The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “But then we spoke to the Zhaar and learned it had been yours all along until the Zhaar took it from you. They took it from you and in its stead they gave you Zhaar virtues, dog virtues: pride and packishness. Those are not faults among dogs, who have no hands, who had no language, who needed pride of leadership and packish order in order to survive. This is a grievous harm to manipulating speaking creatures, to allow the few to contend for pride of power while the many follow, packishly. You were made packish as the Zhaar themselves were packish.

  “Though you did not thrive on Mars, the Zhaar continually took some back to Earth and brought others of you from Earth. Those who survived were the hardiest, the cleverest. Fifty thousand of your years ago, the Zhaar were almost discovered on Mars. They were afraid they might be found if they stayed where they were, so they left your system hastily, and on their way, they returned your changed ancestors of breeding age to Earth, along with all the younger dogs. This was not done out of kindness. The race of Zhaar had already lived for thousands of lifetimes. They foresaw a time they might enslave you again, both human and dog.

  “From those returned to Earth, pride and packishness entered the genetic pool of humanity. You became followers of lead dogs, pack followers of power, and the small group of you spread across the face of the Earth. Over all those generations on Mars, the Zhaar had made you little copies of themselves.

  “When the Zhaar abandoned the old on Mars, they committed a great cruelty. They abandoned those who had served them, left them behind on a moribund planet to suffer a slow death, and in this one instance, all the crimes of the Zhaar were exemplified. If they were to be punished as they merited, they could have been punished for this wrong alone. They were not moved to such cruelty by necessity. They did it simply because they did not care, and this is the great fault of packs. The pack is all. Those outside it are nothing but prey or impediments. The weak are nothing. The aged are nothing. Only the pack is important. Long ago I heard a human say, ‘Me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brother and my cousins against our tribe; our tribe against all other tribes; all our tribes against the world.’ This is what Zhaar say, also.

  “Packs do not care, and we dalongar-folk cannot get where we want to go in the company of those who do not care.”

  “You said…we’re being rejudged?” I asked.

  “On Earth, some of your people inherited the Zhaar characteristics; some of them have not. Even today, some of you have them, some of you do not. We have learned we cannot treat as one race a people who are, in fact, of at least two kinds.”

  I couldn’t think. My mind was an absolute blank. One look at Gainor’s face and I knew he was as adrift as I. Gavi was nodding slowly, as though she understood what had just happened, though I really understood only that the Zhaar were gone, banished, in the shape of the dogs they had wronged, and most of humanity was likely to follow them for crimes they had forced us to commit.

  We were still a bit higher than the forest. We could see that the Derac and Orskim had quit fighting both on the ground and in the sky. We could see that the Hessing ships had gone.

  “How was all that stopped?” I asked, waving my hand to indicate the whole thing.

  “The World did it,” said Walking Sunshine. “So soon as the World knew who was to blame, the World fixed it. Pulled the warships down, sent the Hessing ships away. The World is following them now, to every place they go, for too much power is not good for creatures!”

  “The World?” I said, stupidly.

  “Walking Sunshine means Splendor,” said the Phaina. “Moss is a part of Splendor. We have long had Guardian Houses on Tsaliphor, which sits at the edge of Splendor. We may walk through a door from Tsaliphor and enter here. We may walk through a door here, and enter my Guardian House on the other side. Many times over the last million years we have walked through a door in Splendor and set our feet upon an Earth prairie, or a jungle, or a savannah, and when we returned, we often brought creatures with us into Splendor that they might be saved. In Splendor we have:

  “Elemental, monumental, fine phantasmic elephants;

  hairless hippopotami, snuggled close as spoons;

  riotous rhinoceri, roistering on grasslands;

  tiny, tender tarsiers, with eyes like moons…”

  She smiled again, that invisible smile. “Moreover, Splendor is aware of them, and they are aware of Splendor.”

  “But the Zhaar…” I cried. “They were there, but if Splendor is heaven, what were the Zhaar doing there?”

  “Our Guardian Houses stand outside Splendor, on an edge, a boundary. There the Zhaar lived, along with others. From their place in that boundary, they were as far from Splendor as the next galaxy is to ours.”

  It was too much, I couldn’t get my mind around it, and I wasn’t alone. The Phaina saw our struggle. She said, “You’re tired. You’re unable to put your thoughts in order. Let it go for now. We will return you to Night Mountain. The World will remoss itself. Walking Sunshine will go among its willog constituency and assist in that renovation by slowly growing words to tell the World what has happened here. And when you are rested and ready to put all the pieces together, we will meet again.”

  “Just one question,” I begged. “The Zhaar. They didn’t fight. They just let themselves be rounded up. Why didn’t they fight?”

  “Because of what we said to them, what your mother said to them in music, what Gavi said in scent, what I said in words, what my people showed them in visions. Races can be judged in large part by their arts. We showed them what others thought of the way they had behaved, and they felt the emotion that depiction was designed to evoke. They had never felt it before, but now they felt shame. That was the last word, the last meaning they ever felt, the only one that will stay with them. All others have been taken from them.”

  She moved us, somehow, not just us, but all the people we’d started out with that morning, together with all our supplies and equipment, right back to where we’d started from that morning. We told one another it was an elder race thing. Probably something a Phaina could do without even thinking about it. I felt as though I’d spent at least ten days at hard labor since leaving. I felt as though the dogs had only been gone a few days, but I knew they might already have been gone for years.

  Before falling into my bed I wondered briefly about Adam and Frank and Clare. I had not seen them. I wondered where and what they were. Then I thought of the Zhaar, facing an eternity with only one word left. To my amazement, I felt pity for them. Then I cried myself to sleep, longing for Scramble, unable to comfort myself with the knowledge that the future I’d hoped for them had come to pass. Somehow, I had never thought of their future without me in it.

  END OF A DOG’S TALE

  Out among the stars, upon planets, here and there in space, things happened:

  On Earth, Evolun Moore held a meeting of several hundred of the major contributors and most dedicated workers of IGI-HFO. They were faced with a new challenge, a stir among the down-dwellers, who after several months of a petless world, were astir with resentment at having no more air or water than they had had previously.

  “They say we misled them,” cried Gabbern, who had been tireless in his work for IGI-HFO and had come to feel somewhat betrayed. “They’re claiming we can’t do what we promised. They say we have to get rid of some of these people coming in from off world, that there isn’t room for all of them.”

  Evolun blanched. He was indebted to several members of the legislature for financing his organization. They did so in order to pay off outer worlds who depended on the continuance of the Law of Return. Any talk of limiting return would not go down well with any of them.

  “Tell them to be patient,” he said firmly. “Tell them to look at the average age of the people of Earth. It’s gone well past seventy, and it’s continuing to rise. The birthrate is way down; pretty soon people will start dying in droves. Besides, we’re working on a scheme to open derelict to
wers to colonization by down-dwellers. Lots more air, more light, more everything…”

  “Except power to run the lifts,” cried another large donor. “They need…hell, WE need something more visible than mere promises. We need something dramatic, like knocking some of those exempt estate people off their high horses.”

  Evolun rose and strolled to the window. He had been saving this, just for such an occasion.

  “There,” he pointed. “The top three floors of that tower are owned by the Alred Family. Suppose we blow that away. Would that please you and your constituents?”

  A moment’s silence fell, while they looked at one another, then smiled, then laughed. Oh, yes, that would do it, for a while at least.

  Smiling broadly, Evolun pressed the button on the detonator in his pocket.

  Far out, toward the rim, three Orski ships fled toward an ancient redoubt, one seen by few ever, now known to none but those who were moving toward it. A pleasant enough world. Warm, with seas, with forests, with all the things that willing Orskim needed to build a new life, a new future. There a new temple would be built, and there the experience and memories of generations would once again begin to amass.

  The captain of the lead ship was informed of a blip.

  “Blip? What blip? There’s nothing for light-years in any direction.”

  “The blip is a…well, it’s kind of a squirm, sir. A wrinkle? Something odd. It started over there, you see, sir, on the screen, and it’s propagating toward us. By the holy immortals, look at it come!”

  The Orski ships were already moving at top speed. They were some distance from a nexus that would move them faster.

  “What in the belly of a klonzi is that thing? And what is it doing?”

  “It seems to be gulping, sir. Gulping space, like it’s eating it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Evasive action. Can we avoid it by evasive action?”

  It was the last question any of them asked. By the time the squirming brightness turned itself inside out and disappeared, the Orski ships were only dust, glinting in the light of distant stars. If one had wanted to obtain the Zhaar technology that had been carried on those Orski ships, it would have been necessary to reassemble it, atom by atom.

  On Earth, in the headquarters of the Hessing-Hargess empire, hundreds of district managers occupied the top several floors of the Great Tower of Industry. It was proving to be one of those mornings when nothing seemed to go right.

  “What do you mean it burned?” cried a middle-aged manager into his far-link. “It couldn’t burn. It was fireproof!”

  “What do you mean it broke?” cried another. “They’re indestructible!”

  “Lost the contract!” boomed a third. “How in hell could you have lost the contract?”

  “Send a ship,” said another, in the tone of one who is never disobeyed. Then, “What do you mean, you don’t have a ship? Grounded? On whose authority? Well, then, get one from Patfer IV, they have extras. Planet quake? I hadn’t heard about a planet quake!”

  Over lunch, this director talked to that director. After lunch, several directors went to see the general managers. Late in the afternoon, the general managers called upon the Vice President in Charge of Whatever.

  As the VPCW read the documents placed before him, he turned very pale. “How could this have happened all at once?” he asked. “There’s no power in the galaxy that could have done this all at once.”

  That night, at dinner, Dame Cecelia was surprised to see her husband look up from his sheaf of papers, and cry, “My God, Cece. We’re ruined.”

  On Moss, the day after the battle, the PPI installation and the ESC bubble were moved out of the cavern, back onto the plateau, where they would be used as the official site of the IC inquiry into the future fate of Moss. Of course, such an inquiry was both useless and pretentious, as we all knew, including the IC, but the rules required everyone to go through the motions. The Tharstian Marshal had returned with several IC battleships, which were left circling in orbit, just in case some other race should start an unpleasantness. The Derac, who had suffered almost total losses during the fray, were now represented by a creature named Gahcha, who took some time to explain to the IC Marshal that females from any other race were of no interest to the Derac as females from his own race were now growing up with their brains intact. Gainor and I—and the Tharstians—believed we knew what this was about, but I don’t think anyone else had a clue.

  While the assembly waited for the members of the Hessing-Hargess delegation, who were unaccountably delayed, both the Day and Night Mountain tribes gave Walky a petition to be presented to the World. They asked to be allowed to remain upon the plateaus, except for an occasional journey between the plateaus for wife-seeking and a few trips a year into the forest to harvest thread, which they would do slowly and quietly, with care that human busyness would not disrupt the quiet enjoyment of the World by its parts. Walky told them they would receive an answer in due course. When I asked him how long due course was likely to be, he said a year or so, and the World said they could stay until the World made up its mind.

  During all this, Paul continued to define all the ramifications and pontifications that linguists love and no one else pays any attention to. The actual language was by then well understood by those who needed to communicate in it, and the ESC techs had already combined a lingui-pute and an odor organ to get a translating device that worked quite well, though it was still far too bulky for personal use.

  Recently I had seen Gavi in the constant company of Duras Drom, a completely healed Duras Drom who had lost all signs of having been addicted to redmoss. If the World let the humans stay, which it well might do, there was no reason PPI would not let Duras stay on Moss, and certainly there would always be much for a scent mistress to accomplish, beginning, perhaps, with assuring that she and Duras Drom would love one another forever.

  Several days in succession, Gainor and I went for walks together, usually with Walky as our guide, while Gainor brought us up-to-date on the news from Earth and elsewhere. That was how we learned that the headquarters of IGI-HFO had blown up during a leadership meeting convened to consider what they were going to do next. Several prominent advocates of the Law of Return had been present at the time of the explosion, and a number of others had since died of mysterious diseases.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Gainor said. “The first concs have turned up on two more commercial planets of ours.”

  “You said they would, Gainor.”

  “I know. I should feel proud of being right. I’d rather have been wrong.”

  “I have met concs,” said Walky. “When they were last being fed. They are very interesting for vegetables, though not very bright. Someone did not design them very well for conversation.”

  That made me envision Paul as he would no doubt be, living to a healthy old age on a world where there will soon be no children born at all; traveling to human worlds where children would soon be so scarce that every single one would be treasured, where no one could be spared to be returned anywhere. I thought of a world of derelict towers, slowly falling into ruin, grown over with vines and alive with birds. I thought of forty acres of trees shedding their seeds over a world that welcomed them.

  I asked, “So, has anyone found out if the Orskimi…”

  Gainor interrupted, “Oh, speaking of Orskimi, I forgot to tell you! A flotilla of Orski ships was destroyed in a remote area toward the rim. The ships were carrying their entire leadership and the only recorded history of their race.”

  “You mean…the memory people you told me about.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Derac destroyed them?” I asked.

  Gainor looked puzzled. “As a matter of fact, no one knows who did it. Someone reported coming upon the wreckage, I don’t know whom. The result has been, however, that the Orskimi have no people left who can remember anything further back than their own childhood. What’s left of the Orski race has retreat
ed to E’Sharmifant and is said to be reexamining its racial purpose.”

  A day or two later, someone showed up from the Hessing-Hargess commercial empire, though only to say that the group had no further interest in the future of Moss. The Hessing-Hargesses were evidently in great trouble. On many planets, their businesses and warehouses had been burned. Elsewhere, properties had been condemned and offices searched to obtain proof that local officials had been bribed. Corrupt officials were under arrest and being asked to explain how vast sums of public moneys had ended up in Hessing-Hargess contracts, and how vast sums of HH money had ended up in the officials’ pockets! Fleets of vehicles had been unaccountably wrecked, and all their mercenary starships were inoperable because of the destruction of various indestructible parts.

  “Hessing-Hargess was one of the main supporters of the Law of Return,” Gainor added.

  “How could everything have happened at once, this way?” I asked, amazed. “All the threads unraveling, all at once. I can’t understand it.”

  Walky commented, “It is perfectly understandable. The World wished to know who had committed the badness of the conflict, and you said it was the Orskimi. The World wanted to know who set the ships upon your head, and you said it was this Hessing agglomeration. The World suggested to all of Splendor that Orskimi be punished and Hessing be unagglomerated, so it was immediately done.”

  “Just like that?” asked Gainor with an expression of awe, snapping his fingers.

  “Just like that,” said Walky, snapping six sets of wooden fingers like a flock of castanets, all clicking off at once. “When a world speaks, smaller creatures do well to listen.”

  “But, how?” I asked. “I mean, it happened everywhere, Walky.”

  “Splendor touches everywhere,” it said. “And I am now positive, absolutely sure, utterly convinced that Moss is indisputably, incontrovertibly, and beyond doubt part of Splendor. It was a revelation to me, a vision, a divination. I believe when Splendor warns a people, the people should listen. The Phaina believes she guards Splendor, and perhaps, in a sense, she does, but I sense Splendor has its own guardians as well. When they grow peevish, it is evident they can do large and final things.”