So it was that Klein returned to the experiment station with Moe, got a half-angry lecture from Patak about assuming recruitment duties himself, and began to initiate the young man to all the work the scientific teams were doing. By the third six-month training stint, Moe was not only completely up to date on the pippo situation, including the two new members of the herd and two more that were about to join, but he was also deeply involved in the flora side of genetic re-engineering with the plant folks. Klein celebrated by taking a two-week vacation to the coast, sunning himself, diving to examine sea life, and running along the beach. He was just beginning to congratulate himself on his new-found leisure time when he ran into an old friend. As he crossed the center of the station one day, a Local walked up to him and extended his foreleg, saying “Yes, yes, yes.”
It was Stumpy, the foreleg now proudly and completely regrown. Klein immediately arranged a neural hookup and the two began trading information about their pasts. Each still had difficulty calibrating the other’s concept of time. They mastered this obstacle by devising a code system with a couple of tablets that allowed them to sequence and re-sequence events. Causality was still an issue, particularly for Stumpy’s grasp of third-party motivations. Stumpy comprehended things like the Cashman and Alek episodes without much trouble, but balked at the Kinderaugen affair. Klein guessed that this had something to do with the Locals’ attitude to young people, since their own customs were much more humane than the humans. During the bad times of the hunting parties, older Locals did not hesitate to offer their own bodies as breeding hosts in order to bring more larvae to maturity, though it cost them their lives. Compared to this altruism, a Local could not readily conceive of how earthlings could bring themselves to mutilate their own young.
Even after Stumpy had left to rejoin a group of Locals migrating through the Middendorf Hills, Klein was so buoyed by the experience of their communication that he began to make elaborate plans for future conversations. It took a whole month for the debriefing team to assimilate all their experiences. Moe was about to leave, too, at that point, so Klein turned his attention to training another pippo assistant. Before the year was over, he once again found himself in a leisurely situation, when a Forlani girl presented herself at the research station with messages from Entara and Ayan’we. He persuaded the messenger to stay for a few days while he read the letters over and over again, thinking about how to respond. Entara’s letter was much like her last one, full of information about her family and her increasing official duties, along with personal wishes that assured him she still held him firmly in her heart. In addition to this, there was a new twist that caused Klein to try to read between the lines. It was not that there was any danger – Entara had shown Klein that she was quite capable of talking about danger in a most unambiguous way when she summoned him to Forlan in the past. There were distinct hints that her own role had somehow changed, or at least her notion of what it should be. Klein inferred that she was working on a new project that she was not yet ready to reveal. It seemed to have to do with the structure of Forlani society on a very fundamental level. There was actually a passage in Crop Talk that intrigued him, following a customary disclaimer about how much she would like to visit him if she could. She spoke of “a hen wanting to come back to an old roost, but no one wanting it to leave the coop when it had begun to quack like a duck.” Clearly, Entara did not want to alarm him, but rather to share the secret that she was up to something big.
Ayan’we’s letter confirmed this impression. She complained openly that despite her pleas to be allowed to take a pause in her Blynthian classes for the mahämes, the Council of Nine had heaped extra demands on her that would keep her on Forlan for some time. She had gone so far as to appeal to the Council of Nine, minus her recused mother. A couple of members had approved out of sympathy for Entara, but the rest had stuck with the exigency of possible alliance with the Blynthians and its advantages for the planet. Having grown up in Europe during the Corporate Age, Klein was well schooled in the fact that organizations often found subtle ways to try to keep their most valued assets under benevolent close control. He had a couple of long conversations with the messenger girl, but the most he could worm out of her was that young Forlani of both sexes were excited about some “new songs” that were considered to be daringly progressive about the relations between the matrilines and the Brotherhood. Taking into account the enormous cultural influence of any songs attributed, truly or falsely, to Entara, Klein could begin to perceive the importance of what was going on. He hastened to reply to both Entara and Ayan’we, assuring them in Crop Talk that if someone even knocked on the barn door, the bull would rush out and chase off any intruder.
After another fortuitous exchange of links with Amanda, Klein decided he needed another vacation and joined the paleological unit scouring the southern continent on what he called the “bones and hides patrol.” It was an expedition that might take many months, but with Peebo back at the station for another research stint, Klein knew he could leave the pippo attendants under his supervision with full confidence. The truth was that, while he found all the recent communications with his past life extremely exhilarating, it was also mentally exhausting for him. He longed for the solitude of the wilderness where he could mull things over and decide in an atmosphere of serenity whether it was time for him to leave Domremy again, either in the direction of Forlan to check on Entara and Ayan’we or in the direction of Earth to be close to Amanda. In the meantime, he became passionate about searching for animal remains as the team assembled a trove of biological specimens to bring back for analysis and perhaps future cloning experiments. By the time he got back to the station, Klein had made up his mind to look into the process for joining an Earth resettlement team.
It was then that he began to feel sick. The occasional dizziness and nausea he had experienced on the last two weeks of the expedition must have been from too much sun or too many stale rations, he had told himself. The first time he stumbled and fell coming back from the pippo enclosure, he laughed at himself for tripping over a stone in his own backyard. The second time, he cursed himself for getting old, but still didn’t report it, merely dusting himself off as he glanced furtively around to be sure no one had seen. The third incident was impossible to hide. He had passed out in the middle of a staff meeting, right in front of Peebo and Patak. When he woke up on a bed in the clinic with an IV in his arm he had been irate and tried to get up. It was all his friends could do to keep him from tearing out the IV tube and walking out. Peebo had only calmed him down by promising that if Klein rested, he was going to obtain a new fake ID in case he wanted to take another interplanetary trip.
Inside, though, Klein knew something was seriously wrong. He lost appetite for most food and even had to refuse a glass of beer after the first sip disagreed with him. Patak popped in often with his usual happy face, though Klein suspected he was feverishly performing tests on all the fluids they collected from him. What he didn’t know was that Patak was so worried that he had jury-rigged a comlink to several off-planet medical facilities.
After what seemed an eternity, they changed the meds and Klein began to feel a little better. When they wheeled him into Patak’s office, he thought they were going to simply discharge him. He immediately knew better when he saw the thick files on Patak’s desk and the serious look on his face that seemed to turn his glowing bronze a darker shade.
“So when can I get back to my pippos and check on the expedition’s results?” he asked with false cheer.
“The bone and hide boys are waiting to give you an update, but it’s about your own results, my friend, that we need to talk right now.”
“Bad news, I take it?”
“Some good, too.”
“Give me the good first.”
“As you can tell, the recent cocktail we have brewed up for you has brought a very good control of most symptoms. We can expect this to continue for about ninety days.”
“I think I can
guess the bad.”
“It’s a rare prion disorder. Kept us stumped for a long time until I had confirmation from some off-planet sources. Officially, it’s HPD17 and we think you picked it up on Song Pa. At least, nearly all the known cases have had some association with the planet, usually from indentures such as you were. One researcher has even speculated that it might be related to whatever wiped out the previous civilization there. Song Pai themselves are immune and so far do not seem to be carriers. You were slogging along in the mud for years, so it’s impossible to know how you might have contracted it.”
“So, from what I’ve heard, there’s usually no known cure for prion disorders.”
“Not this one.”
Klein blinked his eyes a couple of times. “If I started right away, I might be able to make it to Greenland in ninety days.”
“I’m afraid not,” Patak sighed. “You would never survive icing or juicing. You would need a sophisticated hospital ship just to keep you alive.”
“And after the ninety days? There will be lots of pain, I suppose?”
“It won’t be pretty, and if we let things take their course, it won’t be fast. The only consolation is that your consciousness wouldn’t be around to feel what’s going on.”
“A nasty straw death, as the old Germans used to say.”
“We can, of course, set up protocols so you can call the final shots.”
“Very appropriate for a mankiller. He becomes his own last target, by proxy.”
“I won’t enjoy it,” Patak stated glumly, “But that’s about it.”
“Then it’s time for me to learn what goes on in the Incubator.”
Patak gave a little start and didn’t know, for once, what to say. The Incubator was the biggest secret in the station and only a few technicians and specialists entered the large building. Of course, it was known that one of the station’s goals was to aid the Locals in restoring their population. There were some mysterious comings and goings, human and otherwise, that had been whispered about by long-time staff. Klein, however, already had a very good idea of what went on there, due to his linkup with Stumpy and others he had communicated with. It was a facility for experimenting with larval hosts.
Finally Patak cleared his throat and replied, “If you wish, we can start processing you for the program. I can tell you from what I know of you condition that you could make an excellent host. Do you understand what it would involve?”
“My main concern would be that I could stay alive long enough to be of some use.”
“No problem there. We have done lots of experimentation. Mostly with animals at first. You see, the original species that Locals preferred as hosts was a sheep-sized grazer that went extinct in the terraforming. After that, they usually used their own bodies to incubate larvae until the settlements started. It didn’t work all that well, for some biological reasons I won’t go into. When humans showed up, they desperately turned to us. The first incubations were, of course, extremely gruesome, despite the fact that they inject an anesthetic substance when they implant the ova. Then we achieved rudimentary communication and began to work with them. Our friend Peebo, by the way, was one of the first to make some breakthroughs.”
“I suspected he was doing more than whistling at the clouds when he walked out past the fields into the savannah.”
“His patience was enough to get the exchange working and to convince them that we were more than a barbaric, destructive species. When we first set up the Incubator, we tried different hosts, mainly thallops. It was clear from the beginning that their physiology made them less than ideal. We’ve had some successes with other types of livestock. Then some humans volunteered – a few Hyperion dropouts but mostly Dissenters who had picked up some disease during transport. I believe your friend Luis is married to the widow of one who chose to be a pioneer. Thanks to them, we were able to totally eliminate the pain factor by using a combination of varoney venom and the Locals’ own injections. Also, we were able to monitor growth and to determine that human incubation need only be ten days long. After that, the larvae can be moved to a more efficient feeding apparatus that gives us better temperature control at the same time. We were also able to develop an implantation technique that avoids a lot of collateral tissue destruction for the ten day period.”
“Sounds like something I can handle.”
“Frankly, the main concern is psychological. The host has to be able to deal simultaneously with its own mortality and with the awareness of a foreign organism feeding off its cells and growing inexorably inside it. Some people just can’t deal with that in a rational manner.”
“Rational, schmational. If I’m going to croak, and especially if I can’t get to see Amanda or Entara in one piece, I want my death to be worth something. As for ‘foreign species,’ I don’t think of the Locals that way anymore. After all, it’s their planet. We’re the foreign species. Time we did something other than exterminate them.” Klein turned his head away and was silent for a moment. “Hell, in some ways, I’m more like one of them. A con, an outcast, an underdog. Maybe the reason I belong here is because I’m more Local than earthling. So bring it on.”
“Klein, I can assure you,” said Patak, nodding his head, “I’ve never known anyone more human than you.”
“The first thing I need to do is to have a long talk with Peebo.”
Ninety days seems like a long time if you count it in minutes or seconds, but it’s only three months, and they can tick by like little clicks on the face of a clock. Peebo had lived for a long time with the immanence of Klein’s demise in one form or another. Beyond that, Dissenters are seldom shocked by the news of death because mourning is so internalized in the observance of their religion. He immediately got the news out on the Crop Talk grapevine and every Circle meeting on Domremy knew of Klein’s condition before the suns set twice. Even their distant colony on Tomakio knew within days. Peebo felt sure that the message, spreading like wildfire, would reach Earth and Forlan soon, but probably not soon enough to let anyone reach them in time. He didn’t even need to inform the Locals. The minute they spotted Klein being wheeled into the Incubator for a first visit, feelers began twitching all over the southern continent. Couriers hurried to the ferry up the coast that Dissenters reserved for Locals -- they abhorred the memory of massacres at Fielder’s and always crossed continents apart from humans. Once on the mainland, they spread like a flash among the pods in the grasslands. A healthy Local can bound along to cover six hundred kilometers in a day, so it wasn’t long until all knew the truth. At night they gathered to drone their incubation chant, but this time with extra emphasis at such a significant event.
When Klein wasn’t resting, undergoing prep for the implantation, or wrapping up things with the pippo crew or the team from the paleontology expedition, he wrote letters and prepared link transmissions for Amanda, Entara, Ayan’we, and even Helga. Forlani delegations from the Domremy houses came to visit him. Moe and Felicia joined Peebo at his side, explaining that Mel was off-planet already. Klein had several communication sessions with Locals from the area. One day Stumpy reappeared and they had sessions almost daily, often linking up with three or four other Locals. Klein barely had time to himself. He spent most of it listening to his music or reading a digital copy of Intruder in the Dust, which he had always meant to start but had continually put off. The day his vision blurred so badly that he couldn’t decipher the words of Faulkner on the screen under any magnification, he asked Moe to read the remaining section to him aloud and then called Patak to tell him he was ready.
They shot him full of happy juice for the implantation and screened off his lower body. All that he could remember afterwards was seeing the head and forelegs of an unknown Local next to him. Patak explained that they had successfully implanted four ova near his pelvis and that the countdown to Day Ten was under way in good order. Klein asked to listen to some particular Schumann pieces that he had enjoyed with Entara, but dozed off before they were don
e. Consciousness drifted in and out. Occasionally they fed him something or woke him up to take samples. He couldn’t tell how long it had been when he awoke to find a purplish form standing next to him.
“Entara!” he whispered.
An arm with dense brown fur reached down to touch his face.
“I was on the grassland for a long time. It’s time to sleep now, I think. But I want to feel you again.”
The lithe Forlani body climbed up gracefully into the bed and gently pressed itself next to him.
“I feel a little bushed tonight. Winter Dreams is playing. Let’s just listen.”
There was no music in the room. The two bodies rested together for a long while until the purple form ever so silently arose and went to the chamber door, where Peebo was waiting. They went into the hallway. The Forlani slumped against the wall.
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 38
