The Companions by Sheri S. Tepper
“And someone told me they were already here,” he snarled. “What’s going on?”
He headed toward the ESC installation, and I went to the house, where I found Clare stretched out on her bed. When I came in, she sat up, saying, “They’re gone.”
“Where did they go?”
“Behemoth wanted to see the battleground. Adam borrowed a floater. He and Frank and all the dogs have gone.”
“And you’re just telling me about it now?”
“I didn’t know until a few moments ago when I came in here and found Adam’s note.” She offered it to me, and I read it, cursing silently. I should have paid more attention when Adam had told me Behemoth was the alpha dog!
“Adam says they’re going south around the bottom of the lake and then up the west side,” I said. “I imagine we can find them.”
“If you think that’s wise,” she said.
I sat down. “Clare, the Derac have heavy armament, and they’ll use it at the least provocation. If the dogs are in the way, they can all be killed, and if so, that’s it for the dog project. Years of work for nothing. All that work stocking the moon, for nothing. If they keep the puppies safe, but the adult dogs are killed along with Frank and Adam, that’s still it. The puppies aren’t weaned. Even if we raised them, they wouldn’t be able to hunt without learning it from someone, just as the big dogs learned it from you three, two of whom would be dead.”
“I wasn’t very good at it, either,” said Clare. “All I had to do was chase along to illustrate pack behavior. Adam and Frank make much better dogs than I do.”
“I’m going to link Gainor,” I told her. “Wait here. Don’t, for heaven’s sake decide to go off on your own. I think Gainor is going to want to go with us.”
I had some difficulty explaining to Gainor why Adam and Frank had behaved as they did.
“When they’re in dog shape, they’re dogs,” I shouted, finally, after trying several times without shouting. “They think like dogs. They believe they are dogs, which is why the trainers were modified in the first place. We believed we needed a role model for the puppies! Adam and Frank taught Behemoth and the rest of the pack how to hunt! You can’t expect Adam and Frank not to act like properly subordinate dogs when they are dogs. Subordinate dogs follow the leader, and Behemoth is the leader.”
He cursed under his breath, calling upon several Tharstian gods. “You’ll have to go after them without me, because I have to stay here to oversee contact between our people and the current residents. I’ll send Ornel and Abe and Sybil…”
“Not in noncon suits, Gainor. We don’t have time to fiddle with stuff.” Eating and excreting were equally difficult in noncon suits, not to speak of the limited time they gave people before the suit had to be flushed and resupplied. Gainor mumbled for a while before deciding I was right, and less than half an hour later the three ESC people were on a floater outside my door, where Clare and I joined them. During all this, I don’t think Paul was aware of anything except what he was doing. I had heard recurrent gleeful shouts from his quarters, his usual habit when something he tried came out right, so I presumed he was making good progress on the language.
The floater we had was a giant step up from the little one we’d used previously. It had both high-speed and high-altitude capability, which enabled us to fly low over the plateau, angle downward through the canyon, and then speed at low level toward the former PPI site, arriving there in only an hour or so. By that time, it was getting dark, so we descended into the forest and used our landing lights to pick up the trail of the other floater. It didn’t take us long to find rumpled mosses and broken twigs leading more or less southwest, around the edge of the lake and far enough from it that no one would have observed them from the shore.
Ornel and Abe took the first watch; Clare, Sybil, and I curled up on the cushioned floor and tried to sleep. There among the trees, our speed couldn’t be any greater than those we were following. Every grove and tree meant a detour, and the trail itself wasn’t straight but wandering, as though the dogs had gone first, sniffing out things that interested them, while the floater followed, bearing puppies and occasional nursing mothers.
Every time I thought of the puppies and the Derac anywhere in proximity, I got a sick lump in my throat. We had all worked so hard to give this race of animals a place of its own, and now that work was threatened in a way I had never foreseen. Behemoth and the other dogs were no doubt intelligent, we could all testify to that, but they were uninterested in or impatient with things like politics and human conflicts. They simply didn’t recognize that dogs were at the mercy of human problems.
At about the middle of the night, Abe woke me and Clare, and we took over for him and Ornel. “We’re headed up the long northwest shore of the lake,” he said. “But it’s still a wandering trail. I spoke to Ornel about just striking a line directly to the place they’re headed for, but he thought it was better to follow them, in case something happened to them en route.”
I agreed with Ornel, so I drove while Clare used the night-vision screen to find the trail. We came to a stretch of un-forested country, all low mosses, and made good time crossing it, only to be slowed down again when we entered the forest on the far side. It was getting light when I stopped the floater so I could go off into the shrubbery for a few moments. When I returned, Abe and Sybil had broken out the rations and made coffee in the food service unit built into the floater.
When Sybil sat beside me with her plate, I noticed her pocket moving and touched it questioningly. A small head poked out, fuzzy, with large ears and huge eyes.
“Gixit,” she said. “The rest of the family are up at the ESC.”
The little creature gave me a look of surprise and dived back into her pocket, from which it peeked at me at intervals, accompanying itself with a long soliloquy that sounded to me like speech. “Do they talk?” I asked Sybil.
“They chatter,” she said, dismissively. “It isn’t language.”
I regarded the little thing with a skeptical eye. It had certainly sounded like language to me. Perhaps it was the result of my having lived with Paul all those years. Anything sounded like language. We didn’t take long with breakfast. By the time the sun was above the horizon, we were on our way again.
Our positional navigation system put us halfway up the side of the lake when we spotted something ahead that was not moss or tree. We stopped the floater and went forward on foot. The something turned out to be the other floater, half-covered with leaves and moss branches. I heard a welcoming woof and turned to one side to find Scramble in a mossy nest, well hidden behind a half-rotten tree. She was guarding all three litters of puppies.
“Scramble,” I half shouted. “Why are you all risking the puppies like this? Don’t you know they could be killed? There are Derac out there. I’m sure they’d love puppy for dinner, and maybe dog, as well.”
She gave me a long, level look that told me I was overreacting. After all, here she was, with all the puppies, and nothing disastrous had happened.
The look wasn’t enough to stop me. “And if Veegee and Dapple get killed? I suppose you have enough milk for all three litters!”
“You ahv,” she said.
I trusted she didn’t mean me, personally, but the resources of the base. Since she wasn’t at all remorseful, yelling at her would do no good.
While the others brought the floater up, I sat down on the fallen tree, wiping my face with the backs of my dirty hands, surprised to find that I’d actually been weeping. It was relief, I suppose. I’d been half-convinced we’d find them all dead.
“What is Behemoth after?” I asked Scramble. “What does he want?”
“Hearsh oishes,” she said.
“Voices? Whose?”
She shrugged. “Hearsh in win. Shay comm.”
“When did he hear these voices in the wind?”
“Heer, mahsh.”
“Here on Moss? Since we first got here?”
She nodded.
The dogs had good ears, but then, so did I, and I had heard nothing of the kind. Unless, of course, the sound range had been above human hearing, in that particularly shrill range that only dogs and bats can hear. Or unless…
“Hear, Scramble? Or maybe, smell?”
“Smell,” she conceded. “Mai’ee.”
This was an all-purpose “maybe” word meaning she didn’t know, wasn’t sure. My mind was full of ugly visions, visions of the other dogs being slain, hurt, incapacitated, and Scramble left here alone. She whined, and I looked up.
“Ai no yu comm,” she said. “Always no yu comm.”
“Yes,” I whispered to her, putting my arms around her. She knew I would always come to love and protect her. I knew she would always come to love and protect me. We were friends, and she had depended on that.
Also, she’d been reading my mind, as usual.
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “You were the one who decided to stay here, with the puppies, because you knew I’d come? You knew they’d be in danger. You didn’t want Behemoth to take them in the first place?”
She looked away from me with that impenetrable gaze she sometimes wore. She agreed with what I’d said, but she wasn’t going to be disloyal to Behemoth by admitting it.
I put my head against hers and murmured nothing at her, letting her know I understood what she’d been up against, letting her know she hadn’t betrayed our friendship, not in any way. She put her nose against my neck, just below the jaw. I think it was a way of saying, “You’re safe with me here. I would take the throat out of anyone who harmed you…”
Clare and the others brought our floater up. She and I held a brief colloquy about what should be done next. I wanted the puppies up on the plateau, where there were people who could feed them and care for them if something happened to their parents, someone who would know exactly what to do, even if no adult dogs were…available, ever. I spoke through my teeth, trying not to make unseemly noises of grief. The very thought hurt.
Clare said, “It’s got to be me, Jewel. There are only two of us here with any idea about it, and you need to go on, to see what’s happening. If someone will go with me to drive the floater, I’ll take the puppies back to ESC.”
I put the matter to Abe and Sybil, and Abe agreed eagerly, giving me the strong impression that the sooner he returned to the protection of the force screens, the happier he would be.
I explained to Scramble, asking her if she wanted to go with them or go on farther, with us. When I assured her the puppies could be fed and cared for, she said she would go with us. She meant, go be with Behemoth, and we both knew it.
“Abe,” I said, “keep low and stay away from the lake until you’re well back on the other side. We don’t want the Derac to see you.”
“Don’t they have traffic screens?” Clare asked. “We’ll show up on them, no matter how low we are.”
“They may have, but we’ve had ships landing fairly regularly, plus floaters going here and there. Remember how we traveled to and from the plateau yesterday, and keep yourselves at treetop level until you’re shielded by rock. A long diagonal line from here to the top of the plateau will catch their attention where a low-flying floater won’t.”
“You want me to come back with the floater?” Abe asked, somewhat grudgingly. “There may not be room on that other one for all of you.”
“I’m sure Gainor already has fish watching the battleground. Ask him to keep an eye on them, and when things settle down, after the battle, we’ll expect someone to come pick us up.”
The four of us who were left took up our packs and began following the trail on foot, Scramble in the lead, Sybil and I behind her, and Ornel bringing up the rear.
TOWARD THE BATTLEGROUND
We made better time than I had expected, as Scramble was able to differentiate between a dog detour and a trail that went continuously forward. We climbed for the first part of the journey, a gentle rise that continued upward for some time before descending again almost to the level of the lake, which sparkled at us intermittently, off to our right. The sun swung above us and as our shadows began to lengthen toward the east, I felt a sense of oppression, a kind of smothering weight on the eyes and the ears, a stuffed-up feeling. I wasn’t alone. Ornel cursed under his breath and stopped at the edge of a small clearing to dig through his pack for some kind of medicament to clear his eyes.
I said. “I feel it, too. It could be some kind of…scent curtain, perhaps. Can you smell anything?”
Though he said he couldn’t smell anything, I certainly did, an elusive and wholly novel odor, not nasty or disgusting, but admonitory, all the same. I called to Scramble, and when she returned to us, I asked her what the smell was.
“Is laish lon umun,” she said.
“This place belongs to someone,” I translated for Ornel’s and Sybil’s benefit. “It’s a keep out sign. No trespassing.”
I wasn’t sure they heard me, both of them staring at Scramble as though she’d grown another head. Finally, Sybil shook herself, saying; “We must be getting close to the battleground. I doubt the warriors will smell it if we don’t.”
“But wouldn’t they be likely to?” I asked. “Gavi Norchis told me they were all ‘noses’ back on Forêt.”
“She was also telling you not to talk about her,” said a voice.
We turned. My two companions gasped as Gavi herself edged into view from behind a nearby tree, complete with crab armor except for the hideous head, which was under her arm.
“I am meeting you strangely, Jewel Delis,” she said.
“I am meeting you happily,” I responded, surprised at the jolt of pure joy that had struck me at her appearance. “We were just talking about the smell. Scramble says it means keep out.”
“It is meaning that.” She shrugged. “But it is being only a caution smell, not a punishment. It is warning World is using to keep creatures from danger. Battleground is dangerous, so, it warns creatures away.”
“Are the warriors already there?” I asked.
“No. When they are camping for the night, I am continuing along trail. I am always liking to know what is around, what kinds of things are growing, where are hiding places, where are trees for climbing. When I am getting to battleground, I am deciding to go around it, to be seeing what is here on every side.”
“What about Day Mountain? Have they arrived?”
Gavi shook her head. “Not yet. Who are these people?”
I apologized for not introducing her earlier and promptly did so. Ornel bowed over her hand, Sybil nodded as Gixit looked out of her pocket and trilled. This enchanted Gavi, and nothing would do but that we sit down in the clearing, build a fire, brew tea—to counteract the stuffiness, so Gavi said—and play with the little creature. I had to confess, we were all in a better mood afterward, including Scramble, who let Gixit lie on her shoulder and talk into one velvet ear, occasionally rumbling a response.
Gavi questioned what we were doing there, of course, so I told her about Behemoth’s adventure. “Adam repeated what you said about the dogs being included in the message from the World, and I guess Behemoth was determined to see for himself.”
“I have been sniffing same message several times since,” Gavi said. “Always, they are emitting question about four legs. Do they wish to come through? They are not saying come through what, and it is confusing, not?”
“You didn’t encounter the dogs on your way here?” Ornel asked.
“No. But I have not yet been going all around battleground,” she said. “If dogs are wanting to watch, they would be going westward a little, where is being higher ground.”
Gavi and I put the paraphernalia away while Ornel drowned the fire with what was left of the tea. We were just about to pick up our packs and proceed once more when Gixit squealed and ran for Sybil’s pocket. Scramble put her head up, drew her lips back, and rumbled a warning as she stared through the trees toward the glimmer of the lake. In a moment I caught
Instinctively, we backed farther from the trees, out into the clearing, as we tried to locate the source of the sound. There was movement in the woods, something invisible moving small trunks and branches, the music getting louder, and then, all at once, a copse of trees came lolloping into the clearing, leaflets burgeoning along every tendril, curved rootlet after curved rootlet turning and heaving like wheels, the whole in flourishing motion as it bugled and banged a marching tune that seemed to set the pace for the whole flower-embellished ensemble.
“What is it?” grated Ornel in a panicky voice.
“Willog,” gasped Gavi. “Is being a willog, most strange!”
The willog no doubt heard us, for it stopped in its tracks with a silvery shiver of foliage and regarded us for a long moment with what felt like either expectation or exasperation. I, having felt that same kind of look from a good many animals requiring acknowledgment, said, “Good morning.”
“Good, wonderful, most elegant morning,” cried the willog in several melodic voices that bonged and thonked like a chime of bamboo bells. “A good morning to be meeting peoples. Is one of you the person who sniffs the world?”
We were for a moment confused by this, but Gavi shuddered briefly, cleared her throat, and said, “I sniff the world, usually.”
“I am willog self-named Walking Sunshine,” it said. “I am first willog with voice! Be congratulatory! I am creature of speaking words!”
“We congratulate you upon your achievement,” I said, not knowing whether to laugh or run screaming. It sounded totally nonthreatening, but it was so very large, so twiggy, so full of offshoots and wiry-looking twiny bits that it was difficult to believe it was harmless and impossible to know where the voice was really coming from. Politeness be damned, I had to know: “Where are your…eyes and ears and mouth?”
An agile tendril zoomed toward me, stopping just short of my face, and from its swollen tip a large blue eye regarded me with interest. The eye had an eyelid with lashes that batted flirtatiously, seeming to wink at me, enjoying its own joke. That tendril was immediately joined by several others bearing either human-style ears or assorted types of eyes, some of them not at all mammalian-looking.