The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The ambassador kindly offered me the use of the tools in the supply room, most of them in new, unopened packages. There was no one on staff responsible for gardening, and no one in the place took any interest in it. How could they? The only places they’d ever lived had been in towers, on Earth, and the average park floor, though there were small trees in most of them, had little in common with a garden.

  The view through the gate was of an expanse paved with huge, irregular blocks of stone that were interplanted with low, vividly colored creepers. Across the way was a park, or so I assumed, as it was given over completely to trees, shrubs, brightly colored flowers, and stands of gracefully waving grasses in various colors. The embassy garden was an unpleasant contrast. No effort had been put into making it look like anything, not even around the stone terrace that had been laid against the embassy wall. A few symbolic earth plants had been plopped down here and there, but they were not flourishing. The only things that were flourishing were the native trees that had obviously been there before the embassy was built.

  The first few days I spent my time loosening the soil around the trees and peering through the gates. I noticed that the Phaina walking in the roadway took care not to step on the vivid creepers that grew between the stones. I knew they were Phaina because they were only half again as tall as I. I’m tall for a human woman—a throwback, Joram said, referring to both my height and my coloring—but the male Phain are twice my height, and the ones I saw always walked in groups, carefully arranged as to height, their footsteps completely coordinated but by no means regular, each group moving to a different beat. One group took three steps, pause, another step, pause, two steps, pause, then started over. The next group might take two steps, pause, another two steps, pause, then five steps, three of them sideways. As they walked, they chanted, their voices coordinated with the beat of the walk, as though it were poetry, which in fact it may have been.

  I saw no vehicles while I was there, but I saw no Phain carrying anything either. Perhaps freight was banned from this particular road, or perhaps they had some other mode of supply.

  The creepers between the stones were in shades of green and blue and violet, with vividly yellow, red, or orange stems, and a number of them had crept under our gate from the street. I considered this an invitation to transplant them to the terrace, an easy enough procedure since each stem had roots all along its length, wherever it had touched the ground. I put them between the terrace stones, kept them wet for a day or two, and the planted sections took hold at once, rampaging along the cracks as though they could not grow fast enough to suit themselves. Looking about for other improvements, I found several stunted clumps of grassy stuff along the walls, perhaps native plants that had been deprived of sun when the wall had been built. Similar grasses were growing across the street, though they were large, burgeoning clusters that swayed when touched by the least breeze, their gold and blue and pale green tasseled seed heads moving gracefully in the wind.

  Since no one seemed to care about the dead or moribund Earther bushes, I uprooted some of them in favor of bunches of the grasses, judging their ultimate height by those across the street that looked most similar. We had arrived, so we had been told, in the dry season, so I carried water to these new plantings as well, and they responded by doubling in size in a few days.

  During all that time, I had not seen a Phain except at a distance through the gate, had not talked with anyone except Paul or the embassy staff, and only chatty inconsequentialities with them. Perhaps it was only that I was bored, but the garden began to assume a place in my life equivalent to the sanctuary at home on Earth. It was a place that needed fixing; it held things that needed preserving and nurturing; and, as Gainor had told me more than once, I seemed to be an inveterate fixer. I staked out a winding pathway from the terrace to the gates and resolved to find some way to create a real garden on either side of it.

  The following morning I went out to find a score of branches and twigs lying at random on the dry soil. It was what one might expect to find after a windstorm, if there had been a windstorm, which I was quite sure there had not. Staring at the clutter I noticed that though they were obviously from different plants or trees, every twig or branch bore ripened seed heads, an extremely unlikely coincidence. Somebody was helping out.

  I spent the entire day examining what I could see of the park across the road through a pair of power glasses borrowed from the security chief of the embassy, trying to determine which trees or shrubs had grown which twigs. One of them was easy for it stood directly opposite the gate, a very large tree with leaves of glossy turquoise and umbels of small, white flowers that gave off a scent something between vanilla and that odor one detects immediately after rain on dry soil. While there were buds on some branches and flowers on others, still other branches bore fruit and large, shiny triangular seeds, just like the ones I had found. I also identified one of the twigs as coming from a much shorter, rounded, many-trunked shrub that some days earlier had been covered with large-petaled, red blooms, the dried remnants of which still clung to the seed heads. One of my Bonner wall vistas had a flowering hedge in it, and I decided that plant was appropriate for hedging the embassy terrace.

  I planted the seeds of the large tree along the inside of the wall, where grown trees would shade both the garden inside and the street outside. Seeds of the smaller shrubs were planted along the edge of the terrace to make a border that would soften its harsh appearance. The other seeds were stowed away in my room until I could find out what kind of growth had produced them.

  Paul and I met only at the dinner table, where we practiced diplomacy on the embassy staff and one another. Paul spent his days in a conference room just inside the embassy entrance, with a couple of coworkers and a few Phain. At dinner, he remarked that they were ritualistically polite and completely devoted to the business at hand.

  “No conversation?” I asked. “None at all?”

  “Except for ritualized greetings and farewells, none at all,” he verified, grumpily. “Which makes it much harder to learn the language. I’m about to believe they don’t want me to learn it.”

  The long evenings were cooler than the very warm daylight hours, so I formed the habit of taking afternoon naps and watering the garden at night, interrupting myself occasionally to peer out through the gates like some prisoner in an ancient jail, reaching through the bars. Several weeks went by, and one morning I was told by the ambassador that I had been invited to take a walk with one of the Phaina, who would come to the gate for me, that afternoon.

  The Phain are tall, as I’ve said, and bipedal, but not at all humanoid. The Phaina who came for me was the first Phain I had seen close enough to describe. She had four arms, which were extremely flexible, either multijointed or tentacular. Since she wore long, full sleeves on all four arms, and since the sleeves were tightly fastened at the wrists, if so they could be called, it was difficult to say which. Each of the upper pair of arms was equipped with three fingers and two opposing thumbs, the lower pair had simple two-fingered grippers with suction cups on the inner surfaces of the opposed fingers and retractable claws at the end, wrench and pliers, all in one. Her head was virtually without feature except for one crest and one ridge. Visualize an egg, pointed end up, with a thick belt around its widest girth, scaled or feathered above the belt, and with an erect tuft of colorful feathers on top. The belt around the head was made up of protruding eyes with rectangular eyelids, all the way around. The eyes could and did open in any combination, allowing a full 360-degree view of the world. Both breathing and speech came from vertical apertures on the neck. The ingestion organ should not be mentioned, I had been told privately, as it was somewhere on the body that was always kept modestly covered. The Phaina’s feet were mostly hidden beneath her robes, but from what I could glimpse, I would say they were scaled, toeless, and rather elephantine.

  I carried one of the embassy’s porta-putes clipped to my belt, in order to speak with the Phaina, thou
gh I had been cautioned to let her speak first, which she did, in a flow of musical syllables. My lingui-pute said, “We have seen you working in the garden. Do you have any questions about our plants?”

  I replied, “Yes. A wind must have blown in some twigs with seeds, and I can only identify a few of them. May I see what the mature plants look like?”

  Whereupon we walked for some distance, she slowly and I at a gallop as her legs were vastly longer than mine, stopping here and there to look at bushes, trees, and shrubs, including many of surpassing beauty and lovely scent. Each one that she showed me happened “coincidentally” to match one of those that had “blown” into the garden, and each one had a medicinal or ecological purpose. Sometimes she picked a flower for me to smell, or cut away a section of bark. Her hands seemed designed for such tasks; the claws had sharp edges, like scalpels, capable of snipping even quite thick branches, as I saw when she cut a particularly lovely plant to half its original size.

  Before I thought, I blurted, “Oh, but it’s so pretty.”

  “Yes,” she said, giving me what I interpreted to be a stern look. “The charb bush is good for many things. It provides a medicine for diseases of the skin. Its leaves make a delightful tea. The flowers create a perfume valued by many, and they are also lovely to look upon. It is necessary, however, to prune it ruthlessly.”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  “You see how it stands alone? Its roots have spread widely and taken all the nourishment from the area around it. It makes a huge barren about itself if it is not kept in check.”

  I regarded the shrub with dismay. “It must be hard to cut back something that grows that well.”

  “It is very difficult,” she agreed, “but if one is a good gardener, one does it, nonetheless.”

  I asked if I might take notes, then did so, making little sketches and comments as we chatted about plants, and about animals. The Phaina asked if I liked “other, perhaps nonspeaking beings.” I said I did, that I worked to conserve animal life on Earth. She asked questions about this, and I told her all about the dogs and how much they meant to me. Strangely, though I had always followed the arkists’ dictum of keeping animal-related things to myself, I talked quite freely to the Phaina, trying for the first time to explain wholeheartedly how I felt about animals in general and dogs in particular.

  It was much more difficult than I would have supposed, possibly because I had to start with Matty, who had started my love affair with dogs. She and her sisters had pets when they were young, and the Lipkin family had supported the arkists for two centuries, maybe more than that. Even though no one could have animals on Mars because there literally wasn’t any air or water for them, Matty still gave me pretend pets like the toy Faithful Dog. When the Phaina encouraged me, I even sang a little of the “Litany of Animals” for her.

  She asked about my childhood, and I told her all about Mars, the airlocks, the algae farms, the vegetable tanks where fresh things could be grown in relatively small amounts of water. I said it was like living in a spaceship where the only beauty was the terrible grandeur outside, and even though people had to wear uncomfortable XT suits to go outside, almost everyone, down to the smallest child, wanted to spend as much time out there as possible. I remember vividly how my continual feeling of being squashed and smothered eased when I stood under the sky and looked across the desert. I told her about Matty discovering the last Martians, and their dogs, and how she’d died because of it.

  “Your people found no life there at all?” she asked.

  “They found some very primitive bacteria, deep underground, and after Matty discovered the remains of the last Martians, they did another very intensive survey, because everyone thought if there had been a race living there, two races, actually, something had to be left! A building, or artifacts, or more bones, something, but they found nothing at all.”

  “What did they look like, these Martians, these dogs?”

  I burrowed into my pocket to bring out the Lipkin Seventh album, with the picture of the cavern wall on its cover. The Phaina looked at that for quite some time, then asked me to play some of it. The last movement was my favorite, so I set the album on a flat place between us and let the music and the dancers fill the space.

  At the end, the figures returned to their wall and the bones lay down on the floor of the cavern, dogs first, then the bipeds, arms around their friends, as they had been found while the last trembling notes ascended into silence. The Phaina remained silent for a long time. Finally, she asked, “This lovely representation, is it accurate?”

  I started to say yes, but then reconsidered. “Matty always stylized things,” I admitted. “One can always tell what they represent, but one would never mistake them for the real thing. Not if one has ever seen the real thing.”

  “But in this work by your parent, it is accurate to say the bones were actually there? The images were there? In that particular cavern? That was not invention.”

  “She didn’t invent them, no! They were really there. I have her original recording if you want to see it. Bones of old people and old dogs. Evidently the young ones had left them there.”

  “Ah. Where is it supposed the young ones went?”

  I shook my head. “Well, Matty thought the carvings were meant to represent human people and Earth-type dogs, so maybe they went to Earth. Even though the carved figures don’t show faces or details of the anatomy, the proportions are very human…”

  “So you think it possible that some men and some dogs went from Mars to Earth, long ago?”

  I laughed. “Matty thought that. Our scientists say the idea is ridiculous. Earth-type humans and dogs were barely far enough advanced to tie two logs together to get across a river, they certainly couldn’t get to Mars. The experts don’t accept Matty’s translation of the carvings, either. The professors at the IC archives have been arguing about it ever since she died. They’ve done over twenty new translations among them, none of them alike! The scientists say if there were men on Mars, then some other race took them there, but there’s no evidence of that either, and since humans and dogs evolved on Earth and had no way to get off it, then the bones have to be of some other beings.”

  “And your geneticists say?”

  “They say all Mars’s air and water were gone by fifty to a hundred thousand years ago, so the bones are at least that old. They say that’s the outside limit to get DNA from, even in perfect situations, which this wasn’t. The bones had been colonized by some kind of microbes, and the scientists couldn’t get any DNA to analyze. Anatomically, the bones are very human and very doggy, the scientists do admit that.”

  She mused, as though to herself, “And nothing on the planet but this one…entombment.”

  “It doesn’t seem logical, does it?” I shook my head. “Everyone has puzzled over it. Prehistoric human people generally left stuff behind, bones and tools chipped out of flint, and then later on broken pots and pictures on the cave walls, and burials…”

  “Prehistoric humans? Tell me about them.”

  I shrugged, apologetically. “I’m no expert. I know only what we all learned in school. There were bipedal primates on Earth as far back as six million years ago, various races of them, some bigger, some smaller, very little smarter than most animals, and they didn’t change much over the millennia except that some of the races died off. Then, sometime around a million years ago, one particular race made an evolutionary jump and developed a brain three times bigger. They learned how to use fire and chip flints for knives and weapons. Probably they also developed protolanguage, but there’s no way we can verify that. They spread around the contiguous world.

  “Then about fifty thousand years ago a race in Africa made another jump, a brain jump of some kind. Possibly they developed a better or more extensive language which let them accumulate knowledge and pass it on. My opinion is that they acquired the ability to imagine, the ability to ask, ‘What if?’ because their technology improved very rapidly after that.
That race of humanoids was the one that spread throughout the world, all the older manlike races died off, and with minor genetic variation, that was our history up until now.”

  “Fifty thousand of your years. Your people live, on average, about one hundred of those years, do they not, so that would be not even a maraquar, only five hundred lifetimes ago…”

  I smiled at that “only.” Five hundred lifetimes seemed a great many to me.

  We strolled a bit, then she asked, “You say your mother had dogs? How does one have a dog?”

  “Oh, like having a child or an aunt, a member of the family.”

  “So, the dog is part of your family. Are you part of the dog’s family, also?”

  Remembering Scarlet, I said, “If we are not, then we cannot say the dog is ours. We…love one another, and sometimes dogs adopt children, as if we were puppies. Or sisters, maybe. Of course, on Mars, I only had pretend dogs…”

  “And then, in time, you met real dogs.”

  “Yes. I met real dogs I could help and do things for. It made me feel…more…complete.” I struggled, trying to find the right words, the truthful words. “I loved them because they weren’t like people. They were different. We need things to be different. If everyone is alike, it narrows our world down, it makes us narrow, too. It makes us think human things are the only things, human ideas the only ideas…”

  “But I have heard it said that humans believe each human is uniquely different, is this not true?”

  “It’s true that it’s said,” I replied. “But it’s actually true only in the way any two leaves on a huge tree are different. Some live high, some low, some are healthy, some aren’t, some drop before their time, others linger on the tree, but they’re all the same kind of leaf. Difference is more a label than a fact.”

  “You feel you are all alike?”

  She asked the question with a peculiar intentness, so I forced myself to concentrate on an answer. “We have different ideas,” I said at last. “There’s a man named Evolun Moore who is the head of iggy-huffo—do you know about iggy-huffo?” She nodded, and I went on. “He sees humankind as the God-chosen occupiers of the galaxy. He preaches this to people who have difficult and unpleasant lives, and it makes them feel good, so they follow him. He insists they obey him, and that makes them feel good, since it gives them a…a position, a place, a particular status. It means he’s paying attention to them. They’ll lie down and let him walk on them if he wants to, because he’s important and if they follow him, they’re important, too…”