After that, things went on for a few days while I let time pass. All the purpose in my life had gone with the dogs. I had become able to think of them with satisfaction, but their loss colored every breath I took. I did not want to die, particularly, but then, I didn’t want anything at all, particularly. I simply existed, letting things happen.
Then one night, while I was standing outside near the edge of the plateau, admiring the green moon, I felt a familiar warmth brush my fingers.
“Scramble,” I whispered. “Oh, I’ve missed you.”
“We know,” said a lingui-pute.
The Phaina had returned. She murmured, “Now that the outstanding issues have been dealt with, we thought you might enjoy seeing…let us call it Tsaliphor II. You may enjoy a visit, a stay with your friends, going with them to see the fine phantasmic elephants and the wily alligators and all the other beasts in the worlds about them.”
“Oh, I would,” I cried. “But what about Adam and Frank and Clare…”
“Do not worry. They are quite content,” she said. “They chose to stay, to be the same as those they had reared and trained.”
It took me a moment to understand her fully. “So,” I said to Scramble, “it turned out they weren’t just playing, after all.”
“No,” said Scramble, gazing at me from those deep, liquid eyes that seemed to see everything. There was gray around her muzzle. “An ai no you come. When ai nee you, you awwais come.”
“You need me, Scramble? It seems to me you’ve done very well on your own.”
“Na,” she said. “Na frens lai Zhewel. Na frens na awais…” She sighed. “Na roo sisrs.”
The Phaina whispered, “No friends who are not always jockeying for position in the pack. No true sisters. They miss humans, Jewel. Scramble most of all. She is getting old, and she does not wish to die friendless.”
I buried my face in Scramble’s mane so she couldn’t see I was crying. I hugged her. Oh, she was…a marvel. A wonder. A dear, dear otherness. An answer to the question of whether humans are any more important than any other creature. A rebuke to IGI-HFO, if any of them were left.
“You orghi’ us?”
I didn’t understand her. The lingui-pute murmured, “She wants to know if you forgive them.”
“Forgive them for what?” I cried.
“For their having enslaved you, all those tens of thousands of years ago.”
I laughed and cried and hugged my friend again. “It doesn’t matter who enslaved whom, Scramble. What matters is we were together. What matters is all that time we kept one another from being entirely evil. So long as we cared for one another, we kept one another from turning into Zhaar.”
With the Phaina as our guide, I knew I need take nothing with me, so I stood up, ready to go.
“One thing,” said the Phaina. Her voice was rather remote, and even her ’pute sounded very slightly distant, as though reluctant to say the words. “Before you decide to make this journey, you may wish to know who placed the concs on Earth, and who is now seeing that they spread throughout all human planets…”
“Except the ark planets.” I asked. “You do mean, except the ark planets?
I received her acknowledging nod in answer, and smiled to think of Mag safe with her cats, to think of all of them, safe with those they had loved and saved. The smile was a sincere one, for her, too.
“Never mind, Sannasee. I already know.”
“SHERI S. TEPPER
TAKES THE MENTAL RISKS THAT ARE THE LIFEBLOOD OF SCIENCE FICTION AND ALL IMAGINATIVE NARRATIVE.”
URSUlA K. Le Guin
Praise for the award-winning author and
THE COMPANIONS
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Books by
Sheri S. Tepper
THE AWAKENERS
AFTER LONG SILENCE
THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY
BEAUTY
GRASS
RAISING THE STONES
SIDESHOW
A PLAGUE OF ANGELS
SHADOW’S END
GIBBON’S DECLINE AND FALL
THE FAMILY TREE
SIX MOON DANCE
SINGER FROM THE SEA
THE VISITOR
THE COMPANIONS
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE COMPANIONS. Copyright © 2003 by Sheri S. Tepper. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-197632-2
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The Companions Page 56