The Companions (32 page)

“So, what does PPI think about this?”

“PPI! That squeezer, Prime! He pretends it doesn't happen, pretends he doesn't know, but every pension he saves, he gets a bonus from his board of directors.”

“If the people have pensions, then why would they be sent to Earth? They could support themselves anywhere!”

“Hah! The planets with living costs low enough for a PPI pension to be adequate don't admit retirees. Old people cost a lot more than young ones, that's all. Some of the ones who disappeared here brought their husbands or wives with them…”

“And they're all dead.”

“You said they were dead, but it's not necessarily true. If they took off their links so nobody would bother them and went off into the moss, they could live out there. Blue moss jellies are delicious; the lab says they'll sustain life indefinitely. There's fruit on some of the trees. The climate's gentle. You can dig a soft shelter into a moss bank. If you stay away from the redmoss and a handful of other dangers, the place is safe.”

I stood up, sickened but not surprised at what I'd heard. During the year after Witt had gone, before Paul had invited me to join him on that Quondangala job, I'd supported myself by working at one deadly dull job or other, and my only pleasure had been the time I spent at the Baja animal sanctuary. If I had lost that singular joy, I might have wanted to die. If we tower dwellers have nothing that delights us or amuses us, it's like living in a jail cell or a coffin. Confining. Anonymous. Lonely. And life among the down-dwellers, in all that noise and dark, that is a foretaste of hell. Drom was right about that.

“You might consider borrowing a power cannon from ESC and getting rid of the redmoss near the compound.”

“I have considered it. It's against PPI policy. We honestly don't know how the redmoss fits into the ecology here. We tried building fences around them, but the mosses crawled out from under them.”

I left his office to stand outside, totally undecided. The link on my wrist vibrated. Lethe was linking me. I didn't want to talk to him where I could be overheard, so I returned to my room before answering it.

“We've got word from Brandt,” he said. “Can you come over?”

“I'll be there soon.” I jotted a note to the trainers who were out with the dogs and stuck it on one of the corridor closet doors—our improvised bulletin board—checked on the puppies, who were asleep, then went down to the shore where the little boat was moored. It was as simple to operate as I had been told: One could set the course and leave it alone. As it purred its way toward the island, I scanned the surroundings. If I half squinted and ignored the scale, this could be an Earth scene, forests retreating up slopes, far mountains, the lake was an ocean with sandy shores and a romantic sandy spit extending into the waters where eight large dogs emerged from the moss forest and drank from the lake.

I opened my eyes wide and sat up. They saw the movement and vanished into the moss. I clenched my teeth and felt my hands shaking. Not anger exactly. Anxiety.

At ESC they gave me Brandt's message, one forwarded from wormhole to wormhole on the way out, with a few consequent faded spots, nothing they couldn't make out.

“Dame Cecelia Hessing has learned about the Hessing ships, and she thinks the disappearance of their crews and passengers has something to do with Witt's disappearance. She demands we investigate.

“If that weren't enough, the revelation about the PPI contingent is causing a meltdown here. Botrin Prime wants to forget it, bury it, pretend it isn't happening, because it's evidently a kind of…accommodation that's traditional in PPI. First I'd heard of it, but he knows all about it. Any enlightenment you can come up with would be welcome. Dame Cecelia won't let him cover it up, says it may be connected to
all the disappearances. Interesting for you, her harassing him for a change. Shoe on other foot kind of thing.

“Expect my arrival. The
intricacies
of the situation require personal attention by someone authorized to deal with the Derac. Have information about their increased numbers. Botrin Prime will probably send someone also, don't know who at this point. I had all I could do to talk Dame Cecelia out of coming herself.

“Be careful. Brandt out.”

“What
intricacies
?” asked Lethe.

“All of them,” said I. “The dogs, the Derac, Dame Cecelia—she's Witt Hessing's mother, and Witt disappeared on Jungle. Then there's ESC's relationship to PPI, and PPI's unstated policy of encouraging suicide.”

Lethe erupted, “What did you say?”

I told him, quoting Duras Drom as accurately as I could. “Gainor used the word
accommodation.
That's more or less what it's viewed as. If I'd been head of PPI, I'd have taken possession of a garden planet somewhere along the line and set it up for retirement, so my people would have something to look forward to. This is a manticore egg…”

“Which is?” asked Sybil.

“Something that will hatch a very scrambled beast,” I rejoined. “That's what happens when science gets mixed up with politics, you get monsters that eat good sense. Especially if what Drom says is true about Botrin Prime getting bonuses for saving pension money.”

“Any progress on the language business?” asked Durrow.

I shook my head. “Paul's finding nothing. His machines correlate nothing. I mentioned the mimicry idea to him, just to get him off high dead center.”

“We wish him luck,” said Lethe.

“I've had another idea,” I murmured. “What if their language isn't oral?”

Abe Durrow sat down beside me. “You mean sign language? The Zhaar are said to have had a sign language, a
batch of them, as a matter of fact. Each of their shape societies had its own, in addition to the general one.”

“I don't know about the Zhaar,” I confessed. “I was thinking more in terms of color, actually. I've been looking at the individual Mossen. There are at least seventy shades, tints, and hues. When there are more than one of the same color in a dance, I notice that the belt around them seems to be identical. I've taken images, blown them up, and compared.”

“Belt?”

“That stiff section around their middle. It has…what would you say, raised areas? Like something embossed: letters or words. So far as I can see, each belt is different, like a fingerprint, except for the identically colored ones. If they are really identical, then we have things that grow to a pattern, maybe as many different patterns as there are colors.”

“Not one race of creatures?”

“I wouldn't say that. Humans are one race, but we have different fingerprints, different DNA. We grow to a pattern, but only clones would be identical.”

“So the communication might be by…?”

“By order of the colors. If we have seventy distinguishable colors that could be something like a syllable, the order in which they arrange themselves might convey the language, mightn't it?”

“That would imply a positional language. Maybe,” said Sybil. She muttered quick notes into her memo pad.

I went on, “So the Mossen might mimic us to attract our attention, and then arrange themselves to convey a message.”

“They mimic us?” asked Lethe. He sat back in his chair, eyes unfocused. “If that's true, if they're using our sounds to get us interested: Firstly, why don't they do it when and where they dance; and secondly, who did they talk to before we came?”

Long silence.

“Well, where did they dance before we came?” asked Sybil. “We haven't looked into their activities before we ar
rived, but there were survey fish on the planet for almost a year before we came, and we have those records.”

“It's only a suggestion,” I offered. “If I suggest anything to Paul, he spends more time debating the proposition than he does working with it, so the best I can do with him is drop a hint he can later claim as his own idea.”

“Tell us something about the dogs,” said Lethe.

The answer to that question had been carefully composed, rehearsed, and was even largely true. “Geneticists selected for size, longevity, and strength. They're better able to communicate and possibly more intelligent than natural dogs were. They were bred this way with the idea of giving them even more survival skills, for when we turn them loose.”

Sybil murmured, “You said ‘selected.' Was that done with Zhaar technology?”

I responded stiffly. “Use of Zhaar technology is against IC law.”

“The Orskimi use it,” said Abe.

I said, “All I know is that Gainor mentions recurring top-level IC discussions about the technology and about other races using it. If the Orskimi have the stuff, it's logical to assume others might get it, too. I can't swear nobody on Earth has ever touched it any more than you can.”

“How about PPI?” Abe asked.

“I can't swear to that, either. I can only swear that I have no personal knowledge of anyone using it.”

“Ah,” said Abe, sharing a glance with his colleagues.

I said, “Gainor has told me what's said about the Zhaar, about their being shape changers, able to change themselves into anyone or anything they wanted to, able to infiltrate any group, mimic any person, any race. They're rumored to have stolen secrets, killed for pleasure. They could have anything they wanted simply by becoming the owner of whatever it was, committing piracy by becoming the crew, committing genocide by becoming the settlers of a planet. But then, it
was said to be the Zhaar who wiped out Holme's World, so if anyone from that world is a Zhaar, it would be you, Sybil.”

“Fat chance,” she snarled. “If I could change my shape, I'd have done it long since.”

“The other thing that's said about the Zhaar is that they're dead and gone. Gainor says whoever or whatever made the final decision to commit genocide on the Zhaar, assuming that it actually happened, probably saved millions of lives.”

“And who's alleged to have done it?” asked Sybil.

“Gainor says some of the elder races may have done it.”

“See, that's what I can't figure out,” Sybil complained. “The Zhaar are gone. But the rumor is the biotechnology still exists. How can they have the one without the other? I mean, the shape changer matrix was in the Zhaar bodies, not stored in a laboratory somewhere. Whoever has it, they had to have taken some of the people…alive. And if they reproduced by budding, as is said, if you've got one live one, you could soon have thousands.”

“I don't know,” said I. “Maybe I don't want to know because having Zhaar technology implies we might still have Zhaar as well.”

“So you'd be against using the technology?” asked Lethe.

“Philosophically, I'm against it,” I said. “But I'm told, the use of Zhaar net tissue would enable amputees to produce new limbs and people with broken spines to be healed and disfigured people to be pleasant-looking again without the long time lapse and repeated surgical interventions we used to do to get lesser results, and without cloning ourselves in order to harvest parts, with the attendant ethical complexities. So, practically, I might feel differently.”

“Ah,” Lethe said.

“But,” I said, “I try to keep in mind that though philosophical absolutes prevent practical solutions, practical solutions can involve insuperable ethical dilemmas. For some people.”

Sybil gave me a quizzical look. “In other words, you're on the fence.”

I laughed, ruefully. “I'm the kind of person who opts for
practical solutions in particular cases, then feels guilty about it later.”

Lethe said, “There was that attempt to give animal senses to people, back…oh, when, fifteen years or so.”

“I'm one of those they tried to plant dognose in,” I said quietly. “I volunteered for the experiment when I was sixteen. There was no danger involved; the cells would grow or they wouldn't, but they weren't invasive, and I have no idea whether any Zhaar technology was involved. The cells did grow, but not a lot. I have a hyperacute sense of smell, but it still isn't anywhere near that of a dog, much less a dog like Behemoth or Scramble.”

“How acute is hyperacute?” asked Abe.

“Blindfolded, I could identify you three from across a room, and who's been here recently. From fifty feet away, I can smell what kind of mood my brother's in or smell something very strange and dreadful in the PPI staffers who are using the redmoss. What I can't do, and the dogs can, is say whether you are afraid of me or not, whether you are a danger to me or not.”

“To their world, we're deaf and dumb,” said Lethe.

“Just about, yes. The sense hasn't been notably useful to me, not on Earth, at least.”

They promised to let me know as soon as they had an arrival time for Brandt. I got in my little boat, backed it up, and turned to go back to shore, seeing once again the spit of land where I had seen eight dogs.

“Damn,” I said, feelingly. “Damn, damn, damn.”

 

“I went out to ESC,” I said to Adam, later that afternoon. “On the way, I looked down the shoreline, and what did I see? Eight dogs, lapping water from the lake, like a pack of myth-wolves. It was I in the boat, counting dogs, but it could have been anyone, counting dogs.”

Adam flushed. “I knew you'd be angry, but he said they expected us to go along. I really couldn't say no.”

“Say no to whom?” I demanded, outraged.

“Behemoth. Well, him and Titan both.”

As that penetrated, slowly, I felt my mouth hanging agape and snapped it shut. “I thought we were the ones who decided what was best, Adam. Are the dogs running things now?”

Instead of remorse, I saw amusement. “Of course they are! What makes you think they haven't been running things for a long while?”

Now I really was stunned. “Explain,” I said, afraid I'd get started on a rant if I said anything more.