly overburdened man.” If I wasn’t there to help give them food and water, if I didn’t come to clean their space…they might not be able to live at all.

  That happened when I was eight. It seemed like my whole life had been aimed at that minute, like I was an arrow flying straight at it. From that time on, I spent every spare minute at Jon Point’s kennel. He’d pirated some water and electric lines in the old tower, hiding them so the weirdos wouldn’t find them. He said the weirdos scattered themselves through derelict towers like soy-nuts in breakfast food, mostly in the first three or four floors. The lifts didn’t work anymore, and climbing higher than that was work. Jon had frien
ds who bred cats, and some who bred birds. Breeder was a word like down-dweller, not a nice thing to call anybody. Breeding of animals wasn’t allowed in regular towers. That’s why breeders camped out in towers that were scheduled for demolition. Out of the hundred towers in each urb, there are usually one or two of the oldest ones waiting to be rebuilt.

  Jon sold the bigger dogs to wealthy people who had exempt estates with room for dogs to run and act like dogs. The little furry, cute ones, he sold as pets to people living in towers. It’s hard to imagine being lonesome in a tower that has ten million people in it, in an urb that has a billion or more, but lots of the apartments were just two hundred square feet, for one person, and if you couldn’t have a little dog…well, people have concs now, of course, but back then, nobody had ever seen a conc.

  The first one I saw was in a pod lobby. Even though it was sort of human-looking, anyone would know right away it wasn’t human. It was pale yellow, with silver hair. It didn’t look male or female, sort of in between, but it was curvy and had a pretty face and it was graceful-looking, wearing just enough clothes not to be bare. After that, I saw a few here and there; then, all of a sudden, everywhere, different colors of skin and hair, different ways of smiling or laughing, all sounding much alike, little kids’ voices using very few words.

  It wasn’t long before the information network started to do stories on them. They were “companions,” or that’s what the news stories said, even though everybody called them concs, for concubines. Only a few weeks later Paul came home from his school with a mop-headed, big-eyed, mostly naked, reddish-brown thing. I saw it by the door, smiling and murmuring to itself.

  I half wanted to laugh and half wanted to get mad, and I said, “Paul, that’s a conc!”

  “I know,” he said in his way-up-there, superior voice. (Matty said Paul had acquired loftiness with his mother’s milk, not that his mother ever nursed him.) “But it’s only a little one, and it followed me home. It’s name is Cinnamon, and I’m going to keep it.”