“But Klein, how can I explain so you’ll understand? It’s so different. Your females experience birth as pain, but for us it’s a physical, palpable joy that surpasses everything. That’s not all, because the birth feeling changes the entire way you look at the world. It’s like when people become addicted to a pleasure drug, but it’s all positive and it lasts. We cross a threshold that is permanent, and that’s without even considering the children, the sense of duty, the vicarious pride.”
She drew him toward her and kissed him again and settled her head next to his the way he always loved. “Klein, I know it’s too much to grasp now, but I know some day you’ll understand.” She kissed him one more time and then they heard a series of whistles echo among the trees.
Entara sprang up and said, “The attendants have spotted something. We can’t stay here any longer.”
“I won’t give up. I have to see you. I’m not leaving you.” He grasped her arm, so much more muscular than when she came to him that first day on Domremy. She could have easily bent his back or pulled away, but instead she bowed her head in resignation and limply stood before him.
“If you insist on that, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said, more to herself than to him. She passed him a micro-memory device and added, as though reading from a prepared script, “Everything you need to know about the danger is here. I can arrange for you to meet Tays’she by appointment or by accident. I can talk with him beforehand if you want, but I don’t think it would be a good idea. Remember that despite his flaws, he is clever, and potentially lethal.”
She embraced him one more time and whispered in his ear. “What I’m most afraid of is that I’ve brought you here to die. That’s the one thing I don’t think I could survive.”
Then she put his hand into the hand of one of the cousins, to whom she gave brief instructions. The girl led him away to the gate, where the two who had accompanied him earlier were ready to return to the mahäme. For a brief second, Klein had an urge to strangle both of them and return to bring Entara away with him, whether she wanted it or not. He grasped the micro-memory to remind himself not to.
The next day, Klein managed to muddle through his morning training hours without quite realizing how he did it. He had spent much of the night going over the files Entara had prepared for him on the micro-memory and constantly looking up references about various cultural details of Forlani life that were previously unknown to him, or indeed to most Earthlings. Fortunately, he had access to the vast mahäme library resources that contained things that were far more detailed than the best of earthly reports. Only after this painstaking scrutiny did he realize the enormity of the activities that Tays’she and his so far unidentified accomplices were planning. On his own planet it might have passed for an everyday scam or a clever piece of lucrative but relatively minor corruption. It was only in light of thousands of years of Forlani history and the considerable intellectual mass of their ethical system that the plot assumed its complete character of evil. Its eventual result might be – in fact, it seemed that this was the plan of some in the Brotherhood – the destruction of the great female solidarity of the matrilines that held together the fabric of their race’s life.
He had finally come to understand how the seemingly scant revenues of the girls working in so many pleasure houses on far-flung colonies tied in with the over-arching enterprise of rescuing Forlan’s damaged ecosystem, since the majority of income from each “trick” flowed back into the matriline’s coffers to support not only the biological restructuring of their world, but also the network of hospitals and birthing clinics that cared for young and old Forlani, as well as a good part of their education. Though fewer than ten percent of the female population were approved for the idolized status of motherhood, all the females gave their efforts with selfless devotion to the mahäme system and the ninety percent who never enjoyed families of their own would sacrifice themselves in a heartbeat for those that carried on the genes for the matrilines. If untold numbers of the women were lured into poverty, isolation, and slavery on alien worlds under the auspices of FastTrack, for the unique profits of a segment of the Brotherhood, the entire delicate, hive-like system could soon begin to unravel and the ages of mass suffering would return.
These grim thoughts haunted Klein through the morning as he tried to serve the trainees with words and caresses that matched the affection they lavished on him. He had the feeling of having failed before he even started. Yet, you couldn’t tell this from the rapt faces of the young women. Even when he was in his clumsiest and most distracted moments, they simply seemed to take that as an extra proof of his powers of intimacy and the superiority of his alleged feelings. He didn’t have much appetite at lunch time, but when he thought he had said goodbye to the day’s group, two of the girls took him by the arms and drew him along with them out the door.
“Teacher Klein, we see you eat by yourself each day in this apartment. You must be lonely. Please come along with us to the refectory to enjoy a little company. They say food is always better when reflected in another’s eyes. Please! Please!”
In vain, he stammered a few lame excuses, but they wouldn’t let go of him. When he finally gave up and let them lead him, they put their heads on his shoulders and beamed with happiness. They walked several hundred meters to a large domed building near the hospital complex. As they entered the atrium, Klein could hear a distinct rustling sound and as his little party came through the entry, he realized that the entire hall full of hundreds of young Forlani had stood to greet him. One stepped forward and began to sing in beautiful high notes. Soon the entire assembly had joined in, creating richly layered choruses that wove together. Klein realized that some of the highest notes were probably beyond the range of his human hearing, but he could not resist the allure of the beautiful melody.
When the song ended in a kind of coda, he told his little group, “What wonderful music! I would swear I recognize a few notes from compositions back on Earth.”
“Of course, Teacher Klein. The song is about you, composed by Entara-para. It is called “Wind in the Prairie Grasses” and mentions the music the two of you listened to together. She blended some of this into this melody, which is famous all over the planet. That’s why no one had trouble joining in once it started.”
Klein’s mind drifted back to his early months with Entara, when she had shown such curiosity about the recordings he had managed to scavenge in the communities of the settlement. She had seemed very moved by some of his favorites: Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Raderski. He often put them on to play while they were making love, which seemed to delight Entara particularly. He never would have guessed how much, or how lasting those impressions would be.
He noticed the people in the refectory were still standing and muttered a few words about how bad he was at speeches, when their heads suddenly turned to the other end of the hall and he realized they had been waiting for something more. A Forlani woman with a brilliant salmon-colored sash over a diaphanous pale yellow robe entered the room and strode confidently toward him. When she got closer, he saw with a start that his eyes were not deceiving him and that it was Ragatti. The young women at their tables saluted her with a series of whistles and chirps that voiced their approval for her.
As Ragatti came right up to Klein, she took his hands together in hers like a Hindu saying Namaste and kissed his fingers. He did the same for her.
“It’s so good to see you again, Klein. I was disappointed that we were parted so abruptly. But I recovered quickly and the mahäme has given me great responsibilities. I have been named organizer of the birthing teams here at this hospital. Someone we know made me promise to come say hello and to apologize that she cannot be here herself. Now I must return and you have a meal to enjoy, but remember that you will always be in my thoughts.”
Ragatti turned and made a gesture that told the assembly to be seated, waving to them as she left the room. Soon Klein was seated, too, and students from all his training sessions took tur
ns bringing him delicacies to sample. He did his best to try a nibble of each, knowing that he would soon be inflated like a balloon if he ate much more. Seizing an opportune moment, he beat a retreat to his quarters and felt immense relief to collapse in a chair, no longer the center of attention.
He must have fallen asleep, because when he came to his senses again, it was well into the afternoon. He called Peebo on the com system and told him in Crop Talk that he should go ahead and make arrangements for his own return to Domremy, since he would be staying on indefinitely on Forlan. Peebo seemed upset at this announcement and peppered Klein with questions to make sure he had not already taken some rash action, but he reassured the landlord that he hadn’t. He told Peebo he was sure he could change Entara’s mind about renewing their relationship and that in any case, he had made up his mind to be close to her no matter what she chose to do. As soon as he put the com link down he began making plans to go right over to Entara’s dwelling and sweep her up into his arms, even if he had to fight his way through a cordon of Forlani security. He was about to summon a transport driver when he heard a discreet tap on the door.
He opened it to find a small, silent Forlani female eyeing him curiously. “If this is for a training session, I’m afraid I’ve finished for the day and…”
“Don’t worry, Teacher Klein. I’m sure you can tell I’m much too young and years away from that kind of training. Mother told me I should come and introduce myself because I couldn’t come to the orchard earlier. My name is Ayan’we.”
“Entara’s oldest child,” Klein whispered to himself. “Come inside and let me get a good look at you, young lady,”
“There’s not much to look at, I’m afraid,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I’m not beautiful like Mother or my aunts. I’m even plainer than my little sisters. I think I have inherited too much from my father,” she added with a note of barely concealed disgust.
“You look very fine to me and I’m sure your mother treasures you a great deal if she sent you to see me.”
She let this pass and strolled around the apartment, looking especially at his computer installation. “Not bad,” she remarked. “I can see you’ve been reviewing the FastTrack files.”
“You know about this?”
“I really found out about it before everybody else,” she boasted. “But there were a lot of spooky things I didn’t understand until Mother explained. The truth is I distrust Tays’she more than anyone else in the family.” She turned and looked pointedly at him. “Are you going to kill him? I know about you, too. You kill lots of people. It would make me happy if you do. I should feel bad about that, and I would never say it in front of Mom, but something inside tells me he’ll get us all if you don’t. Will you kill him?”
“I’ve promised not to go that far.”
“If you’re worried about Mom, I know she’ll forgive you. She can’t love you the same way she did when she was a girl, but I know she won’t blame you if you kill Tays’she.”
“It’s not to spare Entara’s feelings. I’ve made a solemn promise to others who have always helped me. People who know a lot more about good and bad than I do. One thing your mother may have told you is that I do not like to break promises.”
Noticing how Ayan’we seemed to know her way around computers, Klein decided he would try to change the subject. “Would you like to see some pictures of where I come from? I have some over here.”
But as Klein rose to get his digital album, he felt a sudden wave of nausea. Way too many delicacies at lunch.
Ayan’we observed him as though she were staring at a bug under the microscope. “You look as though you need to fuck.”
“What was that young lady?”
“You need to fuck. Sorry, my human languages are not so good. You know, fuck.” She made a little gesture with her hand coming from her mouth that made Klein suddenly double up with laughter. So that’s what it means in Forlani. And all the time I thought Entara was being prudish. It does put a whole new spin on the word.
“Are you all right?” queried Ayan’we, more concerned with this weird outburst of hilarity than with his nauseated expression.
“Perfectly OK now,” he responded. “And by the way, the word in English is vomit and in German erbrechen. Fuck means something completely different that we will pass on for the moment. I’m just going to take a little fizzy pill and I’ll be back to normal.”
When he came out of the bathroom he saw that Ayan’we had opened the digital album herself and was rapidly going through the images. “These are really beautiful places. Is all the Earth like that?”
“Unfortunately not. And some of those places are no longer as terrific as they look in old pictures. This cathedral, for instance” he said, pointing to a soaring stone edifice, “was destroyed by an earthquake caused by a new kind of mining and no one ever replaced it. Too expensive, they said. That was before I left, which was also not so pleasant. Did your mother tell you about why I left Earth?”
“She said you were an exile. Sometimes I feel that way, too. I don’t think I want to stay on Forlan my whole life. It’s not that I hate it really, but I get this strange urge.”
“We call it wanderlust. It’s a bit of a blessing and a bit of a curse.”
“We don’t believe in curses.”
“You should go on thinking that way. Can I get you a cold drink?”
“No. I’d better leave. I’ve got to go over to the lab for a health class.”
“Well, it was a pleasure meeting you Ayan’we. I hope we get a chance to talk again. But you have to understand that when things begin to happen, they may happen very fast.”
As she was about to walk away, Ayan’we glanced back at Klein and said, “I’m glad I got to meet you, too. It may not show, but I am. I was a little afraid of coming here. You’re not what I expected. Not like any males I’ve ever met on this world. Thank you for coming all this way. And please don’t stop loving my mom.”
Days followed days and Klein’s attitude deteriorated as his patience frayed. However, the enthusiasm of his trainees was a well that would never go dry. Each day they appeared with new questions that they asked as often with their bodies as with their voices. He suspected that they must be sharing their experiences somehow, because fresh faces would arrive and they would present comments and gestures that could only refer to something he had done at a previous session with different trainees. Perhaps they were able to sense his growing inner turmoil because “old” trainees began to come every day bearing gifts to cheer him up: an endless procession of flower arrangements and tidbits, but other mementoes, too, and even a little pet, a feathered, flightless lizard that gobbled insects. When he watched it in its cage, Klein had the feeling he was gazing into some distant eon of his own planet’s past. This thing could be a cousin of ornithomimus or diatryma. It looked at him with an intense stare that seemed to pierce right into his head and often pecked at the cage to get his attention before uttering a collection of clicks, squeaks and gargles that might be a prehistoric version of “Chin up, sonny!” He dubbed it Quetzalcoatl.
But his restlessness only grew. His only contact with Entara was through a secure com link that a messenger brought one day. When he contacted her, he tried to bare his emotions, but she evaded him, insisting on giving details of her domestic life and the arrangement of the dwelling, for she had decided it was the only possible place he could confront Tays’she. To combat his funk, Klein began taking walks after lunch, soon mastering the path to the Orchards of Fataarey and to the Garden of Fulfillment, hoping for a glance of Entara. He spent one long evening going all the way to the Exit Center at the Spaceport and back, thinking that even though he himself never intended to leave, he might have to help Peebo to do so. After some hesitation, he plotted out the way to the home Entara shared with Tays’she. He found it in a pleasant neighborhood, across from what seemed to be a small park for children. Slipping back to his German days, he adopted his “you can’t see me” stroll a
nd his “I am nobody” expression. Before leaving the mahäme that day, he had borrowed a baggy coverall he had found in a closet near his rooms; it had been used at one time by alien construction workers and gave him a suitable disguise. He carried around some outdoor receptacles he found from one location to another, as though he knew what he was doing, in order to case the street for surveillance. Schoolgirls chatting on a bench, a vendor doling out some sweets, an elderly lady feeding fish in a pool, a transport delivering parcels. It seemed like the perfect residential street. Too perfect. His experience told him this was staged, and staged in an extremely proficient, professional way. Since his construction worker’s facemask, meant to keep out dust and pollen no doubt, covered much of his face, he decided it was unlikely he would be recognized, and he ventured a little close. Yes, the vendor’s decorations contained mirrors aimed at Entara’s dwelling, the elderly female’s sunglasses contained reflectors, too, the delivery transport had an extra antenna, and the schoolgirls had com links that looked a bit too official for talking with classmates. Risking another little container replacement right in front of the dwelling, he could see there were figures in the shrubbery. They seemed grayish and bulky as they lurked among the leaves. Then another figure came out the door. Not Entara or Ayan’we, as he had secretly hoped, but a more wiry body with horny projections on the face and shoulders and a leathery skin with very little of the typical Forlani fur. He recognized it must be a breeding male. This was Tays’she. He was surprised that a gaudily dressed female soon emerged from the doorway and headed with the male out the side entrance and down a cross street that led to a market area. This was the new first wife, leading hubby out on a buying trip for more expensive clothes and jewelry. It was time to withdraw before his anonymity wore off and he began attracting attention, so Klein took a different route back to the mahäme.
His spying instincts fully reactivated, Klein began in the following days to get much more proactive about the upcoming confrontation. First of all, he reviewed the results of his visit to the Entara home. The “neighborhood people” were all females, but they were unlikely to be members of the matriline, who would have no reason to do surveillance, especially in such a professional manner. They could only be some sort of police or intel security representing the state. With a little research, he learned that the grey fellows in the bushes were probably castrated males, dobutu. They had failed to move up in the Brotherhood hierarchy and been gelded for use as stooges for the breeders. If the females were there to keep something in, the geldings were there to keep something out, and that probably was him. But it also occurred to him that they may be there to execute some aggression on behalf of Tays’she toward unwanted members of his family. He remembered what Ayan’we had said about distrusting her dad.
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 21
