The Companions Read Online Free PDF Page A

apartment Paul and I were still “sharing.” Joram said it was a prestige location because it had windows, even though there was nothing to see except the tower across the street. It wasn’t a street, really. It was more like a chasm, the bottom of it stuffed with roaring stacks of dark, dirty freight tunnels and catacombs where the down-dwellers live.
    Earth scared me at first. The towers were huge, each a mile square and more than two hundred stories high. Podways ran along every tenth floor, north on the east side of each tower and south on the west side. Up one level, they went west on the north side and east on the south side. They stopped at the pod lobbies on each corner, so when you were on one, it went woahmp-clatter, rhmmm, woahmp-clatter, whoosh . That’s a pod-lobby stop, a slow trip across the street, another pod-lobby stop, then a mile-long whoosh , very fast. The pod-lobbies were full of people, too, and that’s the clatter part, the scary part. Taddeus and I saw more people in one pod-lobby than we’d ever seen together anywhere on Mars, and many of them were dressed in fight colors: Tower 59 against Tower 58, Sector 12 against Sector 13, all of them pushing and shoving and tripping over each other. Often they got into fights or screaming fits. It took us a while to figure out how to dodge them and keep out of their way, but when we got good at it, it turned into a kind of game, and we rode the podways for fun. It was a lot safer than it sounds, because there are so many monitors on the pods that people are afraid to do anything really wicked unless they’re over the edge. Tad and Ithought part of the fun was spotting people that were about to go over the edge. We could almost always tell.
    Paul and Taddeus and I started school at the Tower Academy while we were waiting for Matty to get better. Matty would improve, then she’d relapse, then she’d improve. The disease attacked her nerves, so she was in dreadful pain, and finally it got into her muscles so she couldn’t move. After that, she didn’t improve anymore. She got weaker and weaker and finally just faded away and died. Joram and I were with her. Joram said Taddeus was too young for a deathwatch, and Paul said she was no kin of his, not that it made any difference. If she’d been kin, he’d probably have acted the same way.
    After Matty died, things got complicated. Paul was ten, and he refused to go back to Mars, and Paul always did exactly what he wanted to do, no matter what anyone said. Since he had lots of money from his mother, and I had some from my father, we each had what’s called an NCC, a non-coparenting certificate, which meant we didn’t have to have coparents under Earth law so long as Joram arranged for us to be properly cared for. Taddeus hadn’t inherited any money, and Joram was his only living parent, so he needed a coparent.
    Joram was a vista preservation artist, and Earth had no vistas left to preserve. Joram’s grandfather had scanned the last few: Antarctica before it thawed; Ayers Rock before they broke it up; the pyramids, just before they tore them down for landfill. Joram couldn’t do his work if he stayed on Earth to parent us, so he decided to make a liaison contract among himself, us three kids, and a Licensed Child Custodian named Luth Fannett LCC. Both my trust fund and Paul’s paid something in every year, and Joram sent money for Taddeus, so while Joram was off God-knows-where, we three kids and Luth lived in the apartment with the prestige windows we couldn’t see anything out of.
    Even at ten, Paul was very proud. He was proud of his mind and of the way he could learn languages so easily and proudof being a Delis and proud of having his mother’s money. When he was twelve, Paul told me that Victor Delis had begotten me on purpose so I could be Paul’s assistant when we grew up. “Because you’ll be smart enough to help me