The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Guides, Walky? What guides?”

  Walky beckoned, and the mosses around our feet became alive with tiny creatures, like moving bits of vine, a twig with a leaf or two on its legs, many of them with crab eyes or insect eyes. When Walky called again, they swarmed away.

  “Guides are needed to assure distribution of proper growth. Mosses have no minds. They must be pushed, directed, steered, pointed, focused…”

  “Thank you, Walky. I think Sybil and I will go back up to the plateau now. Do you want to come with us, or will you stay here?”

  “Ah, so kind of you to ask. I will stay. First we must make a simulacrum of the ESC installation, with something in it to make it sparkle, as the real one did. Also, I have been thinking greatly about the kindness of all your people to our World: eyes, ears, voices, wonderful gifts. Also I have been thinking that the Derac made no gifts. Those who opened the door in the battleground, they have made no gifts. If there is a war, then the willogs will want to fight in it. I am a shepherd of the willogs, and I will stay here to organize our resistance!”

  We wished him farewell and went slowly and carefully back to the plateau, arriving there very early the following morning. Both the ESC bubble and the PPI installation were encaverned, and I fell into the bed in my rerelocated house like a single grain of rice into a nutshell, a tiny grain rattling in a vast emptiness. Only Paul was in the same building. I don’t know where the concs were. I hadn’t seen them since I’d returned.

  We were all awakened shortly before dawn when the Orskim ships arrived in orbit and began bombarding the PPI and ESC installations that Walky had built the night before.

  THE WILLOG WAR

  Huddled together inside the cavern, we watched the bombardment as it was transmitted to us by the fish in the area. Walky had not only simulated the installation, he had also added simulation to its destruction. Great clouds of spores rose after each hit, red and orange and yellow, followed by billows of black and gray. When the weapons hit the sham ESC, out on the little island, it went up in a great cloud of energetic white and silver.

  Duras Drom said, “Our installation would merely have burned, without any of those colorful clouds of smoke, but I must say it looks very dramatic.”

  “The Orskimi won’t know the difference,” I said. “They’ve never warred against humans before, have they?”

  “An outpost here and there,” said Gainor. “I doubt they’ll pay much attention. Their real target is the Derac.”

  “Who have gone,” I said.

  “Except for warriors hidden back in the trees, ready to take on any landing parties,” Gainor commented. “The Derac warships are hiding behind Treasure at the moment. I imagine they’ll be along anytime.”

  He was quite right. They came along almost at once, red ships that glowed like embers, attacking silver Orski ships, beams of light flashing from one to the other. Before long, several ships on both sides had been damaged enough that they had to make emergency landings and continue the battle on the ground. During this early stage, we weren’t involved, we weren’t at risk, all the conflict was going on well south of and below us. Gainor maneuvered our fish-eyes to get the best possible view as though we had been at a sporting event. We wanted to be able to foresee the outcome, of course, in order to take appropriate action, but both sides had good body armor that limited fatalities, and neither side seemed to be winning.

  There were signs of willog intervention from the beginning. When a warrior of either race bumped against the wrong tree, bush, or thicket, a mad thrashing occurred, and after a time the copse walked off, leaving the resultant corpse behind.

  “No collateral damage,” remarked Gainor, approvingly.

  That wasn’t true in the thick of the battle, which was catastrophic insofar as the landscape was concerned. I saw tree after tree go up in flame, while wooded areas on all sides erupted in showers of mosses, soil, and leaves. A hail of escape pods came from two badly damaged Orskim ships to land north of the battle. They were followed at once by a rain of Derac IMAVs—individual, mobile, armored vehicles—that hit the ground still farther north, establishing a battle line much closer to us than before, and several of us moved out to the edge of the plateau to get a better view.

  From our vantage point, it looked as though half of Moss was burning, though the view transmitted by the ESC ships in near space showed fighting going on only in a narrow slice of country between the east side of the lake and an area south of Night Mountain. The slice grew wider and longer with every passing hour, but our plateau, which Gainor assured me looked completely uninhabited from space, remained unthreatened. I didn’t care what happened to either the Derac or Orskimi, and the planet would renew itself very quickly, so I admit to feeling a kind of selfish optimism about the eventual outcome.

  That mood soon passed when we heard the unmistakable scream of descending ships directly above us. We ran before we looked, kept running as the sound grew deafening, and stopped only when we were inside the cavern being stifled by a cloud of dust.

  Gainor shouted, “By the tonsils of Twivus the Twelve-Throated. It’s the Hargess-Hessing fleet!”

  Only the first ship was down. The explosion of dust was renewed with each of the several others that landed. I had never seen Gainor move as quickly as he did in reaching the communication center of the ESC bubble, where he repeatedly hailed the captain or captains of the ships. Ignoring the hails, the other ships kept coming down, almost on top of us, the “almost” due solely to good fortune and not to any foresight on their part. Only then did the fleet captain of the Hessing ships respond to Gainor’s hail.

  The captain’s protest that he had been sent to “Protect Hessing-Hargess interests,” did nothing to assuage Gainor’s fury, particularly inasmuch as the Derac had seen the ships and decided to attack them, an onslaught that began before the last ship had even landed. Hessing ships were far superior to Earthian military ships, a fact that resulted in recurrent congressional hearings on Earth. Earth’s Navy was required to deal with Earthian manufacturers, but Hessing ships were known to have not only the latest armaments but also the newest technology from anywhere in the galaxy. They were so well shielded that while the Derac bombardment could keep them on the surface, the ships themselves were undamaged. That no doubt annoyed the Derac, for in short order several larger ships showed up, and our “safe” plateau went up in flame. The only shelter was the cavern, where we had all moved into the ESC bubble, which had been designed as protection against indigenous and usually non- or low-tech hostiles on survey planets and was totally inadequate to the current circumstances.

  The Hessing captain apologized profusely, saying he hadn’t been informed there were any people where he had decided to land. His assertion was preposterous, as Gainor well knew. Not twelve hours before, Dame Cecelia herself had been on this same site, and we all knew her ships had her located down to the exact millimeter.

  “Who ordered you to set down here?” Gainor asked.

  The order had been given long before the battle started, and it had come from Dame Cecelia Hessing, who told them it was a perfect place to set down.

  “I think your little jest with Witt and his mama has just backfired,” Gainor told me through gritted teeth.

  “Do you mean to tell me that she would…” And I stopped, because it was obvious she would. It had been obvious from the first moment I had set eyes on her in the University Tower that she would. What Dame Cecelia wanted, Dame Cecelia got, or she killed it so no one else could have it. What were fifty people, more or less? What were half a dozen Hessing ships and their crews if she could get even with me along with them?

  It was too late to do anything about it. The Hessing ships couldn’t take off without turning off the shields, they couldn’t turn off the shields because the Derac had been joined by several Orski ships who figured any non-Orski ship was a target, no matter who it was.

  In the space of a quarter hour we had moved from sensible safety to desperate dan
ger and ended up doing what desperate people do. We ran, all of us but one. When Gainor and I went to get Paul, he insisted upon being left in the cavern to get on with his work. Gainor told him a direct hit would destroy him along with his work, but Paul was utterly oblivious to the risk. When he was working, nothing short of being actually blown apart could interrupt him.

  The rest of us, Drom’s people from PPI, Ornel’s people from ESC, Gainor, and I gathered up whatever survival packs, weapons, and communication equipment we could pack on half a dozen tiny, two-man floaters that were guided by tethers as we went. In my own pack I had a lingui-pute and the prototype odor organ, which I had taken from the ESC dome moments after leaving Paul. No one knew I had it, and it certainly wasn’t mine to take, but I was not going to leave it to be destroyed even though I knew the Phain already had a device that was probably its superior. The Phain were not known to be generous, and I felt we humans needed anything that would help us communicate with other races, including the two very nasty ones who were intent upon killing us at the moment.

  “Do we try to reach Loam, or one of the other Night Mountain tribes?” I asked Gainor. “I have a map that shows where they are.”

  “Better we just get down into the forest, where it’ll be warmer,” he commented, breathlessly. “It wouldn’t be quite fair to involve Night Mountain people by leading the enemy directly to them. We brought this on the world, they didn’t.”

  “Don’t say we brought this on the planet. The Derac did, if anyone.”

  “Whatever you say,” he puffed. “I’ve already messaged IC for assistance as well as the ESC fleet. We’ll have help eventually, but it may take a while.”

  We waited for a lull that gave us time to get into the slanting cleft used by ascending floaters. The rift was all that remained of a onetime waterfall. Though smoothed to some extent by the flow, it had been littered with boulders fallen from either side, and it made a continuous if somewhat tortuous route to the bottom. We scampered down, that is, some of us scampered. Others of us half dropped, half fell, crawled, and in difficult spots, hung by our fingers.

  During a momentary halt to choose between a nasty climb to the left or a worse one to the right, I asked Gainor, “Where’s the Tharstian Marshal from IC now that we need him?”

  “Up there somewhere.” Gainor jerked his head toward the sky. “Tharstians don’t stay on planets any longer than they have to. As soon as he warned me, he left. I hope he remembers we’re friends.”

  We clambered over ten thousand uncooperative stones, and then we rested before dropping and falling over another ten thousand. We stopped for lunch, then trotted along a fairly level path for a mile or so, counted noses to be sure we were all there, before another clamber. There’s nothing interesting to say about it. We were bruised and cold, we were tired, by the time evening came we were wet with rain, and most of us were sharing a very bad mood. We had not, however, attracted attention from the combatants since our route was well hidden by the depth and narrowness of the cleft. We were forced into no adventurous detours; we had no reason to take cover; we simply followed the route all the way to the bottom, arriving there to find the battle much closer than we had expected or desired.

  After a brief breather on the level, the time spent watching the nearest explosions through the trees, we began working our way eastward around the base of the cliffs, away from the fighting. Gainor was still keeping track of the overall situation, and he told us more and more warriors from both sides were now on the ground, fighting from hastily erected fortifications. I warmed up a little when my clothes began to dry, and I recall being momentarily and stupidly cheerful about the whole thing. I told myself the fighting would inevitably dwindle, and, at some point, the warriors would leave the planet.

  We had not figured on encountering another set of warriors until a boyish voice cried, “Halt and be recognized!”

  They hailers turned out to be half a dozen youngsters from Day and Night Mountains. We identified ourselves with some difficulty, since the boys, who were little more than children, had never heard of us. We were obviously human, however, so they invited us into their supply depot, nicely placed between a bulwark of fallen boulders in front and a sheltering overhang in the cliff behind. The lads had been set to guard a huge pile of supplies left there by a group of bellicose volunteers.

  “Day or Night Mountain?” I asked one of the brighter-seeming lads.

  “Oh, both, ma’am. We all want to get into it. A lot of the Day Mountain folk stayed here in the north after the fight with the Derac! Some had wounds to heal from or they found wives among the Night Mountain girls, and some of the Night Mountain folk decided to go back with us and look for wives themselves. Today was the day we were to set out for home. When we got this far, they sent the women back up to the top and decided they weren’t about to sit about while there was fighting going on!”

  “They’re fighting each other, not you,” I said.

  “They got in our way, they did. That’s reason enough,” said a slightly older youth who still regarded us with some suspicion. “And if it weren’t, we’ve got reason enough for those lizards ambushing us near the battleground.”

  “So you’re fighting on the side of the Orskimi?” cried Gainor.

  “Is that who they are?” a guard asked. “Well, whoever they are, we’ll help them get rid of the alligators.”

  Gainor said through his teeth, “The Orskimi are more dangerous than the Derac, and if your men get in among them, they’ll come back dead.”

  The boys seemed to have difficulty comprehending that possibility and no idea at all what might be done to prevent it. The upshot of it was that Gainor and I decided that, since the warriors were on foot, we could probably catch up to them on a floater while the rest of our people went on around the plateau to a place of relative security.

  Duras Drom offered to go with us. So did Sybil and Ornell, but Gainor thought the two of us would be quickest and quietest alone. While he and Drom unloaded the floater, I took a few moments to talk to Sybil.

  “Unload a floater for yourself,” I said. “Go on along the cliffs to the east, not very far, until you come to another deep cleft in the plateau. You’ll know it’s the right one if you see three falls close to the right of it, two low ones and a very high one in the middle that comes all the way down from the rimrock. Take the floater up to the top and yell for someone to get in touch with Gavi Norchis of the Tribe Loam. Give her this message from me. ‘Jewel has the instrument you practiced on and she needs you to play it.’”

  “What instrument is that?” Sybil asked.

  “You don’t need to know,” I said. “What you do need to know is that getting to her with that message may save all our lives.” I had no proof of that. In fact, it may have been one of my episodic incidents of self-dramatization that Gainor had so often deplored. It was only a feeling, perhaps one of those feelings Aunt Hatty had suggested I should pay more attention to. “Lend Gavi the floater to follow us. Better yet, you follow us and bring her. Gainor and I are both wearing locators.”

  She made note of the locator frequencies, and within moments Gainor and I were off. Riding was actually a rest from the climbing we’d been doing, and we spelled one another at the controls, following the easy trail left by, I said, several score intrepid and very stupid men. Gainor said “not stupid, but ill informed,” and once again chided me for making judgments without sufficient evidence.

  “In his heart, mankind has never been able to evolve past the tribal stage,” Gainor said. “Civilization does not take the place of tribalism, but if it is well designed, it can control it. Here, on Moss, these men have their whole lives centered upon their tribes, the defense of territory, the shielding of honor. Any threat against tribe, territory, or honor is an acceptable excuse for battle. The women have children and caves and gardens to manage, but the men live only for what they think of as valor. When no fighting is imminent against a remote foe, they will fight one another, and when
ever things get too peaceable, they may claim to have been deathly insulted if someone walks through their light.”

  I knew that. In the towers, back on Earth, sports teams from various locals or sections competed with one another for championships of a tier, or a section, or even a sector! They would crow or complain for days, depending upon the score of a game in which nothing had happened except that one team had scored one more point than the other team. The dogs were the same. Even among the six dogs we had brought to Moss, I had seen them defending their personal space, their relationship with their mates. I mentioned this to Gainor. “Perhaps it’s why we get on with dogs so well. We and they have the same societies.”

  He gave me a surprised look and a grunt, whether of agreement or admonition, I had no idea.

  The trail we were following was clear. I had already noticed that warriors in crab armor could not move without snapping twigs and crushing mosses. We drove the floater at its top speed, some good bit faster than a walk. The men ahead of us had one or two hours’ head start, and we hoped to come up to them when they stopped for an evening meal. In fact, that is what happened. We came into a clearing at top speed, sliding to a halt when we saw thirty or forty warriors sitting stock-still around a small fire, plates on their laps, utensils halfway to their lips, frozen. Before we could realize what was happening, Derac poured out of the forest all around us.

  The next few moments were too chaotic to make sense of. By the time things settled, we had been loosely shackled to good-sized trees, and the Derac were finishing the meal the warriors had started. They had not taken our packs, they had not tied our hands, they had simply chained us up out of the way in their hurry to get something to eat, and they were totally concentrated upon consuming it. I therefore opened my pack and took out the lingui-pute.

  “You brought a ’pute?” Gainor whispered. “By all the tail joints of…”