The Companions Read Free Page A

dance.”
    â€œRight.” The word drawled out, spinning itself into something more than mere agreement. Into connivance. Into complicity.
    Drom said desperately, “Even if they’re people, if they don’t talk or interact in some way, we can’t establish intelligence. If there’s no intelligence, we have to leave and let the real estate guys take over.”
    Lukha kept his eyes fixed on his monitors, which were dancing for no reason. He had not been able to find out what was happening. For days now, the monitors had been dancing to sounds he couldn’t hear, electromagnetic activity he couldn’t locate. He had finally decided the dials were doing it because they liked it, because it was more fun than standing still.
    â€œWe’d stay if they—you know, them. If they wanted emergence,” he remarked, in a preoccupied voice.
    â€œIf they wanted emergence, yes.” More than anything, Drom wanted to stay here, to do what he had spent years doing before he had sentenced himself to confinement: take off his clothes, wander off into the mosses, eat the sweet bulbs of dew that formed on the stems of the blue, lie deep in the scent of the violet, thrust himself against the velvet of the scarlet, feeling his skin prickle and burn and then flare in ecstasy that went on for a seeming eternity. Maybe ask one of the women if she’d like to do the scarlet with him. Oh, yes, he wanted to stay here.
    â€œMaybe the flame folk want to meet other people,” murmured Lukha.
    â€œProve it,” challenged Drom.
    â€œWell, they don’t talk to us. Maybe they write.” Bar Lukha hummed to himself. “Maybe…we’ve found a message they left us.”
    Drom looked up in disbelief. The flame people of Moss didn’t even acknowledge that men were there! How in heaven’s name would they send any kind of…message? “It’s a mystery to me how they’d do that!”
    â€œMystery…is the message,” Lukha went on, as though entranced. “I think it was on a piece of that flat, gray mossthat wraps around the trees. I think they wrote with some of the red juice of those berry kind of things.”
    His voice was intent, speaking of something he had obviously thought about, wondered about: the enigmatic Mossen leaving a message.
    Drom considered the idea of a message. Would it be in the Earth language?
    â€œIn Earth-tongue,” Lukha answered the unspoken question, half-singing it. “Oh, yes. They wrote it in our language and left it where I would find it. I read their message. It said, they wanted to meet other people. From beyond the stars.”
    â€œHow did they learn our language?” Drom whispered, not wanting to break the spell.
    â€œListening to us, Chief. Listening to us. Reading our bulletin board. Looking at our papers…”
    â€œAnd they want to meet other people, from beyond the stars.”
    â€œThat’s what the message said. The message I read.”
    â€œWhere is it, Lieutenant? This message.”
    Now Lukha was, in fact, crooning the words. “I’ll look for it, Chief. I had it. I know I put it somewhere…”
    â€œWe’d need a linguist,” breathed Drom. “I’ll ask them for a linguist.” And also, he told himself, he would ask them for a team to look at those abandoned ships. Since they were Hargess ships, they’d have to send someone. And meantime, he really would stay out of the mosses.

THE LINGUIST’S SISTER: JEWEL DELIS
    Eventually, the Planetary Protection Institute mission on Garr’ugh 290 requested a linguist. The matter was referred to someone in Exploration and Survey Corps who attempted to link Paul Delis, my half brother. At the time, Paul was deeply involved in quite another activity: a session of manic and escalating eroticism that had driven me to take refuge behind the locked door of my room, where I sat stewing, my annoyance not at all