The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The idea of meeting Witt again was depressing, but I couldn’t argue about the rest of it. We moved across the meadow, keeping well clear of the big, blue-skinned creatures. I had seen them before, on Tsaliphor, but only at a distance. As we came nearer to the building, Oskar stopped and drew in a shuddering breath. I followed his eyes and saw a pair of P’narg headed in our direction. Oskar’s fingers grew lax on the leash. His face was ashen. I pulled the leash from his fingers and moved toward the P’narg. When I was within hearing distance, I bowed, and said in Phain-ildar, as I had said on Tsaliphor, “I greet you and wish you well.”

  The P’narg snuffled between themselves, then turned and shuffled toward a patch of woods at the top of a low hill. I turned, catching a glimpse of a Phaina standing in the door of a long, ramified structure. When I returned to Oskar and handed him my leash, he was still very pale.

  “They’re not supposed to be out loose,” he rasped.

  “When I knew them on Tsaliphor, they were always out loose.”

  “That’s a Phain planet.”

  “I lived there for almost a year.”

  “And those things walked around loose?”

  “They lived there,” I said. “It was their home. I imagine this is also their home. The Phain don’t cage animals.”

  “Maybe not, but when we’re coming or going, they’re supposed to get the dangerous ones out of our way, so we don’t get killed. What did you say to them?”

  “I just greeted them, that’s all.”

  Now he looked angry, and I decided it wasn’t the time to go into a discussion of whether or not the P’narg were dangerous or whether talking to them was inappropriate. He obviously thought so in both cases, and he was unlikely to be convinced otherwise. Besides, I had no real way of knowing that the P’narg wouldn’t eat him. They might, for all I knew.

  Oskar indicated the sprawling structure we were approaching. “That’s the Guardian House.”

  We veered around one end of the building to enter a long, low annex at the back, going through a refectory with tables and chairs to a dormitory with rows of cots and storage units for clothes. Witt sat expectantly on one of the cots, obviously waiting for me. I gritted my teeth, introduced him to Oskar, and left the two of them talking to one another while I looked around.

  Behind the dormitory were the doors to sanitary areas with toilets and showers, one for women, one for men. All in all, a considerable improvement over the kennel.

  When I heard a third voice speaking, and then Oskar, saying, “She does not!” I returned to the dormitory. Oskar was very pale and obviously upset, staring after a man headed out the door.

  Witt said, “The Phaina sent someone to tell you she wants you to work in the garden here. The house garden. And she says, you already know what to do.”

  Oskar challenged this angrily. “How could you possibly? I always have to tell the new ones what to do!”

  I summoned up my Paul-soothing voice. “I worked on a garden on Tsaliphor. This Phaina may know of that, may actually have seen me there. I’m not an expert on Phain gardens, by any means, so what she probably means is that I can do the weeding without supervision.”

  Oskar took a deep breath, lips twisted in…what? Defeat? Discouragement? “Oh, well, possibly that’s it. Yes. Well then. If you don’t need me for anything…”

  Then I caught on. The poor man wanted to stay here, at least for a while. He needed an excuse to rest somewhere before attempting the long walk back.

  “Please, stay,” I begged. “There will be other things I need to know before you leave.”

  He demurred without conviction, and I insisted. In the end, he lay down on one of the cots and promptly fell asleep.

  I stretched out on another cot with every intention of resting, but Witt ignored the pillow I placed over my eyes and recited a long litany of complaint, ending with, “He said the P’narg were out. They’re not supposed to be out when we’re around. They eat us.”

  If I had hoped for a change in Witt, I was disappointed. He was still aggrieved and at a loss for a remedy, stuck where he had been for the last twelve years, I supposed. Rather than make me feel sympathetic, his whining annoyed me.

  “They may well eat you,” I said in a voice that sounded aggressive, even to me. “They won’t eat me.” I wasn’t at all sure they wouldn’t, but the P’narg, once greeted, hadn’t made a move toward me, and I thought it very unlikely they ever would. Witt gave me a hurt look and went away. I didn’t see him again until evening, when the dormitory filled up with workers, most of them able to communicate in common speech and a few able to translate for those who didn’t. There were about thirty of us, soon joined by another eight or ten who came into the refectory bearing bowls and platters of food. It was all vegetable, no meat: something very like mild cheese, though the smell made me think it was probably a fungus; sections of an aromatic and sweet white root; greens, cooked and raw; fruits, cooked and raw; several dishes of mixed grain and legumes, cooked with various savory additives. Everything tasted better than Earth food, and there was plenty of it. Oskar sat near me, telling me the names of the foods and the plants they came from while eating more than I would have thought possible, another reason he had wanted to stay. The poor man was aging, tired, hungry, and in pain. At the moment, I was unable to be helpful, but I made a mental note to keep him in mind, to help if and when I could. He reminded me a great deal of Jon Point, with something of the same indomitability about him.

  The people asked many questions about how I’d been caught, and where, and so forth, responding with their own stories. Six of the men had been among the eleven men “harvested” on Jungle. Since PPI operated under noninterference directives, it made sense that the six of them were here, for the Phaina no doubt approved of noninterference. They told me that the other five taken on Jungle had been new recruits to PPI. One of the five had been Witt, of course, though the others taken from Jungle rather ignored him during the meal. The others had gone crazy, Oskar whispered, so they’d been taken to the Simusi food pens.

  Someone asked what I was going to be doing, and I said working in the Phaina’s garden. That prompted a long silence.

  “What?” I asked. “Is there something bad about that?”

  “The Phaina doesn’t let any of us in her garden.”

  Oskar spoke up, importantly. “Jewel was on a Phain planet once, where she worked on a Phain garden, and she’ll only be doing the weeding.”

  They seemed to accept his explanation, but to avoid further problems I began asking questions of my own. Some had been harvested from spaceships, some from planets they were visiting, a few from Earth itself, or from Earth colony planets. When they had arrived, all those chosen had been questioned for many days by an agent of the Phaina.

  I asked what they’d been questioned about.

  One woman spoke up. “What were we doing on the planet, where were we going in the ship, why were we sending all our old people back to Earth, why were we having so many children, and why had we killed this bacteria or that weed, or that animal, or that insect?”

  A man spoke. “They got me on a colony planet, they showed us a picture of this thing, and they asked how long we’d studied this kind of half animal half plant thing they called a fromfis. I told them we hadn’t studied the things at all, we weren’t supposed to, we were there to do research on a cure for Ban-Atkins Disease. So then this Phain told me this fromfis thing had a microbe growing in its gut that would have cured the Ban-Atkins Disease, so it was a pity we’d killed them all, and that really upset me. Maybe they were just jerking us around.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “The Phain don’t do that. If a Phain said that, it was the truth.”

  He turned even paler, if that were possible, and gave me a resentful look while I cautioned myself to keep my judgments to myself. Doubtless most of the captives had comforting ideas of victimhood and would become angry if contradicted.

  The dormitory beds were far more comfortabl
e than the pads in the kennel. Though we all wore collars, I had seen no one leashed thus far. From their talk, everyone knew what he or she was supposed to do, and everyone spent their days doing it. After supper, we had storytelling and dancing of a crude kind, and music also of a crude kind, though from the quality of some voices, they were capable of better. Everyone went to sleep early. Witt stayed away from me.

  The following morning, after a quick meal, the people went off in different directions, and I was shown through a locked gate into the Phaina’s garden. A stone-built toolshed contained everything I needed, and I worked up a considerable sweat (smell vocab: present tense. to work.) loosening the moist, loamy-smelling earth around trees (vocab: to dig), transplanting creepers into bare spots (vocab: no smell detected?), harvesting seeds (fragrant shells, various. vocab: to gather? or to ripen?), and putting aromatic seed (smell) in the ground (plus smell) (vocab: to plant). The creepers were obviously an edging plant, separating grasslike plants from decorative ones. The lack of smell…No. It came to me suddenly that wasn’t lack. It was negation. Nonsmell. Separation. An undetectable odor eraser? Like the one Gavi had used on me?

  I gradually worked my way along the side of the structure. At what felt like midmorning, I took a break and walked around the nearest corner of the rambling building to look across the garden. It was huge, and no one else was working in it, so the work would occupy me forever, which at that moment seemed a blessing. If there was no hope of being rescued, at least I would be employed in an enjoyable way. Also, once I had established what my hands should be doing, my mind was free to think things through, starting with yesterday’s conversation between Behemoth and Scramble.

  The first smell had been a milk smell. The “speaker” had to have been Scramble, and milk smell no doubt signified puppies. Next came the odor of Matty’s perfume, one I wore from time to time. Scramble had never known Matty, so that smell had to be her word for me. Then there’d been a retreating smell, which meant, according to Gavi, going somewhere. And the last smell had been the milk smell and my smell combined.

  No matter how I linked them, they came out to mean one thing. Jewel should go get the puppies or go be with the puppies.

  Behemoth didn’t agree. He had emitted the smell of the stuff Gainor used on his hair, then a nasty, “you must” smell. Then a coming forward smell of the hair stuff coupled with the puppy smell. Gainor has to bring the puppies or…blood smell and Matty’s perfume again. Gainor bring the puppies or we’ll kill Jewel.

  I sat down with a shock. I don’t faint, as some people are said to do, but I came close. How was Gainor supposed to get this threat? Some kind of ransom note, delivered how?

  That hadn’t been the end of the conversation. Scramble had said blood odor, plus dog odor. Which dog? I didn’t know. Was she threatening to kill Behemoth if he injured me? Or threatening to kill me if I injured a puppy? Or telling Behemoth his way would get puppies killed? Or, kill herself? Behemoth considered himself mated for life. If Scramble was gone, he’d be a nonbreeder, a virtual eunuch, so Scramble’s absence might have been a real threat to his primacy.

  My stomach told me it was noon just moments before one of the kitchen people showed up with a bowl of food and a bottle of water. She told me to bring the bowl and bottle with me when I came back to the dormitory.

  “When?” I asked her. “Is there a bell?”

  “When the light starts to dim,” she said. “This place has the same-length days all the time. Three meals a day. First light, middle light, when it’s brightest, then when it starts to dim. Then’s when you come in. Later, when it’s dark, some really big predators wander around loose.”

  For the first time since I’d been in the place I realized the sky shone with an utterly sourceless light. No sun threw a shadow, though there was shade where the trees were dense and encircling. I sat down on a bench with my bottle and bowl, thinking my way through Scramble’s conversation once more. Reconsideration yielded nothing new or fresh. Scramble wanted me to get the pups, Behemoth wanted Gainor to bring them, there was some bad consequence threatened on someone by someone.

  I was hunched over the bowl. The splatting of tears onto my spoon was the first inkling I had that I was crying. Over Scramble, of course. And Behemoth. All those years spent working for them, making a future for them. Had they been reached by the Simusi while we were still on Earth? Were they told then that they were Simusi? If not, when did they find out? Had the odor messages on Moss told them much, much more than the odors had told Gavi?

  And what about Moss itself, the world of! Was it also Simusi? Owned by, managed by? Or was it just a nice little world trying to do its best for its inhabitants, rather in the same way Gainor and Shiela and I had tried to do the best for dogs and cats and any other life-form we could protect?

  So I sat there, grieving over the loss of my lovely dogs, grieving over the fact that I couldn’t care about Witt anymore, grieving over being separated from Mag, and from Gavi, and Gainor, of course. Even Drom and Sybil. What was going to happen to them? And Paul. Was he plowing along on the language? All these wonders, rages, and griefs had me astir when I heard a familiar sound, liquidly sweet, the music of a Phaina’s voice, followed by the equally soft-toned translation by a lingui-pute.

  “Why do you shed tears?”

  “For the loss of my friends, the dogs,” I said, without even thinking.

  “But they are not wholly dogs,” she said.

  This was annoying. “Then I’m not crying for the part that isn’t. I grieve for the idea of the dogs I believed they were. Not Simusi, but my friends.” I dried my face with the backs of my hands. “And even if these dogs aren’t wholly dogs, there are other whole dogs we are trying desperately to protect. I am ashamed to have wasted my time so misguidedly on these if they do not merit it.”

  “Ah,” she said, sitting down beside me. It was the first time I had seen a Phaina seated. On Tsaliphor, we had always walked in open places where there were no seats. Her legs stretched a long way onto the path, and her head was far above mine.

  “So you have real dogs you wish to protect. Why, then, were these not left to be merely real dogs?”

  “Real dogs had short life spans, they had health problems. The arkists started out trying to breed them back to their ancestral form, their natural form, to get rid of the bone and breathing problems, but their life spans were still very short. The arkists thought…think that longer life spans would allow more learning to be passed on to future generations, and that, in turn, would result in a better survival rate. Someone, I don’t know who, must have decided to use Zhaar technology. I don’t even know when or who or how they got hold of it! It must have been done in utero. I wish they hadn’t.”

  She asked, “Is the pack leader hostile toward you.”

  “Behemoth? Now? I think so,” I confessed. “He wasn’t before, though, so why is he now?”

  “He was told he was Simusi, that you knew and had kept it from him. Unfortunately, he will soon discover this is untrue. He is a superior dog, but far inferior to Simusi. He will not be pleased to learn of his true status. He can understand their odor language, he can even speak it, as a child speaks, but he will never be able to emit it eloquently. True Simusi have maraquar of experience in telling heroic tales about their past, reciting epics, and sniffing the stories and sagas of others. It is how they spend most of their time. Behemoth will never be able to do that well.”

  I thought of Walky’s poems, “The Simusi must be like Walking Sunshine.”

  She asked me what I meant, and I told her about the willog who wrote poetry, and how delighted he was to have eyes and ears.

  “On the planet?” she asked. Lingui-putes cannot convey tone of voice, but I could hear her tone before I heard what the words meant. She was astonished. “Where they brought you from?”

  “Yes. I was just getting to know the place. It’s very beautiful. If the willog is any indication, it has wonderful creatures on it. We must leave it,
you know. It belongs to itself, not to us.”

  The great torso beside me tensed. “If a planet belongs to its own creatures, you let it alone?”

  I thought about her question for a time, trying to frame an honest answer that wouldn’t convict us in her eyes. “The Interstellar Confederation says if a planet is occupied by intelligent creatures, it belongs to those creatures. And usually, any creature with a language is considered to be intelligent. That’s what was hard about Moss. The language is one of smells, like the Simusi, but we’d never encountered that before. We know about sign languages and vocal languages, but it may be there are many other languages that have missed being identified simply because they aren’t spoken or visual.”

  “So you will leave the planet alone. And the Derac?”

  “PPI is committed to noninterference, Earth will leave it alone. The Derac will be required by IC to leave it alone, though they have a history of cheating when they can get away with it. The humans who came there by accident, several hundred years ago, will be required to leave also, unless the World asks them to stay.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “The World?”

  “I think it’s all one being, the whole world. Everything is all tied together, with one mind running everything…”

  She made a strange, high, tinkling sound. Laughter? Or pity? “But, that is always so.”

  I stared at her, knowing full well what she meant. “Yes, Sannasee, it is always so, as we know to our sorrow, but in most worlds the planetary mind is…or seems to be unconscious. My brother says transmission and response equals protolanguage, but in most worlds it takes years and years for response to occur. Because life spans are short, and the response is so late in arriving, the living things who detect it don’t know it has anything to do with them.”