The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I remembered the willogs strangling the Derac. So. Someone had salvaged the bodies. Or, more likely, remembering what I had read about reptilian creatures, they hadn’t really been dead. I rubbed my head fretfully.

  “And why are we their servants?” I asked.

  “It’s a matter of pride with them. The taking of ‘friends’ to serve them.”

  “Like slave owners on old Earth,” I said. “Too proud to dress or clean up after themselves.”

  “Oh, yes, they’re proud, and it’s wise to remember that. An alpha male demands complete surrender of individuality or personal thought from his ‘friends,’ as well as from other members of the pack.” He made a face. “They use one race for fetching small things, another for underwater work, another for heavy lifting, and still another for sending information by air. And humans, as I’ve mentioned, for different things.”

  “And this is how we live?” I looked around the room with dismay.

  “It’s better than the hunting pens. Here, you get enough to eat, a warm place to sleep. You have a doctor to take care of illness or injuries. You’re not allowed to breed, but you can sensualize, so long as you wash yourself afterward and don’t do it where they can smell you at it. It makes a smell they don’t like.”

  “No children.”

  “No. The Simusi consider us to be…a verminous life-form. They find us useful, but they keep us only so long as we are useful.” He moved his lame leg, gritting his teeth as he rubbed at it. “When we get too old, they put us down.”

  “Do you know, did the Simusi ever live on a planet near Earth? One we call Mars?”

  “If so, it would have been a long, long time ago. They don’t talk to us about their history.” He laughed. “They don’t talk, period. Their own language is all in smells.”

  “Witt…the man who was here before, he said the Phain are near here.”

  “Ah, well, yes. It’s mostly Simusi this side of the dike, but beyond it there’s a big stretch of Phain country, with Guardian Houses all up and down it. If you could somehow get service with the Phain, that would be a good thing for you, but they say we don’t have respect, so they don’t take many of us.”

  I said, “When I saw into this space through the doors to the…outside, it looked like paradise. What’s outside the pen, however, looks quite ordinary. A pleasantly warm, wooded sort of place, but nothing…splendid.”

  He looked slightly confused by this. “Well, through the door, you saw dazzle. The Simusi can do that, make you see dazzle, when you look at them, particularly. They dazzle you, make themselves looked bigger, stronger. This area here is a transitional way to Splendor, but it isn’t actually part of Splendor. To the Simusi, however, this is Splendor enough. Their natural prey can live here, they can engage in the hunt here, there are no enemies to kill the pups. In order to get to Splendor, you’d have to go past where the Phain are.”

  “The Phain live both on regular planets and in here? I mean, they haven’t gone extinct out there or anything?”

  Again, he wrinkled his brow thoughtfully. “I get the impression they go back and forth from galactic worlds to the inner worlds…”

  Worlds? Interesting. “More than one world, in here?”

  “An infinite number, I’m told. All of them connected. You go in a door here, come out somewhere else, step through another door, and you’re twenty light-years away from where you started.”

  That explained things being lost on Jungle and popping up on Moss, but it didn’t explain the connection between Phain and the Simusi. “What are they, the Phain, to the Simusi, I mean? Relatives? Friends?”

  He thought for some time. “I don’t think they’re anything except…neighbors. I know each of them despises the way the other race lives, so they leave one another alone. By the way, do you speak any of the languages of the other people here?”

  I shook my head. No. “Just Earthian common speech, and a little Quondan and Phain-ildar. Is there any way I could send a message to the Phain?”

  He gave me a long, weighing look. “Unlikely, unless you have access to a universal translator, which we are forbidden to use anywhere inside, even if we could lay hands on one. Neither the Simusi nor the Phain want us listening to their talk.” He gave me a sympathetic look. “I know it’s confusing. I’m by way of being overseer for a group of kennels…Think of them as housing units, it makes it easier. The first thing I’ll do is try to transfer you to a kennel housing Earthers. Anyone you know special that you’d like to be with?”

  “Gavi Norchis,” I said. “If she came through with me, but I don’t think she did.” I laughed, ruefully. “The Simusi would like her. She…makes music with smells.”

  He gave me a peculiar look. “A woman. There was only one woman brought in with you, and I have no idea where she is.”

  Not long after he left, a bell summoned the people in the room, and they all went outside. I followed them to the feeding shelf. After everyone else had taken a bowl and filled it, I took one and turned the spigot above it to receive a quantity of warm mush. It was neither nasty nor palatable. About on a level with green algae crackers. You’d eat it if you were hungry, but you wouldn’t salivate for it. I ate what I could and gave the rest away to three eager scroungers who smiled their thanks and split the remainder among themselves. When everyone had eaten, they prepared themselves for bed in one way or another. I waited until darkness provided some privacy to relieve myself outside and wash off the day’s dust in the shower (cold water). I had a comb in the deep pocket of my jacket along with the wedding album and Matty’s Seventh, so I sectioned off chunks of hair and braided my hair tight to my head as the other women wore theirs. There were no mirrors. The completed job felt uneven at best, but braided hair was either required or it made sense, so no point in testing to see if I could get away with letting it hang.

  It all took far longer to accomplish than to tell of it, and I was thoroughly weary by the time I’d finished. Someone had opened a closet disclosing a pile of mats, and even the inadequacy of the one I lay down on didn’t keep me from falling asleep almost at once. I did wake during the night, surprised to find I’d been dreaming about having a conversation with the Phaina, Sannasee, in her own language. The Phain-ildar words hung in the front of my mind like ripe fruit on a tree, succulent and fragrant words I hadn’t thought of since learning them years ago. I found a bit of sharp rock on the floor and scratched the words on the wall so I wouldn’t forget them. In the morning, when I woke, I read them over several times, repeating them.

  Though I’m recording all this quite calmly, it would be false to give the impression that I was at all tranquil at the time. Often, between talking and eating and sleeping and thinking, my breath would catch in panic, I’d feel a fit of nausea, a shiver of mixed rage and fear and a strong urge either to throw up or throw a fit. Each time I gripped my hands together and made my nails bite my palms, concentrating on the pain until I could breathe easily once more. Paul’s scornful tongue had managed me out of tantrums long ago, and it required no more composure here in Splendor than it had in Tower 29 of the Northwest Urb. I found myself actually being thankful to him for having given me an apprenticeship in self-control, and to Joram and Matty for whatever old-timey attributes I’d inherited from them. Spunk, Joram had called it. Grit, Matty used to say. “Buckle down and get at it.” I was never sure what one buckled, but the sense of it was clear enough. Don’t panic. Keep your eyes open, your mouth closed, and do the best you can. Be aware of tomooze. Think your way around flabbitz. The Simusi were certainly generators of tomooze, though no flabbitz had emerged as yet.

  I was already awake when the morning bell woke the other sleepers. They rose, showered, used the toilets, shaved or braided, got dressed, all without seeming to notice the lack of privacy. They were all lean and well muscled, not at all overfed. We ate our morning mush. Oskar, my acquaintance of the previous day, arrived. He brought with him the pack I’d had on when Scramble pulled me through the door.r />
  “Yours?”

  I said, “Yes, it’s mine. Will they let me keep it?”

  He made a wry face. “The Simusi call our kind toolmakers. It’s a contemptuous term they apply to several of their ‘friends.’ Any creature who needs any kind of accoutrement is considered inferior. Accoutrement includes shelter, clothing, devices, anything beyond one’s own body and mind, because only vermin accumulate things. A pure creature, say the Simusi, should need nothing but itself. It does without clothing or shelter, it does without tools, without belongings.” He gave me a wry smile. “A stupid, hypocritical idea, inasmuch as we provide all the things they lack, but then, we humans can be hypocritical, too. They profit from our building things, and they know we need tools, so we get to keep our property and even acquire new things if we need them. Some humans have moved out of the kennels and into private huts on the strength of their usefulness. It all depends on how well you get along.”

  I breathed deeply, determined to buckle down and absorb this.

  He said, “I went through your pack to remove contraband. Didn’t find any.”

  “What’s contraband?”

  “Food. Translation devices. Weapons. Let me see what’s in your pockets.”

  I emptied them for him. My comb. A little kit with nail tools inside. The album of Matty’s Seventh with her picture on the outside. The wedding album.

  “Who?” he demanded of the album.

  “My mother.”

  “She was a musician.”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up the album. “This is your liaison-mate.”

  “No,” I said. “The liaison expired years ago.”

  “But you keep it.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I gave it away a long time ago. It showed up on Moss, that’s all. Evidence of the spatial anomaly.”

  “The fewer things you ask to keep, the more likely you get to keep them,” he said.

  “Then throw that away,” I told him.

  I put my things back in my pockets, and he handed me my jacket. “So bring your pack along and come with me.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To meet some of your countrymen,” he said, reaching forward in one fluid motion to fasten a collar around my neck. The attached leash was already in his hand. “Sorry about the collar, but I’m trusted, you’re unknown. Just walk quietly, and we won’t get into any trouble.”

  We went out through one of the heavy doors, which opened directly upon a path. Behemoth was sitting across from the door, with Scramble beside him. She whined. I started to go to her, only to be jerked hard by the collar. Before my head was jerked around, I saw Behemoth bare his teeth at her, and I smelled a very rapid exchange of odors. Before knowing Gavi and learning to sniff Mossen words, I wouldn’t have detected them, they were so quickly dissipated, but I did smell them, clearly.

  Oskar muttered at me. “You don’t approach any of the Simusi, old or new. If they want you, they’ll summon you with your bark-name. Until you have a bark-name, you don’t look at them or go toward them or interact in any way. For the time being, I’m your owner.”

  “And I’m a slave,” I said, abstractedly, my mind busy with the conversation I had just sniffed between Behemoth and Scramble, listing the odors and remembering them. Figuring them out could come later.

  “Slavery,” he mused. “Well, our race had dogs. Were they slaves?”

  “We didn’t think so,” I replied. “The dogs didn’t think so. They’ve voluntarily been with us since caveman days, forty or fifty thousand years ago.”

  “Those dogs, yes. Wolves. Jackals. Wild dogs. Canines. But the Simusi aren’t canines. They are, however, the pure paradigm of all pack creatures.”

  “How did Behemoth get to be Simusi?” I asked.

  “If any Zhaar genetics were used in breeding him, he’d have heard the call. Zhaar genetics had to have been used. I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”

  I said defensively, “I didn’t know that. If true, I’m sure the people who did it were only intending to make them bigger, stronger, healthier, with longer life spans. I’m sure they didn’t mean to hurt anything.”

  “…said the child who’d played with matches, after the house burned down.” He jiggled the leash. “Zhaar genetic matrices are like viruses. When they enter another system, they take it over and rebuild it in their own likeness, or some other likeness if they prefer. If enough of the matrix is used, the rebuild can be almost total.”

  He’d made a subtle emphasis on the word almost. I thought of the dognose I’d been given when I was sixteen. In the light of everything I’d seen here, it, too, had probably been Zhaar-modified. “And if not enough matrix was used?” It came out sounding almost as casual as I’d intended it to.

  “You end up with a hybrid. The Simusi kill any of those they find, unless they can use them for something. The Orskimi use a lot of Zhaar tech, not to change themselves, though. They use it to change other creatures they can use as symbiotes.”

  “The Orskimi are trying to wipe out the human worlds.”

  He snorted. “The Simusi would approve of that.”

  We were strolling along a path through light-dappled woodlands. On any other occasion, I’d have enjoyed such a walk. The day was warm, the air was sweet with slightly resinous odors; to either side I could see Simusi moving about, singly or in small groups, and they were gorgeous to look at. Graceful, gleaming, regal. Four very young pups were playing in a clearing. They were still a little wobbly on their legs, and they were being supervised by a human with a collar.

  “Baby-sitter?” I asked.

  Oskar glanced that way. “More like nanny. It’s one way for us to gain a better life here. If the pups grow attached to their nanny, they’ll be less likely to dispose of her, or him, over some small failing later on.” His steps had slowed somewhat, and he was limping more heavily than before.

  “How far are we going?” I said, glancing at his legs.

  He grimaced. “A couple of miles. Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it.”

  We fell silent. I was still trying to correlate everything I knew or had heard about the Simusi. “If the Simusi would approve of wiping out the human race, out there in normal space, and if we’re all nonbreeders here in Splendor, what will the Simusi do for nannies and kennel-keepers when we’re gone?”

  He stopped, staring at the sky, his mouth twisted with anger or pain. “I don’t know. The matter has never come up!” Angrily, he jerked me off-balance with the leash and stumped along with me running to keep up.

  I gave him a while to settle down. “What’s their real objection to us, aside from our being vermin?”

  “We’re not much worse than most other creatures. It’s just that with Simusi, you’re either more powerful, like the Phain or the Yizzang, or you’re nothing. There’s no category in between.” He chewed his lips for a moment, thinking. “The Simusi do hate humans particularly, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because humans have dogs as…pets. Dogs share the holy shape. That makes humans guilty of blasphemy.”

  “Do you speak Simusi?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No. I’m not a noser. The Simusi have odor-generating cells in their mouths and throats. They exhale their messages, except for the few bark-name words they use with us and the Gixit and the other creatures…”

  “Who are also slaves?”

  “Not the Gixit, no. They lived on some world that was damaged by humans, and only a few of them survived. They were brought here by the Phain to be safe, and a few of them seem to like being with the Simusi. It’s the Phain who object to us most. If we all went to a sterile moon and drilled it out like an ant nest and populated the entire moon with human beings to the depth of miles, they wouldn’t care. It’s the terraforming they hate, because it involves killing the native plants and animals.”

  “I wonder if this is where Moss got its odor language from,” I mused. “Through the spacial interface with
the Simusi world.”

  “An odor language outside? Really!” He became animated. “That’s interesting! I didn’t know there were odor languages anywhere else…”

  “There are odor languages on Earth,” I said. “Or were. Toward the end of the twentieth century, scientists discovered that plants communicate with one another, and with other living things, through the exchange of odor molecules. If one plant gets eaten by a beetle, it sends a signal into the air, and similar plants downwind accelerate the manufacture of their natural insecticide. One plant gets invaded by a fungus, the ones around it increase production of fungicide.”

  “Rather primitive,” he said.

  “Nonetheless, it worked. A transmission and a response constitute a language, at least so my brother says. It’s probably the way the odor language on Moss got started.”

  Either he could think of nothing else to say, or he was feeling too much pain to talk. His face was set in grim determination, and the farther we went, the more he limped. We came to the dike he’d mentioned, a heavily overgrown wall of stone that stretched across our trail as far as I could see on either side.

  “Simusi territory on this side of the wall,” Oskar said. “Guardian territory on the other.”

  Only a narrow defile led through the dike. Once we were past it, the woods thinned and gave way to grasslands. Oskar was dragging his leg by the time we came to a stretch of meadow that was being grazed by some large, six-legged, blue-skinned herbivores. The herd was between us and a structure across the grassland.

  “Your friend is here, temporarily,” Oskar said.

  “Gavi?”

  “Not the woman. The Simusi took her…”

  “Took Gavi?” I cried.

  “I don’t know who the woman was. But this one is a man. Says he’s your husband, from Earth.”

  I stopped short. “Oskar. Please. I’d rather be somewhere else…”

  He looked me in the eye, really looked, then said sympathetically, “No, you wouldn’t. If you don’t want to have anything to do with him, then don’t, but you don’t want to pass up this chance. This is a Phain farm, you speak a little Phain-ildar, and the Sannasee has picked you from among the new ones. The Phain have first choice, you see, and the Simusi don’t interfere with the Phain. They don’t hunt here, because the Phain forbid it. This is the safest place you could be right now.”