The Companions (48 page)

A faint whine. The fish was back. It zoomed down near me once more, and I heard a scratchy voice say, “Play dead, Jewel. We'll be there shortly.” Gainor, probably. I let my eyes almost close and concentrated on the headache. Sometimes I could make pain go away just by thinking my way to its source, which in this case was at one side of the back of my head where it and the rock had briefly collided.

I was looking sideways at nothing through slitted lids when I noticed a change in the fringe of trees around the rim. They had been symmetrical before, but now each tree was lopsided, as if it had lowered its right side. Which it had
done! Each tree was lowering several branches from among the foliage above, lengthy, ropy extensions, with no foliage, like whips. The tips of them came down, and down, alongside each Derac, then…where? All at once, the branches drew tight, snapped upward, and there were the Derac, every blessed one of them suspended by his neck.

The trees hadn't been just trees! They'd been willogs! Walking Sunshine had said it had “friends” in the area. Even so, the lizards weren't easy to kill. Their huge, muscular tails thrashed wildly, whipping at the tree trunks. Their clawed arms and legs raked the bark until it shredded. Other whip-thin branches snaked out and caught arms and legs, to hold them fast. Here and there, bodies went limp as a roar of human voices came from beyond the rim, and in a moment there were human figures among the trees, a full circle of them around the battleground, many of them busy stabbing at the pendant bodies of the Derac. One of them, in full crab armor, without hesitation started a run down into the saucer. Gavi, no doubt. And where were the others? Where were the dogs?

Dreamily, I noticed that the northern group of warriors carried flags of black bearing a green moon. The southern group carried yellow flags with green trees. Both groups wore small flags of the same colors on their helmets, and they intermixed and moved quite amicably together as they finished off the Derac and came down into the battleground, some of them paying more attention to the surroundings than to anything else. First-time warriors, I thought. Those who hadn't seen the battleground before.

The forerunner had been Gavi. She reached me, took off her helmet, and knelt beside me. “Are you being badly hurt?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“I got a bash on the head,” I answered. “I'm not dying, but my head hurts.”

She felt of my head, reacting when I winced. She found a small jar in her pack and applied its contents to the bruise and under my nose. “Be lying here and letting it work,” she said. “Our people are bringing our dead down now.”

“You weren't in time to warn them?”

She avoided my gaze. “I was being not quite quick enough. The lizards were ambushing the tribe of Burrow when I arrived. Chief Badnor Belthos and several of his close kin were being killed.” She looked upward, all innocence.

“You were…fortuitously delayed,” I said.

“Only a little,” she admitted. “Badnor was not being a good man.”

“He's the one who harassed you when you were little?”

“That one, yes. At any rate, now he will be going into Splendor.”

“They'll open the gate now?” I struggled to sit up. “Before the battle?”

“There will be no battle. Enough have already died. It is not necessary to battle and be killing each other if someone else is doing the killing already.”

She left me sitting there and went among the bodies lying around me, checking to see who was dead and who alive. I noticed for the first time that they included both Day and Night Mountain warriors. Several were alive, and she treated them, with one thing or another. Though I'd already come to respect Gavi's skill, I was still amazed at how quickly the pain went away, taking the dizziness with it. Soon I was able to sit up and watch the warriors filing down into the saucer, bearing their dead on hastily contrived litters. After adding the twenty or so already beside the pillar, there were more than fifty of them.

The system seemed well understood by the participants on both sides. When all the bodies had been laid at the foot of the pillar, six Night Mountain warriors came down the slope carrying a tall ladder. Since it would have been completely mossened and rotted if left long in the moss, I assumed that either they had brought it with them or their scouts had built it anew when they had finished laying out the trail. The ladder was erected at the south face of the pillar by a committee of warriors who paid considerable atten
tion to the distance from the pillar to the foot of the ladder, evidently a matter of significance.

Gavi came to sit beside me. “They are saying door will come out of the pillar, not always on same side,” she whispered. “If the ladder is too close, the door might knock it down.”

“Who goes up the ladder?” I asked.

“Chief Larign,” she told me.

There was a brief delay while the warriors of both sides assembled in a great circle around the pillar. Chief Larign then scrambled up the ladder, positioning himself three steps from the top, one hand holding on while the other reached out toward the key. He leaned forward to press on it, three times.

The bottom of the pillar was suddenly perforated with vertical slots. Radiance and a smell poured out, washed over us, and filled the saucer. I saw it as a discernible fluid, flowing from the pillar, filling the saucer up as far as the rim before it stopped flowing. The moment the radiance stopped at the rim, the door came out of the side nearest me, a flat plane of brilliance, two-dimensional, flat, bright on one side, dark on the other. The inhabitants who emerged from the light side were solid. I saw them perfectly well. I saw the country beyond them, a place so beautiful it drew my eyes until they felt as though they were being plucked from my face. I saw the people there, I did, I saw them. I remember seeing them perfectly well, but I could not put into words what I saw. Into smells, yes. Into words, no.

Teams of warriors picked up the litters, carried them to the nearest doors, and pushed them in. They gathered up the bodies that lay at the foot of the pillar and pushed them through the doors also. When this was done, they merely stood there, staring. The people from inside the pillar stood as well, looking out toward the edge of the place. I followed their eyes and saw the dogs coming down into the saucer. Behemoth. Titan. Wolf. Dapple. Veegee. Scramble…

They walked directly to the door and went in. Except Scramble. She saw me. She broke loose from the others and ran to me, taking my arm in her mouth, tugging me erect. She followed the others, pulling me with her. Across her head I saw Adam and Frank being held by the warriors. Gavi was near the gate. Then the people from inside were reaching out to Scramble, she was going through, Gavi grabbed at me too late, for I was already being dragged through the door.

For only a moment I had looked up to see an armed ESC shuttle close above us. My eyes slid across Gavi's horrified face. Then the door swallowed us, and everything vanished. My mind was unfathomable as mist, vacant as air. I had no words. No nothing.

Sometime later, the nothingness separated into chunks of cloudy stuff that dissolved to make room for thought. I pushed myself away from the hard, painful corner I'd been crumpled against, a place where a stone floor met equally stony walls. Barred windows above my left side made a stripe of light in the wall opposite, disclosing two solid doors with some plumbing device between them. The wall to my right was stone, completely bare. At the end of the wall to my left a doorless opening to the outside admitted a slanting beam of light, and I assumed that it led outside. This assumption seemed portentous for no reason at all, so I stared witlessly at the door, hoping the reason would present itself.

Something important was hanging just at the edge of recall, begging to be remembered. I heard its flea voice, “Jewel, over here, over here, looky, remember me?” I acknowledged its presence grudgingly. “Give me a minute. I'm not awake yet. Let up, will you!” I couldn't identify it. A something strange. A something very strange, to do with the door or a door…Whatever it was, the shreds of cloudy stuff still in my head were hiding it from me.

Perhaps the answer was outside. I considered exploring
the possibility of outsideness until a shadow fell through the opening, followed by a person, a bearded man of medium height whose dark hair fell smoothly over his shoulders and down the front of the long-sleeved, ankle-length sack he was wearing. He took a few steps inside, stopped as though surprised, mouth gulping like a fish, hands repeatedly clenching at his sides, breath issuing in dramatic sobs, once, twice, as prelude to his gasped, “Oh, God, Jewel.”

I didn't know him, refused to know him, struggled to say go away, stranger, don't bother me. The words wouldn't come. Even his name took several tries. “Witt?”

He babbled at me. “How did you end up here? You didn't come looking for me, did you? Oh, I didn't want you to do that. I prayed you wouldn't do that…”

His voice was high, panicky, the same voice I'd heard the last time I had seen him. So many years trying to forget that particular voice! So many wakeful midnights spent imagining how I would feel if Witt ever returned, if he were ever found.

So much for years and imagining. I felt nothing at all. Here stood the person I had tried to re-create from scraps of memory, over and over, for years. Here he was, entire! Surely there was some proper response to make!

Whatever it might have been, it eluded me. He was still lamenting, plaints pouring from his lips like a fall of rain. I took a deep breath and determined to put an end to it. “I didn't come to Moss looking for you.”

“Moss?” he cried. “Not Jungle?”

No, not Jungle. We were not on Jungle. Of course, we were not on Moss, either. I didn't know where we were, but I wanted him to stop talking and let me think my way around the emptiness inside myself. If I got any emptier, I would start to come apart like that earlier wall of mist. I would break into chunks and float away to be lost forever!

The only way to stop his talking was to talk myself. I babbled, “No, no, no, not Jungle. A…a spatial anomaly seems to…to intersect both planets, plus the moon. The moon,
Treasure. Did you lose the photo album I gave you when you left?” That slipped out. I hadn't intended to mention it.

He cried despairingly, “On Jungle.”

I said hastily, “Well, it was found on Moss. That's how we knew the places were interconnected somehow.” There had to be something else I could say, some impersonal subject that would move us away from this whatever it was. All I could come up with was, “What are you doing here?”

“They sent me,” he said, wearily, almost calmly. “One of us older ones always talks to the newer ones, to tell them there's no way to get out. To tell them we have to stay to take care of them. We're their best friends. We were born to take care of them, designed to take care of them. We've always looked after them.”

With a sinking feeling, I asked, “Look after who?”

“The Simusi,” he said. “The Simusi.”

“The people who came out of the doors…” The memory was there, right there, in a moment I'd see it…

“The Simusi.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “You saw…”

“They were dogs!” I cried, as the scene came back in all its fantastic details. This was what my mind had been hiding from me. “What came out of the doors were huge dogs!”

He babbled, “No, no, no, they aren't that big, really. They can make themselves look bigger, that's all, very intelligent of them, too, other creatures do it, why not the Simusi…”

“Do they usually abduct people?”

He had some difficulty switching gears. “Ah, yes, abduct, well, yes, whenever they need some new ones. All of us here, we're all fixed, you know, so we can't breed. There are lots of us outside, though, so they harvest us from there…”

By that time, I was so confused that any further talk could scarcely add to it. There was no point in not finding out what I could, even if I couldn't put it together yet, so I crouched against the wall, leaned back, stretched out my legs, then crossed them and gripped both hands together to keep them from writhing. I forced myself to pay attention.

“What gives these Simusi the right to snatch us up and enslave us like this?”

He shrugged. “Well, it is their right, it really is, because when we're not being of service we're vermin, and the Orskimi are vermin, and the Derac are vermin…”

Vermin, yet again? Acceptable or unacceptable? The symbol on the pillar at the battleground had shown dogs and people. Not masters and dogs, as I'd assumed, but Simusi and their…servants, and in that case, what kind of creature had the servants actually been?

“When I was a child, Matty found that cavern on Mars, remember?” I waited for his grudging nod. “Were those pictures of human people and the Simusi?”

He made an impotent little gesture. “We only know what they tell us, and they don't tell us much, but it's obvious the Simusi have to have servants. They need creatures with hands or tentacles, creatures that can manipulate things, create things!”

“Could they have been on Mars?”

His face went blank. “They've never said anything about Mars. They tell stories about their history, but they do it in their language, and we can't understand them.”

It was useless to go on questioning him when he obviously knew nothing and cared less. “Are you here in this room by accident, Witt? Or are you here because we know one another?”

“One of your…one of the new Simusi told someone you would be coming. The new Simusi said I should come to meet you.”

“The new Simusi?”

“A female one. The one who brought you in.”

Scramble. One of the Simusi? How and when had that happened? And how would she have known…? Well, of course. I'd talked about Witt sometimes, when she was in the room. No doubt she…no doubt
all
of them had understood far more than they could express. I couldn't think of anything else to ask or say. Witt didn't move, didn't come to
ward me, didn't offer any words of comfort or encouragement. Finally, the silence became too burdensome to bear.

I said, “What's this thing you tell the new ones?”

“Just…what you mustn't do. You mustn't act untamed. They control you if you act untamed, and it'll hurt. Sometimes it can kill you.”

“How?” I asked through a haze of disbelief. Though the essential reality of the situation was completely persuasive, I nonetheless kept trying to convince myself it was dream, or fantasy, or hallucination. “How, Witt?”

“Collar with a stinger in it. Cap with a knockdown in it. Tie you up for several days without water. If nothing works, they put you in the food pen or the hunting pens. Like all the bodies they get from the battles.”

“Food pen?”

“They fill it up with dead people. Almost dead people. They dose them with zurflesh animators, and the young ones hunt them for practice. The dead ones don't last long, but the hunts don't last very long either. Animated ones can't run very fast.” A long silence fell between us while I tried to catalog this singular horror. No doubt there were a thousand things I needed to know, but none of them were about Witt. I already knew how he felt, hopeless, and what he intended, nothing.

He must have seen the revulsion in my face. “Don't think about escaping,” he whispered. “You can't. If the Simusi don't find you, the Phain do.”

My head came up at that. The Phain! Something hopeful! I opened my mouth, but any questions I might have asked were derailed by a bark from outside. It was only a dog bark, but even I heard it as peremptory. So did Witt. He scurried back through the low door as fast as he could move, and I sat there for a long moment wondering at the persistence of this weird blankness where he was concerned. I had not wanted to touch him. I had not wanted to kiss him or call him by an old, intimate name. I had not actually wanted to remember Witt since…almost since the first day on Moss. No, since my first trip to the plateau. Since I met Gavi…Since…

Memory drifted. Since when? Well, since I'd bathed in the pool along the warmwall. Which Gavi had carefully prepared for me. A scent? Something she'd put into it. She'd asked me if Witt had been my first. She'd said something about imprinting. She must have done it. She had erased him. Just as she erased former fascinations from couples who got married, getting rid of prior attachments. Just like that! A bit of something marvelous in your bathwater and you were no longer possessed! I should have been outraged, but all I could feel was a faint indignation. There was no time even for that, however, not when there was something outside to be seen.

I stooped through the low door and came out into a fenced pen some fifteen paces either way, sweeping my eyes along the line of toilets against the fence to my left, the several open-air showers that were merely pipes over a hard surface with a drain in it, over the bowls lined up on a long counter across from me, a spigot above each one. On my right, Witt crouched inside the single gate. He faced a huge dog standing on the outside, half a dozen smaller creatures around it, one of them a Gixit, or perhaps
the
Gixit that had been with Scramble. Two of the other creatures were rather like four-armed lemurs. One of these opened the gate, which creaked with a peculiarly irritating screech, and Witt scuttled out, still crouching. The dog—Simusi—glanced at me incuriously, then turned away. Some of the smaller creatures rode on its back or scampered behind, others rode on Witt's shoulders as he walked quickly, just behind the dog's right shoulder, not looking back.

“Heel, Witt,” I murmured to myself. “Heel. That's it. Good human.” Again, I tried to find some feeling, like testing a griddle with a wet fingertip, but nothing hissed. Witt had been found, and so what? All I felt was a vague discomfort at being there in the open all by myself.

Back inside, the fixture between the two solid doors turned out to be a drinking fountain. I drank and splashed cold water on my face and neck before returning to the wall
to sit with my back against it and sort through memories as though I were sorting out a closet, holding each incident up to the light, separating each recollection into an appropriate pile, everything I'd ever heard about the Phain, what Matty had said about the cavern, the Saik Sp'laintor story Paul had mentioned, things Gainor had heard from his ET friends about the Zhaar, about Zhaar technology. No one had ever admitted it to me, but I'd always suspected Zhaar technology had been used in breeding the big dogs, and I'd known damn well it had been used to adapt the trainers. There had been both dog shapes and Zhaar in that cavern on Mars, the bones of the one, the seals of the other. Had they ever been there simultaneously?

Delving into memory did nothing but make me so groggy that I fell asleep where I sat and didn't wake until I heard the peculiar screech of the gate outside, opening, shutting, opening and shutting again to the accompaniment of muttering voices. People seeped in from the pen, a few at a time. Some wore the same kind of sack that Witt had worn, but others were dressed in loose-fitting coveralls or trouser-tunic outfits. Some of the men had beards, others were close-shaven. The women, fewer of them than the men, had either shaved their heads or wore their hair tightly braided.

Several of the women came to me, extending their hands, greeting me in languages I did not recognize. I believe they named their planets of origin, for I recognized the names of several colony worlds I'd read of. I repeated them while pointing at those who had named them, then pointed to myself and said, Earth. They nodded and repeated it, patting my shoulders.

The last person to come in was an elderly man with a lame left leg. He limped over and greeted me, unintelligibly. When I said I couldn't understand him, he smiled. “We'll use Earthtalk, then. My name is Oskar. You are just come? Where did they get you from and what are you called?”

“The planet Moss,” I said. “My name is Jewel.”

“A newly discovered planet? I don't remember it, and I'm fairly well acquainted with most human worlds.”

“Discovered twelve years ago,” I said. “Maybe a year more than that. The system is called Garr'ugh 290 by the Derac…”

“After my time,” he said. “I've been captive almost twenty years.”

“What do they want us for?” I asked. “What do we do for them?”

He thinned his lips in a sardonic smile. “Baby-sit. Clean out the dens. Fetch things, especially things that need climbing to reach, like fruit, or prey that can go up a tree. Even though they hunt and eat their kills as a ritual commemoration of their ancestry, they prefer cuisine to corpses, so we cook and we work on the farms, growing crops and livestock. If you have any choice about where you'll work, choose a farm. That way you can eat some fresh stuff you'll never get here.”