The Companions (47 page)

 

“They
who lie
below us
deeply buried
have no knowledge of
our speaking thanks in words
for food drawn from their bodies.”

 

“Very true,” said Gavi. “There is much buried on Moss, and much going on above it that is mysterious. It is a good poem.”

The willog preened itself at her praise, leaves lifting and resettling into place with a silver shiver of pleasure. “No willog else has ever done a double-double seven in both smell and talk, with one sound of talk for each smell, the two meaning the same thing. No willog else has ever done a poem one could smell and say—in human words, of course,
for they are the only sound words we have—and also hear and even see what it looks like when Walky's own words dance it or when it is printed in human words with a stick in the bare mud of the river shore or in berry juice on a sheet of bark as Walky did with the message Walky made and left for the human people to find…”

It wheezed to a stop, having run out of air. It had obviously not yet learned to breathe between words.

“I thank you, Walking Sunshine,” I said. “Particularly for telling us you left the ‘thankful, thankful' message written on bark. The one that said you people wanted to know more people.”

“More peoples,” it corrected me. “Humans made no answer, but Walky understands. Poor human people cannot send words the World can hear, and human people did not think to write a message Walky could read. Oh, poor humans who cannot speak. Unless we prevent, World is going to do something dreadful to you because you are smell-less! I have been telling World you have no noses. I am praying World will heed!”

I heard a movement behind me, then Behemoth's voice. “Noh, av 'mell.”

Every part of the willog heaved upward and made a clockwise flailing motion except for one sturdy root, on which it spun. A palpable pirouette. “Ah. Dog! We are hearing very much about dog.”

Behemoth stared his “nasty” stare at Scramble, who whined, deep in her throat, rather anxiously.

“Clare took the puppies back to the plateau,” I said firmly. “They are safer there. Even if your being here gets you all killed, they will still be safe!”

Behemoth turned toward me, a rumble deep in his chest. Scramble put herself between me and him, and I smelled…some sort of interchange between the two, so subtle a flow of scents that I was not even sure I had detected it. Whether it was real or I had only imagined it, Behemoth stopped glaring at her as the others came out of the woods, Veegee and
Dapple, Wolf and Titan, the two pseudodog brothers behind them, packs on their backs.

“Many dogs,” said the willog, surprised. “I am Walking Sunshine.” He bowed to the assembled animals before I had a chance to say anything.

I moved forward and introduced the dogs, as each made a slight movement of acknowledgment along with, again, some very subtle odors. They were introducing themselves by smell! How did they do that? Scat and urine were the usual smell markings, but they were doing it some other way…

When it came to the trainers, I didn't know quite what to say, and Walking Sunshine spoke before I said anything.

“These are not dogs. Smell is not right for dogs.”

I cast a sideways look at Sybil and Ornel. Well, it would do no good to try and keep the secret any longer. “No,” I said. “They are not dogs, not really. They are really humans whose names are Adam and Frank.”

Ornel's jaw dropped open. Sybil merely opened her eyes very wide and stared first at them, then at me, in angry disbelief.

“False dogs,” the willog said. “But not made from redmoss. Something like redmoss. Something better, not so fibrous. Oh, how wonderful is such substance for making replicas!”

“Aren't you the clever one,” Ornel said to me, in a hard, disapproving voice.

“There was a good reason,” I said. “One you would approve of. We were breeding dogs for a world of their own, and we had no role models for them. We had no mature dogs to show them how to hunt and how to dig dens, how to act as a pack. If they hadn't had someone to show them, we'd never have been able to turn them loose on a world of their own.”

Ornel did not change his expression, but his stare shifted to the willog, which was continuing its exposition.

“Replication is most interesting. Out of thankfulness for eyes and ears, willogs have let humans alone, for humans do
not like being replicated. At least,” it stopped momentarily and focused several eyes on Gavi, “not those humans who live high on the rock, where willogs do not go.” It turned its eyes toward me. “Other more recent humans, however, have been old ones who enjoyed going into the moss and being remade, though their people do not want them to return afterward, to remake others…”

“The people have been remade?” blurted Ornel. “They are still alive?”

“Oh, yes, very alive. Still with same thoughts, same memories, but no more pains in bones, no more sadness. Walking Sunshine long ago has sent message to all redmoss, ‘Do not remake humans to go back for others.' Silly for replicas to go back, to offer remake to others, and get burned dead for their trouble.” At that point the blue eye stared at Gavi, letting her know it was her people who had committed this indecency, before it went on: “Humans would be far happier being remade as part of world instead of just sitting on top of world as they are now.”

“All the old people from PPI are still alive?” I asked. “They are still…functioning?”

“Function?” said the willog, in a thoughtful tone. “What is function? They are not interested in doing things they did before, writing on papers, putting things away, making reports, all those things. They are wandering, tasting, smelling, talking to one another. Is this function?”

I didn't know how to reply. Ornel, however, said, “I would need to talk to one of them in order to know whether they still function or not.”

The willog nodded, an all-over up-down motion. “We have had messages for some time describing this new dog creature. So far, no replication of dog had happened, but forest is alive with anticipation.”

“No magh us,” said Behemoth, with a snarl. “No mahs.”

The willog actually recoiled at this. “Very well. You have only to say what you prefer. It isn't necessary to be abusive!”

Behemoth subsided with a rumble, and I spoke quickly
into the uncomfortable silence. “We're forgetting why we're here. We came to watch the battle over the key to Splendor. If we want to be on time, I suggest we don't delay finding a place to watch from.”

Behemoth's obvious truculence was more than a little disturbing, but I didn't want to query it at the moment, not with this completely unknown creature in our midst and large numbers of warriors coming toward us from several directions.

Gavi said, “I think I am already finding a place big enough for all of us. On west side of battleground, I am seeing a stone outcropping on the high ground, high enough to be seeing over the trees.” She turned to the willog. “There is being room for you there, as well. Unless you want to try to get closer.”

“With you will be good,” it said, inclining several trunks in a bow. “Hearing conversation is good. Thank you for the invitation.”

With Gavi in the lead, our now augmented group plunged back into the forest, with the male dogs following Gavi, Frank, and Adam close behind, then Scramble, Veegee, and Dapple. Ornel, Clare, and I were at the end of the line, followed by the willog, who, or which, had stopped making martial music and was contenting itself with a pleasantly harmonic humming in its several voices. I spent the journey trying to catalog impressions and draw conclusions that might be useful. The willog did not seem dangerous It responded with annoyance only when its intelligence was questioned. It had a strong sense of personal worth, which ought not to be disparaged. As for Behemoth, I was at a loss. Adam's subservience I could understand, it fit into the usual pattern for canine packs, but Behemoth's sudden exercise of authority had me baffled. He knew this wasn't the world we'd planned for them; he knew there was no prey here to keep them alive. Surely he wouldn't risk the ultimate freedom of a world of their own for some interim display of cu
riosity? Since that's exactly what he was doing, I could only assume something was going on that I knew nothing about.

We made a considerable loop away from the lakeshore, and by late afternoon, we had come to the back side of the outcrop Gavi had mentioned. There a long, bare slope stretched upward and eastward to a line of broken stone. The sun threw our shadows before us as we went up quietly, even the willog silent. The distance was greater than it had appeared from below, and we had gained a considerable height by the time we reached the top, a jagged cornice of fractured stone stretching widely to either side. The crevices we could see through appeared to lead out into the air. Nonetheless, the dogs threaded their way into the maze and very shortly found a sizable ledge where the shattered rimrock had fallen onto the scree below. When we all found our way through various cracks, we had an excellent view of the battleground below.

The moss-carpeted saucer was just as Gavi's informer had described it, though Gavi had not used words like
mysterious
or
eerie
, both of which applied. The moss was indeed blue because it was either fluorescing blue light or was bathed in blue light from some other source, a luminescence that most resembled a pool of shining, sapphire smoke. The paved center of the great dish lay like an island in this gleaming pond, no smoke obscuring its rocky surface, which reminded me of the roads on the Phain planet in being leveled by nature rather than art. The trees around the rim of the dish were also as described. Through my glasses I saw a perfectly uniform fringe: each twig repeating the pattern of each leaf; each branch reproducing each twig; each tree restating each branch.

In the center of the paved circle stood the hexagonal crystal of stone, tall and dark, with something extraneous mounted near the top of the southernmost face. I could see it only edge on, for we were almost due west of it. If I had had to label it from what I could see, I would have called it a
medallion, perhaps, or a mask rather than a key. Though golden in color and appearing circular, I could not distinguish its details.

There was no sign of anyone approaching. Gavi murmured to me that the men from Night and Day Mountains might possibly arrive during the night. I conveyed her words to the group, and we all decided to get some sleep, including the dogs. The willog thrust some of its roots into crevices in the rock before arranging itself against the stone and becoming one with the landscape. When I had spread our sleeping mats, Scramble came to lie down beside me, with Gavi on the other side of her. As I dozed off, I heard Gixit's tiny, tremulous voice talking of…something, interrupted occasionally by Scramble's rumbling mutter.

The full moon was low in the west, its light blocked by the stones behind us, when I was awakened by a stink. We had slept away most of the night, though it was still quite dark. I could hear Gavi breathing, but Scramble was no longer curled against my body. I sat up, eyes gradually adjusting to the combination of reflected moonlight and the blue radiance that bled upward from the giant moss saucer below. Gavi was still there, as were Ornel and Sybil. All the dogs were gone, however, both real and pseudo, and something nearby was generating a feculent, powerful stench.

I rose, careful to make no sound, crouching low as I went to the ledge and looked down. There at the center of the pave, staring at the erect crystal and the surrounding trees were a company of…lizards? Alligators? No. Of course not. Derac! Erect, but with sizable tails they used as props when they stood, as balances when they moved at any speed. Knobby-skinned. Jaws protruding under sizable snouts. A forehead of clustered eyes, three horns sprouting below them. Fangs, yes, their glitter visible even from this distance. They were also heavily armed and armored. I couldn't tell whether the armor was natural or manufactured, but the weapons were large and complicated-looking.

I crept back, put my hand over Gavi's mouth, and shook her slightly. She came awake without a sound, her face
crumpling at the odor. “Wha?” she started to ask, but I muffled her as I whispered into her ear. She rose, and the two of us woke Ornel and Sybil.

“We should get out of here,” Ornel whispered, when he had had a look below.

I shook my head at him, putting my lips near his ear. “We don't know how many there are, or where they are. We're probably safer here than we would be trying to get away.”

Gavi nodded in agreement. “We should be very quiet,” she murmured.

“Where are the dogs?” asked Sybil. “Where's Gixit?”

“Gixit was with Scramble,” I said. “I imagine the smell woke the dogs, and they've all gone into the forest. It would be natural for them to do that. Probably Gixit is still with them.”

We stretched out on the ledge, pillowing our chins on our arms to keep watch on what went on below. More Derac came down from the northern rim of the bowl, and more yet. After I had counted two hundred and there was no diminution of the flow, I gave up the count.

“Where were they headed?” Gavi whispered.

“Gainor thought they'd come to the installation east of the lake. He was wrong.”

“A thousand of our people are coming here,” Gavi persisted. “They need to be warned. I'm in armor. I can go…”

“No,” I said. “Gavi, there's been a huge buildup of the Derac forces. They're probably scattered all through the forest along the lake, maybe on both sides. You don't know where your people are. Won't they have scouts out?”

She shrugged, her hands struggling with one another. “I don't know. Why would they…”

“I can go,” said the small grove of trees that stood beside us on the ledge. It looked so natural there that I had quite forgotten what it was. The willog!

“These toothy ones will not even pay attention to me,” it said, “and I have friends in the area.”

“Please don't talk,” I said. “Or sing. Or hum.”

“You don't want me to have any fun,” it said in an accusing voice.

“I don't want you to be chopped up for firewood,” I said. “Those lizards are carrying axes, among other things.”

“I was making joke,” said the willog, in a slightly offended tone. “Of course I see they have axes. My eyesight is marvelous, fabulous, spectacular…ah, that is almost pun! My sight is better than yours. I have human eyes, also mouse eyes, crab eyes, some bird eyes. Oh, how wonderful to have eyes!”

At the threat of its becoming rapturous once more, I shushed it with a final: “Please, don't attract attention, or we may all end up dead.”

One of its eyes zoomed toward my cheek, fluttered lashes against it in a butterfly kiss, then retreated as the willog trundled away through the stones. I dug my link out of my pack and attempted to reach Gainor. Though I keyed the link several times, I couldn't get through. Ornel was watching me, nodding as though he had foreseen the problem I was having. “The radiation from down there,” he said. “It may foul up any attempts at communication.”

“It has to be biological,” I complained. “Not electromagnetic.”

“You're assuming the two are exclusive,” he said. “It could be biological and electromagnetic. We've encountered a good many such. There's a kind of fish on Thorgov III that…”

“Not now,” said Sybil. “It doesn't matter what the effect is, we can't link outside, and linking outside is the only way we have to get some help.”

“They'll leave,” said Ornel. “If we just stay quiet and don't attract their attention.”

“That's not the point,” I said. “The people from Day and Night Mountains are approaching from the south and north. No matter which direction the Derac go off in, they're likely to encounter one or the other. That's why the willog went northward, to warn the Night Mountain people.”

“Since the Derac came from the north, the southern way is probably clear,” Gavi said. “I'll go that way.”

She stood up and reached for her helmet, readying to go, when we all heard a scrabbling from the rocky slope we had ascended earlier. Gavi disappeared into a crack between two stones, the rest of us followed suit, along with our packs and sleeping mats. We had built no fire, so there was nothing to say we had been here, if whoever…

Whoever was the Derac. Some ten or a dozen of them, filtering in through the cracks in the rim wall, going to the edge to stare down and bellow at their fellows in the battleground. I wished I had one of Paul's lingui-putes. I would have loved to know what they were saying to one another. About half the group went back the way they had come, but six of them stayed where they were, poised at the rim, occasionally turning to left and right to look out over the forest north and south, as though they had been posted as sentinels.

My narrow crevice had no escape route. It made a nicely angled bend, one large enough to hide me completely, but there was no opening through the rock behind me, and I was too close to the Derac to get out without their seeing me. Peeking around the corner, at the stones opposite me, I saw Ornel slide out of concealment and fade back into a large crack toward the west. A little later, I saw a suspiciously crablike creature move in the same direction. That left Sybil and me. If Ornel got far enough away, he could link ESC on the plateau. If Gavi got away, she could warn the people coming from the south. All Sybil and I had to do was stay put, if I could keep my mind on that fact instead of the confused swirl it was in at the moment!

Scramble hadn't wakened me, hadn't warned me! None of the dogs had warned any of us! I had rather depended on them to do that. Being deserted by Ornel and Gavi left me feeling angry and insecure, but Scramble's leaving me was like being wounded! I would never have thought she could
do that. Not if she had a choice. Well, she couldn't abandon me, so she'd had no choice. She'd been lured away somewhere, somehow. Probably by Behemoth. When we came, I'd thought we were in this together, that we were agreed on what our aims were, and all of us were hoping for the same ends. Perhaps that had only been my assumption. Behemoth had never said in so many words that he approved of our plans. And he had never said he would not make plans of his own…

I reminded myself that the puppies were safe. Clare would know what to do for them. Probably the dogs were safe as well, and they knew where the floater was if they needed to get to the plateau. Adam could fly it if he decided to stop being a dog. Unless, for some reason, Behemoth wouldn't let him stop being a dog.

The faint moonlight faded to the west. The blue glow from the moss below was also fading. Along the eastern horizon, a pale greenish line widened like a window being opened. Dawn wasn't far off. I thought it probable that when daylight came, the Derac would continue on their way south, then Sybil and I could escape.

It wasn't to happen. Voices came clearly through the quiet air, people, talking, singing, making a racket. At first I thought it was only from the north I heard them, but it was soon evident that the sound was coming from both directions. The sentinels at the ledge stood up, peering in both directions, then looked down as they made wide arm gestures. Evidently they received silent instructions in return, for they dropped among the stones, weapons at the ready. Now, for a moment at least, they could not see me, and I slipped out of the crack and back among the stones toward the slope. Sybil saw me go by and came after me, a bit wild-eyed, but quietly enough that they did not hear us. We got as far as the back edge of the rim rock, where the downward slope began, when all hell broke loose behind us. Weapons began firing, people were yelling, the Derac were roaring and coughing,
and we stepped out onto the hill to confront half a dozen more Derac coming up the hill at a dead run, jaws agape and slavering.

I have no idea what made me put my hand in my pocket. I didn't consciously reach for anything. I had no picture in my mind. My hand just went there, closed around the vial of STOP that I have carried for years, thumbed up the cover, and as the Derac reached us, stretched out my right arm and spun to the left, throwing an arc of the stuff outward in their faces.

They were moving so fast that they ran over us, carrying us down with them. Some of the stuff got from them onto Sybil. They were choking, she was choking, the thrashing body on top of me was beating me this way and that as it struggled to breathe. I managed to turn half on my side and flip the vial over. Sybil's face was not far from me, under another Derac body. The antidote is a spray, luckily, and it reached her agonized face. She breathed in, then began gasping, little, tortured gasps. I sprayed her again, this time murmuring, “Play dead, Sybil. Lie quiet and play dead!”

I didn't realize the Derac we'd left up on the ledge were joining their kin, but they were on top of us in moments. I shut my eyes and played dead, the vial shoved under my body. The dead Derac on top of me was heaved up, then dropped. Through slitted eyelids I saw the one on top of Sybil also heaved up, then dropped. A burst of babble came from the uphill contingent as I was heaved over a leathery shoulder and carried off, able to see only briefly that Sybil remained where she was. Then my carrier went so quickly around a stone that my head swung against it with a mind-stopping thonk, and that was the last I knew for some time.

 

When I came to, more or less, I was lying in the middle of the saucer, to the south of the column and not far from it. The sky was light, but the sun had not yet risen. I didn't move. There were a dozen or so other bodies around me, most of them in crab armor. One of them might have been
Gavi, but I couldn't see the faces. The Derac, such of them as I could see, lay at the rim of the saucer with tails stretched behind them and weapons pointed outward, a fringe almost as fractally regular as the trees above them. I moved my head very, very slowly, to see if there was a guard nearby. Not that it made any difference. The cordon of Derac at the rim was quite sufficient to keep me from going anywhere. Seeing no one on guard duty, I crept to the closest body and put my fingers to the neck of it, pushing them under the beetle helmet. No pulse. I tried again, and again, finally finding one faint pulse among them. So. Perhaps we were considered dead and had been laid aside for supper.

I turned over slowly, looking upward along the cliff to the ledge we had been occupying. It was a considerable distance, and I couldn't make out any details. I swiveled my eyes toward a faint sound and confronted the monocular lens of an ESC surveillance fish. ESC might be watching, but more likely the output from this fish was merely being recorded to be scanned at some later time. I made the ESC “help” signal that Gainor had taught me years ago, and the thing came down, near my face. “Emergency,” I said. “Top priority. Get this entire scene to Gainor Brandt.” It lifted, did a complete turn, recording everything around the rim, then zoomed off toward the north.

When it left, I was lying on my back, looking almost straight up at the top of the pillar, where the “key” was, by then close enough to be seen clearly. As I had thought, it was sizable and shaped more like a medallion than a key, a medallion bearing a symbol or picture that was startlingly familiar to me, though it took a moment to figure out where I had seen it before. Fuzzy thoughts came and went, my mind dealing them out like a hand of cards. This one? No? Then this one?

It finally came to me: I'd seen this same glyph among Matty's notes for Lipkin Symphony no. 7, third movement, “The Ancient Wall.” A heavy, square outline with rounded corners. Inside that, a stylized image of a Martian and his
dog, a dog that looked a lot like Behemoth. The resemblance was in the way the head and ears were held, the angle of the tail, the shape of the muzzle, the comparative size of the two figures. Though greatly foreshortened by the angle I was seeing it from, it was perfectly recognizable in both senses: as a copy of a Martian glyph and as Behemoth himself.

I was stewing away at some web of correlation, something to do with Zhaar technology having been used on the dogs and the trainers, and the Zhaar seals in the Martian cavern, and the translations that Matty had paid for…I couldn't make it all add up to anything. “Fanciful impressions allowed to take precedence in the absence of hard evidence.” That was what Gainor would call it, but then, I'd had a bang on the head, and it hurt abominably. One or several Derac bellowed into the surrounding forest, receiving no answer. Why were they just lying there?

I fixed my eyes on their tails and tried to count one quarter of the circle. I started over about five times, but eventually counted 150, more or less. Which meant there were six hundred or so all the way around. Which meant…the Derac were outnumbered! They hadn't known about a thousand warriors from each Mountain. They'd come to take out a few people at the ESC installation and only forty-seven at PPI. They'd managed to kill a few scouts from one Mountain or the other, before the full armies arrived and what? Surrounded them? It certainly looked like it.