In the Company of Others (71 page)

Gail Smith? Be sensible and abandon him?
Pardell stopped and gave himself a mental shake, feeling an easing of the despondency he'd felt—and inadvertently sent through to the Susan-Quill. He could hear Malley now . . . ‘Aaron, my friend, there's so much you don't know about women.'
He knew enough about this one.

“We need to get rid of this barrier,” he said out loud, gaining a relieved flash of blue eyes.
They were meant to be seen in sunlight
, Pardell decided possessively, as was her golden hair. “Walk to the pod and tell me what you plan to do. I'll see if I can—translate.”

Gail nodded, announcing in a clear, ringing voice: “I'm going to the
Athena
for some supplies. You need a hat and more water, for starters. I'd like to change.” This with a familiar exasperation, as if Gail disliked justifying herself even in these circumstances. She retrieved her gloves and the headgear as she walked toward the pod with determined, quick strides.

So much courage.
Pardell's thoughts flashed to the stationers watching through the
Seeker
's vid feed.
Utter fools
, he raged inwardly.
They'd better believe what Gail had tried to prove to them—with her life.
Like Malley, he could name most of those likely to be there, if not all. None of the first rounders had been stranded to live Outside—Raner had said it was because they'd never lost hope and tried to run home with the rest.
If so
, Pardell thought with a sudden chill,
they'd be all the more willing to die to set foot here.

They didn't have much time.

Dread
. . . slithered up his spine and along every nerve—an ominous darkness. It wasn't based on his thoughts, so Pardell could only guess at why. Did the Susan-Quill dread the presence of more humans? As a threat—or because she feared causing more death?

Or was he completely wrong? Could she dread the concept of time itself? That it had limits within his conception, and now hers? He couldn't be sure and didn't dare interact more deeply to find out. He was learning not to become absorbed in the Susan-Quill's reactions, but it was agonizingly difficult. Merely noticing them threatened his sense of self.
Having Gail here, with him
, he told himself,
was like a tether holding him from that void.

She'd walked out of his sight, but he could hear the reassuring sound of her voice as she called out: “Aaron, she's not letting me pass.”

“Grant,” he said. “Can you move the 'bot in front of me? Thanks. A bit left. Up. There.” With a sense of déjà vu, Pardell found himself staring into the gleaming lenses of the dark little hoverbot. This time, he used their reflective surfaces to see over his own shoulder, to where Gail stood, more-or-less patiently, in front of a stubborn wall of grass. “Wait,” he told her.

Need
. . . Pardell concentrated on the dryness of his mouth, pushing his swollen, aching tongue against lips that were cracking where they weren't already cut.
Trust
. . . he projected as he looked at the image of Gail's small form in the 'bot's surface.

A fragment slithered inside his mouth before he could close it. Pardell struggled not to gag as it filled the back of his throat, fought not to scream at the thought of the Quill penetrating the inside of his body through that opening. Before fear overwhelmed him, the fragment slid out again, as if finished exploring.

“It's okay now, Aaron!”

“Oh, good,” he said weakly, witnessing the collapse of the Quill wall in the reflection.

Then Pardell closed his lips firmly—in case great-grandmother became curious again.

CURIOSITY warred with worry. Gail pushed both aside as she hurried to take advantage of Aaron's apparent truce with his—friend?
What was the relationship?
she wondered, stripping out of the foul suit as quickly as possible, beyond caring who saw her skin or witnessed the indignity of unplumbing herself.

It wasn't instinct. The Quill riding her legs had dropped off before she'd set foot on the ramp. The one on her wrist had showed no sign of wanting to burrow under her skin. She'd experimented: she could unwrap and hold it. The fragment simply rewound itself over her arm the moment she released it. Despite feeling a new reluctance to give up its comfort, Gail had no difficulty coaxing it to leave her for the grass.

She was missing something—something fundamental about the Quill and its environment. The Quill was alien here, yet it must be reacting to them and to this world as it would to its home. The clues were here.

After the briefest—and utterly blissful—effort to clean herself, Gail pulled on a plain pair of coveralls and stuffed the pockets with ration tubes and water containers. She yanked out the sled and dumped the monitoring equipment from it without apology to anyone spying. It was the work of a few minutes to load it with all the blankets and protective gear she could find. It might be early summer, but at this altitude and with no shelter from the wind, it could be a cold night.

And a dark one.
On that thought, Gail went back and found as many portable light sources as she could, adding them to her pile.

When Gail was satisfied she'd scoured everything useful, she dropped into the pilot's chair and reactivated the remote control system. The
Athena
could now be operated from the
Seeker
—allowing its eventual retrieval, if no one was left to fly it.

Or a very quick retrieval, if she was dragging Aaron inside on the sled.

She was about to leave, when a small flashing light on the comm board caught her attention.

 

“Another drink?”

“Maybe in a while, thanks,” Aaron responded. The hat—technically a piece of blanket material Gail had cut into a triangle—drooped on either side of his head as he spoke. He'd appreciated it—especially as the sun dropped low on the horizon and the air immediately took a chill. They were both used to a more regulated climate.

Gail wished he could turn around and see his first sunset. The last rays were torching the river below the hills and igniting the clouds spired to the south. The lighting had also turned the grass pink, rather than green/brown. A temporary change, as the dimming encouraged the Quill to slip farther up each stalk, adding their purples, reds, and golds to the landscape.

The hat, and drinks she suspected Aaron accepted more to make her feel better than because he needed them, were the only comforts she'd been able to offer. He claimed to be warm enough. The woven grass would be insulating, although Gail had concerns about his circulation.

“You sure you want to sleep there?”

Gail chuckled, busy creating a layer of blankets for herself “Did I ever tell you I used to camp every summer as a kid? This is great. A little hard,” she thumped the dried soil beneath her with one foot, “but that's good for the back.”

A whirlwind of activity began a few meters away. Gail stared as grass bent and broke, then seemed to drag itself like a beast of straw toward her. Before she could do more than say, “Oh ...” the mass settled into a pile beside her blankets. The Quill in the mass slithered into the soil and away. “Thank you,” Gail said as calmly as possible.

The Susan-Quill, as Aaron referred to it/her, was becoming capable of acting appropriately—even generously—on some understandings. Frustratingly, these usually involved needs or wants—as if its intelligence favored those ideas over others. Aaron assumed this was due to the template of Susan Witts, his great-grandmother.

Gail wasn't so sure. She was beginning to grasp when they were up against something more alien. To her, this was one of those somethings. She accepted the gift of the bedding material, but she reserved judgment on the reason.

She curled up inside the blankets, not needing to feign exhaustion—the boost shot was taking its toll as well as all else. “I'll be here, Aaron,” she promised, finding the comfort of lying down almost painful. “Call if you need me, or if anything changes. Grant will have people monitoring us through ‘Bob,' there.” Gail had nicknamed the 'bot; only fitting—it represented a visitor, in a sense. Aaron hadn't questioned her choice of “Bob” beyond a raised brow. She hadn't bothered to explain, but it made the exposed hillside seem friendlier, less alien-infested, to name the sophisticated machine after the smelly, grouchy old uncle whose stories had kept her entertained so long ago.

“Good night, wife,” Aaron said softly. She felt tears come to her eyes and didn't let him see—just blew a theatrical kiss toward his silhouette before tucking herself under the top blanket.

Once there, she didn't waste any time bringing out the disk containing whatever message had waited for her inside the
Athena
, slipping it into a small reader whose light Gail hoped wouldn't show beyond the blanket. It wasn't Aaron's attention she avoided, but the unknown watchers represented by “Bob.”

She read quickly. Then again, more slowly.

It was from Aisha. Temujin had performed his customary sleight-of-hand to get it to her without going through the FDs. Her scientists might be trusting sorts, but recent events were doubtless making even them uneasy.

Once the Quill fragment had been safely contained—by having Dafoe use the protective suit to simply walk into the lab and put their “guest” into another container, the teams had gone straight back to work.
There was a lot to be said for the inertia of research
, Gail told herself with a smile. Through everything else, they'd kept to their list of analyses and experiments.

And results were already pouring in—

First, and as predicted, biochemical analysis of the exterior of Quill produced results consistent with bluegrass, not only in its DNA, but other molecules as well. Ideal camouflage, if you were hiding from sensors—or something that searched by taste. The interior was alien enough to completely confound their machines.

Sazaad's report—typically self-congratulatory—was a little late to be useful. Thanks to Aaron, Gail had already confirmed her suspicions that the Quill interacted on a level which tapped into what humans experienced as emotion. She moved past his list of suggested commercial applications to the next report.

Aisha's.
Opposite to Sazaad in approach and assumption, the biologist had included the raw data as well as her conclusions. Gail didn't bother with the former, not when the latter made such sense to her. The missing
something.

The wind picked up, finding a tiny opening by her feet. Gail used her toes to fold over the blanket, less worried about the cold than a curious Quill fragment. Aaron had told her how the Susan-Quill wasn't always aware of the impact of her intrusions.

Curiosity.
How much of that was the original Quill and how much the human?

Among Aisha's findings: the Quill lived on the grass because they had to—they were symbionts, taking a share of the abundant energy harvested from sunlight by the plant's chloroplasts, in return—well, Aisha hadn't been sure what benefit the grass experienced, but she felt there had to be one or more. Wherever the grass on Pardell's World was exceptionally lush and healthy, it contained Quill. In Terran ecosystems, a symbiont might have antibacterial properties, perhaps grant protection from fungi. In the case of the Quill? Difficult to determine the partnership's parameters, when one of the symbionts had evolved . . . elsewhere. For all they knew, on the Quill's homeworld plants competed to attract Quill of their own. Gail examined the premise thoughtfully.

More significantly, Aisha had had some growth models run by her team's population dynamics expert. It looked as though the terraformers' very choice of seed species had been their downfall.

Gail closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it had been like—the rain of seeds from the shuttles landing on the vast, waiting expanse of prepared soil, bouncing, lodging in every crevice. The terraformer, perhaps almost forgetting the Quill on his or her wrist—beyond enjoying its soothing effect—walking out to inspect the first sprouts of green after the obedient rains.

The Quill fragment, sensing the first appropriate partner since being taken from its homeworld, flows from wrist to soil before the human can stop it.

Did the terraformer even hunt for it? Futile. And how many did as Susan Witts and simply discard their Quill, confident the organisms would die?

Instead, how quickly did the fragment multiply and spread?
The loss of all human life on the terraformed worlds had come before the grasses had set their first seeds. Aisha's modeler had a chilling conclusion. The fragment was morphically uniform, simple at the macro level. It likely reproduced by multiple fission—its strength was in numbers, after all. Given an entire planet that was basically a monoculture of a suitable partner? The Quill had virtually exploded over their new homes. How many had been needed before the Quill Effect had been deadly? The calculation was there—less than she'd expected. It didn't matter now.

What had been created that day?
Gail asked herself sleepily. Something unintended and of dreadful consequence—but was it evil? Something alien and new—but was it merely the stranger's face before being introduced?

She fell into dreams of coexistence that faded into nightmares of being imprisoned by stalks of dying grass.

A whistle?
Gail dug her way free of blankets and straw, not sure what she'd heard but recognizing a summons. “Aaron!” she called immediately.