“Yet here we are again. And you and I are watching the stars revolve through the void and wondering what his life is like and what we can do to make it better. Mom, he’ll never be away from us.”
Neither had anything more to add. Eventually, Entara changed the topic. “Well, speaking of that, any news from the digisphere on our friend?” Though they were both virtually certain that Klein had made it to Song Pa, they had not been able to trace him over the years, despite convincing every sister of the Eyes of Alertness who got an off-planet pass to scour the spaceports and transfer stations, handing out gifts to any beings headed for the Song Pa system so they might contact Klein and report back.
“More of the usual, I’m afraid. Mom, I think I may want to take the search into my own hands.”
“You don’t have enough seniority to get anywhere near Song Pa. Besides, that place is so cut off from everywhere else. We would be helpless without a solid confirmation of just where he is. If only we knew what alias he used.”
“We may have something in that direction soon. One of my old hacker friends has been working on retrieving indenture records through a hole she found in the Song Pa firewall. She says it’s frustrating as hell, but she’s going to keep throwing out the net until she catches something. It’s become a challenge for her.”
“Let’s keep hoping,” added Entara, drawing the infants closer. “We better get these imps back to the house. It’s starting to get cool.”
At that very moment, a good many parsecs away, Klein was leaning against the trunk of a tree fern and gazing up at a binary daytime sky filled with the milky stratus clouds that often hung over Song Pa, wondering about how many children Entara might have by now. It was a comforting thought to his increasingly dreary existence. Over the length of more than a decade of Earth years, he had wrestled, or rather fumbled, with many frustrating, seemingly insoluble mysteries. Even the puzzles he had encountered on Carrier 12 still remained, for the most part, inscrutable.
One thing that still tantalized him was the nature of the strange creature that the Song Pai called a “Lowly One.” Judging from the likelihood that the only Lowly One he had glimpsed was hunted down and killed while he was still on the ship, he wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t seen any Lowly Ones in public on Song Pa, but what surprised him more was that the Song Pai never even discussed them. During his entire time working on the shoreline restoration project, not a single Song Pai had even mentioned the Lowly Ones, which made it impossible for Klein to deduce anything about their nature from the everyday conversations he observed on the work site. He was loath to ask the Song Pai themselves about it—they had very short tempers, and judging from what he had seen of their reactions when the subject was brought up, he didn’t want to risk the honor they placed on his contract to a fit of irrational rage. As the project drew to its close, his obsessive desire to discover the truth finally overwhelmed his sense of self preservation, and he mustered up the courage to ask one of the overseers on the work site, “What are the Lowly Ones?”
The Song Pai was shocked by the words on Klein’s screen. How could a mere indentured servant from another planet know of the vile Lowly Ones, a truth all true Song Pai strove to keep hidden? He flushed fuchsia in rage at the thought of the loathsome ape in front of him demanding the truth! Why, if the creature wasn’t an indentured servant, he’d cleave it to pieces! He tensed his bladed tentacles… The contract. The contract was always sacred, always inviolable. Such had been said by the Elders of Song Pa, so it shall be. The muscles in his tentacles relaxed and his skin turned a sickly green color. He felt a strong sense of disgust with himself—not so much for nearly killing Klein in his rage as at the thought that the loathsome offworlder would somehow learn the truth, no matter what he said. He already knew too much; surely Klein had seen something, maybe in the ship that brought him here, maybe in the work camps somehow. But the thought of being one among the Song Pai to reveal the nature of the Lowly Ones to Klein inspired only shame and disgust, and he decided he would not be the one to do it.
The supervisor pointed one of his tentacles in the direction of a large, ugly building painted a faded yellow pastel color. “In there,” he texted to Klein. “Go to the center of that building and talk to the Speaker-to-Idiots.” The Song Pai then turned away from Klein, still flushed green with disgust.
Despite being pock-marked with discolorations and pits, the building still seemed to be used regularly; its exterior and interior lights were still functioning, and Klein could feel a chilly breeze from some sort of air conditioner as he walked down the long hall to the center. There were various alcoves and lockers in the hallways, most of them filled with the guns and ammo the Song Pai favored, and arrows on the ceilings and the walls pointing the way to various areas. Klein walked straight to the end of the hallway and came to two broad metal doors that were closed. He saw a large blue button on the wall and pressed it, opening the doors with a loud groaning sound.
The empty room had rows of tables and chairs arranged in front of an amphitheater. In the center of the amphitheater sat a gigantic texting screen that was thin enough to fit on the wall, but tall enough to span the entire height of the room. It looked more like the fabled analog cinema screens from before Klein’s time than any electronic device he had seen on Earth or Forlan. A red light shone out of the side of the machine’s monitor and scanned Klein’s face briefly, and then he heard a loud whirring sound as the machine turned online.
“Advance, Indenture Joe. What information do you need today?” appeared on the massive screen.
He decided to experiment with a seemingly less touchy question than the Lowly Ones first. “Why are you called ‘Speaker-to-Idiots’?” he typed into his text screen. The machine sent out its red light again and scanned an image of the text from Klein’s screen. It then responded, “This position is not considered desirable employment for Song Pai organisms. It used to be filled by cowards and those unable to breed. Technological advancement has eliminated the need of Song Pai to fill this position.”
It may be more or less accurate, but this thing has a programmed slant towards propaganda, Klein thought. However, he realized that the Speaker was probably the only thing he had found so far that would give anything remotely close to the truth, so he typed in “What are the Lowly Ones?” to his texter and held it up for the Speaker’s scanner eye to see.
The machine whirred again briefly, and then more huge text appeared on the screen. “The Song Pai were one of two species derived from cephalopods on Song Pa. The second species was smaller and had a faster reproductive rate. The second race was a species that was conquered and exterminated during the Song Pai expansion.”
“What do the Lowly Ones have to do with any with this?” Klein asked.
The Speaker explained further. “Some of the females of the second race were used by Song Pai males for breeding purposes, as the two species were genetically close. Future generations of Song Pai bred from these females acquired a faster reproductive rate as a result. However, among Song Pai descending from this breeding, a certain amount of children will be born with the undesirable characteristics of the second race. Undesirables are considered ‘Lowly Ones’ and should be exterminated.”
The Song Pai’s reaction to the Lowly Ones finally made sense to Klein. The Lowly One Klein had seen had been nervous and fearful…qualities the warlike Song Pai would see as cowardly. The Lowly Ones, throwbacks to a race the ancient Song Pai valued only for their breeding potential, were the embodiment of all qualities that were un-Song Pai, far more so than any Talinian or human could be. The more rapid breeding, an asset that likely aided the Song Pai in their evolution and technological progress, was directly linked to the possibility of giving birth to genetic throwbacks to the older, second race.
The Speaker asked, “Do you have any further questions?” Klein texted “No,” and the Speaker turned off with a loud whir. As Klein walked down the hallway, he pondered the complex nature of the Song Pai race.
How would he be able to get out of this bizarre place, a world with incredible technology run like some nightmarish antebellum plantation?
Above all, Klein had two great preoccupations -- obtaining an off-planet com link to contact Entara, or even Peebo, and locating the Song Pai guard who had molested him at the space port. He had failed miserably at both tasks. He had tried to bribe, coerce, beg, trick, and even hypnotize other indentured servants to help him obtain the com link and the closest he ever came was a short-range device that would not reach the edge of the continent and was now irreparably broken, to boot. He had never been able to get a single part to replace one of those that were nonfunctional. As for his rapist, Klein had consulted everyone he had come to trust to help him to trace the guard, but his only breakthrough had come four years back, when a reptilian servant had managed to determine that the glyphs on the badge indicated a date associated with seniority of service, and nothing more. The thing was etched with numerous little notches and holes whose purpose he had never been capable of learning.
Now he was going to try once again, hoping against all hope, to get help from another team of Talinians who owed him a favor. He had covered up their absence when they swam off to cadge some extra food one day. He beguiled the Song Pai supervisor with a cock-and-bull text story that they had gotten the wrong directions to the reef. It was time for his meeting, so he drove up to the shoreline with a load of rip-rap and made a show of delivering it to them, texting from low in the machine’s cabin to hide it from view. It was easier for them to answer, since they could text from under water.
“Locate squid guard?”
“Supervisor? Over there.”
“No, other. Must talk.”
“No name? No job?”
“Just this. Look.”
He sauntered over to the water’s edge and the newts all pushed on the same stone, while he slipped the ID to the one that was texting. He snatched it and it disappeared under the wavelets. There was a big eddy, as he could tell they were crowding around to see it as they uttered a lot of “slubbrr, blubbrr.” After a while, a post from the one who had texted him, “Stand by.”
The whole group of Talinians began texting away with the supervisor and he could follow the exchange partially on the translator of his own texter. The newts convinced their boss they could not work at the depth last week’s supervisor fixed for them and they needed to contact him. The super protested until his skin turned a bright shade of fuchsia out of anger. Sometimes you didn’t need to know what a squid was saying, because his coloration changed with his emotions. He fired off a barrage of “Filthy slime worm!” messages, until he finally handed over a handheld machine Klein had never seen before. Pretending to readjust the treads on his hauler, he surreptitiously watched as his Talinian contact slid the ID bar into it. After a minute or two, they handed the machine back to the super as Klein cursed beneath his breath at another apparent failure. But in seconds it was his turn to receive a message.
Coordinates follow.”
He could barely believe his eyes. According to this, the Talinians had succeeded in tracing his tormentor to a spot less than twenty kilometers away. It was a construction supply center where his unit was often sent to pick up materials. He would have to set to work right away, planning how to punish his enemy before they could move him again to a distant assignment.
Another text arrived from the Talinians: “Even?”
“More than even!”
By the time Klein had found his target, he had decided several things about his revenge. He would have to ambush the squid when he was alone, because dealing with more than one of the creatures would be totally impossible. He would have to do it quickly, because the Song Pai had every advantage if the struggle were to become prolonged -- their maneuverability and savagery were just too great. Finally, he would probably have to devise some weapon of his own rather than hoping to disarm the thing. To further complicate matters, he would not have much time to fiddle around with planning, for work in this area was wrapping up and crews were already beginning to depart for a mine in the mountains. He stayed watchful for days as he joined the work of closing down the supply depot. Getting revenge on the guard had become a sick obsession inside him, a crazed effort to exorcise the built-up hate of his servitude and the years of separation from Entara that had eaten away at him. He felt the desire to renew contact with Entara fading into his mental background as the imperative of revenge grew. He cursed himself for it, but couldn’t seem to control his desires any more. His own body’s deterioration had always fed these festering thoughts, as over the years his work injuries mounted up. He had never recovered full use of the arm Tays’she had poisoned, while other breaks, strains, and wounds just continued to wear him down. Soon he would be reduced to nothing unless he managed to redeem himself through vengeance. He fantasized on how it would look to watch the guard’s blood flow out of him, as though it could wash him clean of all the dirt he had accumulated, mental and physical. The enemy’s sweet blood: would it be blue, like the Song Pai’s relatives on Earth? The supply base gradually emptied, but the guards stayed on. When Klein’s crew was ordered to hit the road for the mountains, he managed to slip away unnoticed.
The next day a big dust storm blew up, confining the few remaining Song Pai to the wet rooms. Like earthly octopi, their species had siphons that were used for propulsion and breathing circulation in the water. On land, they could store oxygenated water through them to last for a day or so before needing to return to a pool, a canal, or a wet room. The siphons were extremely sensitive, though, to snow, sleet, or dust. Their five eyes were sensitive, too. Storms pretty much disabled them. Klein was counting on it. As his few scavenged rations disappeared, he wracked his mind for a plan, until he spotted some gas cylinders that gave him an idea. They contained extremely compressed nitrogen used in industrial processes and he wondered whether he could ram one of these into the guard’s siphon and literally blow him up. It would require him to keep the siphon tightly grasped around the hose from the cylinder while being exposed to deadly blows from the tentacles and hooks -- a plan that Klein admitted to himself was foolhardy. But his mind latched onto it like a limpet because there was just no alternative and by now he was nothing but a fool.
He waited until the guard was alone in a wet room in the midst of the storm. The others had gone to the far end of the complex to check on something. Then he ran to the entrance and hit an alarm, texting that intruders were in the compound and burglarizing tractor parts. As expected, his Song Pai target came tearing out of the building and headed for the lot where the graders, lifters, and earth movers were parked, his rod-like particle beamer at the ready. As it turned its eyes looking for the burglars, Klein stole up with the cylinder he had prepared and launched himself onto its bulky body. He was lucky enough to grab the siphon and shove the gas tube in before the guard understood what was happening. He put what seemed to be all his last strength into a vise-like grip around the siphon and tube, having correctly guessed that the creature’s body did not possess muscles in this area that allowed it to push it off. It was stunned by the nitrogen-argon blend that rushed into its body and started to be absorbed into its blood. It turned the silvery color of shock and defense, but this inaction lasted only seconds, and it soon began flailing its reddening tentacles to seize Klein and to lash him with the dreadful claws. Klein could feel cruel wounds opening on his legs, but he didn’t dare to look, concentrating all his forces on the tube that was inflating the cephalopod like a balloon. Within one minute, he could feel its internal organs beginning to rupture from the pressure, but this race was accustomed from soon after birth to desperate combat and this one would hold out until the instant of death. Its head swelled and swelled, turning a dark sepia tone of despair. Klein knew that it was only instinct now that fueled the cephalopod’s struggle, but he didn’t dare to let go. Finally there was a horrendous ripping sound and its body exploded, spreading sticky gore everywhere and throwing Klein sev
eral meters through the air.
After a moment’s mindless gloating, he felt the onrush of his own pain and found that he could not move his legs. Action was probably useless, but if he didn’t die right away and didn’t cover up the murder, he knew he would face unspeakable torture, should he be caught. He dragged himself on his belly to the nearest loader and pried off an engine panel. If he could short-circuit the batteries and ignite the hydraulic system, it would create a blast that would flatten the whole area. Blinking through blood, he could hardly tell if he was crossing the right wires, but he felt a manifold with his hand and pulled it back at once, for the heat told him the reaction was taking place. Useless to even try to run. The dead were mauling the dead. He rolled himself sideways, over and over, down a slight incline into a ditch that might protect him and heard the detonation as soon as he slid into it. A huge fireball spread debris in all directions, blackening the ground, as incandescent shrapnel landed on his back. He could never look up to see the aftermath, because he was already unconscious and never expected to awaken.
Ayan’we strode into her mother’s rooms and pointedly asked, “Mom, do you know somebody named Elytra in the Backscratchers? We got a strange message this morning.”
Entara put down her papers and shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s a small matriline and I only know a few from school and training. Why? What’s the message?”
“Don’t get too excited, but it may be what we waited for so long. This Elytra describes herself as a pleasure worker on her way from Taluka to a new house on Dahlgren. She says that while she was in a transfer out in that sector, she happened to see a group of Talinians transshipping and one of them ran up to her blathering something as soon as he noticed her. He grabbed her com and texted this: “Entara-para, Forlan. Clan. Song Pai. 206.5, 44.38, six years more past, gift Fatty Tahinni” and a com link number somewhere. Can we trust it to be true?”
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 28
