The Companions

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Someone named Lukha,” I said. “Your deputy? Someone named Lackayst, someone named Maywool. All of whom, if I may say so, Chief, looked decidedly unwell and incapable of function.”

  Drom shifted from foot to foot, lips drawn back from his teeth, nose wrinkled, a futile snarl of exasperation? Guilt? Anger? I couldn’t decode it.

  “I’ve been working long hours,” he said at last. “I told Lukha to wake me.”

  “You must have been exceptionally tired,” said I. “It was 24:13 yesterday.”

  His eyes opened wide. “I slept through two days?”

  “If you have the same disease as the ones I just met, I could understand that,” I replied, searching his face. “What’s going on, Chief? And where is everybody?”

  Drom cast a surprised glance at me, as though I had said something bizarre. “Sorry?”

  “I don’t see any activity. Where are your crew?”

  “Ah.” He nodded, his eyes wandering evasively over the installation and the trees beyond. “Well, we spend a lot of time out in the moss. Taking samples. Identifying species. As for what’s going on, well, ah…we have a project under way, trapping some small Big Crabs. I mean, that’s what we call the type, the Big Crabs, but we want some small, ah, immature ones to analyze.”

  “What are they? Really crabs? Like on old Earth?”

  For the first time, he seemed truly responsive. “They look remarkably like extinct Earth shore creatures, as a matter of fact. Since we recently learned about the ships up on the escarpment, we’ve wondered if perhaps these down here aren’t descendants of some that arrived in the cargo holds of those ships. If so, they’ve grown at an astonishing rate.”

  “How large are they?” I asked.

  “The biggest ones we’ve only seen in the mist lands. From what the fish—I mean the floating data-gatherers—show us, they’re a couple of meters long. The legs are much stockier than an Earth crab’s. I mean, proportionately, they’d have to be, to carry the additional weight, not that they’re heavily built. The armor is chitin, fairly light, very strong, and there’s not a lot of gut…” His attention veered to the construction party, now leaving the site. “I understand you’ve brought some animals?”

  “Dogs. And the linguist’s concs.” If they counted as animals.

  Drom flushed. “Right. PPI stewards’ department will see to keeping your quarters clean, except for conc quarters: That’s tabu territory for PPI personnel. Meals are available in the commissary or you can obtain foodstuff there and fix it yourself. By regulation, commissary’s off-limits to anybody but humans, that includes dogs and concs.” He glared briefly at nothing.

  “I know,” I said. “That’s understood.” I did understand it, but it struck me that this was the first time Paul had actually lived on a PPI installation. He might not be aware of the rules.

  “Well then, I’ll let you get moved in. We can complete the arrival routine when you’re settled.” He turned and stalked off toward the installation, his face darkened by some emotion I could not read. All in all, an enigma.

  The sergeant came up the hill. “You’ve got a house, it’s furnished, the service cores are working. The mechs are running a line from the water purifiers to the lake; you should have water within the hour. There aren’t any pens for the animals yet, but we’ll bring some fencing over from the island.”

  “The dogs’ll do fine in the house,” said I, distractedly. “Though a fenced area would be nice for exercise. We’ll put up some kind of barrier to keep them out of Paul’s hair.”

  “Not necessary,” said the sergeant. “Mr. Delis’s bedroom and study are at this near end, then a lockable door, then the great room and food service core, then another lockable door, then the other bedrooms. That’s in accordance with the info we got from the general manager’s office.”

  I smiled at this, wondering when in heaven’s name Gainor had had time to specify the floor plan. “Grand. Sounds perfect.”

  Voices spoke behind me, and I turned to see the three trainers, each with a dog and a bitch on leash. The sergeant took one look, and muttered, “Great Mahalus!”

  We had a protocol for meetings between the dogs and people who knew nothing about them. On such occasions they would play the part of pets, and I would play the part of master, though I could no more master these creatures than I could fly. They knew, as I did, that it was only play. I called to black Behemoth. Adam unclipped his leash, and the dog strolled over. When he reached me I put my hand on his neck without stooping. The top of Behemoth’s head was well above my shoulder.

  “He’s a big one, isn’t he?” I said in a doting voice, as Adam and Scramble approached. “Much larger than the original Great Dane or mastiff types, but with none of the bone or joint problems that used to be associated with large dogs. Life span is longer, too. Big dogs used to be old at twelve, but Behemoth will live to be thirty or forty at least, maybe a lot older than that! This brown bitch is his mate, Scramble.”

  Scramble turned her eyes toward me when I said her name, her jowls curved into a dog smile, mocking me. I turned to Adam. “This gentleman heads the ESC team that has put our quarters together. Sergeant, this is Adam Whitlow. The other trainers are his brother, Frank, and Clare Barkley. The white dog is Wolf, and the gray one is Titan. The spotted bitch is Dapple, and the red one is Vigilant. We call her Veegee. They’re a bit smaller than the dogs…”

  Adam nodded; Behemoth sniffed the sergeant’s outstretched and gloved hand with magnificent disdain, then he and Adam rejoined the other dogs and trainers where they stood near the ship, all of them turning slowly, nostrils wide, smelling the world, reading its messages, interpreting its meanings.

  “The females aren’t all that much smaller,” said the sergeant in some awe. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re just smelling the air,” I murmured.

  “The trainers, too?”

  Indeed, the trainers, nostrils widely flared, were testing the air for smells.

  I said, “We humans aren’t totally without a sense of smell, you know. It helps if we can guess what the animals are sensing. Sergeant, please accept my sincere thanks for being so accommodating. I’m sure Gainor Brandt will be pleased to hear how helpful you’ve been. Now, though we don’t have water yet, I think we’ll get into our own quarters.” I wanted to avoid any further interaction between dogs and persons. The less curiosity, the fewer tales told on shipboard or in ESC barracks, the better.

  He sketched a half salute and took himself off. I located Paul, who was so busy repacking his equipment he had forgotten he was supposed to be angry. I pointed out the building into which Drom had retreated, said a few words about some of the personnel being ill and not up to their usual standard, and suggested he go take care of the formalities. Full of himself and his project, Paul stalked off toward the headquarters, not even noticing the dogs. So far as I could tell, he hadn’t noticed them at any point in the journey, though they had all been awake and in evidence at transit points.

  I caught up to Frank and Clare. “You all seem to be finding a lot to sniff at.”

  Frank nodded. “You should get some dognose, Jewel. You really should. You’re a little old for it, but some of the cellular transplants would take…”

  I murmured to him, “I have what will take, Frank, have had since I was sixteen. I volunteered for the original transplant study, but let’s for God’s sake not talk about dognose where anyone can hear us, okay?” I jerked my head to indicate both the ESC men behind us and Paul, who was entering the headquarters. “We’ll have to learn to be quiet about things we talked about freely at the sanctuary. PPI is BuOr, and BuOr is enemy territory. Some of them might even be iggy-huffo. There probably aren’t a dozen people on the planet we could call sympathizers.”

  I headed for the door farthest left, saying, “This should be trainers’ wing. Four bedrooms here, plus whatever sanitary service core they’ve put in. Middle door will be living room with a food service core, and the other e
nd should be Paul’s quarters.”

  “Same building?” murmured Clare, her brow furrowed.

  “For the time being,” I said, ruefully. “That’s part of what I meant by enemy territory. There’s a door we can lock in between. We’ll have to share quarters until Paul considers us inconvenient enough that he moves out, or asks us to. Don’t worry about it now. Just do what we do and ignore him.”

  “Four concs are a little much to ignore.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more, but that wasn’t the issue. “Paul uses concs as advertisements for himself. He dresses them up and shows them off. Here, they can’t leave their quarters, so, if he really gets involved in the linguistics bit, he’ll forget all about them and leave them in their cases until the feeding alarm goes off. We can put up with a few hours a week.”

  Our door entered at the base of a wide, T-shaped hallway, with a bedroom-cum-study on either side. The sanitary core, between two more bedrooms, was on the far side of the cross corridor, which had an outside door at the left end and the lockable inside door at the right end. Deep storage closets lined the near side of the cross corridor, and each bedroom was well equipped with integral storage plus comfortable furnishings in a jumble of styles and colors that had obviously been dumped into the rooms more or less at random. I had long suspected that all ESC employees were as totally color-blind as dogs had once been.

  The cross corridor was extremely wide; the dogs’ beds were already along the wall. I noted the outside door had a lever type latch, one easy for the dogs to manage. Gainor really had thought of everything. While the dogs explored the rooms, Clare directed a shift in furnishings to make more harmonious groupings. The Whitlow brothers, Adam and Frank, took the rooms on the other side of the cross corridor, while Clare took the one to the right of the entry hall, leaving the one to the left of the entry for me. It was the one I would have chosen, as it had a large window that looked out to the south, into the forest.

  We had barely finished shifting furniture when a carryall brought our personal baggage, which didn’t take long to sort out and store. As soon as I had my own belongings stowed and the empty cases stacked outside for pickup, I went through the building to Paul’s quarters and helped with the disposition of his furnishings and belongings. Other conditions being equal, he stayed in reasonably good temper if he was fed regularly and his quarters were kept in order. I had time to put things where he would expect to find them, though I left the cases of references and equipment strictly alone.

  Over at the headquarters building, I found Drom and Paul hovering over a table laden with stacks of recordings, logs, journals, and enough data cubes to build a play city. I had built many as a child, using Matty’s DCs.

  “There’s plenty of room here,” Drom was saying in a strained voice. “You can have an office here, at the headquarters.”

  Paul had donned his professional charm, a garb he usually wore with strangers, at least until he began to dislike them for some reason. “Figuring out a language is the kind of job where you do nothing but puzzle for days, then suddenly wake up at three in the morning with a clue in your head. It helps if everything is at hand. I have my own AI machines over there ready to digest most of this stuff as soon as I decide how to enter it.”

  “Any help we can be?” asked Drom, attempting unsuccessfully to hide his relief.

  I picked up on Drom’s reaction, though Paul did not. Inasmuch as PPI had asked for Paul, it seemed very odd that they’d be relieved to have him separated from them. Strange. Eccentric. Or, from what I had seen so far, unnatural.

  “I’ll let you know,” Paul replied.

  He had no intention of doing so. Most places we had visited he had managed to find someone besides me to be his flunky, and it was seldom the person anyone else might have recommended. Though I am efficient, I am insufficiently adoring, so Paul usually picks someone to adore him. Since he’d brought the concs along this time, however, maybe they’d provide a satisfactory level of worship.

  Paul and I carried the material back to his quarters, where the door now bore a neat little sign, LINGUISTICS. Inside, he dumped his armload of materials and looked around without comment. He took for granted that the place was orderly, seeming to believe it happened naturally, like a fall of rain. Two men from the ship on which we’d arrived brought the conc’s sleep tanks and installed them in the dormitory room at the north end of the building, along with a store of conc rations. Concs could eat anything humans ate, but they didn’t need to, and conc-kibble was cheaper. Mechs from the larger ship returned with a load of fencing and made a yard at the south end of the building. When the fence was complete, the dogs came out the door, raced around it in three strides each, jumped over it, chased one another through the shade of the moss trees, marked this territory by defecating at the edges of it, then jumped back in again to greet me where I stood in the doorway watching the ESC men, who were pointedly watching the dogs.

  “Fence won’t do it, ma’am,” said the ESC sergeant, shaking his head. “We’ll have to get some barrier fields from the island. They’re not things we carry supplies of on board…”

  It was a hurdle I had foreseen. “Dogs are built to run,” I said in my most charming voice. “It keeps them healthy. These dogs are hunters, but there’s nothing on the planet for them to hunt. They can’t get lost, they won’t hurt anything, so can’t we just let them run?” My suggestion was, of course, in total defiance of all applicable ESC directives, but we were on PPI ground, and given the rivalry between the two, the ESC man might be quite willing to let PPI handle trouble.

  He had a huddled conversation with another ESC man, then murmured into his com, shrugged, and returned to me. “The boss says okay, for now. We’ll check with headquarters, and if something else is needed, we’ll install it next time.”

  Once inside, I wiped the narrow line of sweat from my hairline. If we’d had to keep the dogs fenced in, it would have defeated the purpose of bringing them to Moss. Gainor and I had been prepared for me to kick the problem upstairs with the ESC people and let Gainor handle his opposite number at PPI, but with the PPI contingent seemingly oblivious to anything around them, we were home free. It was quite true that the dogs wouldn’t hurt anything, though I reminded myself to talk to the trainers about dog pee. It killed many kinds of plants, and Moss was covered in plants.

  The mechs reached the lake, installed the water intake, then returned to stow the packaging units before departing. The shriek and thunder of the shuttle’s rising was succeeded by an absolute silence. I stood at the door of our quarters marveling at it. There was quite literally no sound. No wind. No wave. No bird calling from a tree. No mechanical thing. No voice. Heaving a breath that was half relief and half wonder, I turned around to watch the lineup of hindquarters in the hallway, six tails twitching, six sets of jaws eagerly wolfing food, six sets of jowls and noses being licked, six sets of paws groomed with efficient teeth before six large animals curled into huge doughnuts of various colors and fell asleep. I had a strong feeling that only the need for food kept them with us. If there had been prey on the planet, they would have gone the moment they were loosed. Except for Scramble, of course. She turned twice on her bed, then rose and came to me, reaching up to tongue my neck as she did, often.

  “A good place for a while, love,” I said. “Can you all be patient, just a little longer?”

  “Ai whill,” she whispered. “Ai no huwwy loos you.”

  “You’ll never lose me, Scramble. Not if you need me.”

  “Lil wons com. Ai awais nee you.”

  At one time her words would have surprised me, but Adam had been right when he said she was smarter than the rest of them. She knew she was pregnant. She knew what that implied. She would need help, and she depended on me to provide it. I was, so to speak, grandma to the pack.

  Scramble returned to her bed, and I went to mine. Thus far, Paul had taken no notice of the dogs, Drom had taken no umbrage at them. Thus far, all had gone well, and I si
mply lay there, savoring the quiet, which remained unbroken until the commissary signal blared.

  Adam, Clare, Frank, and I went outside to find Paul awaiting us, escorted by two prancing, giggling concs. I waved the trainers on, waiting until they were out of earshot before saying, “Concs aren’t allowed anywhere in the compound except their own quarters, Paul. Neither concs nor dogs are allowed in the commissary. Also, conc quarters are off-limits to PPI stewards, so you’ll have to clean up after them yourself.”

  He turned red. “They have no right…”

  “It’s in the regulations, Paul. I don’t recall that you’ve ever stayed inside a PPI installation before. Concs are not allowed on PPI installations, period. Since you’re a private contractor, so long as they’re in your quarters, technically, they’re not on the installation. They’ll have to spend their time in the cases or with you.”

  “Who told you? About concs being off-limits?”

  “It was in the briefing material.” I had checked, and it was. Paul still looked doubtful, angry, or both, so I went on. “Drom reinforced the information when he saw the dogs and the conc cases.”

  He stalked furiously back into his quarters, Poppy crying, “Whassa madda, Pow-ie? Can’ we go have din-din?”

  I followed him to his door. “The conc protein rations are stored in their dormitory, Paul. Commissary meals are pretty much time-dependent. Try not to be too late.”

  “I’m not coming,” he said sulkily, his face still red.

  I gritted my teeth. “Well, there are also prepared meals in stasis storage in the kitchen. And if you’re not going out, you can sort out your materials and put them where you want them before someone from PPI puts them in the wrong places.” I left in a hurry, before he could reply. Whenever he was determined to be angry, I always tried to give him as many different things as possible to be furious at. A broad field of complaint diluted his concentration of fire.

  The commissary staff was entirely mech except for two middle-aged female supervisors, neither of them at all vacant-eyed. I’d expected the food to be at best slightly better than Earth food, but it was astonishingly good! Fresh vegetables and fruits, newly baked bread, real butter! There was a fluffy dessert made of real chocolate with real cream, flavored with something wonderful! The meal alone was worth the trip, though the trainers and I made no progress in getting to know the PPI contingent. The twenty or so staffers in the room studiously ignored us, and Drom wasn’t there. I noticed that only a few of the people at the tables showed the same symptoms as the three men who had greeted me, all to a much lesser degree. Whatever it was, some had it and some didn’t. Or some had had it and were getting over it.