The Companions
Witt grinned at me, he said, because I was scrunching up my eyes when I was chewing as though I was using my whole face to squeeze out every bit of taste. He also said I was looking nice, half-starved, but nice. Mostly we talked about the food.
“No faux pepper,” he remarked.
I took a deep breath and smiled. “And no coffee 10, no pretend-cinnamon, no maybe-ginger.”
“No can-this-possibly-be vanilla?”
“I know the answer to that one. It can’t. No matter what Worldkeeper says.”
He laughed. “Give Worldkeeper credit for seeing that we’re all fed, Jewel.”
I made a face. “Worldkeeper doesn’t have to eat meat substitute or simulated vegetable flakes. It’s always weeks or months between the times we get fresh stuff.”
“Special-license places like this always have fresh food.”
I was annoyed at the way he said it, offhand, as though I was being absurd. “Always for the wealthy, Witt. You’re rich, and other people aren’t. You keep forgetting that.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, flushing slightly. “I don’t forget it. It just…gets in the way sometimes.”
I put down my fork and frowned. “You can be glad you’re rich. Most of the rest of us can’t eat like this ever!”
Witt muttered. “Many humans used to eat like this. Many of us could eat this way if we got rid of the Law of Return.”
“Why don’t we? Everybody on Earth hates it.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Unfortunately, that’s not quite true. The outer worlds don’t hate it. They want to keep high birthrates to have lots of workers available for development. Development is everything. If things aren’t getting bigger and faster and higher, people aren’t satisfied. The trouble is, high birthrates eventually result in very large numbers of elderly people who have to live somewhere, and even at the price of space travel, it’s much less expensive to send them back to Earth than to support them on the outlying planets.”
“But why do we let them?” I asked. I really didn’t know why, and it had always bothered me.
“The law was pushed through Worldkeeper Council the same way it’s kept on the books today: Any councilor who votes for it gets lots and lots of campaign money from the outer worlds, along with the guarantee of a luxury retirement on an uncrowded planet.” He frowned, fiddling with his fork. “My family knows a great many of them, the retired ones. They have mansions, and private lakes, and acres of grass and trees…”
I felt a sudden pang, nostalgia for some time or place I had never actually been. “I want to go off world,” I cried.
I didn’t realize my voice had risen until I saw people at nearby tables turning to look at me. I flushed, ducking my head, terribly embarrassed. One simply does not speak loudly in public places.
Witt said, “Really, Jewel. Don’t shout about it. If you really want to go off world, you probably can. Find out what professions are being solicited and learn one.”
“I’ve done that. They want sewage system managers and city planners and warehouse operators. They want all kinds of engineers.”
“They don’t use any salespeople or expediters?”
“Oh, of course, they do. It’s just that the jobs they’re recruiting for aren’t the least bit exciting.”
He sat back in his chair, twirling the stem of his wineglass slowly left and right, watching the light gather and spin in the pool of dark liquid. “I want to get away from here. I’ve wanted nothing else for as long as I can remember, but for the next couple of years, I’ll be finishing my business course with all those damned ET contract studies. Dame Cecelia insists on that.”
I chased the last bit of something delicious to the edge of my plate and captured it with a bit of chewy bread that was nothing like Worldkeeper bread. “I’ve never asked you, Witt, but I’ve always been curious. What’re those titles your parents use? The Dame and Sir thing?”
His raised his eyebrows. “Hereditary titles from way, way back. Ten or fifteen generations, at least. Before space exploration. Even before pod transport, or aircars. The family was British…”
“British?”
“Some islands off Euro-sector, West. They don’t exist as a residential place anymore. All noncrop lands in what used to be Britain and the former Scandinavian countries are covered with algae and desalinization plants because they have long coastlines.”
I was still thinking about his parents. “I’ve met your sister, Myra. How come you’ve never let me meet Dame and Sir?”
His mouth tightened “Jewel, you wouldn’t…enjoy meeting my mother. My father is at least polite to people he…well, people he doesn’t know, but there’s no way you can meet him without meeting her. She thinks that Dame stuff sets her above the rest of the world. What actually sets her anywhere is the Hargess-Hessing money. She’s from the Hargess side; she and my father are cousins, sort of, and she believes the family is…well, aristocratic.”
“You mean I’m not their class of people.” I was absurdly wounded by this. I had always thought of myself as of quite a good class of people. Certainly his friend Shiela had thought so.
“No, you’re not,” he replied. “Nobody is. The Hessing-Hargess are…completely in a class by themselves, them and their cousins and aunts and uncles and so forth. Anyhow, the Dame expects me to take over the Hargess-Hessing empire eventually, when Sir Dahlish and his brothers are ready to give it up. None of the brothers has any children to inherit. I’ve told Mother when I do take it over, it’ll be from Faroff, but she pretends not to hear me. When it happens, she’ll be surprised to learn that I mean it. If you really want to go off world, you should be studying something that will help you do it.”
He hit a nerve with that one. My innards went into the familiar spasm that was half embarrassment, half fear. I forced myself not to sound whiny. “I know that, Witt. Paul is only twenty, but he’s doing advanced-level language studies, specializing in ET lexicology…”
“And taking personal credit, no doubt, for having inherited his father’s talent for languages,” Witt said in his topstory, very superior voice.
“Yes, that’s true. He does have the talent, however, so it doesn’t really matter where he got it, for I don’t have the talent despite having Delis as my father, too. Paul will be a linguist, and linguists are in demand.”
He nodded. “Every time we encounter a new race we need squads of new translators.”
I went on, “Taddeus is more modest about inherited talent, but he got Matty’s artistic skills, and I didn’t, even though she was also my mother…”
“He could have inherited from Joram…”
“He could, yes, or from both of them. Whichever, he’s been exhibiting since he was twelve, and his future as Joram IV is all mapped out. By the time they were halfway through general schooling, both of them knew exactly what they wanted to do, and I haven’t a clue. I got all the way through general schooling without any idea what to do next. I’ve worked with Jon at the kennel since I was eight. I’ve taken vet courses and animal behavior and nutrition courses. I’ve become more and more able to do things that are needed less and less, things that are either illegal or impossible.”
He lowered his voice. “How about the ark planets?”
I whispered, “At the shelters, they say arkists don’t take anyone under fifty years old.”
“They don’t?” He sounded both surprised and pleased, which I couldn’t fathom.
I said, still in a whisper, “The iggy-huffo terrorists have sworn to wipe out animals and the people who care for them on any ark world they can find. Since it could possibly happen, the arkists only take mature people who are willing to risk losing their lives…” I stopped for a moment as I tried to sort my confusion into sensible words. “So, I ask myself, why go on to school? To learn what? With this sanctuary thing happening, I’m sure I’ll have a lot to do, but only for a while. Once it’s over, if I want to go off world, I’ll have to settle for doing something not
very interesting.”
“You might settle for joining me in a cohabitation liaison, instead.”
It came completely without warning. I thought he was joking. I started to laugh, but stopped when I saw the intent, totally focused expression on his face, as though he had been working toward this remark all evening. I said doubtfully, “You don’t mean that, Witt.”
He sat back, smiling. “Oh, yes. I do very much mean that. We get on very well together. People our age need…companions. Even if I haven’t said…well, I’ve thought about it. We could make it work, Jewel. I’ve already taken a single apartment in the University Tower. With my income from the family trust, we can get along until we’re ready to go off world.”
“I’ll bet your mother had a fit about your moving out.”
He shrugged. “Well, yes, but it’s customary for students to live there, and Father told her to quit fussing about it. Many of the students are liaised…”
That surprised me, and I said so.
“No concs in the University Tower,” he said. “As I said, people our age need companionship.”
“My inheritance is tied up in the liaison contract for two more years, until Tad’s eighteen!”
“It doesn’t matter. If we’re living there, you can find something you’d like to study, and we can get by on my trust funds.”
“Your mother will say you’re too young.”
“We’re both young, sure, but a cohabitation liaison is only a five-year contract.” He took my hand, interlacing his fingers with mine. “If you had something you wanted to do, something that didn’t include me, I wouldn’t have asked…”
“No,” I said, breathless at the sudden simplicity of it all. Liaising with Witt would get me away from Paul! Perhaps this was simply meant to be. “Of course I don’t have other plans!”
It was only at home, later, as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered what he’d said. No concs in university towers. As though his proposal might have been based on that. No. I set the idea aside. Witt was too…well, too mannerly even to think anything like that. At that moment I also realized that he hadn’t said he loved me, but then, I hadn’t said I loved him, either.
REMEMBERING MATTY
I don’t think about Mars when I’m awake, but when I’m half-asleep, I often dream about it: caverns and canyons so huge they could swallow the moon, airlocks everywhere, XT suits for people moving between caverns or outside. XT suits are very expensive. I got Paul’s old suits when he outgrew them, and Taddeus got the ones I’d outgrown. Sometimes I dream about Tad and Matty and me, but mostly I dream about space. I dream of being alone, with no one else around, just wonderful emptiness going on and on forever.
On Mars, almost everyone lives in caverns cut in the sides of the big canyons, where it’s warmer and wetter—well, damper, at least. When I was there, Earth embassy was in one of the smaller caverns that housed only a few hundred people. Our home cave was next to the embassy, fairly large, with a room for each of us and a studio for Matty. When I was little, I thought all mothers had studios and made sensories.
Mars food was imported or hydroponic. During a dust storm, dust got through a filter that had been made on Earthmoon by Earth Enterprises, and all the food died. The people got so hungry they rioted against Earth. My father tried to calm them down, which was a mistake. Someone cut his air hose and he died. That was the Great Mars Riot, when I wasn’t even a year old, so I don’t remember my father, Victor Delis, at all. Matty told me he was a savant, and he spoke fifty languages including Zhaar, which was either a fib or an exaggeration because nobody spoke Zhaar except the Zhaar themselves, and none of them were left.
Almost everyone knows the name Joram Bonner. If someone wants to see and hear and smell a windblown willow dropping leaves in rippling water, he buys Joram Bonner the Elder’s “Brook Series” Vista Replication Wall-view, VRW. If someone wants to see the Grand Canyon, hear the shriek of an eagle, see the waterfalls plunging over the rimrock, it’s all there in Joram Bonner II’s VRW no. 39, Canyon Suites. Vista-reps are partly on-site records and partly reconstructions from other sources including substantive records of similar things on other planets. The VRWs made by our Joram Bonner III, or his father, Joram II, or his grandfather, Joram the Elder, are the only record we have of old forests, lost rivers, vanished prairies; they’re all we have of old Earth and all most of us will ever see of the far-off worlds. Almost everyone on Earth has at least one vista made by a Bonner, to keep them sane.
Matty had known Joram Bonner since they were children, and they’d studied art together. Matty’s work was very different from Joram’s, less realistic, more interpretive and based on her explorations of the Martian gorges. She recorded changes of light and the sounds of wind, then ran them both through a synthesizer, augmenting the wind sounds with vocals and instrumentals, the views with actors, dancers, and special effects. The final result was a work of art that was greater than the sum of its parts, or so the critics were fond of saying. She loved caverns and was never so happy as when she was wandering into the unexplored, leaving a trail of relay transmitters behind her to bounce every nuance of the experience to the waiting recorders in her desert car above. Her last abyss, the one that kept her busy for almost a year in its honeycombed caverns, turned out to be where the last Martians had died a very long time before.
Of course, Matty had no idea she was going to find remnants of a lost people, their bones, their pictures, their words on the walls. She was just going into the darkness the way she usually did. I always carry my copy of her original recording of that cavern. I watch it whenever I’m lonely for her, from the first transmission in the outer cavern as she fingers the control wand of her light-helmet to make narrow beams, like brushes full of starshine to glisten the dark walls, then hard, sun-amber chisels to shatter the shadows, and at last wide-flung sprays of blood and sunset to blush the cold stone into life. Farther in, she uses waves of baffling, beautiful blues, shading every hollow, caressing tall columns with amethyst wavelets until watery light pours across the arched ceiling and runs down the sides to fill the cavern with opalescent foam. When she wades through it, her feet raise pygmy fountains of gilded dust, every step an iridescent spout of glory, a fire-dotted line that follows her farther in and farther in and farther down and farther down…
She passes a series of dead ends, pockets leading nowhere. Then she finds a perplexing passageway along a narrow shelf that towers on one side and plummets on the other, ramifying into side trails dark as pits. The shelf becomes a narrow bridge over a bottomless gulf where the wind comes up moaning, full of lost voices, and I watch her going across it like a glowing spider, weaving a web of tenuous tints as she goes, feeling her way, silent as a wraith over that narrow slab, then along another ledge no wider than her shoulders that leads to a long, horridly twisted way full of spiked stones. The narrow path weaves among them into the final place, the fanged mouth of a bubble with one way in and no other way out, the end of the journey.
Over and over I watch her stop just inside the bubble, a single beam reaching from her helmet, a finger probing the dark. The light touches a wall with a difference, taps it once, veers away in surprise, then snuffles its way back like an animal to an enticing but unfamiliar smell, whiskering it gently, nose wrinkling, before exploding into a radiance that illumines the entire cavern with all its carvings, pictures, people, creatures, words…Glory! Wonder! Marvel!
How she moved that day is still as clear and familiar to me as her face. I always carry her original record of the exploration and the album she made from it. They’re half the size of the palm of my hand. It’s hard to believe such little things can hold all that glory. Touch the button on the side and all the marvels hover in the air: the winding cavern, the awful bridge over darkness, the twisting channel, and, finally, the curving walls of the Room of Witness, as Matty named it, carved all over with words and pictures. The pictures show two sorts of creatures, tall and short, biped and quadruped, bo
th sorts always in company, walking, running, leaping…
I was with her that day, oh, not down in the caverns, but I was in the desert car. I liked to sit there, waiting for her, fascinated by the recording screen, seeing what she saw. I was waiting there when she came up from the cavern, and I’ve never seen such happiness and awe on anyone’s face, before or since. I was only six, but I still remember her face as I watch the recording, Matty dancing blissfully from one section of the wall to another, here, there, everywhere, before she finally settled into the methodical, meticulous work that produced the final album.
My original recording includes her voice describing the music she intends to set to each sequence, mentioning the Sono-Visual artist whose augmented vocals should accompany the wind sounds; mentioning the dancers to be costumed as the lost Martians; the creature artist who will animate the other beings.
When we got home, she was still ecstatic. As soon as we were out of our XT suits, she pulled me into her arms and held me, whispering into my ear. “They had dogs, Joosie! Imagine that! They had dogs! Or something like.”
“Like my Faithful Doggy, Matty? Like in the Animal Book?”
“Just like in the Animal Book. ‘Dutiful and diligent, man-friend, dog.’”
I hadn’t seen them on the screen, for their bones were deep in dust. She didn’t describe them to me until later. People bones. Dog bones. Not exactly like people now or dogs now, but very similar, lying near the carvings, the people’s arms around the dog bones, their heads laid close, the way I slept with my Faithful Dog at night when I needed comforting. The cavern was the only evidence anyone has ever found of the Martians, the last ones, the few thousand of them in the cavern possibly all there were, gathered into that place to die together.