Walky rustled at me in indignation. “Because time spent is part of living,” it said. “Slowness, ripening; slowness, dancing; happiness spent in doing, smelling, understanding. If everything is all the time instantaneous, prompt and sudden, then no one is having any time to enjoy! Life becomes a plethora, a glut, a surfeit of instantaneous amusements barely leavening the job, the task, the thing to get through somehow that life becomes. Who would live a do this, do that, right now, hurry up, finish, all the time finish? Such life has no peace. It is a disease! I will name it the human disease.” It rustled again in indignation. “This is why World is insisting upon proper function before humans live on Moss. No more running about all the time.”
I set that aside. “But you say that from here, we can send odor messages?”
“In case of an emergency, speed is sometimes needed,” Walky said. “And World agrees, this is an emergency.”
“And what do we say to the Zhaar?” said Gainor. “They don’t care what the World says. The odor language probably isn’t even their native tongue.”
I shook my head at him. “It wasn’t their native tongue, Gainor, but they’ve used it for a very long time. They may remember the former language, but I’d bet this is the one they will respond to emotionally.”
“Respond how? What’re you going to hit them with? Home, family, fireside? That might actually work with the Derac, but Zhaar never had home, family, or fireside. Conquest, victory, achievement? That might work with the Orskimi, but Zhaar never had to conquer, they ruled whatever they wanted to, just by taking it over.”
“I wish there were some way I could hit them with remorse,” I snarled. “Though that’s a forlorn hope.”
And while I thought, while Gavi set up the odor organ, the carnage below went on. Gradually, the Derac and the Orskim were learning how to kill Zhaar, and more Zhaar were added to the casualties. Gainor was trying to estimate Zhaar numbers from the screen, getting totals that varied between three and five thousand, each one a match for five to ten of the other races.
Our predicament was a round-robin kind of thing. If we could stop the bombardment of the Hessing ships, they could take off and knock down part of the armadas above us, but that really wouldn’t affect the outcome on the ground. No matter who won on the ground, we were still at risk. Somehow, before that battle was finally won by the Zhaar, we needed a way to fight the Zhaar or a way to escape them. The only door we knew of was the one we had used, far to the west across a wide stretch of battleground and a lake. Walky could undoubtedly get there, but he had no way to open the door, which, in any case, led directly into Zhaar territory. I still had some hope for Phainic intervention, but both Gainor and I knew the Phain didn’t make a habit of intervening on behalf of anyone.
As we sat there watching through fish-eyes and our own, the northernmost companies of Zhaar sent a skirmish line to the west, drawing a noose around both Orskimi and Derac. Then the line began to tighten, pressing the other races into a smaller compass, down toward the lake. They were rounding up the opposition. The end was certainly not far off.
Out of sheer desperation, I was about to suggest that we get ourselves back to the plateau, as it held the most defensible positions we were likely to find anywhere, when an errant sparkle at the foot of our giant tower drew my eyes downward. It was definitely there. Not the same flash of light that had presaged the Zhaar. Quite different from that, softer-looking. Moreover, as I looked out, I saw clusters of such glitter, all outside the area of conflict, a vast arc of them. I reached for the glasses and looked more closely. The arc was a circle that enclosed the entire area of battle.
I reached out to Gainor, but before I could touch him, the lovely liquid speech of the Phaina fell softly upon us, and I turned to see her standing at the top of a suddenly created stairway, almost beside us.
“What a mess,” her ’pute murmured. “What a filthy mess.”
“I know,” I said, as guiltily as though I had personally created the situation below us. “Are all the Zhaar here, on Moss?”
“Virtually all. They left a few here and there in Splendor, but Phain and Yizzang have most of them rounded up by now. What are you doing here? I searched for you on Night Mountain.”
I told her, as quickly as I could, concluding, “…and when they’ve killed all the Derac and Orskim, they’ll come after us…”
“They would plan to, true,” she said. “But I wish to speak to them first.” She turned to Gavi. “You are a scent mistress of this world?”
Gavi bowed. “I have some small skill.”
“You have a device there, to assist you?”
“It is quicker than the traditional way.”
The Phaina turned to me. “Our people have analyzed the so-called epic history of the Simusi, as told by them, determining which parts of it are true and which are false. We had to find out the truth of their history in order to validate judgments we have made about others. Judgments based upon untruths are not worthy of us.”
“Judgment,” I said, lost. “Of what, of whom…”
She raised her hand, shutting me off. “No questions now. In Splendor, we gathered the Zhaar and spoke with them. Oh, very long we spoke with them. They had more versions of their history than a charb bush has roots. We elicited all known versions from our captives, who, though reluctant to howl for us, preferred storytelling to the alternative we offered.
“We then put all versions together, to see what truth had been left out, what lies had been inserted. Our labors gave us a slightly different story. In the story you were told of, it was said the Zhaar adopted as slaves dogs they had seen on Earth because dogs had Zhaar shape. The opposite was true as you thought, Jewel. The Zhaar took dog shape as camouflage. It was a way to hide.
“Once they took dog shape, however, they found great difficulty in maintaining the shape when frightened or angry. Such emotions made the Zhaar change instinctively, as one of your Earth gastropods could change color, to avoid discovery. Even simple hunger, irritation, or confusion made it difficult for them to keep the shape continually, without lapse. They feared greatly for their lives, however, and they needed to be sure their disguise would not give way. Can you guess what they did?”
I stared at her for a long moment before the bell rang far in the depths of my mind. Adam. Frank. They, too, changed like lightning when they were frightened, or angry. And they had been…crossed.
I said, “They didn’t use Zhaar genes on the dogs, they used dog genes on the Zhaar?”
“Quite right. They did. Proud of their flesh as they were, they used dog flesh because they had picked dogs for two reasons: dogs already had slaves with hands and speech; dogs were already Zhaarish in their ways. That is to say, dogs were packish. Dog family groups followed the most powerful leader, as did the Zhaar. The similarities between themselves and the dogs reduced their reluctance to play with the stuff of their own bodies. They crossed themselves with dog flesh and carried that shape within them.
“Only then could they cleave to it continuously, and they have bred themselves in that shape now for how many hundreds of thousand years? A million perhaps, back to the time your people strayed down from the trees because the Zhaar had changed you into bipeds. Back to the time your people began to speak sooner than they would otherwise have done, because the Zhaar had changed your minds and throats. And as a consequence…”
Below us something went up in a thunderous roar. An ammunition store of one side or the other.
The Phaina said urgently, “You have with you music?” she asked. “Written by your mother? Concerning the old humans and dogs that were left behind on Mars?”
I nodded, wordlessly.
“Gavi has heard it? She has heard the words?”
Gavi said, yes. She’d not only heard the words, she’d translated them into Moss language, for fun.
The Phaina smiled. I know she had no mouth on her face, and I know there was no feature there to make a smile, but nonetheless, she smiled, a
nd I felt it. “All that glitter down there,” she whispered to us. “Doors. And outside the doors, the dogs of Earth become, for a time, the hounds of heaven.”
It took me a moment. “Scramble? And Behemoth? Veegee and Titan? Wolf and Dapple?” I had thought I would never see them again.
She barely whispered. “Oh, yes, Jewel. They and their children. I will loose the music, now. I will amplify it. Create the odors now, Scent Mistress, and the trees will spread them. Open the doors now, and the dogs will repay the Zhaar…”
Matty’s Seventh had always been mixed up in my mind with the time she was sick and dying. It always made me cry, not only because of her death but because of the death she had read in that cavern, from the pitiful bones she found there. The Phaina took the album from my hand and started it at the second movement, that long, torturous climb into darkness, with death breathing up from the abyss, and the bridge as narrow as the beam of light that illuminated it for a single pair of feet to cross. It was all there in the music, all the horrid shadow, the pity, the sorrow, the need to know that kept her moving forward…
I heard the music through my skin, through my feet. I felt it flee away across the lands of Moss. Gavi, at the organ, pressed and pulled, touching this button, that lever, her hands leaping from side to side, playing it like the instrument it was. I have no idea how Matty’s work was amplified, for it sounded no louder than usual where we were, but each tree it touched repeated it at that same volume, at the same scent, and the tree after that, over and over, so that it did not diminish with distance or fade into silence, and time was banished, for the note where we stood was simultaneous with the note miles to the north. All the embattled on Moss lay in the palm of the music: Zhaar, Orskimi, Derac, human, all of us surrounded by the sound, and the scent evoked visions that went with it. We could see no enemies but the darkness, we could invoke no help but the beams of light that reached out like the tentative touch of a spider’s leg setting a web that would hold all this marvel together. I smelled the odor language, too, time suspended and simultaneous, so that odor and vision and music lay together, ply on ply on ply, each layer making the whole more potent.
Below us, the glittering doors opened to loose the hounds of heaven, as the Phaina had named them. What poured from those doors was unimaginable.
The Phaina leaned down, and whispered to me, “This was all Scramble’s idea, Jewel. Perhaps out of vengeance, a little, but mostly out of love for you. I would not have thought of it, but she asked me if there was a place where time moved more quickly, where lifetimes could be lived in mere days of human time. She said her people owed you a debt that they must repay, even if they risked their lives doing so. The others agreed with her, even Behemoth, and I took them to a place where time slips by like a lightning stroke, Jewel. Here are the generations of Scramble’s daughters, and granddaughters, and great-granddaughters. There are ten thousand of them. Ten thousand children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
The Zhaar below turned and hesitated, caught in the music and smells. I felt their hesitation on my skin. One here, one there stood high, mouths agape, ears twitching forward, searching for the source of what they saw, felt, smelled, heard. They threw back their heads and howled, to no avail. They could not hear their own voices. They could not smell their own odor. The only senses allowed in that place were those that Matty had woven as a requiem for the bones in that cavern, old people left in the chasm, old dogs left with them, to die there alone, their children far away…
The music reached the last cavern, and entered it. The light grew from a tiny stream to a great river that flowed over the old men and women working at the pictures on the wall, the old dogs lying beside them, their heads upon their paws, rousing sometimes to the sound of a dear voice, the touch of a familiar hand. We heard the sculptors’ broken voices chanting each word of the story they were carving; we heard the dogs raise their voices in that same saga, a tale that stretched from generation to generation, from millennium to millennium, while oceans dried and wind scoured the bones of those who had fallen into darkness far from home. We saw and heard their creation of this memorial, a final monument to show that they had existed and waited here for those who had never returned.
The music ascended, fading notes, high and far as the call of a shorebird on a blue world they would never see again, higher and higher, beyond our hearing yet not beyond the hearing of the dogs then, or of the Zhaar now. The last note trembled into silence as we saw the carvers put down their tools and lie beside the dogs, their arms around their friends, both sinking into death in that last, dark place where no grass might cover them and no star shine upon them ever.
The sound faded. The odors were gone. The visions blinked out. Below us the Zhaar stood stunned, as if witless. I realized they had seen themselves in those old dogs, knew they had felt their death and darkness and ultimate betrayal. Their very flesh had been shared with the dogs, their shape had been evolved by the dogs, and now that connection drew them in like a hook on an unbreakable line as the dogs circled them, herding them into an ever smaller compass. I could not turn my eyes from the spectacle below, but I heard low muttering growls behind me and felt a muzzle thrust into the hollow of my neck. Scramble and the others had come.
We crouched there together as the Zhaar moved like flotsam in an eddy, circling and circling, many of them trying desperately to change form, without success. They had used dog shape to escape their fate; only when they were dead would they take their own form again.
The circle slowed. The Zhaar were shoulder to shoulder below us, crowded tight, surrounded on all sides by dogs almost as large as they, and far more beautiful. I turned to Scramble and the others, dreading to find them old, but they were not yet aged, only mature, majestic in the way I had always dreamed they would be. They threw back their heads and joined the dogs below, who howled a single question toward the place we sat.
“What shall be done with them, in return for what they did to our friends?”
The Phaina was no longer with us. We heard her voice above us. She stood on a higher ledge, where a group of the Phain were gathered, male and female, as a bench of judges might be gathered, to pass sentence after a trial.
“For all the crimes committed in ages gone, for which you had been already sentenced, you are expelled from the galaxy,” said the Phain. Though the intention was clear enough in the tone of voice and the odors that floated down, my ’pute translated it for me.
“For the more recent crime of interfering in the development of other races, you are sentenced to lose all memory of the race you once were and to become, in actuality, the creatures you seem to be, as they once were, without the gift of words.”
A few faint and plaintive voices were raised in protest, only to end, abruptly, as though cut off with a knife. At the center of the crowded mass of Zhaar, a door opened in the mosses they were treading, flat, barely shining, like the surface of a shallow pool or a sheen of rain on a hard surface. The surrounding dogs pressed in, the outer Zhaar pressed upon those at the center, and those at the center stepped onto the shining surface and vanished. Those at the outer edge could not see what was happening. Few of those at the center even looked down. They flowed around, like crowded ice chunks in a whirlpool, circling and draining away, bit after bit until all had gone.
The Phain above us conferred with one another. The polished circle that had swallowed the Zhaar became a well of green fire, and into it the dogs plunged, eagerly but orderly, without crowding or pushing, swiftly leaping forward and down, and away.
Scramble didn’t move. “Where?” I whispered.
“Home,” she said.
“In Splendor?”
“Ess. Hemosh an Sammle laish.”
Behemoth and Scramble’s place. I realized the prominence we had occupied was lowering toward that well of fire. I cried, “Oh, Scramble, don’t leave me again!”
“Mus,” she whispered. “Li’l ones there. You nee us, we come. Awwais, we
n ai nee you, you awwais come, Ewel.”
I reached for her but we were level with the mosses, and she was abruptly gone into the well of fire. We were left alone. The sky above us was empty of ships. As we watched, the Hessing fleet lifted from the plateau.
“We will eat together,” said the Phaina’s ’pute. “It is necessary.”
A table appeared from somewhere, along with people of various kinds who set it and brought the food. Wine was brought and poured—I say wine for that is the closest approximation we have to what we drank, though even the best wine would not be comparable. The Phaina sat with us, and so did several other of the Phain, male and female. We ate, Gainor, Gavi, and I, and Walking Sunshine poured the drink on its roots and seemed to enjoy the taste. There were many courses, each a tiny serving of something variously wonderful. We ate slowly, but eventually the last taste was gone, and one of the Phain said something, which the Phaina translated.
“He wishes to know if you have any questions.”
Gainor was looking at me. So was Gavi. Oh, I had so many questions!
“The Phaina told us the Zhaar used dog flesh upon themselves. Why then were they convicted of having interfered with them?”
The Phaina nodded. “You misheard, Jewel. It was the dogs’ friends who were interfered with. It was your people the Zhaar changed.”
“But you said, we humans were only speeded up in walking, speeded up in talking…”
“If that had been all, it would not have mattered greatly. But that was not all.”
“What?” grunted Gainor. “What did they do?”
“Your ancestors were communal creatures, living in mutual support, possessing the dalongar all those born into a world owe to all others born in that world as kindred creatures—creatures of that world. We have a planet occupied by a race of ape creatures from your world. We rescued them long, long ago, for there were few of them left. We preserved them, as we have preserved many thousands of worlds and creatures. They have dalongar. We said, oh, it was a pity that race had it, and you had not. We judged you as not having had it, never having had it.
The Companions Page 54
