The Companions (58 page)

I returned to witness the rest of the rite. There was a good deal of harping, singing, and odor squirting, as well as outcries of ecstasy from behind the curtain. Witt had never yelled like that with me, and I found myself in a bit of a snit over it. Then with a flash of intuition, I realized that Witt had been imprinted on concs. Of course he had. I had been a novice, he had been imprinted on another life-form, and we hadn't had Gavi to help. Finally, in the hour just before dawn, we packed up everything and departed, she and her assistant to the floater that was waiting to return her to Loam, I to my bed where I lay down and cried a few more tears, perhaps partly because I had long ago wanted someone to love and had thought Witt was that someone, but more
likely because I was lonely and past the age where I could convince myself that just anyone would fill the void.

Came the morning, Witt and his bride were there to greet his mother and sister. The bride was veiled. Gainor told everyone that Mossian custom demanded a bride should be veiled the first few days of marriage. I was watching the whole thing from inside the nearest building. Though the bride was a good six inches shorter than I, Dame Cecelia didn't notice the difference. I did note Myra looking around, here and there, as though searching for someone. As I had thought, however, Dame Cecelia had never actually looked at me, and she would not have recognized me if she had seen me on the street.

While the group was sharing toasts, Myra sneaked away and made a beeline for the building I was in. Gainor let her go. He had probably told her where I was.

“All right, Jewel,” she said, with some annoyance. “Who is she?”

“Her name is Gemma,” I said. “Call her Jewel, she won't care. She is Witt's true love, and you may believe me when I say he will never love anyone else.”

“
Who
is she!” demanded Myra again.

“A lovely young woman of Loam, one of the provinces here on Moss. Her people were originally from Forêt. She was a virgin at her marriage to Witt. She has a good reputation. She is a skilled tapestry designer. She is physically healthy and quite capable of producing several grandchildren for your mother if Witt is capable, which he may or may not be.”

She waved my explanation aside. “And Witt loves her?”

“He does,” I said firmly. “He will continue to do so even after they fix her face, back on Earth.”

“Aha! So she's ugly?”

“She is quite plain, yes. Here on Moss, they were unable to do anything about that, but I'm sure any beauty surgeon on Earth will be delighted to help a Hessing.”

“How will she put up with Witt?”

I sighed. “You don't understand, Myra. Witt was habituated to concs. That habituation has been erased and forgotten. They are both completely, absolutely in love with one another. Neither he nor she will ever love anyone else.”

“Good Lord. That's possible? You arranged this?”

I said, “Yes. I ‘arranged' it. Such things are often ‘arranged' here on Moss.”

“Mother will scream the ship down!”

“Let her scream. It won't affect Witt. Not after last night. He's been deprogrammed and reprogrammed.” I had only my own example to make me sure it would work, but Gavi had told me she had never failed before and had no reason to think she would fail with Witt and Gemma.

Later that day, several Hessing ships left orbit for return to Earth, including the one Witt was on. I amused myself imagining various scenarios of what had taken place. The simplest was that Witt, thoroughly in love with his wife, had responded immediately to her request (which Gavi had schooled her to make at least twice during every waking hour) that she be taken to Earth where her appearance could be modified, making her more acceptable in her new position in life.

The whole business amused both Gainor and me greatly. We laughed about it. It was rather nice, in a way, to have such a humorous memory, since what was coming had nothing amusing about it.

 

The following day the Tharstian Marshal from IC recessed the meeting indefinitely and then he (she, it, or them) spoke privately with Gainor. Derac and Orskim peoples were at war, he said. Since there were several thousand Derac on Moss, we could probably expect an invasion of Orskimi, or at least a hit-and-run raid. He suggested very strongly that the Earthers, together with all their force fields, shields, buildings, and weapons be moved into the nearest convenient cavern, inasmuch as there were no ships available to evacuate all of us.

I said, “What about the Hessing fleet?”

Gainor snorted. “They're not in a mood to be helpful, Jewel.”

Moving the compound wasn't something that could be done in a few hours, but the ESC staff, together with crews and mechs from both the shuttles and the two small ESC ships in system, made a valiant effort. Luckily, there was a very large cavern nearby, into which mech crews could move the disassembled ESC installation while other crews took apart the PPI structures and moved them as well. None of the shifting about could be done, of course, without the Derac delegation seeing what was going on, and Gainor had to explain that we had “an intimation” we might be attacked and by whom.

That was enough to make the Derac delegation depart at once, in their own shuttle, and in an amazingly short time thereafter, their flotilla of warships soared up from the Derac camp below. As Gainor reminded me, ships don't fight well from the ground. The warriors and chiefs from Day Mountain spent the day finding their own cover and making it look as natural as possible. After several hundred years of practice, they were really very good at it. Walky observed everything that was going on, from start to finish, remarking from time to time that if he could just borrow a floater and bring up a few hundred willogs, the camouflage could be vastly improved. I think I was the only one listening to him, and it occurred to me that while he was right, it would be more useful to make false installations below, where they had been, rather than hide the ones we were moving. I talked to him about doing so, and he grew quite enthusiastic. When evening came, and everyone was too tired to be attentive, Sybil and I took a floater to transport Walky down to the site of our former encampment.

“Do we go back right now, or do we stay and see what Walky does?” Sybil asked me. “Is the attack theoretical or imminent?”

We decided to split the difference and stay for a while.
There would be moonlight later on, and we would be able to see well enough to get the floater back to the cavern. Walky wasted no time. He had not been gone an hour before we began to see a ghost installation rising up where the real one had been. The headquarters building, constructed entirely from moss. The building we had occupied, the refectory, the workrooms and habitations, all rising up complete with windows and doors, even the ornamental mosses set as they had been when I first saw the place. Moss-demons, I thought, had no lock on similitude.

Walky came out to ask how we liked it, and we told him we liked it a great deal, but to remember that if an attack came, these structures might be set afire, or blown up.

“Oh, gracious, yes, Walky is not unintelligent! My, yes, it would not do to put delicate, rare things in the way of such a danger. These are ordinary mosses, easily regrown, and once the guides have put them in place, the guides themselves will go back into the forest. All that will be left will be the mosses, with no voice, no mind. Do not worry, Jewel. I would not commit an ethical misstep. No. Not for all the world!”

“Guides, Walky? What guides?”

Walky beckoned, and the mosses around our feet became alive with tiny creatures, like moving bits of vine, a twig with a leaf or two on its legs, many of them with crab eyes or insect eyes. When Walky called again, they swarmed away.

“Guides are needed to assure distribution of proper growth. Mosses have no minds. They must be pushed, directed, steered, pointed, focused…”

“Thank you, Walky. I think Sybil and I will go back up to the plateau now. Do you want to come with us, or will you stay here?”

“Ah, so kind of you to ask. I will stay. First we must make a simulacrum of the ESC installation, with something in it to make it sparkle, as the real one did. Also, I have been thinking greatly about the kindness of all your people to our World: eyes, ears, voices, wonderful gifts. Also I have been
thinking that the Derac made no gifts. Those who opened the door in the battleground, they have made no gifts. If there is a war, then the willogs will want to fight in it. I am a shepherd of the willogs, and I will stay here to organize our resistance!”

We wished him farewell and went slowly and carefully back to the plateau, arriving there very early the following morning. Both the ESC bubble and the PPI installation were encaverned, and I fell into the bed in my rerelocated house like a single grain of rice into a nutshell, a tiny grain rattling in a vast emptiness. Only Paul was in the same building. I don't know where the concs were. I hadn't seen them since I'd returned.

We were all awakened shortly before dawn when the Orskim ships arrived in orbit and began bombarding the PPI and ESC installations that Walky had built the night before.

Huddled together inside the cavern, we watched the bombardment as it was transmitted to us by the fish in the area. Walky had not only simulated the installation, he had also added simulation to its destruction. Great clouds of spores rose after each hit, red and orange and yellow, followed by billows of black and gray. When the weapons hit the sham ESC, out on the little island, it went up in a great cloud of energetic white and silver.

Duras Drom said, “Our installation would merely have burned, without any of those colorful clouds of smoke, but I must say it looks very dramatic.”

“The Orskimi won't know the difference,” I said. “They've never warred against humans before, have they?”

“An outpost here and there,” said Gainor. “I doubt they'll pay much attention. Their real target is the Derac.”

“Who have gone,” I said.

“Except for warriors hidden back in the trees, ready to take on any landing parties,” Gainor commented. “The Derac warships are hiding behind Treasure at the moment. I imagine they'll be along anytime.”

He was quite right. They came along almost at once, red ships that glowed like embers, attacking silver Orski ships, beams of light flashing from one to the other. Before long, several ships on both sides had been damaged enough that they had to make emergency landings and continue the battle on the ground. During this early stage, we weren't in
volved, we weren't at risk, all the conflict was going on well south of and below us. Gainor maneuvered our fish-eyes to get the best possible view as though we had been at a sporting event. We wanted to be able to foresee the outcome, of course, in order to take appropriate action, but both sides had good body armor that limited fatalities, and neither side seemed to be winning.

There were signs of willog intervention from the beginning. When a warrior of either race bumped against the wrong tree, bush, or thicket, a mad thrashing occurred, and after a time the copse walked off, leaving the resultant corpse behind.

“No collateral damage,” remarked Gainor, approvingly.

That wasn't true in the thick of the battle, which was catastrophic insofar as the landscape was concerned. I saw tree after tree go up in flame, while wooded areas on all sides erupted in showers of mosses, soil, and leaves. A hail of escape pods came from two badly damaged Orskim ships to land north of the battle. They were followed at once by a rain of Derac IMAVs—individual, mobile, armored vehicles—that hit the ground still farther north, establishing a battle line much closer to us than before, and several of us moved out to the edge of the plateau to get a better view.

From our vantage point, it looked as though half of Moss was burning, though the view transmitted by the ESC ships in near space showed fighting going on only in a narrow slice of country between the east side of the lake and an area south of Night Mountain. The slice grew wider and longer with every passing hour, but our plateau, which Gainor assured me looked completely uninhabited from space, remained unthreatened. I didn't care what happened to either the Derac or Orskimi, and the planet would renew itself very quickly, so I admit to feeling a kind of selfish optimism about the eventual outcome.

That mood soon passed when we heard the unmistakable scream of descending ships directly above us. We ran before
we looked, kept running as the sound grew deafening, and stopped only when we were inside the cavern being stifled by a cloud of dust.

Gainor shouted, “By the tonsils of Twivus the Twelve-Throated. It's the Hargess-Hessing fleet!”

Only the first ship was down. The explosion of dust was renewed with each of the several others that landed. I had never seen Gainor move as quickly as he did in reaching the communication center of the ESC bubble, where he repeatedly hailed the captain or captains of the ships. Ignoring the hails, the other ships kept coming down, almost on top of us, the “almost” due solely to good fortune and not to any foresight on their part. Only then did the fleet captain of the Hessing ships respond to Gainor's hail.

The captain's protest that he had been sent to “Protect Hessing-Hargess interests,” did nothing to assuage Gainor's fury, particularly inasmuch as the Derac had seen the ships and decided to attack them, an onslaught that began before the last ship had even landed. Hessing ships were far superior to Earthian military ships, a fact that resulted in recurrent congressional hearings on Earth. Earth's Navy was required to deal with Earthian manufacturers, but Hessing ships were known to have not only the latest armaments but also the newest technology from anywhere in the galaxy. They were so well shielded that while the Derac bombardment could keep them on the surface, the ships themselves were undamaged. That no doubt annoyed the Derac, for in short order several larger ships showed up, and our “safe” plateau went up in flame. The only shelter was the cavern, where we had all moved into the ESC bubble, which had been designed as protection against indigenous and usually non- or low-tech hostiles on survey planets and was totally inadequate to the current circumstances.

The Hessing captain apologized profusely, saying he hadn't been informed there were any people where he had decided to land. His assertion was preposterous, as Gainor
well knew. Not twelve hours before, Dame Cecelia herself had been on this same site, and we all knew her ships had her located down to the exact millimeter.

“Who ordered you to set down here?” Gainor asked.

The order had been given long before the battle started, and it had come from Dame Cecelia Hessing, who told them it was a perfect place to set down.

“I think your little jest with Witt and his mama has just backfired,” Gainor told me through gritted teeth.

“Do you mean to tell me that she would…” And I stopped, because it was obvious she would. It had been obvious from the first moment I had set eyes on her in the University Tower that she would. What Dame Cecelia wanted, Dame Cecelia got, or she killed it so no one else could have it. What were fifty people, more or less? What were half a dozen Hessing ships and their crews if she could get even with me along with them?

It was too late to do anything about it. The Hessing ships couldn't take off without turning off the shields, they couldn't turn off the shields because the Derac had been joined by several Orski ships who figured any non-Orski ship was a target, no matter who it was.

In the space of a quarter hour we had moved from sensible safety to desperate danger and ended up doing what desperate people do. We ran, all of us but one. When Gainor and I went to get Paul, he insisted upon being left in the cavern to get on with his work. Gainor told him a direct hit would destroy him along with his work, but Paul was utterly oblivious to the risk. When he was working, nothing short of being actually blown apart could interrupt him.

The rest of us, Drom's people from PPI, Ornel's people from ESC, Gainor, and I gathered up whatever survival packs, weapons, and communication equipment we could pack on half a dozen tiny, two-man floaters that were guided by tethers as we went. In my own pack I had a lingui-pute and the prototype odor organ, which I had taken from the ESC dome moments after leaving Paul. No one knew I had
it, and it certainly wasn't mine to take, but I was not going to leave it to be destroyed even though I knew the Phain already had a device that was probably its superior. The Phain were not known to be generous, and I felt we humans needed anything that would help us communicate with other races, including the two very nasty ones who were intent upon killing us at the moment.

“Do we try to reach Loam, or one of the other Night Mountain tribes?” I asked Gainor. “I have a map that shows where they are.”

“Better we just get down into the forest, where it'll be warmer,” he commented, breathlessly. “It wouldn't be quite fair to involve Night Mountain people by leading the enemy directly to them. We brought this on the world, they didn't.”

“Don't say we brought this on the planet. The Derac did, if anyone.”

“Whatever you say,” he puffed. “I've already messaged IC for assistance as well as the ESC fleet. We'll have help eventually, but it may take a while.”

We waited for a lull that gave us time to get into the slanting cleft used by ascending floaters. The rift was all that remained of a onetime waterfall. Though smoothed to some extent by the flow, it had been littered with boulders fallen from either side, and it made a continuous if somewhat tortuous route to the bottom. We scampered down, that is, some of us scampered. Others of us half dropped, half fell, crawled, and in difficult spots, hung by our fingers.

During a momentary halt to choose between a nasty climb to the left or a worse one to the right, I asked Gainor, “Where's the Tharstian Marshal from IC now that we need him?”

“Up there somewhere.” Gainor jerked his head toward the sky. “Tharstians don't stay on planets any longer than they have to. As soon as he warned me, he left. I hope he remembers we're friends.”

We clambered over ten thousand uncooperative stones, and then we rested before dropping and falling over another
ten thousand. We stopped for lunch, then trotted along a fairly level path for a mile or so, counted noses to be sure we were all there, before another clamber. There's nothing interesting to say about it. We were bruised and cold, we were tired, by the time evening came we were wet with rain, and most of us were sharing a very bad mood. We had not, however, attracted attention from the combatants since our route was well hidden by the depth and narrowness of the cleft. We were forced into no adventurous detours; we had no reason to take cover; we simply followed the route all the way to the bottom, arriving there to find the battle much closer than we had expected or desired.

After a brief breather on the level, the time spent watching the nearest explosions through the trees, we began working our way eastward around the base of the cliffs, away from the fighting. Gainor was still keeping track of the overall situation, and he told us more and more warriors from both sides were now on the ground, fighting from hastily erected fortifications. I warmed up a little when my clothes began to dry, and I recall being momentarily and stupidly cheerful about the whole thing. I told myself the fighting would inevitably dwindle, and, at some point, the warriors would leave the planet.

We had not figured on encountering another set of warriors until a boyish voice cried, “Halt and be recognized!”

They hailers turned out to be half a dozen youngsters from Day and Night Mountains. We identified ourselves with some difficulty, since the boys, who were little more than children, had never heard of us. We were obviously human, however, so they invited us into their supply depot, nicely placed between a bulwark of fallen boulders in front and a sheltering overhang in the cliff behind. The lads had been set to guard a huge pile of supplies left there by a group of bellicose volunteers.

“Day or Night Mountain?” I asked one of the brighter-seeming lads.

“Oh, both, ma'am. We all want to get into it. A lot of the
Day Mountain folk stayed here in the north after the fight with the Derac! Some had wounds to heal from or they found wives among the Night Mountain girls, and some of the Night Mountain folk decided to go back with us and look for wives themselves. Today was the day we were to set out for home. When we got this far, they sent the women back up to the top and decided they weren't about to sit about while there was fighting going on!”

“They're fighting each other, not you,” I said.

“They got in our way, they did. That's reason enough,” said a slightly older youth who still regarded us with some suspicion. “And if it weren't, we've got reason enough for those lizards ambushing us near the battleground.”

“So you're fighting on the side of the Orskimi?” cried Gainor.

“Is that who they are?” a guard asked. “Well, whoever they are, we'll help them get rid of the alligators.”

Gainor said through his teeth, “The Orskimi are more dangerous than the Derac, and if your men get in among them, they'll come back dead.”

The boys seemed to have difficulty comprehending that possibility and no idea at all what might be done to prevent it. The upshot of it was that Gainor and I decided that, since the warriors were on foot, we could probably catch up to them on a floater while the rest of our people went on around the plateau to a place of relative security.

Duras Drom offered to go with us. So did Sybil and Ornell, but Gainor thought the two of us would be quickest and quietest alone. While he and Drom unloaded the floater, I took a few moments to talk to Sybil.

“Unload a floater for yourself,” I said. “Go on along the cliffs to the east, not very far, until you come to another deep cleft in the plateau. You'll know it's the right one if you see three falls close to the right of it, two low ones and a very high one in the middle that comes all the way down from the rimrock. Take the floater up to the top and yell for someone
to get in touch with Gavi Norchis of the Tribe Loam. Give her this message from me. ‘Jewel has the instrument you practiced on and she needs you to play it.'”

“What instrument is that?” Sybil asked.

“You don't need to know,” I said. “What you do need to know is that getting to her with that message may save all our lives.” I had no proof of that. In fact, it may have been one of my episodic incidents of self-dramatization that Gainor had so often deplored. It was only a feeling, perhaps one of those feelings Aunt Hatty had suggested I should pay more attention to. “Lend Gavi the floater to follow us. Better yet, you follow us and bring her. Gainor and I are both wearing locators.”

She made note of the locator frequencies, and within moments Gainor and I were off. Riding was actually a rest from the climbing we'd been doing, and we spelled one another at the controls, following the easy trail left by, I said, several score intrepid and very stupid men. Gainor said “not stupid, but ill informed,” and once again chided me for making judgments without sufficient evidence.