The Companions Read Online Free PDF Page B

before. They were warm and soft. Their mother was watching me, her eyes told me to be careful, but she didn’tmind if I touched them. She was a man-friend, and I was trying to remember anything I’d ever heard about man-friends in the “Litany of Animals” that Matty taught me and the pictures I’d seen in baby books with animal alphabets, from aardvarks to zebras. D was always Dog. In olden times men had dogs as pets, friends, companions, workers, too, I guess. They pulled wagons and herded sheep and all sorts of things. Oh, yes, they’d been eyes for blind people, too, before we could put artificial or cloned eyes in, but mostly they’d been cures for loneliness. All this was bubbling up in my mind while a feeling was rising up my arm like warm honey: softness, friendliness, someone saying, “Hello, other thing.” I was the other thing, and this one needed me…
    Then, from behind me, I heard a surprised grunt, and someone said, “What the bloomin’ oompah’re you doin’ here?”
    He was a big old man with a whitish beard and woolly eyebrows. His face was full of lines, and his hands and fingers were thick and bumpy. I could see them very well because he had hold of me by the arms and was sort of shaking me, not to hurt, just as though he wondered what kind of thing I was. I told him my name.
    â€œJewel Delis! Now, isn’t that somethin’. You any relation to that Ambassador Delis got killed on Mars?”
    I said he was my father.
    â€œPoor man. Wrong place at wrong time, so they say. So what’s Delis’s daughter doing here all alone midst all this ruin an’ wreckage, droppin’ in on Jon Point and his dogs?”
    I said, “I’ve never seen a real one before.”
    â€œDon’t have dogs on Mars?”
    â€œNo, sir. There’s not enough air or water for anything except necessities. ‘Hydroponics first, people second, and there is no third.’ That’s what they say.”
    He laughed about that, and he offered me some algae crackers, not the good kind but the light green ones that taste funny. I still took one, to be polite. We talked, and he showed me his dogs, and I stayed there most of the day. When I gothome, Luth was furious with me until I told her Paul had started in on me, so I’d been pod-hopping. She knew Paul as well as I did, and she didn’t blame me. Besides, all sorts of people pod-hopped, and nobody would hurt you because everybody was identichipped, and nobody could get away with really hurting anybody without being stun-gunned by the automatic monitors.
    I didn’t tell Luth about Jon Point or the dogs. I didn’t tell Paul, either. From then on, I had two families. I had Paul and Luth and Tad on the 145th floor of Tower 29 and I had Jon Point and several kinds of dogs on the 10th floor of Tower 91. The first family was the one I lived with, but—except for Tad—the other family was the one I cared most about. The dogs needed me. They really did because Jon Point’s wife had died, his son had gone off planet, and Jon claimed to be “A vastly overburdened man.” If I wasn’t there to help give them food and water, if I didn’t come to clean their space…they might not be able to live at all.
    That happened when I was eight. It seemed like my whole life had been aimed at that minute, like I was an arrow flying straight at it. From that time on, I spent every spare minute at Jon Point’s kennel. He’d pirated some water and electric lines in the old tower, hiding them so the weirdos wouldn’t find them. He said the weirdos scattered themselves through derelict towers like soy-nuts in breakfast food, mostly in the first three or four floors. The lifts didn’t work anymore, and climbing higher than that was work. Jon had friends who bred cats, and some who bred birds. Breeder was a word like down-dweller , not a nice thing to call anybody.