The Companions (13 page)

I shook my head at Gainor. “He really didn't pay attention to things, Gainor. I tried to tell him about the garden, for ex
ample, but he simply wasn't listening at all. Besides, I think Paul's translation of
dalongar
was wrong. It doesn't mean
protocol
at all. I think it must mean
courtesy
or
respect
in the context of equilibrium or symmetry…”

“Weren't our people courteous and respectful?” he asked, surprised.

“To the Phain, I'm sure they were, but the Phain are only one part of their world. Being polite only to the Phain is like someone being polite to my face while stepping on my feet. Our people were not respectful of their totality, their world.” I described how the Phain city had been shoehorned into the natural one without disturbing it, then I described the embassy garden, so called. “The land we sat on was dead, Gainor. And our people killed it.”

He harrumphed. “If you could see the implications of that, the ambassador certainly should have been able to see it!”

“Well, he didn't. I didn't like him. I liked the Phain, though. The Phaina, anyhow. I never met a male one.”

“According to my Tharstian friend, the males were assigned to provide us with information because our staff was male. It's the Phaina who really run things.”

“Well of course,” I said, half to myself. “That was obvious.” The Phaina dealt with the world, the Phain dealt with art and religion. The Phain could deal with art and religion only because the Phaina kept the world in balance.

Gainor frowned. “After talking to my Tharstian friend, I read your report again. I'm now wondering if you weren't the one who carried the Phain's warning when you told the ambassador about the garden.”

“Me? No one told me to warn him. No one ever told me to say anything.”

“Perhaps you were simply unaware of being told. Somehow the Phain knew the message had been delivered, and they knew the ambassador had paid no attention. Your meeting with him is the only possible conversation that could have been it. In future, if you should feel impelled to deliver
a manifesto, sweetheart, get a message to me somehow, and I'll see that the fools listen!”

 

Gainor's group continued to pay me well, and since I had few expenses, I invested most of it as Shiela Alred advised, along with the money I received when I turned twenty-five. Needless to say, I didn't talk about investments with Paul. By that time I was participating in sanctuary decisions and had been elected to the very private board of directors of the ark movement—always referred to simply in that way, no capital letters, no emphasis, and no publicity if avoidable. We did everything we could to foster the impression that there were only a few active but impotent arkists who had succeeded in preserving half a dozen unimportant species on tiny little worlds that nobody wanted because, as was largely true, they were too far from normal space-lanes to be economical to settle. Whenever we spoke to the public, we were dull. When people attacked us, we did not respond; if we had to respond, we whined that our little sanctuary for the speckled waddling beetle wasn't hurting anyone, then we went on and on about mating habits of the speckled waddling beetle until they gave up in disgust.

By that time, I had become very close to some of the people who really made the ark movement possible, Shiela among them, though she insisted on worrying about me, which made me most uncomfortable.

“Why don't you socialize, Jewel? There's a very pleasant man, one of our people, who's quite taken with you. I'm his emissary. He wonders if you would accompany him to dinner?”

“Thanks, Shiela. But no. I'm just not interested.”

It was true. I was not even interested enough to wonder who the pleasant man might be. I still woke every morning with Witt's smell in my nostrils. It annoyed and infuriated me, which made me contrite for being annoyed and infuriated. It quite wore me out. One minute I wished him back,
the next I was carrying on an imaginary and very angry conversation with him. I decided to focus on a set of pleasant things I could recall about our relationship, a string of memory beads, the way people used to tell beads in some of the old religions. Five nice things: our times training Quick and Busy; the first time he took me to a wonderful restaurant; the time he helped me at the kennel when Jon Point was sick; the time…I gave up on the idea because it took me so long to come up with five things to remember that didn't end up making me furious at him.

And at myself! We had never thought ahead to either of our lives alone. He would finish his schooling. We would go off planet, and he would manage the Hessing empire, if he had to, from somewhere else. I would continue preserving what could be preserved. Perhaps we would have children. Neither of us had thought of being alone, what we would do, what we really wanted. Then he was gone, and I ricocheted around until falling into my current pocket, almost by chance. The fact that it was an interesting pocket, one that was sometimes vital, was a good thing, but it had one great inadequacy. No matter what I did, or where I went, or how successful that might be, I felt no anticipation of delight. The only dream that moved me to joy was the vain and ridiculous fantasy that the Phain would invite me back to Tsaliphor.

Aunt Hatty may have been right when she said my life would have been different if Matty had lived, even though I'd resented her saying so. Matty might have helped me find a better way. I stood before my mirror at the sanctuary and wondered what she would say to me if I could summon her up. She would see shadow nests in my face, though otherwise it was, I suppose, a decent face. Witt had said so.

Shiela often called me “lovely,” but anyone young and healthy was lovely to her. I couldn't find any character in the mirror. It was just a face, with rather large gray eyes and quite a lot of eyelashes. The eyebrows had a good, clean shape. I had always felt my mouth was too large, but my nose was
reasonable, not fat, not bumpy. My skin was my worst feature, very pale, easily burned, a strange shade of skin in our time. Almost everyone now is light to medium brown, all the human former skin colors mixed and stirred until very few people are very dark or very pale. Still, both Delis and Matty had carried the pale strain from ancient Scandinavian ancestors, and it popped out in me, a thin, pale skin that showed every flick of emotion. At the moment, it was blotchy because I was tired and troubled, but then, since Shiela was wearing the same face, she'd no doubt understand.

When I came out into the hallway, I saw one of the older guards, a man I'd known for years.

“Jewel. Did you know Adam got picked up last night by that plipping Species Control? We just got him back.”

“Is he all right?”

“He had a seizure or something. They took him to the medical center. One of our tame doctors checked him out and got him home.”

I went past the labs and took the moving walkway to the staff apartments that had been built around an atrium cut through both the park floor above and the roof above that, and I found Adam lying on a chaise in the sunlight, the part of his face not hidden behind his beard looking quite gray.

“Whoever designed those pills ought to have to take one every month for the rest of his life,” he grated at me, husky-voiced and obviously in pain.

“They have to simulate a real emergency, Adam. Otherwise, you might get Worldkeeper doctors looking at the wrong parts of you…”

“All very nice in theory,” he snarled. “I'm sure I'll be fine as soon as my ears stop ringing and I can focus my eyes.”

I sat down beside him, troubled both by his appearance and his obvious annoyance.

He said angrily, “Jarl Alred needs his head examined. Either that or he needs to stop dosing. He got me into that mess last night…”

If he needed to tell me, then I needed to listen. I sat back, made myself relax, and was careful to make my question as casual as possible. “Shiela's son? What did he do?”

“He buzzed me after midnight, told me he was down at this surface club, one of
those
clubs, and he needed a ride because flit taxies refuse to go down there, and who can blame them? So, since I'm blessed with terminal stupidity, I took a two-seater flit from the sanctuary garage and went to the address he gave me, which he hadn't mentioned was level minus three.”

“No flit entry,” I said. It sounded like Jarl Alred.

“Of course not. And he wasn't waiting for me at level. At which point I should have returned to quarters and sent an armed party after him, five or six mech-guards at least. Being, as I said, lethally incompetent, however, I parked the flit and went down after him. When I brought him up, a bunch of down-dweller users and half a dozen ruined concs had turned the flit over and were climbing the walls looking for something new to play with.

“Alred had the staggers. I propped him inside the door, slipped into the alley, came around the back, and broke up the party. While the running and screaming went on, I went back the way I'd come to pick up Alred, which took a little time, and by the time I got out the door, somebody in the group had called Species Control. They decided to take me in for questioning, because I was there, and because I wasn't Alred, who was dropping his mother's name like concs drop giggles.”

“So you bit the pill.”

“So I bit. Yeah. Told them I was subject to seizures, just before I shook out. Also told them I saw something funny leaving the alley. Alred backed up the seizure bit, as much as he could, dosed as he was. He's not a strong shoulder, Jewel. I wouldn't want to have to lean on him.”

“Gainor and I have had worries about that,” I confessed. We had more than that, if truth be told. “Shiela is solid as a rock and she claims her son is supportive, but he's just…
feeble. With this new edict, he probably won't be involved much longer.”

“What new edict?”

He hadn't heard. I told him.

“And now what?” he breathed, his face turning even grayer.

“We have a little time. There are some arks that are mostly ready. Gainor's getting a delay on enforcement. Don't panic yet.”

I left him with that, good advice, though I had trouble following it myself. The panic was there, barely held at bay, ready to take over the moment I let my guard down. In the meantime, a specific something had to be done. Shiela wouldn't think of it. Adam obviously hadn't known about it. The dogs had to be told.

I changed direction, taking a branch hallway toward the gated lift that opened upon forest. Trees, of course, real ones, brought back as seeds or saplings from planets where their species had been planted generations ago, stimulated into rapid growth by current technology. Oak. Ash. Beech. Pine. Smaller growths beneath and around: grasses, forbs, ferns. Rock outcroppings with hollows that could be used for dens. The trickle of water. The smell of moist earth.

I knew that the dogs would have heard the lift arrive. I sat down on a stump—imported, along with the trees—and waited, sensing the subtle tang in the air that denoted the approach of a furred thing, an other creature, a nearing manifested also in the momentary hush among the tiny creatures that kept this mini forest alive with chirpings and chewings. A larger thing was coming, a magisterial presence. It moved on tough-padded feet, its tongue lolled, a flow of saliva coursed its edge to spatter on soil; the deep velvet of coat stroked grasses and twigs soundlessly aside, the plumed tail streamed like a banner, air entered lungs like bellows, eyes rested on me.

“Scramble,” I said, not daring to look up.

A murmured growl. An acknowledgment, not a challenge.
When I looked up, she was sitting behind a screen of willow, next to a watering pool. After a moment, she got up and came over to thrust her muzzle into my neck, below my ear, moving it down my body and across my back as she took an inventory of where I'd been lately and whom I'd been with. Scramble was Scarlet's granddaughter, eight years old, twice the size of her mother, four times the size of her grandmother, twice as fast, more than twice as smart. If Scarlet had sometimes thought of me as family, Scramble thought of me as a puppy. Her puppy. I adored her. She was a manifestation of every dog I'd ever loved, starting with my stuffed plush puppy on Mars.

Vigilant stepped out of shadow, Dapple behind her. Scramble returned to them and they sat, tails wrapped around their legs, utterly silent, watching me with opaque golden eyes.

“Dapple, Veegee. You're going to hear talk,” I said conversationally. “People are going to be jittery. We may be taking you off world soon.”

A mutter from the underbrush. I had already sensed them. Behemoth, with Titan and Wolf behind him. These were the six “big dogs,” the culmination of the sanctuary's efforts to create the consummate paradigm, the essential, perfected dog, bigger, healthier, smarter…no, I couldn't say smarter when I didn't know how smart they'd been before people had fooled with them. Maybe not smarter, but far better able to communicate.

With all six of them there, staring at me, it was hard to speak. Sometimes…even though I had held these dogs as puppies, helped feed and bathe them, taught them behaviors, even though they were as close to family as any living things, sometimes they frightened me. I always told myself it wasn't fright. Nonetheless, they stunned me; they were awe-ful.

“I don't know where you'll end up, yet,” I said, keeping my voice level with an effort. “Not exactly, but it's bound to be an ark planet.”

Nothing. No movement. No eye blinked, no ear twitched, tails didn't move. I sat beneath that timeless regard, waiting, wondering. I could not think as they thought. I could not see as they saw, nor sense as they sensed. I could only wait, hoping they would…agree? Concur? What?

When I had given up hope, Behemoth growled, “Awl?”

“All?” I whispered. “Yes. That's all. For now.”