After the descent to Domremy’s surface in the shuttle the group of homicidal deputies broke up within a few minutes, each heading off in a different direction, though Klein wished he could have spoken longer to Guzman and Rodriguez, perhaps to share something of his perplexity or at worst to have a friendly beer. Yet he was in no hurry to return to Site 89, feeling in his gut that Alexandrov could not possibly have made the place any better in his absence. He decided to try to call on Peebo and found him at his farm outside Stafford Station in the midst of a rapidly growing family of Dissenters. When they all lined up to welcome him into the house, he could not help thinking they looked like the family of Charlie Chan in the old 20th century classic movies. A new wife (or perhaps not really so new, judging from the group of children that swarmed around her) shuttled back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. Klein couldn’t remember her name as Peebo reeled off all the new relatives, so he just called her “Ma’am.” Apparently Peebo’s brood had just reassembled after stays in several different Forlani facilities between Earth and Domremy. The Forlani had given them passes as cleaning contractors to disguise the move from Hyperion’s intelligence agents. Just like Hyperion to ignore child labor laws while trying to break up Dissenter families. The Forlani, treated like chattel themselves, must have gotten a kick out of using Hyperion’s own greed against them, Klein mused. Peebo was very concerned that Klein might be suffering from some kind of PTSD after the massacre and insisted on hearing the gory details, although Klein knew how distressing all this bloodshed must be for a devout Dissenter. His old landlord dealt with it pretty well, but seemed much more interested when, in private, Klein related to him the encounter with Helga. Peebo made him repeat a lot of details about the medic and Klein had the impression that the farmer intended to check into her through the uncanny network of Dissenter intelligence.
As the conversation appeared to be trailing off, Peebo’s face took on un uncharacteristic scowl as he announced, “A letter came for you. I didn’t know if I should tell you now. You might not like the contents. Sorry I had to poke into it, but it came in Croptalk and encrypted to boot, so I couldn’t avoid finding out. “
“What kind of letter?” Klein exclaimed. It was much too early to be news from Helga, unless she had had some kind of tragedy.
“It’s from Forlan. From Entara. I’ll at least let you read it by yourself.”
When Peebo had stalked out of the guest bedroom, Klein unfolded the letter, written on scrap paper so that it could be easily burned up in Dissenter fashion. Entara’s original must have had to be destroyed along the way as a precaution against discovery by the Corporation. His brows furrowed deeper and deeper as he read of the threat to Entara and her family. She had done a good job of communicating the severity of the situation without disclosing details of FastTrack, which she simply called, “the plot.” It didn’t take much for the wild visions of his icing dreams to return to his head, nor did it take long for him to resolve that he had to find a way to get to Forlan immediately to help her.
“Peebo, I’ve got to get off planet again.”
“A big difference between leaving the barn with the farmer’s herd and sneaking out on your own.”
“You must have contacts with Forlan just to get this letter. Isn’t there a way?”
“A way for revenge? You know that’s not our creed. Blood for blood is not within the Circle. And now I’ve got the family to think about. I know you mean to do well in your own way, but do you even trust yourself to do well? It’s not really your row to hoe.”
“Just transport, friend, that’s all I ask.”
“You won’t have a weapon. Security in Forlan customs is airtight. Plus, Forlani males can be tougher to overcome than you think.”
“I’ll use my bare hands if I have to.”
Peebo mused a minute before responding. “Well, maybe if you can control yourself and promise not to kill, I may be able to help, but it won’t be easy. The transit I can probably arrange on my own, but for other things we need a little help. I’ll send for the vet and he’ll be here tomorrow evening. Until then, think over if you really feel you need to risk this. I’m going to see the missus.”
Klein had already been back at Site 89 for several weeks, chaffing at his daily patrols as his mind turned constantly to Entara. He was upset by a weird mixture of arousal, fear, anxiety, and curiosity. He could kick himself for the way flashbacks to past love-making with her popped back into his head, despite his efforts to control them. Ever since his childhood, since the time the family broke up, he had prided himself on his ability to focus and control, to worship at the idol of progress, no matter how tarnished it might be. Now he was victim to floods of what could only be rank sentimentality – and what was worse, he liked it. To be honest, he cherished it. It was way beyond ordinary Schadenfreude and seemed to be becoming an obsession. Moreover, it distracted him from the rotten feeling that he was becoming an unwilling accomplice in Alek’s scheming management of Site 89. His emotions were in turmoil. He longed for the ability to move, to act, maybe to kill, if that would restore what passed for sanity in his psyche.
Finally he got a Crop Talk sign from Peebo that he was to meet in the Circle. Luckily, a train was just due to leave. He shoved his thallop into the barn for someone else to take care of, snapped his M221 into its clips on the wall of the arms room, and sprinted to the station, actually leaping from the platform onto the end of the train as it pulled out, and forced his way into the door at the tail end. The company men in the car snickered and made quiet remarks about how anxious he must be to get to the Forlani house at the end of the line, but the handful of Dissenters in the car merely looked up for a second, nodded his way, and went back to staring out the windows or reading their seed catalogs.
The sun was moving low towards the horizon when he reached Peebo’s farm and his host hurried him along to the building where he had met with the Dissenters before. This time there was a bigger delegation, perhaps a dozen, including a man Peebo called Cousin Al, who had been on the train from Site 89, somewhere up ahead of Klein. Peebo and Klein stood at the foot of the cross. The others formed a crescent at the other end. Klein recognized Trevor in the center, with a bronze-colored fellow on his right and – to his surprise – Peebo’s wife on the left!
“Greetings once again friend. The sun goes down as we speak. We understand you wish to leave?”
Klein tried to be as succinct and unemotional as he could in describing his desire to help Entara. He closed his speech by requesting, “I don’t want to dig to the center of the Earth. If you put me in a wagon, I don’t seek to hold the reins. But if you can meet the tailed ones at the fair, I would be your hand forever to be able to be among them.” In Crop Talk, this meant Klein was not asking to be let in on any Dissenter secrets, that he was content to know as little as necessary in order to obtain what he desired.
Trevor looked around his group in the crescent and each nodded approval. “It’s true we have an understanding with the purple critters. We play the fiddle for them and they dance for us. They’re fluffing up the pillow for you now. Truth is, they’re mighty fond of fruit, as you know. So from time to time we send a consignment of seeds and saplings. Helps them set things straight up there. Now, you’ve been a kind of a hand to Peebo once in a while, so you’ll get sick at work and help out here again for a few days. The doc here,” he nodded to the bronzed gentleman, “will fix things up. Then it’s Route 66 for you, pal.”
“I’m so grateful, I…”
“Felicia will speak now.”
Peebo’s wife took a step forward. “Before you peel the turnip, there are a few things to say about the knife. You know our ways. We will not tolerate any wanton killing. That purple bull up there has never gored you, nor has he ever touched us, though we know full well he cannot abide staying in his pasture. So you’ll handle him as we handle the livestock, with this.”
She held up a kind of glove with a metal boss in the palm that held a small retractable
spike. Klein had seen Dissenters on the farms use them to inject sheep, goats, and especially skittish thallops with serums and vitamins.
Felicia went on. “It holds five doses. Dr. Patak will supervise.”
“Yes,” said the bronze-skinned doc, in an accent that might have been Punjabi, “I know something of the Forlani body and you will have five doses, in case you may miss the right place with some. I say the dose must be administered to the neck to be effective, just here.” He pointed to a point beside his Adam’s apple. “However, there you will actually inject one and one only dose, for an effect that will last several days. You will see me tomorrow for further details.”
Trevor looked around both sides of the circle and asked, “Is that the last tune?” When everyone nodded, he started to erase the ashen symbol at their feet.
The next morning, just as Klein, Cousin Al and Peebo finished scything a field of barley (“Course I got a harvester, but we need some exercise for Route 66”), Klein saw Dr. Patak sauntering up the road. The doc beckoned to Klein, who followed him into the equipment wing of Peebo’s settlement.
“I have brought all the necessary equipment for you,” Patak chirped as he spread out a variety of beakers and bottles and other items on the lab table. “Of course, Peebo will furnish all the ag equipment you need to take care of the saplings in the shipment. You will be caring for them, but they will also be caring for you, because, you see, saplings are too fragile to ice, and will require daily tending, so you won’t be iced either, and will travel in relative comfort with only light daily work. Here is your injector. I have checked it and sterilized it, so it will work perfectly. Here are vials with five doses of toad toxin, carefully measured and prepared, that Peebo will place among apparently identical vials of plant vitamins until you reach the destination. If you wish to practice injecting, which I recommend, borrow one of Peebo’s needles and try it out with vitamins on some sheep. This one must be used only on the Forlani target and then given back to Peebo for disposal. Perhaps, if all goes well, you may not have to use anything so… intrusive, after all,” he added with a little sigh.
“And here,” he went on, “Are your papers as a member of the Farm Union. Naturally, you cannot use your mankiller ID on Route 66, and in fact, you’d better leave it completely behind. Now, Wilhelm Klein, hmmm. Since I am a native speaker of the king’s English, and god save his majesty Henry X, no longer emperor of India, I will anglicize your first name to William, which I trust will cause no objection. Klein will become a middle initial K. I hate to lie and find that it is sometimes best to use a mother’s birth name in the manner of our South American friends. What is it, please?”
“Himmelreich, with two m’s, one l, and -eich at the end.”
“So, congratulations, William K. Himmelreich, new member of the Farm Union, but I think I will distress this card a bit to make it seem less suspicious and more like something a field worker might carry.” Patak hummed a little tune as he smeared what looked like a few grains of turmeric and graphite on the card before lamination, then dipped it with tongs into several successive solutions that darkened the covering and made little blisters in places.
“Wonderful, now it looks like you could have been hoeing beets for twenty years. Additionally, I have used my veterinary credentials, which on Domremy are as good as any MD’s, to report you sick with a badly strained back and agonizing pain. By the time they call to get you back to work, you will be long gone. Cousin Al will report you were lost on a trip into the savanna to prospect for a new field site, and Site 89 will assume for the time being that you are Local bait. Arrivederci e buon viaggio!”
Two days later, the cargo transport for the Kagahashi Maru floated up from the surface of Domremy with nearly a hundred saplings that Peebo had assembled, along with several boxes of ag seed and fertilizers, as well as the servile William K. to tend the plants, since it was now Peebo who had developed terrible back pain that necessitated delegating everything to a helper. Peebo had accessed some reading material about Forlan to help Klein comprehend the nature of the consignment. Certainly, he knew already that Forlani consumed mainly fruit and certain types of insects, despite Entara’s private cravings for toast and jam. What astonished him in his reading, however, was to learn that Forlan had undergone a planetary environmental disaster ages ago, during something called the Time of Cities, which had led to the ominously named Time of Famines. At the end of these crises began the Modern Era, featuring the reorganization of Forlani society into the female matrilines and the male Brotherhood. It was the matrilines which oversaw the environmental and agricultural restoration of the planet, under the direction of the Council of Nine and various sub-agencies.
This agricultural consignment of theirs was destined for the Eyes of Alertness matriline, the one Entara belonged to. In return, Klein surmised that the matrilines must be doing something to help the Dissenters, and he suspected it had something to do with the unheralded appearance of wives and children on Domremy. People on Earth characterized the Dissenters as having all sorts of retrograde ideas on reproduction, since they had totally rejected the in vitro methods that had become so popular in upper levels of human society. “Only the poor procreate, and the rich only fornicate” was the watchword on the teleprograms. When he had been shipped to Domremy, only adult men like Peebo and Cousin Al could be found at the Dissenter settlements, so it followed that during the intervening years, they had discovered some way to eliminate the physiological dangers space travel posed to the reproductive system, particularly for ovulating females and young males. They could then complete the colonizing process.
With little to do each day but feed the plants and little to talk about with Peebo that couldn’t be monitored, Klein used his old computer skills learned at the ministry to do some discreet digging. His big discovery was that, as he guessed, Dr. Patak was more than met the eye. He bore a striking resemblance to a Dr. Sharma who had won the Albertson Prize for physiology by discovering a way to restore breeding ability to cloned rhinoceri and mastodons. Sharma had been reported dead in a tragic decompression accident on the Europa shuttle, but Klein wondered if his bronzed ally had not already learned how to change identities as easily as he had with Klein. It still remained for him to figure out just how the Forlani were aiding the Dissenter exodus from Earth, but he made a mental note to try to learn what he could on Forlan.
Space travel without the suspension of icing could be a tedious affair, but at the end of three weeks, the Kagahashi Maru had finally completed its intermediate stops and was hot, curved, and normal for Forlan. One day, after watering and feeding the plants as his act demanded, Klein returned to their cabin to find Peebo lounging in his bunk with a wistful look.
“You know, pal, I never would have believed it after all those years of separation without losing control of my emotions, I find myself missing Felicia an awful lot after only a matter of weeks. I guess the experience of being reunited gave me expectations I was able to keep under control earlier. It just shows how perverse the human mind can be. Feelings always seem to trump reason.”
“I know what you were doing all that time, but what was she doing?”
“I must have a bubble of water in my ear. Can you repeat that?” Peebo replied, rubbing his ear a bit. This meant Klein had forgotten that all conversations could be monitored, even on a third-rate transport like the Kagahashi Maru.
“Oh, I was talking about that big grey ewe back on the farm. Did they deliver her straight from Kasimba’s (one code word for Earth) or did you get her from some farmer in between? “
“Well, for a long time, she had to stay in a pen next to Kasimba’s banana grove (Central Africa). But when the time came, they sold her off to Aunty Fox (the Forlani!). For a couple of long summer days (years), she just mostly helped calm the other critters down and keep things orderly (worked as a servant of some kind). Lived in a nice purple barn (a Forlani house). They put their brand on her, you see (furnished her with a new identity). But I
figured that was a waste of good mutton chops, so when I got a chance to see her at the livestock auction at Grover’s Corner (the transshipment station on Premidathra), I moved her on into my herd.”
So the Forlani were helping the Dissenters move their wives and children off Earth and through various points in the colonies by hiring them as servants for the girls’ houses. Klein recalled that on trips to the Stafford Station house with Entara and Ragatti, he had usually seen some females of other races cooking, cleaning, or doing other domestic tasks so that the girls could always be ready for a paying client. He had never guessed they might be refugees being moved about by the Forlani. However, it made sense, because as he thought back on it, he had seldom seen the same servants twice. He supposed this was why the Dissenters felt such an obligation to help restore the Forlani home planet’s ecology, and perhaps even why they had agreed to this hare-brained scheme of Klein’s.
Having satisfied his curiosity by digging to the root of the mystery of the link between Dissenters and Forlani, he realized it was dangerous information and he had to cover it up. Having had a fairly high security clearance in his days back in the BNATOR forces, he tried to remember the anti-interrogation techniques a wise old Serbian had taught him. First he mentally designed all the facts into a geometric solid in his mind. He reviewed it many times until he was sure how he visualized it. Next, to lock it. He picked as his password the name of a neighbor’s cat back in Düsseldorf. He reviewed everything again before applying the mental lock. Of course, this little trick would not stand up to drugs and specifically directed electro-biological probing. Nothing would. But the subject matter was so obscure that he doubted any Hyperion interrogator would be able to get on the right track and know the right questions to ask in order to get at the truth.
Days later, as everyone was beginning to stow and strap for unloading, one of the mature Forlani females on board as a passenger summoned them all to the view screen. “Come see this! Our own patrol ships have started to protect the space near Forlan.” They squeezed closer to the screen and saw a squadron of odd vessels that looked something like snowflakes in old Bavaria, hexagonal shapes arcing across the outer reaches of the Forlan solar system. “Of course, the hex interceptors separate for military action. Built by the Song Pai, who have protected our system under contract and furnished these vessels to make up our own defense force.”
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 18
