The Companions

  I nodded. “Sounds logical.”

  “What’s a butterfly?” asked Wyatt.

  I said, “An insect that used to live on Earth, with beautifully colored wings…

  “Ah. I’m sorry. I’m not an Earth native, and while I support the preservation effort philosophically, I know very little about Earth fauna.”

  “There’s damned little to know, these days.” I stood up, suddenly decisive. “I can’t keep that poor PPI man waiting on the pier any longer. Will you report this to ESC, or shall I?”

  Lethe said, “We’ll draft a complete message from you and us, copy to you, adding our study results, such as they are.”

  “Now that I have a boat to use, I’ll drop over in the next few days. Link me if anything happens.”

  Sybil Wyatt came with me to the lock, scuffing her feet on the path, looking down at her shoes, murmuring, half to herself, “You must think we’re completely oblivious, not wondering about the presence of children’s voices or knowing about people disappearing from PPI…”

  “Why should you? It’s not part of your directives to keep track of PPI, is it?”

  “Not since Jungle. There, they were based in our space, and we were supposed to protect them. Which we couldn’t do once they went out in the tangle. Since then, ESC has refused all responsibility for PPI contingents.”

  I stopped short. “You were there?”

  “On Jungle? Yes. All three of us were. It was Lethe’s first command. Why?”

  “One of those who vanished was Witt Hessing. He and I were liaised. He was…very important to me…”

  I don’t know why I felt it necessary to add that last. Surely the fact we were liaised was enough to legitimize my concern. We stared at one another, my anger confronting her pity, inconsequential as a rock hitting a pillow. Something moved in her pocket, and she patted it until a tiny face peeked out.

  “Gixit,” she said, as explanation. “We were the only two things left…”

  “On Holme’s World,” I said. “I know. But that was years ago. Small animals don’t usually…”

  “This one seems to have a long life span,” she said, as the little beasty leapt out of the pocket onto her shoulder, large eyes watching me with intent curiosity, all four hands busy holding on, wide ears pricked.

  “You mentioned the attack on Holme’s World. That’s what it was like on Jungle. There was nothing wrong there on Holme’s World. One minute we were all celebrating the final stage of terraforming, the next minute everything on the world was dead but me and Gixit. There was nothing wrong on Jungle. One minute everything was fine, the next minute eleven men were gone.

  “Gixit came with me back to Earth. When I was a lot older, working for ESC, I got hold of the genetic material saved before terraforming and created several more of his kind, male and female, hoping I could find somewhere to turn them loose. Moss is the best bet I’ve seen so far, but that’s not important…”

  “You have the others here?”

  “Oh, yes. Most ESC staffers have some kind of pet or hobby. Living inside a force field isn’t terribly fulfilling. Anyhow, that’s beside the point, which is that we don’t know why Holme’s World was hit, and we don’t know what happened on Jungle.”

  I said firmly, “We may not know why, but there are Hessing ships on the plateau, so we know people have disappeared from up there, too. All of which says this system needs to be investigated. I don’t care what the IC protocols say about surveys, intrusive or otherwise. We’ve got to get PPI off dead center.”

  “Lethe said we’d report to General Manager Brandt.”

  “Wrap it and put a bow on it for him. Tell Gainor Brandt if we’re to save the PPI contingent, it will have to be quick, and the orders will have to come from outside. Please don’t just wait and weigh about this one, Sybil. Try to get some action.”

  During the Mossen dances over the next several days, I went on listing the colors and the order of the dance; daytimes I took the dogs on long walks in the forest; and Paul fed his computers with everything he could think of, concentrating on the sounds the fish had picked up in the forest. Early on the fifth morning, when I happened upon him in the kitchen, he was beginning to snarl.

  “I was talking to one of the PPI kitchen people the other day,” lied I. “He’s a hobbyist, extinct fauna. He happened to mention protective mimicry among prey creatures. It got me wondering, if those sounds are made by the Mossen, could they be protective mimicry?”

  Paul stopped what he was doing and became very still. “In what way, protective?”

  “Well, mankind can be dangerous. Perhaps by assuming our sounds, the Mossen are less exposed to predation by something else.”

  “PPI hasn’t found any predators.”

  “I know. But they haven’t really looked at much of the planet, either.”

  “Besides, mankind has only been on the planet a short while. Wouldn’t these creatures have needed much more time to evolve…”

  “It could be like birds. The organs required for singing probably took a long time to evolve, but once they could do it, new songs might take no time at all. There used to be birds on Earth that could spontaneously mimic whatever they heard, voices or bells or sirens.”

  “In which case,” Paul said in a deadly tone, “my work on the sounds these creatures make would be totally wasted.”

  I cursed myself silently. “Oh, I doubt that, Paul. I just thought it was an interesting idea. Probably nothing in it at all.”

  As there probably wasn’t. Any more than my report to Gainor Brandt had anything real in it. Surely ESC wouldn’t simply let the entire PPI contingent kill itself off! Unless Botrin Prime had kicked up a fuss and demanded Gainor keep hands off. Which wasn’t impossible. Assuming that might be the case, and even though it broke protocol rather seriously, I decided to talk to Drom himself!

  I found him before his console in the headquarters building. Lukha’s chair—at least I supposed it had been Lukha’s chair—was empty. Drom himself looked more troubled but slightly less ill than when I had seen him last. I pulled a chair over and sat down beside him. When he pretended to ignore me, I pulled his chair back and faced him, saying, “You have forty-seven live PPI people left on the planet. Did you know that?”

  His shocked dismay told me he had not. “Out in the mosses…” he whispered.

  “No, you don’t have eighty people wandering around out in the mosses. Many if not all of them are dead. What’s going on here, Duras? Why did all the oldsters come here? Was it to die?”

  He turned away from me to bend over his console, almost resting his forehead on the work surface, taking a breath like a sob. “Most of them.”

  “Why?”

  He knotted his hands together, clenching his teeth, almost shuddering from the effort to control himself Then he took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and said, “You probably won’t understand. People don’t, not unless they’re…PPI. It’s a tradition with us, we’ve always done it. My own father. His father…” His knotted hands beat his knees, punishingly.

  “Talk to me,” I urged. “You’ve got to talk to someone.”

  He took another shuddering breath. “I know. I told myself that, some time ago…”

  “What has PPI always done?”

  “When we get too old to do the work, when we look at retirement, being planetbound…it’s fine for some people, some even look forward to it, but a lot of us can’t face it. We want to go on doing what we’ve done all our lives. See new places. Learn new places. We don’t want to live shut up in four hundred square feet of an anthill on Earth, we don’t want to die like that.”

  “So. You say ‘always’?”

  He took a deep breath, stood up, walked away from me to stare out the nearest window. “There’ve always been planets or moons where it was easy to die…”

  “Dangerous planets.”

  “I didn’t say easy to get killed on. I said easy to die on. Go to Borderland 13, sleep out in the open, y
ou don’t wake up in the morning. Flying night creatures come to suck your blood, but they do it without your feeling it, and they inject a chemical that gives you lovely, euphoric dreams while they’re doing it. It’s painless. Easy. Nice, if death can be nice. The largest moon of Chime 30 is a lovely place, beautiful views, light gravity, easy on old bones, old hearts, and a kind of happiness in the air. You wander, feeling happy, not even tired. About fifty, sixty days after you arrive, you’ve forgotten everything except the inclination to wander. You don’t eat, or drink, you just walk and chuckle and walk and chuckle until eventually you fall down dead. There’s a spore floating in the air that settles in the brain. That’s all it takes.

  “PPI men, they know these places. The word gets around, just like it did about this one. I’ve lost fifteen people from my original crew out there. Some of the retirees have filled in behind them, the ones who’re still in good enough shape that they’d rather work than die. The three you met—Maywool had an ET disease, one we can’t cure yet. Lackayst was within two weeks of retirement. Lukha…he just got in too deep, that’s all…”

  “Lukha died with a woman. I saw it.”

  He turned toward me, shaking his head. “It isn’t sex. I did it enough to know it isn’t sex. That’s not what it’s like at all. If you lie on the moss with someone else, you seem to dissolve into one another. You have a whole new world in your mind, another person, memories, ideas…”

  “You did the redmoss?” I asked.

  “I was an addict,” he said stiffly. “But I broke the addiction when we decided to send for…for someone. I got all the crew together. We identified the users, including me. We used the med machines to fight the addiction. I figured when the linguist we asked for arrived, it’d get reported, and besides, it was interfering with my job. I like my job. I’m not ready to die yet.”

  “No more addicts among the people here?”

  “A few recovering from it, like me. We did a general warning. If I see any sign of it in people, or they see any sign of it in me, a med-modifier gets installed until the next ship, then out. The warning couldn’t apply to Lukha and the others like him because they were already too far gone. It didn’t apply to the temporary duty people, oldsters who didn’t want to go back to Earth. I wasn’t about to sentence them to that. The moss was the only good road left for them.”

  “Didn’t want to go back to Earth? Did they come from there?”

  “No. But they came from planets that get rid of anyone over eighty-five. Most of the men and women who came here were close to that. They couldn’t face fifteen or twenty years of pensioned-off hell!”

  “So, what does PPI think about this?”

  “PPI! That squeezer, Prime! He pretends it doesn’t happen, pretends he doesn’t know, but every pension he saves, he gets a bonus from his board of directors.”

  “If the people have pensions, then why would they be sent to Earth? They could support themselves anywhere!”

  “Hah! The planets with living costs low enough for a PPI pension to be adequate don’t admit retirees. Old people cost a lot more than young ones, that’s all. Some of the ones who disappeared here brought their husbands or wives with them…”

  “And they’re all dead.”

  “You said they were dead, but it’s not necessarily true. If they took off their links so nobody would bother them and went off into the moss, they could live out there. Blue moss jellies are delicious; the lab says they’ll sustain life indefinitely. There’s fruit on some of the trees. The climate’s gentle. You can dig a soft shelter into a moss bank. If you stay away from the redmoss and a handful of other dangers, the place is safe.”

  I stood up, sickened but not surprised at what I’d heard. During the year after Witt had gone, before Paul had invited me to join him on that Quondangala job, I’d supported myself by working at one deadly dull job or other, and my only pleasure had been the time I spent at the Baja animal sanctuary. If I had lost that singular joy, I might have wanted to die. If we tower dwellers have nothing that delights us or amuses us, it’s like living in a jail cell or a coffin. Confining. Anonymous. Lonely. And life among the down-dwellers, in all that noise and dark, that is a foretaste of hell. Drom was right about that.

  “You might consider borrowing a power cannon from ESC and getting rid of the redmoss near the compound.”

  “I have considered it. It’s against PPI policy. We honestly don’t know how the redmoss fits into the ecology here. We tried building fences around them, but the mosses crawled out from under them.”

  I left his office to stand outside, totally undecided. The link on my wrist vibrated. Lethe was linking me. I didn’t want to talk to him where I could be overheard, so I returned to my room before answering it.

  “We’ve got word from Brandt,” he said. “Can you come over?”

  “I’ll be there soon.” I jotted a note to the trainers who were out with the dogs and stuck it on one of the corridor closet doors—our improvised bulletin board—checked on the puppies, who were asleep, then went down to the shore where the little boat was moored. It was as simple to operate as I had been told: One could set the course and leave it alone. As it purred its way toward the island, I scanned the surroundings. If I half squinted and ignored the scale, this could be an Earth scene, forests retreating up slopes, far mountains, the lake was an ocean with sandy shores and a romantic sandy spit extending into the waters where eight large dogs emerged from the moss forest and drank from the lake.

  I opened my eyes wide and sat up. They saw the movement and vanished into the moss. I clenched my teeth and felt my hands shaking. Not anger exactly. Anxiety.

  At ESC they gave me Brandt’s message, one forwarded from wormhole to wormhole on the way out, with a few consequent faded spots, nothing they couldn’t make out.

  “Dame Cecelia Hessing has learned about the Hessing ships, and she thinks the disappearance of their crews and passengers has something to do with Witt’s disappearance. She demands we investigate.

  “If that weren’t enough, the revelation about the PPI contingent is causing a meltdown here. Botrin Prime wants to forget it, bury it, pretend it isn’t happening, because it’s evidently a kind of…accommodation that’s traditional in PPI. First I’d heard of it, but he knows all about it. Any enlightenment you can come up with would be welcome. Dame Cecelia won’t let him cover it up, says it may be connected to all the disappearances. Interesting for you, her harassing him for a change. Shoe on other foot kind of thing.

  “Expect my arrival. The intricacies of the situation require personal attention by someone authorized to deal with the Derac. Have information about their increased numbers. Botrin Prime will probably send someone also, don’t know who at this point. I had all I could do to talk Dame Cecelia out of coming herself.

  “Be careful. Brandt out.”

  “What intricacies?” asked Lethe.

  “All of them,” said I. “The dogs, the Derac, Dame Cecelia—she’s Witt Hessing’s mother, and Witt disappeared on Jungle. Then there’s ESC’s relationship to PPI, and PPI’s unstated policy of encouraging suicide.”

  Lethe erupted, “What did you say?”

  I told him, quoting Duras Drom as accurately as I could. “Gainor used the word accommodation. That’s more or less what it’s viewed as. If I’d been head of PPI, I’d have taken possession of a garden planet somewhere along the line and set it up for retirement, so my people would have something to look forward to. This is a manticore egg…”

  “Which is?” asked Sybil.

  “Something that will hatch a very scrambled beast,” I rejoined. “That’s what happens when science gets mixed up with politics, you get monsters that eat good sense. Especially if what Drom says is true about Botrin Prime getting bonuses for saving pension money.”

  “Any progress on the language business?” asked Durrow.

  I shook my head. “Paul’s finding nothing. His machines correlate nothing. I mentioned the mimicry idea to him, just to ge
t him off high dead center.”

  “We wish him luck,” said Lethe.

  “I’ve had another idea,” I murmured. “What if their language isn’t oral?”

  Abe Durrow sat down beside me. “You mean sign language? The Zhaar are said to have had a sign language, a batch of them, as a matter of fact. Each of their shape societies had its own, in addition to the general one.”

  “I don’t know about the Zhaar,” I confessed. “I was thinking more in terms of color, actually. I’ve been looking at the individual Mossen. There are at least seventy shades, tints, and hues. When there are more than one of the same color in a dance, I notice that the belt around them seems to be identical. I’ve taken images, blown them up, and compared.”

  “Belt?”

  “That stiff section around their middle. It has…what would you say, raised areas? Like something embossed: letters or words. So far as I can see, each belt is different, like a fingerprint, except for the identically colored ones. If they are really identical, then we have things that grow to a pattern, maybe as many different patterns as there are colors.”

  “Not one race of creatures?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Humans are one race, but we have different fingerprints, different DNA. We grow to a pattern, but only clones would be identical.”

  “So the communication might be by…?”

  “By order of the colors. If we have seventy distinguishable colors that could be something like a syllable, the order in which they arrange themselves might convey the language, mightn’t it?”

  “That would imply a positional language. Maybe,” said Sybil. She muttered quick notes into her memo pad.

  I went on, “So the Mossen might mimic us to attract our attention, and then arrange themselves to convey a message.”

  “They mimic us?” asked Lethe. He sat back in his chair, eyes unfocused. “If that’s true, if they’re using our sounds to get us interested: Firstly, why don’t they do it when and where they dance; and secondly, who did they talk to before we came?”