The Companions Read Online Free PDF

but not smart enough to do anything significant on your own.”
    I don’t know where Paul got that idea. He was only three when our father was killed, and people don’t remember things that far back. Besides, I don’t think Victor Delis would have said any such thing. He was an ambassador, and they’re supposed to be tactful. Paul certainly wasn’t tactful. He was just plain nasty a lot of the time, which is why Tad and I spent a lot of time on the podways.
    Podfare was almost nothing. We could ride all week on our allowance of pocket money. We’d go across the urb and back again. Sometimes we’d go up to the 200th floor and take express pods that went outside the urb. We’d watch people and make up stories about them and eat pod-lobby food like sizzlejuice and crunch-a-muncheese. One particular day when I was off school, Paul started the morning making me miserable. Tad wasn’t home. I couldn’t lock myself in my own room because Luth wouldn’t let me have a lock. So I just left and went pod-hopping by myself. I found a corner seat on a multipod and rode it back and forth, watching people. That was before people wore veils, so you could really look at people so long as you didn’t stare. After a while, I switched podways and rode the expresses, and finally I depodded at a funny-looking tower I’d already passed half a dozen times, trying to decide whether to cross the street to go north or up one floor to go west, and I noticed the glass doors leading into the park floor of the tower.
    Every floor ending in a 0 is a park floor, but these doors didn’t look like ordinary park floor doors. They were painted all over with tall red letters: DERELICT. DANGER. DO NOT ENTER. I put my nose against the glass, my hands shadowing my eyes. Nothing out there! Except that nothing was something, so far as I was concerned! Space. Real space. Without people in it!
    I edged to the crack in the door, where it was chained almost shut, but not so tight I couldn’t squeeze through. Right inside, staring into my face, were a pair of strange eyes. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me, but everybody had already gone up or down or across to connect with another podway, so I pushed the door as far as it would go and scrunched through. No one bigger than I was could have done it; only someone like me, as Paul said, all bones.
    Inside, when my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw the creature of the eyes staring at me, so I went toward it. It backed up, and I followed it. It was moving through the dark toward a faint light at the center of the floor. The walls were all crumbled into piles of trash with hairy bits of wiring sticking out, like disintegrating monsters. Broken pipes were hanging from the collapsing ceiling, and way off at the edges of the floor, daylight leaked in where the outside walls had fallen.
    The creature was still ahead of me, a darker shadow against the inside walls where the core services had been. It slipped through an open door and into a lighted space, then turned to look at me. Once I’d seen it in the light, I knew what it was, even though I’d never really seen a live one, because Matty had talked about them, over and over, and she’d found the remains of them on Mars, and she’d had one when she was little and I’d had one, a stuffed one, when I was just a baby. It was a Faithful Dog, just like the pictures she’d shown me only bigger. It stepped into a kind of basket thing and nosed around, and when I got close I saw the basket was full of little ones. Seven squirmy, fat sausages with their eyes shut. When the big dog lay down, the little ones started sucking on her, and I made the connection. Those were her mammaries. Like breasts, so she was kind of my cousin, because I was a mammal, too.
    I crouched down by the basket and stroked the puppies while they were eating. It was a feeling…I’d never had that feeling