The Companions (42 page)

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.”

 

Both Dapple and Veegee whelped during the night, seven puppies in Adam's room, eight in Frank's. Wolf and Titan did as Behemoth had done, staying on guard in the rooms most of the time, leaving only to eat and drink and go out into the forest to relieve themselves. Whenever the bitches departed on the same errands, the dogs lay next to the box where the puppies were sleeping. Dapple and Wolf's puppies were lighter-colored than she, but with darker markings. Veegee and Titan had produced a litter of brindle pups, several with red or gray masks around the eyes.

I increased the bitches' rations and added supplements. Gainor came to look at the pups late in the afternoon, asking if Adam and I would like to join the ESC team that would investigate the old ships.

We left early the following morning, making a single wide spiral to gain altitude and a shorter one to set the shuttle down. It was my first unhurried look at the planet from the air, and I was surprised to see how clearly the moss-covered PPI installation showed up against the homogeneous pattern of forests. The Derac base was considerably larger than when we'd landed, a charred scar at the north end of the lake. Elsewhere, except for the occasional wide stretches of meadow and the linked lakes or seas that more or less girdled the planet, the world was covered from plateau to plateau with the same growths, repeated in variations so minute that they produced an overall impression of absolute uniformity.

We landed near the covered ships. They weren't grown over with moss, as I'd supposed. The plant that covered them grew in flat, overlapping shields, almost like scales on a snake. A crew bearing torches and cutters began at once to uncover the areas where they were most likely to find ship identification. While they were occupied with that task, Gainor and I wandered around the area, recording the surroundings in some detail. While examining a particular view, I became aware I was looking at a garden. Beckoning to Gainor, I walked him through it.

“Look here, a cluster of root vegetables. I've never seen them grow, but I've seen pictures. There, corn, maize, at the foot of that tree, on the sunny side, and the vine growing up the stalk is a legume. That level space with the marbled texture is also a mixture of several vegetables, peppers, I think, and melons, and something I don't recognize at all…”

“It doesn't look like agriculture.”

“It doesn't resemble our idea of field crops, no, but it does remind me of something I've read about, the forest culture of a people who once lived in Middle America. The type of farming was called microculture, each plant set in a pocket environment that would support it. A tall sun-loving plant being used to shade another and to support a vine, for example, or one plant fixing nitrogen for another type planted next to it. Different plants were grouped together if they would benefit one another. And, of course, it looks very natural, as it should, since each thing is growing in a tiny space well suited to it. I guess that explains why no one noticed it from space.”

“I wouldn't have noticed it from three meters away, if you hadn't pointed it out,” he said, patting me clumsily on the shoulder. Noncon suits were not designed for caresses. “But then, it's just another example of how helpful you can be. When are you going to accept my offer of a job with ESC?”

“Soon,” I said, stopping with my mouth open. Now where had that come from? I'd been saying no for three years. I confronted Gainor's piercing look.

“What changed your mind?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I confessed. “It's just…being here. Suddenly I know I'd enjoy it, and there seems no reason why not.”

“I've been saying exactly that for some time, but you never believed it, or accepted it. I always thought you were still hoping against hope that someone would find Witt.”

Not hoping exactly, I thought. More that Witt had been in my mind all the time, like a wall around me, a tall barrier I couldn't get over. “I guess I've given up.”

“The moment you finally have a hint of his continued existence, and you've given up?” He regarded me with puzzled scrutiny that made me uncomfortable.

I turned to hide my face, noticing as I did so a huge crab creature crouched in low, furzy growth among some thorny shrubs. “Look, Gainor,” I said. “It's huge!”

He turned and regarded it. “Huge indeed,” he said. “But we have no time for zoological divagations at the moment.”

I blinked at the crab, not calling Gainor's attention to the fact that several of the legs seemed rather lifeless, then followed Gainor as he tramped back to the abandoned ships. A worker beckoned from a cleaned section of hull and pointed to numbers that told us these were indeed the Hargess-Hessing ships from Forêt. Three other men were working on an airlock, which opened reluctantly, with a shriek of corroded metal. The inner lock was forced open in its turn, and we went through. No bones. No signs that anyone had been inside recently, though the stripped interior spoke eloquently of people having been in the ship when it landed and for some time afterward.

“I think we have our evidence,” muttered Gainor. “A garden, recently planted. A vacant ship, stripped of all usable items. Under the circumstances, anyone would agree that exploration, even intrusive exploration, is now required.”

“PPI or ESC?” I asked.

“PPI,” he replied. “I've been looking for an excuse to get them away from the moss forest. The growth up here is quite different.”

As it was. Some of the ewer-shaped trees gave off pungent smells and were interspersed with areas of waist-high, green-twigged growths bearing parallel rows of flat, shiny leaves that continuously though imperceptibly turned toward the sun. Beneath these, in the shade, violet-stalked creepers wove tough networks across stones and tree roots while liverworts—which is what one of the workers said the ship coverings most resembled—shingled the areas between. Where this dense coverage was interrupted by stone out
croppings, every hole and crack in the stone was fringed and crosshatched with patches and lines of low, wide-bladed grass that carried a spike of dark, prickle-headed seeds.

“Are you going to move the whole camp up?” I asked.

He nodded, somewhat regretfully. “The whole camp, yes, and almost immediately, before the Derac get the word to attack. There's no reason for them to have increased their numbers here unless they intend to do just that. With only forty-seven left in the PPI contingent, they'd be far safer up here. I've got fish watching the Derac; so far they have no heavy armament.”

He mused for a moment, then said, “So, we'll start by keeping a shuttle on the ground at the installation, so we can leave at a moment's notice, and meantime we'll move all the records and most of the buildings plus a sizable team up here to look for survivors. As soon as you get a translation of the message from your friend, we'll take decisive action. Meantime, I'm sending word back to IC that Hargess-Hessing has a prior claim on this planet. The people from Forêt may not have found the Splendor they were looking for, but they didn't come up empty-handed.”

I thought privately that they might have found Splendor, too, though perhaps they didn't know it yet.

One One of the original settlers of Night Mountain had been a worker in glass who had made perfume bottles on Forêt. During the early exploration of the plateau he had found a large cavern with several lava chimneys that would serve admirably as glass furnaces. He named the cavern Lace Rock, after a huge stone formation along one side of it, and settled in with a few associates to make bottles, drinking glasses, and glass for windows or skylights, products that were traded and sold among the Day and Night Mountain tribes.

Some long-gone Loamer chieftain had used Lace Rock glass to fenestrate the irregularly shaped slits and holes of a large bubble contained in a lava fist that jabbed upward above the Fortress of Loam. This hidden room was floored level with sand and carpeted with thread-moss fiber rugs. Uniquely among the fortress chambers, it had a hearth and chimney, from which the seeping smoke rose invisibly among myriad other smokes and steams that fumed the plateau.

When a chieftain made his way through the lengthy natural passages and the several heavy doors that led from the fortress to this chamber, he was in the most private place in Loam, so it was there that the current chief took his son, Lynbal, to discuss the coming battle with Day Mountain.

“Our scouts have marked the way to the battleground. About a two-day march,” said Chief Larign, referring to a
hand-drawn map covered with many notes and emendations. “We'll need to go a bit wide, to avoid the fanged ones.” He pointed to the lake, a long oval stretching from the northeast to the southwest, and then to the north end of it, where the Derac camp was shown by a number of concentric, ever larger circles. “Normally we'd go to the lake at that point, since it's closest, and we'd follow the shore around to the west, but with more of them camped there every day, we'll have to loop a bit to the north before we head south, directly to the battleground.”

“Won't we attract their attention when the battle starts?”

“Not likely. A day's travel through the forest is far enough. Now, it's time you heard about the key.”

Lynbal adopted a serious expression and sat very straight. This, he had always been told, was one of the important moments in his life, and he had given much consideration to the demeanor and attitude that would be appropriate, deciding on silence, respect, and appreciation of the honor.

“When our forefathers first landed here,” his father said, “they did some exploring, of course. They were particularly eager to look at this lake, the only one within a day or so travel. Probably thinking of fish. They'd found no animals we could eat: no crabs then, no land animals at all, and they couldn't afford to slaughter the few farm animals they had with them for food.

“So, they set out for this lake, got to it, and went around it to the west, and in half a day or so came to this place…” He fell silent, staring out the nearest window at nothing, as though he had passed into reverie.

“This place…” prompted Lynbal, softly.

The chieftain came to himself with a start. “I suppose you'd call it an amphitheater, a mile or so across. It's a bowl, set into the land, absolutely smooth, absolutely round. The moss inside is blue, very short, velvety, like a rug. At the top, there's a circle of trees, hundreds of them, exactly alike. Every branch. Every twig. Every leaf. As though they were…I don't know, identical clones governed by the
same forces. If a bug eats a leaf on one, another bug eats the equivalent leaf on each of the others so they stay the same. One of our people tried breaking off a twig, one time. The minute the twig was in his hand, every tree in the circle dropped the same twig, and on the way home, that man was eaten by willogs. Just a word of warning there.”

Lynbal swallowed deeply, wondering if this cautionary tale was fact or myth, deciding that no answer he might get would ameliorate his discomfort.

“In the middle of the amphitheater, at the bottom,” his father went on, “there's a stone pavement, say a hundred feet across, and at the center, a crystal of basalt about six men high with the key hanging near the top.”

“You mean you hang it there?”

“I mean it hangs there, always.”

“You leave it there?”

“It can't be removed.”

“Then how can we say we have it?” Lynbal cried, forgetting about silence and respect. “I thought it was something you won, something you carried around.”

The chieftain bestirred himself to annoyance. “Pay attention, boy! This discovery was before Day Mountain split off. When the explorers told the tale, both Hessing and Hargess went to see for themselves. There it was, bowl, pavement, pillar, key. Being Hessing and Hargess, the two mucky-mucks decided they had to have the key, so they cut wood, built a ladder, climbed up it, and laid hands on the key.

“And?”

“And a door slid out of the pillar edgewise, and then something stepped out of the door.”

“What was it?”

“Nobody knows exactly. The men saw it, or them. They could remember seeing it, or them, but they couldn't remember what it looked like.”

“And that's it?”

“Not quite, no. Whatever it was, it told Hargess and Hessing that one person could use the key every year. Only one
for the whole year. Some one person, if he came with at least a dozen others, could use the key to ask if he…or she…could go through or if some other person could go through. And whatever answered the door would say either yes or no…”

He fell silent again, lips pursed, brow furrowed, sighing heavily. “While this was going on, the people with Hessing and Hargess were looking through the open door. Later they said they couldn't even blink their eyes for fear of missing some of it. They said it was paradise.”

The chieftain looked expectantly at his son, who nodded but said nothing. After a moment, the chieftain went on:

“So that's the way it was for a while. The Hessing chief and the Hargess chief took turns, year by year, sometimes nobody could go through, sometimes the gatekeeper let all twelve people go through, and Hessing and Hargess went on hating each other, and the place was always in an uproar! After three or four turns each, the head Hargess demanded they draw straws to see which group should stay and which should move out and leave the other in peace. The Hargess chief lost the draw and decided to move down into the mosses. Right away, he ran into moss-demon trouble, so they moved farther south, more moss-demons, and farther south yet until they ended up on Day Mountain. The two sides agreed to meet each year at the bowl and battle for the use of the key.”

“Each
year
?”

“Well, we say year, it may be something other than a year. It's a span of time for the people behind the gate, is what it is. It has been as short as seven of our years, it's been as long as seventeen. We know when the time is coming, from the flashes.”

“Flashes,” Lynbal managed to say from a dry throat.

“Flashes. On the moon. In the moss forest here. When it starts flashing several times every night, that's time to get ready. We've still got a few of the old communicators, though we have to charge them by pedaling a generator, so
we only use them when we think the time is coming, to say when the battle will be.”

“But Day Mountain has to come all that way!”

“Well, they lost the draw, so they've got nothing to complain about. Anyhow, with the Hargessites, inconvenience doesn't mean anything. It's winning that's important. Even though the Hargesses and the Hessings are long dead, it's still important with them. It's traditional.”

Lynbal sat with his head in his hands for some moments before looking up. “Let's see if I understand this. Every year, not our year but somebody else's year, Day Mountain and Night Mountain fight for a key. People get killed…”

“Not too many,” said his father, casually.

“People get killed,” Lynbal repeated. “When enough have been killed, then the winner has the right to use the key for a year to open a door. When he opens the door, the people on the other side of it may allow people in, or they may not.”

“That's right.”

“And why do we want to do this?”

“Because it's paradise. Splendor. Marvelous beyond all telling.”

“You've seen it.”

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“I can't describe it. Just, wonderful.”

“And you can't remember what the people look like, beyond the door.”

“No.”

“And who knows this, this story you're telling me?”

“The chieftains, of course. We lead the men in battle. Plus most of the men who've fought there. They've all seen what I've seen at least once or twice.”

“Except for Lace Rock Tribe, which doesn't battle.”

“Right, but they don't get to go through the door, either. Even though we don't let the men hear what we say to the beings inside, we let them watch when the door opens, so they can see through the doorway. It motivates them.”

“Have you ever seen anyone go through?”

Chieftain Larign nodded, though sadly. “Yes. I've been the leader of the Night Mountaineers, and during my time I went there several times with a dozen men. Both times, the people beyond the gate let my men through, but not me, of course. I was just the opener. And then, a few times we've taken dead or dying people there. They'll always take the dead or dying. I took my father there when he was dying, and they took him.”

“But if one of our women, say, died in childbirth. We wouldn't take her, would we?”

Chief Larign shifted uncomfortably. “It's quite a long way, so we don't bother for ordinary people. We usually take chieftains. And heroes. And anyone who's died during the actual battle, of course, Day or Night Mountain.” His eyes shifted away from Lynbal to search for nothing along the arc of the room, murmuring, “Having the battle to train for and look forward to gives the men something to keep their minds and bodies occupied, so they're not always fighting each other. Besides, they've seen through the doorway. They've seen their dear comrades go through. Any of us would risk a great deal to go through there.”

Shaking his head, Lynbal stood up and went to the door. “I think I'll make the rounds of the guard posts, Father. I need to…think this over.”

“Do that, son,” said the chieftain. “I'll just sit here a while and look at the gardens. If I can figure out where they are. Ha.”

The young man took himself away. The older man lay back in his comfortable chair and, in a very short time, began snoring.

At which point, outside the windows, a woman in crab armor rose from the ledge where she had been crouched and began the tedious and risky climb to the ground. Gavi Norchis had once more extended her intimate knowledge of the world in which she lived.