The Companions (38 page)

The evening that we were on our way back to the base, as I learned later, Drom called his people together and announced formally, for the record, what had happened to their vanished colleagues. No one seemed particularly surprised until he mentioned the number.

“Eighty people have gone,” said Drom. “There are only forty-seven of us left here. Most of us have spent some time out in the moss; some of us have done the redmoss; those of us left here have been able to stop doing the redmoss even though a few of us had to be locked up for a while to break the habit. We're five men short of the original strength, and as I'd asked for ten more, we're actually understaffed by fifteen. I'm going to report the redmoss to ESC…”

There were indrawn breaths from a few, only a few.

He continued. “They know about it by now, because Jewel Delis found out about it, and their group reports to ESC. The only way we can keep ourselves employed is to report it and report it as an inimical force.”

“Because there are no penalties for falling to inimical forces?” jeered a voice.

“That's exactly right,” Drom replied, affably. “We incur no penalties for falling to an inimical force we did not know was present when we came here or did not know immediately was dangerous while we were here. We knew it was addictive as hell, but we didn't know it was fatal until Jewel Delis saw it eat Bar Lukha. If I report only to PPI, they'll
continue sending retirees because BuOr management won't admit to knowing what's happened here. We all know why. Reporting to PPI and ESC both will keep our hands clean, and probably Earth Enterprises will do something about it.”

“What's the linguist come up with?”

“Nothing, so far. It's been suggested that the noises we hear off in the forest are the Mossen mimicking us, so we'll come to their dance.”

“Why?” demanded a commissary worker, from the back row. “If they get us together to talk to us, why don't they talk?”

“We can't answer that question! That's why we sent for a linguist. Perhaps the Mossen usually make their noises to attract something that serves a purely botanical purpose, in which case, there may be no language and the message we found, the one written on bark, could have come from…someone who's gone off in the mosses, gone off his head, and is dead now.”

“You mean it was faked!” someone cried.

Drom frowned, shook his head, said unwillingly, “I'm accepting the possibility. I got you together tonight in order to reinforce what was ordered earlier. Stay away from the redmoss. To that, I'll add, get all your records in order. Bring everything up-to-date. Earth Enterprises will probably pay us a visit very shortly, and we should at least look like we know what we're doing.”

His instructions evoked some grumbling from the commissary and maintenance workers, who said they didn't need reminding, they did their jobs and their work was always up-to-date. Which it was, Drom conceded when they mobbed him after the meeting, and why shouldn't it be? Their routines would be the same on Moss as on Stone as on Earth. Drom hadn't been talking about them, he said. They were only asked to the meeting so they'd know what was happening.

Mollified, they went back to their up-to-datedness, while other staffers began grumpy, in some cases frustrating or fu
tile, nightlong searches for mislaid, postponed, and misfiled records and reports.

Drom was already as up-to-date as he could be. He went back to his quarters, took a long, warm soak in the steeping bath, made himself a pot of tea the med tech had recommended for stress, and got into bed with a fileboard full of other people's reports he had to read and initial. He'd planned to stay up and wait for Jewel Delis's return from the plateau, but there was no guarantee she'd get back this evening. One day there, one day to look a round, one day back had been the plan, but they could just as easily have decided to spend two days there, especially if they found something interesting. He decided to leave the shutters open. If they did come back before he went to sleep, he'd see the lights.

The reports were the same old stuff, nothing new. No new species, no new ideas, nothing happening on the linguistics front. At noon, the linguist, Paul Delis, had shown up at the commissary with all four concs, and the man in charge had had to threaten him with arrest if he didn't put them back where they belonged. Delis had stormed off in a fury. Temperamental man. Like a kid who'd never grown up, never stopped having tantrums. He hadn't put the concs back in their cases, hadn't even taken them into the house. Late that afternoon, Drom had seen all four of them running through the mosses with Paul Delis egging them on. He should have arrested the guy, rounded up the concs, but it was late, he was tired, he had the meeting coming up. He decided to let them riot. Maybe, if he was lucky, the redmoss would eat them, or the concs, at least.

He read and initialed, surprising himself by feeling drowsy. The med tech had perhaps, just perhaps, known what he was doing. He dropped the fileboard on the floor and lay back, dimming the light. After a little time he slept, knowing he was sleeping, glad of it. His dream was full of wonderful smells, like good food and ripe fruit and being
home on Dabber's World, the way it had been when he was a kid…

When the door opened, he was glad of that, too. Something smelled wonderful, very calming, pleasant. He opened his eyes just enough to see who it was…

“Lukha,” he murmured. “Lukha. Glad you've come back…”

The dogs, the pseudodogs and I had an uneventful trip back to the encampment, arriving about when we had said we would, late evening, still not totally dark though close to it. I drove the floater while the trainers sorted through the specimen boxes and the dogs padded along behind.

“I'll go past the headquarters' building,” I murmured. “If Drom's around, we'll let him know we're back.”

“It's dark,” said Adam. “Nobody there.”

I drove along the building, noticing the amber glow from a large window, incurious about it, but brought to sudden panicky awareness by Behemoth, who erupted into a fury of growling and barking at the dimly glowing window. Something moved inside. I halted the floater, staring, unable to accept what I saw. Lukha. Bar Lukha. Bending above Drom on the bed, lowering himself over the sleeping man, Lukha, the dead man.

Enlightenment came, late but complete. “Moss-demon!” I screamed. “Behemoth smells it.”

Adam had seen it, too. All four of them ran for the door, along with all the dogs but Veegee and Scramble, who remained standing over the puppies, Scramble's lips drawn back to show every tooth at full length, Veegee's head thrown back as she uttered a wavering, ululating howl. Adam ran through the office door and kept going toward the door to the bedroom, I behind him, bursting into the inner room, the
dogs' nails rattling on the hard floor. Clare and Frank were behind us, shouting, all of us making as much noise as possible to rouse someone, anyone in the encampment.

“Pull it off him,” I cried, at the top of my voice.

Behemoth was already doing so, mouthful by mouthful, for the thing came apart under his assault, little rootlets pulling out of Drom's flesh with a tearing sound. All the dogs were at it, biting and spitting, then clawing at their mouths to remove tendrils that tried to root there.

“Gloves,” said Adam, drawing on his own to pull handfuls of the stuff from Drom's face, his mouth and eyes. “Put on gloves, or it'll root in your hands.”

Drom's mouth came clear, and he gasped weakly.

I had attacked with my bare hands and was now trying to rub the stuff off, for it was rooting into my fingers. “Dogs,” I cried. “Back off. Don't get it in your mouths.”

Growling, the dogs backed off, clawing at their mouths. Since Adam and the others were busy with Drom, I pulled the tendrils out of my hands, put on my gloves, and pulled the tendrils out of the dogs' mouths and tongues. They came loose easily, unlike the ones on my own flesh, as though they found the dogs' flesh unsuitable. Perhaps the moss-demon had to seek human flesh because it had human flesh in it. Wasn't that what Gavi had said? It created selves like the things it ate?

Something moved at the corner of my vision, and I saw a chunk of moss inching its way toward me. I cried, “Wolf, get a disposal bag, quick. There's a pack on the floater.” As he fled, I chopped off a chunk of the approaching moss, fished a specimen bag from my pocket, and sealed it up with great care before kicking the crawling stuff away.

Wolf returned in moments with a box of disposal bags in his mouth, half a dozen PPI men following him, alerted by the howling and shouting. Adam, Clare, and Frank were still busy pulling the last of the stuff off Drom while the gathered workers stuffed the writhing moss into disposal bags.

“God,” said one. “There's bones in this stuff.”

The med tech yelled from the door, “Who's hurt?”

I called him over and spoke rapidly, suggesting that he use magnification to be sure all the tendrils had been removed from Drom's body, that what they had pulled off was some kind of moss monster, that they had to dispose of all parts of it at once by burning.

“Including the bones?” he asked, staring at the chunks of material being bagged, wriggling moss with thighbones in it, rib bones, a skull.

“Yes,” I said, shivering. “Including the bones.” My mind went off on a tangent. There had been two people in the moss when Lukha was eaten. He and a woman. “How many sets of bones?” I cried.

“One skull,” someone grunted. “One set of legs and arms.”

Lukha. Why only Lukha?

One of the PPI men went off to get the flame cannons from the armory, items they had never had to use. When he returned with the equipment, Adam went with him to supervise the burning while I helped the med tech find all the tendrils on Drom's face and chest, arms and legs. It was like pulling hairs, except that these hairs wriggled and tried to re-root themselves. As we worked, Drom gasped and blinked and eventually was able to tell us with reasonable lucidity what his name was, what his job was, and where he was at the moment.

“Lukha,” he said thickly. “I saw Bar Lukha…”

I had been thinking up a story to deal with this inevitability since I had begun pulling rootlets out of the dogs. “Yes,” I told him, raising my voice so Clare, Frank, and Adam would hear me. “We all saw Bar Lukha. We might not have been so quick to realize what we were seeing if we hadn't run into one of your old fellows out there in the moss. He told us when the redmoss eats a person, later it takes the form of that person.” I'd decided on this story to warn the people at the base without betraying Gavi's trust.

“Who was the person who told you?” Drom asked in a feeble voice. “Which one of our people?”

“Have no idea,” I said, still loudly. “The dogs were all off running, and the others had hiked up to one of the falls. An old man came and talked with me for a few moments and warned me about the moss-demons, and when he heard the others coming, he ran off. He didn't mention his name.”

“Moss-demons,” said the tech. “What next? This is the craziest world…Wait. Hold still. There's a few of those damned tendrils still wriggling in your navel…”

I excused myself as the tech began an intimate survey of Drom's nether parts. I had to be sure all my people and the dogs knew the story I had just told. I had to take the sample of moss material and tendrils to the ESC so they could compare it with the earlier redmoss samples, and both things had to be done at once. It had been a long several days.

Outside, half a dozen men were burning the pile of moss chunks. Though the pile was not large, it showed a sullen insusceptibility. Every chunk had to be pulled apart into smaller and smaller bits with the fire kept on each bit until it turned unequivocally to ash, after which the men poured flammable substances on it and burned it again. The bones stood out against the dark ashes, pale blotches on the ground. One of the men marched into the space and tramped them into fragments, all but the skull, which resisted breaking.

Lathey, the man who had taken Lukha's place as Drom's deputy, asked, “Should we treat the ashes, you think? We've got acids we could use. Or barrels of wet-set we could mix the ashes with. You know, I keep thinking of spores…They can be really tenacious of life. Some won't even burn.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” I mumbled, half-paralyzed by the idea of fireproof spores. “Pour the wet-set right on top of the ashes, and stir them in. Be sure to get all the bone fragments in.”

A sensible thing to have done in the first place! If the spores were fireproof, they would have spread for miles. Could the thing regrow into another Lukha?

Lathey went off, shouting orders. I found Adam, who had been outside when I spoke, and told him what I had said and
why, asking him to reinforce it with each of the others, including the dogs.

“We'll do it together,” he said. “I'll get them rounded up…”

“You do it now, Adam,” I said. “I have to get out to ESC with this sample of moss-demon.”

“You kept some of it?” he whispered, eyes wide. “You kept some of the damned stuff?”

“I think it's safer to have some and know what it's doing than not have some and not know, Adam. I hope it didn't escape your attention that since a good number of PPI men or women or wives of PPI men were lost in the moss, we may have that many more of these things wandering around out there. Plus, if, as Lathey suggested, the thing had fireproof spores, the possibility of thousands more.”

 

Lethe woke reluctantly and took some time to be convinced I needed to see him at once. When I arrived at the island, he had Durrow and Wyatt with him, and we walked to the laboratory in virtual silence.

“Tell us,” Lethe said, when we were seated inside.

I told them the current version, the old man and his warning, what we had seen on our return, what we had done.

“I brought you a sample,” I said, laying the wrapper on the table. “I would suggest you treat it as hostile, certainly don't touch it with bare skin. I think we got all of it out of Drom, but I'm not positive. It kept trying to crawl back onto him or onto me even after we'd thrown it some distance away. We've burned all the rest, and I've suggested the men stir the ashes into wet-set. However, Drom's deputy, Lathey, mentioned fireproof spores, and if there were such things, they've been spread with the smoke. Please see if this stuff has spores. If it does, we need to know if they burn, and if they don't, we need to get the hell off this world.”

“It actually looked like Lukha?” asked Sybil.

“It actually looked like Lukha, not just shape and size, but facial features and the way it moved. Do I know whether it
actually looked like that or only made me feel I saw that? No, I don't know. So far as I could see while we were ripping the stuff off him, there was no part of what we tore away that was as smooth as skin or in long filaments that resembled hair. The old man said they came at night, so the effect may depend upon a lack of light and the use of shadow or suggestion combined with some kind of chemical hypnotic released into the air. I don't know. I know it's called a moss-demon, I know we all saw it as Lukha, and I brought you a sample, and that's the limit of my information.”

“Gainor Brandt will be here tomorrow,” said Lethe. “He's brought some new technical help.”

He sounded resentful, but I wasn't. “Ornel, be glad he's bringing help. It's no reflection on you, and at this juncture, we need all the help we can get. I have some other news for you. The language of the Mossen is not color. It's odor. The Mossen that dance on the meadow are not separable things. They're all one message. They are created at the same time, in a certain order; they keep that order, because that order is a message conveyed in smells.”

They looked at me as though I had lost my mind.

“Smells,” said Wyatt, skeptically. “And you know this because…”

Since I could not tell him the truth about either Gavi or Behemoth, I had invented a story for this as well. “Because I saw a message being…born from its parent plant. They grow, as a group, all in a row. They're botanical. They create some kind of gas inside themselves, hydrogen, I'd suppose. They have little tendrils at the bottom and the sides to hold themselves down and together; they come off the plant all in one string; and they sort of float-skip themselves away, still in the same order.”

“Of course you recorded this?” asked Lethe, dubiously.

“I did not,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I was walking around, just sight-seeing, and I'd left all the paraphernalia on the floater. Once I knew what I was looking at, I stayed right where I was, so I wouldn't miss any of it. I'm sure we can
find another one to record. I've seen the mother plant around here, I just didn't know what it was at the time.”

“Around here?” asked Durrow. “Really?”

“A basal rosette, rather thick, with leaves as long as I am tall. No. That was in the mistlands. Things grow bigger there. Maybe not that large around here, Abe. Anyhow, out of the center of the rosettes come long, arching stems with the little bell shapes hung beneath them in a row. You may already have samples in your collection, but listen, this is important. We must not collect any more of them. The plants that grow the messages must not be bothered. We didn't disturb the Mossen because we thought they might be people, might have language. They aren't people, they don't have language, but something upstream of them does. We have to shift our scruples to whatever creature or being is actually speaking. Once the message is…born or detached, we'd probably be safe in capturing the whole string if we had to.”

“If we had to?”

“I don't think we have to. All we have to do is set up an apparatus that can analyze and reproduce the odors produced by the Mossen, one at a time, as they pass. If PPI doesn't have any such paraphernalia, surely ESC does, or you could get it…”

Wyatt said, “Of course we have scent analyzers. It's part of regular survey gear, used in identifying botanicals, determining emissions, perfumes, if you will. We gather the same data on insects, birds, animals, as pheromones are often important for reproduction.”

“But you've never used it here? Why not?”

Lethe shot the words at me one at a time, like bullets. “Because, dear lady, we have not done a survey here. Not until we have the permission of the local population.”

I was too tired to get involved in whys. “In this case we'll have to do the survey to identify the local population. If you can get the equipment set up by the meadow where the dance goes on, we can analyze the smell of each one of the
things as they pass. Does each smell produce some kind of symbol or chart that can be used for comparison?”

“A profile, yes,” said Abe Durrow. “Made by its constituent molecules. Of course, they may be mixed with ambient odors from the local vegetation. They may be hard to isolate.”

“They don't mix,” I said. “I've noticed several times that odors on this planet are as limited in duration as tones played on a…a flute or a trumpet. You get a note, then the next one, and not a mixture of the two. So we get the charts or symbols or whatever, then we can give those charts to Paul.”

“To Paul,” Lethe said coldly. “Why?”