The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper
“Then the Derac are a real danger,” I said.
“The Derac are definitely a real danger. Yes. We’ve got that base of theirs ringed with observer fish. When things start to happen, we’ll know about it. Right now I’m wondering how we should act toward those people up on the plateaus. We can’t pretend we don’t know about them forever.”
“Let’s do the natural thing,” I suggested. “The only person we have to protect is Gavi Norchis, because she gave us some sensitive information, but if we go visit the derelict ships, we will no doubt discover her people as a consequence of that visit. Accidental discovery will leave her in the clear.”
“I have a more immediate problem,” said Abe Durrow. “If the Mossen aren’t people, but merely the utterance of people, then are the word growers the actual Mossen people? Or is there another link in this chain? Does some other thing make the thing that makes the plants that make the Mossen? Several times, Jewel, you mentioned this Gavi person as saying, ‘We have peace with Moss,’ and ‘the planet leaves us alone.’ Did you see any redmoss around the plateau?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Perhaps that’s part of leaving them alone? I’d love to know, who the actual speaker is on this world.”
I had considered Gavi’s words to be merely a figure of speech, as I myself might have said, “Earth suffers from too many people,” and though I’d wondered who the real speaker might be, I hadn’t gone so far as Abe had just done.
“They may have…parts underground I didn’t see,” I offered. “They could have huge roots. What might we be looking for, a kind of vegetable brain?”
“If it’s underground,” said Sybil, “then it might be a network, several of them or maybe one enormous network that extends all over the planet. New plants sending down roots to join onto old ones?”
“Or equally,” said Lethe, “the talker part could be responding to instruction from some other organism. In the absence of any data at all, we don’t know.”
“Until we know,” Gainor Brandt told them with some emphasis, “we don’t destroy or hurt anything. What we will do is send an ESC team onto the plateau to look at the ships. When we find some evidence for survival of the crews and passengers, we’ll start looking for them, and we’ll send a statement to IC saying Earth has a prior claim on the planet.”
“Pretending we don’t know that something on this planet has the only legitimate claim?” I asked. “That is, assuming the bark message wasn’t written by some PPI oldster who wanted to stir things up.”
“A prior claim by Earth can serve as a…transitional belief,” Gainor said affably. “We’ll support that claim only until it’s proven that an indigenous intelligence exists. The Derac will make enough out of the system either way. They made a big profit out of Treasure, and they’ll still be doing very well out of their bonanza on Stone.”
“When the Hessings get involved, they’ll want to search for Witt,” said I. My face felt odd, as though it might be frozen.
“If we can establish that the connection exists, they probably will,” Gainor agreed, giving me a quizzical look. “You look rather reluctant, Jewel.”
I shrugged, unwilling and unable to put my feelings about it into more specific words, but reluctance wasn’t far off the mark.
THE LANGUAGE
The odor sensors set up by the ESC, so the crew chief remarked to me, could detect and analyze over a million odors that had been identified by any one or more of the 512 races who had nose equivalents, on any of the 9052 IC member worlds. All these odors had names; in some cases, such as one odor called variously “burned dung,” “sweet-weed,” and “dead body,” widely variant names assigned by different races. For nonlabeled odors, the chromatograph units on the smellers simply identified the chemical constituents and the molecular structure, compared it to those odors that were chemically closest, and assigned it a name as descriptive as possible. In this they were aided by lexicons of terms used to describe wines and perfumes as long ago as the twentieth century.
By evening, the equipment had been thoroughly tested. I had suggested that they space several detectors around the circle, at some distance from one another, to determine whether, in fact, each Mossen delivered multiple scents. Lethe and Durrow had decided to link the odor apparatus to the visual and aural recorders, so that analysts would have access to simultaneous sight and smell.
During all this process of setup and conference, Paul was notably absent. Once evening fell, however, he came out of the house dragging a chair, seated himself upon it, folded his arms, and paid attention to what was happening. Seeing him, Gainor Brandt strolled over, hunkered down beside him, and exchanged a few words in a pleasant voice, to which Paul replied volubly, with gestures.
Gainor returned to the group of noncon-suited ESC people near where Frank and I were leaning on the low limb of a convenient tree. The dogs lay in a wide circle in front of us, noses ready. Gainor moved about, eventually stopping beside me to say, sotto voce, “Your brother claims he’d have made more headway if he hadn’t been distracted by those dogs of yours. That annoyed me, so I told him you’d found out about the odor language because of the dogs, that we were considering using dogs in our own linguistic work.”
“And how did he react to that?” I murmured.
“I don’t think he liked it, but he shut up. Is he really good at this work?”
“He really is, Gainor. If we can give him anything decent to work with, he’ll probably come up with a lexicon for you, and possibly a syntax. He’s just…”
“A pain in the ass,” grunted Gainor. “Where’s Adam? And Clare?”
“Down at the far end, away from people,” I said. “Seeing what they can…detect.”
“Good for them,” grunted Gainor, as he turned to rejoin his ESC people.
“Why doesn’t he wear a noncon suit?” asked Frank.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I do know he wants to change the ESC protocols on planets where both ESC and PPI are working, but the Earth Enterprises medical committee won’t do it. They say the risk of transporting a slow virus back to Earth is so enormous that it’s foolhardy to give up any protective measures unless the ESC plans to stay in quarantine whenever they’re on Earth, the way the PPI do. If all life on the planet is botanic, rather than zoologic, they can cut that time way down.”
Frank said, “With all those crabs and beetles and mouse types you brought, plus the survivors up on the mesas, it’s clear this isn’t a purely botanic planet anymore.”
I replied, “The survivors have been here for a couple of hundred years. A virus slow enough to exceed twice the normal life span can’t do much damage, which is probably what Gainor thinks, too, though he did point out the survivors have been up there, not down here.”
“Look,” whispered Frank. “Here they come.”
And they did come, the usual pack of them, though now I saw them through informed eyes not as a disorderly milling of individuals, but as chains, all about the same length, some of them connecting with others during their assembly in mid meadow before spooling out, one after the other. Little lights came on in the equipment around the meadow. The dance began, and I noted almost subconsciously that the order was the same as it had been, at least in color. The same sequences went by, departed, joined others that went by and departed, again and again. I also noticed that the Mossen turned in the dance, rotating their bodies with successive sets of tendrils, a different edge or side of them facing outward until they had turned completely around, repeating and repeating. It wasn’t an obvious turning. I had to watch for sets of tendrils letting go to be sure of the movement. Finally the Mossen began to swell. I actually saw it. I noted the slight puffiness of outline, the slight increase in buoyancy, saw the tendrils straighten to make more room between them, more room between themselves and the moss carpet beneath them. The wind lifted the carpet; the whole thing fluttered upward before exploding, softly, breaking into shards of rosy amber. One of them fell near
The meadow had not been floodlighted during the dance. Only a few isolated lamps had illuminated the spectacle. The ESC technicians were busy with the equipment again. Gainor came to my side, whispering, “I’ve asked Lethe’s people to come up with a synthesizer, a kind of odor organ that can be programmed to issue the dance scents in order. I thought you might take it to your pal up by the plateau and see what she thinks of them.”
“Seven-day interval,” I replied. “That’s the earliest I can signal. That’d be…let’s see, this is day five. If I want to meet her as soon as possible, I leave day after tomorrow, and you signal that night. We may have to wait one day at the other end, but there’s a chance she’ll meet us a little early.”
“That should give my people time.”
“Thanks, Gainor. And thanks for not making me break my promise to Gavi Norchis. I have a hunch she’ll be of great use to us if we can let her do things her way.”
Gainor nodded. “I’m going to tell Paul we’ll have something for him tomorrow. Do you want to sit in on the results? You might have some insight. Lethe’s already sure we’re getting multiple scents from most single Mossen.”
“What did he see?”
“Those things we thought might be eyes seem to be emitters arranged in six vertical zones around the body, each separated from the adjacent zones by rows of tendrils. The body is actually hexagonal, though the angles are softened when the body is inflated. As the body turns, it presents different sets of emitters, and sometimes the same smell is presented several times during one pass.”
“I saw that, too, Gainor. Is a doubling like a double letter? An emphasis? A doubled meaning?”
“I have no idea. Do you want to sit in?”
I shook my head. “I’m intrigued, but not tonight. I’m…wearier than I should be. Too many things happening. I’d rather spend tonight with the dogs.”
He lowered his voice. “They may have something to tell you, in any case.”
Which was what I had been counting on.
Adam and Clare returned to their quarters the long way around, through the forest, and in through the southern door, which could not be observed from any other place in the compound. Both were still in dog shape, though they began the process of returning to their own form as soon as they were inside, with the doors closed. By unspoken agreement, they chose to do so in the hallway, where there were no windows, and I compulsively checked the doors several times to be sure they were locked. When they were changed enough to put their clothing back on, they went into their own rooms and lay quietly, letting their bodies change themselves. Only when their mouths and palates had returned to virtual normal did they come into my room, to sit against the wall and share the experience.
“It was…remarkable,” said Adam. “For the most part, we have no idea what they were saying, but Clare and I agree there was a carrot and a stick in the message. We detected smells like a slap in the face, like the one on the moon, as well as enticing smells. Don’t do this, do that, seems to be the message. Dead body smells could be interpreted as either a threat or a warning, I suppose. There were sweat smells, a hell of a lot of sweat smells.
“Effort,” I said, after a moment. “Humans sweat when they work. Plants don’t. They’ve picked up our smell for work…”
“Which would explain that ambient sequence. Sweat, then the ambient odor, then nothing, then sweat again.”
“When you say ‘nothing’…?”
“We mean nothing,” said Adam. “Among their odors, they have one that simply wipes every smell away. It’s like being in a sterile glass bottle unable to smell even yourself. It gets rid of everything, even the ambient odors of the planet. Since I doubt it could really overcome the ambient odor, what it no doubt does is block our sensors for a brief moment. You’ll get a sniff of an odor, then get hit with nothingness, then another sniff the same, and again nothingness.”
“So that sequence you mentioned might mean…?”
“It might mean, it’s a lot of work to make a world,” said Clare.
“Or,” Adam said, “It could mean persons, human, are working too much in the world.”
“Or,” said Frank, “that we ought to get our stinky selves gone and leave the world alone.”
“What do the dogs say?” I asked.
Clare replied, “Behemoth says it’s talking to us, not angry. Scramble says it wants to talk to us and has been working hard to reach us, but we don’t respond.”
“Scramble said all that!”
“Scramble said the message was: moss try talk, no talk, try talk again very hard, no talk, why no talk.”
“And how do they say talk?” asked Frank.
Clare said, “Scramble says their smell (evidently the Mossen have a smell of their own that’s distinct from the ones they emit) and then our smell and then them and us and them and us.”
“Talk,” I marveled. “Though it could equally well be fight, or battle. Them and us or them versus us. No. Battle would involve death, so there’d be dead and blood smells. Gainor’s bunch has a synthesizer they’ll program to emit the message we got tonight. We’ll leave for the plateau day after tomorrow, and he’ll signal Gavi Norchis that night, by which time we ought to be near the plateau. Did anyone notice how many chains it took to make the whole message?”
“A chain being?”
“The number we saw on the branch. That’d be one chain. Some of them hooked up with others, I noticed.”
“The ESC can probably tell you,” said Adam. “The whole thing had a lot of redundancy.”
Tomorrow I would ask Gainor Brandt, and I’d tell him what interpretations the dogs had come up with.
The morning after the Mossen had danced, Gainor came over to Paul’s quarters carrying several large data boards displaying the smells emitted the night before together with notes (including some unattributed ones from the trainers and the dogs) that identified some smells or the category of the smell, or, if category could not be identified, giving it a label. Also included were lists of the smells in order, including repetitions and separations from individual Mossen as well as from Mossen chains that were duplicated.
“On the theory,” Gainor said, “that each Mossen is a word or short phrase and each chain is the equivalent of a sentence.”
I stood in the door, listening, as Gainor went over the material with Paul, concluding, “Both the ESC and the PPI people are exploring the nearby moss forests with scent detectors, recording different smells and what they are. For example, you’ll find a series in there that seems to be varying stages in moss rot, starting with the fresh and concluding with compost. We’ll do some digging and see if that interpretation is accurate. We’ll find out if fresh redmoss has a smell. We’ve already established that the moss-demon did have a smell. Jewel was thoughtful enough to grab a sample while the grabbing was going on.
“One of the odors they used quite a bit was human sweat. We don’t know, of course, what it means to them, but since they also used our own clean body smell, sweat smell probably doesn’t mean human.”
“Work,” said Paul. “Effort. Exertion. Struggle.”
“Quite possibly. Or, weight lifting, or building, or running, or…”
“I’ll get to work on it,” said Paul, dismissively. He had that look on his face. This was the first real material he’d had to work with since getting to Moss, and I could see he was eager to begin.
Gainor bowed himself out and we went down to my quarters, where we found Scramble sitting in the sun, surrounded by puppies. Though they were too young to sense it as anything beyond warmth, she had brought them out into the sunshine.
He joined me on the ground. “Scramble’s litter,?
“Any day now. If they have five each, we’ll have over twenty dogs here, Gainor. I’ve been concerned about pollution, so I took a walk early this morning, to see what happened where they’ve been defecating. Everywhere they’ve been, the moss has covered it. Where they pee, on the other hand, there is some damage to some organisms and no damage to others. So, I’ll tell them to pee where it won’t hurt anything.”
“Lethe told me about the conc business,” Gainor remarked. “About Paul putting one of his into the redmoss.”
“I didn’t know whether to feel outrage or pity,” I said.
“Whatever’s in the conc cellular makeup that kills bacteria and viruses might keep the redmoss from duplicating them,” he mused.
“Possibly. The dogs haven’t found anything that smells like Poppy except the redmoss where it lay down.”
“I wonder what the Orskimi made them from, assuming they did make them,” Gainor mused.
“God knows,” I said, feelingly. “I was thinking how good it was they didn’t spread disease, but that could be changed in the wink of an eye, couldn’t it? As disease disseminators, they’d be perfect. I’m thinking back to the AIDS and Ebola epidemics of the twentieth century.”
Gainor said, “If they start to show up in the colonies, I think we can accept that we’re under attack. There’s no doubt the Orskimi are using Zhaar technology.”
“You mean to modify their slave race?”
“Races, plural. One of them is a kind of sucker fish that hangs on their bodies and eats dried skin or detritus. They call them klonzi. Also, as I learned recently, their legs are actually the leg segment of another race that’s been beheaded and fitted onto each infant Orski.”
“When the Zhaar did stuff like that, somebody wiped them out, Gainor.”
“That’s what is said, though equally, they might have gone away,” he said in an expressionless voice. “If they were wiped out, you’d think someone, some race would have taken the credit for doing it.”