Klein imagined the dreaded Dorfman impaled on Peebo’s farm tool. He remembered then that farmers in the Middle Ages could turn a flail, a pitchfork, an ox yoke, any everyday implement into a lethal weapon against bandits or marauding ex-soldiers. Was this something the Religious Dissenters included in their training? Another puzzle inside a mystery inside a conundrum.
“I thought you couldn’t do that kind of … planting without talking it over with the boys?”
“Did it. They all agreed that thing had to planted and fast. Weeds can spread before you know it, so sometimes you just need to up and act.”
“I really have to congratulate you on those cucumbers, but maybe I will appreciate them more wafter they’ve been pickled. There was something else I wanted to ask you about. It has to do with a bull and a heifer.”
“Well, you came to the right place and that’s a fact. Nothin’ I like to talk about more than the neighborhood livestock. I bet you want to know something about that one got shipped out of here some time back.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well, you better sit down because the news is not too good.”
In a combination of Crop Talk and low, precise sentences, Peebo told Klein that his former “girlfriend” (Entara’s little joke) had fallen on difficult times. Klein had already learned from the Forlani at the nearest brothel that one of Entara’s female relatives had died just before she left and she had been called home urgently to marry an important male who had been the intended spouse. Klein had already suspected that Entara would not enjoy being a stand-in mate, no matter how much the family would benefit from the alliance. However, Peebo was now telling him that the situation was much worse than he had feared. Entara had found that the new husband, Tays’she, was a particularly bad example, even for the Forlani male gender, which was not known its brains, its courage, or its gentility. Tays’she was an especially spoiled and dronish creature. Despite this, she had taken her family duties very seriously and already had a trio of beautiful daughters to care for, with more on the way. Klein was not surprised, since Entara had shown hints of a powerful maternal streak that neither of his more recent consorts had shared. She had discovered, furthermore, that her husband was involved in some corruption, but refused to expose him, rejecting the advice of her own mother. Word was that Tays’she was threatening to demote her to the status of second wife by taking a younger and socially superior bride. Right then and there, Klein felt a sudden urge to wring Tays’she’s purple neck. His blood surged in his veins in a way that happens only in mankillers, so the colonists say.
Peebo let Klein chew silently on the bitter truth for a while as he regained his calm. He had been worried about this sit-down for weeks and was glad the message was now passed on.
For his part, when Klein had cooled his temper, he marveled at how much the Dissenters had been able to find out about domestic politics on far-off Forlan. They had no farms there, as far as he knew, and it was a planet for which it was notoriously hard to obtain travel passes and transportation. The consorts in the local Forlani house could not possibly have known so much. He had always thought the Crop Talk network was a kind of quirk limited to a string of remote farms, but he now realized it might be capable of intelligence operations on a scale that surpassed both the Corporation and the Military. As the sun was heading for the horizon, he accompanied Peebo into the “cottage,” which in reality now resembled something closer to a cruciform Quonset hut. He was hoping that no cucumbers were on the menu that night.
Fortunately, they weren’t. But all sorts of other vegetables were, and he stuffed himself with lots of fresh treats. This led Klein into a deep sleep as soon as he had slumped down in the recliner in his old room in the original adobe wing of the cottage. That night he dreamed of Entara, surrounded by a herd of little purplish muskrat-like things. She was skipping with them through grass the color of white asparagus. She was speaking French and leading them in a little song…
En allant par la Lorraine avec mes sabots
En allant par la Lorraine avec mes sabots
En allant par la Lorraine, j’ai vu un capitaine dondaine…
The Forlani kits were chirping along like human kids back in the days when they still had écoles maternelles and Kindergärten, before they started pumping near-infants up with drugs and hooking them up to subliminal computer programs. When he woke up, he wondered what it all meant. He got as far as associating the pale grass and the song with a trip he’d made to Metz years ago, when he’d eaten white asparagus for the first and only time because it was on a menu touristique et gastronomique and been amazed at the difference in taste and texture from the freeze-dried type obtainable in the ubiquitous Aldi supermarkets.
Entara was still on his mind in innumerable, unfathomable ways when he came out to breakfast, so he decided to change the subject to jog his consciousness a little, and he told Peebo about the Heroes movie and Hyams and the Varoneys. Peebo listened intently as he leaned back, sipping on his colonial coffee made of scorched wheat and chicory.
“Varoneys, huh?” he chuckled. “Yes, indeed, that’s a pretty good name for those critters ‘cause that’s just what they sound like.” He gave Klein a little wink and invited him to the corridor leading to the new wings. “Follow me and I’ll show you a little something.”
As they passed the doors to the two transverse wings, Klein tried to catch a peek. They had started as little more than sheds and had always been pretty much empty, except for spare crates and packing material, but now, he noted, things had changed. One seemed to be filled with a lot of scientific equipment and boxes of what appeared to be old paper books. Was Peebo developing a literary hobby in his spare time? Domremy was far too remote to try to hawk antiques like those. The other wing also had lots of boxes, mostly quite big, of varying shapes and sizes – not like the old produce packs that had been there during his residency. When they came to the remaining wing, Klein was astounded to see it filled with cages, chemicals, and specimens of Domremy wildlife.
They walked up to one very neat cage and Peebo exclaimed, “Voilà!” A Varoney squatted in it, looking at them expectantly. Klein could perceive it had a kind of splint affixed to one of the hind legs.
“What do you think? Oh, that isn’t my first. She’s number five. My own little rehabilitation ward for fractured Domremians. You see, these toads aren’t really very fast or very smart – at least by most accounts. So when a crawler or another vehicle shows up, they’re more than likely to just try to face it down and get themselves partly squashed. So I bring them back here to patch them up and study them a little.”
“You know they’re poisonous. How do you avoid those spines?”
“Easy. I just grip ‘em with one of these harvesting arms of mine. See?”
Peebo demonstrated the articulated metal arm that had rested on a nearby barrel and showed how it clipped onto the desired object to allow safe lifting, even of a venomous toad.
“They’re right interesting creatures. I had one that didn’t make it, so I didn’t figure he’d mind being dissected a bit before a proper burial. One very adaptive type of little animal. That’s how they were able to survive after we came and changed their atmosphere.”
“WHAT?” yelled the mankiller. “You mean Domremy was different from this?”
“Look it up. It’s in the old records if you dig deep enough. The company semi-terraformed the planet before setting up the colony. It originally had trace gasses that would have interfered with human habitation. Unfortunately, when we changed the atmosphere, we made a lot of the wildlife instantly extinct. Including some pretty important parts I’ll tell you about when I have more time someday. But the Locals and these little guys and some other stuff didn’t depend on any of those trace gasses, so they evolved a little bit and fit right in with our simple nitrogen/oxygen mix. Except an ecosystem is an ecosystem and you can’t just knock out part of it and expect no problems, just like you couldn’t do without the brakes or the
transmission on one of our vehicles. Like I say, it’s a little complicated and I’ll explain more some other time. Need to know only right now, ain’t that right?” he chuckled, giving Klein a little slap on the back as he ended his joke.
“So did you find out anything useful about them?”
“Sure did. I found out how to keep them out of my garden so I won’t step on one by mistake. A vine called goya. They’re allergic to it and they won’t cross a row of it, so I just plant it like a wall all around the garden area. You can eat it too, the goya, that is, if you cook it in some sauce – ‘cause by itself it isn’t all that wonderful.”
“Anything else?”
“Yup, one other thing. The madam over at the Forlani house asked me to check out why these critters seem to be more toxic to the girls than to us. One of the girls just tried to pick one up out of curiosity and got sick without even being stung. It seems that, besides the spine venom, they actually have multiple toxins in the skin that are potentially harmful to Forlani physiology. They can result in a kind of neurological shock. I finally found the minimum fatal dose, which is mighty small, but I haven’t been able to work out an antidote yet. I did get them to promise not to try to pick up any more of them, though.”
Klein had to wait a couple more days for transport back to Site 89 because the surface trains were only running on an ever more reduced schedule. Supposed to be temporary, due to a parts shortage, they said, but temporary had stretched now to include indefinite, or so it seemed. As he lolled around the farm, he noticed that Peebo spent most of the time out in his crop-rows walking on stilts to avoid the Varoneys out beyond the garden. Klein would watch him go on out until he couldn‘t see him anymore. He would be gone so long that surely he must have gone to the limit of the crops and beyond. Unarmed. Without any patrol. Or even any tracking device (none of the Dissenters could abide wearing tracking anklets under any circumstances). What could he be doing out there all that time? Wasn’t he afraid of being snatched by a Local? Could Peebo have found some way of managing with those creatures? Could other Dissenters, too? Need to know only, he repeated to himself. Better I don’t ask too many questions till they want me to know – if there is anything to know. What was the Crop Talk signal, something about don’t upset an apple cart? Apple cart? What the hell was that? His imagination in a whirl, he would go inside and punch up a football match, see how Borussia Dortmund or Monchengladbach were doing, but still found that his mind would find its way back to Entara sooner or later.
Entara sighed as she entered her marriage house, provided by her husband’s Brotherhood connections. She never succeeded in completely relaxing when she returned to the small living space she shared with her mate, and sometimes the children, though by now it should have been familiar and comforting. Typical of most Forlani homes, the house was very compact and designed to provide a maximum amount of interior storage space at the expense of what humans would consider aesthetic appeal; the building was a simple, unadorned dome on the outside, with a door opening to what humans would consider to be a “living room.” The living room contained a low couch, seats, and communications devices, which Entara rarely used. Like most Forlani females, she typically spent most of their time working with her extended sisters or socializing at the mahäme and relatively little inside the private home. Her new mate’s bad disposition only increased the tendency to stay away. Nonetheless, Entara had obtained a new multiband receptor as a wedding present for her Tays’she, knowing that he enjoyed the human media programs that Hyperion Corporation had begun broadcasting on Forlan. Perhaps it might improve his moods. True to form, he was sprawled out in his recliner, watching some Earthly melodrama with rapt attention. Entara heard the cacophonous yelling of an angry woman coming from the holoscreen as Tays’she swiveled his recliner around to face her.
“Hello, wife,” Tays’she said lazily to Entara. He was about a foot shorter than his spouse, and had a slender build with spindly limbs, typical of Forlani males. His eyes were a deep jade shade of green, and Entara had once been enthralled by their beauty, when he had given her the honor of becoming his First-Wife-in-Standing. As the years of their marriage had passed by, she found herself less attracted by his physical beauty and unhappy with his shiftless, arrogant nature. It seemed that he never tried to keep the living quarters in good order unless she nagged him, and he often let bills go unpaid, languidly drifting through life with the barest minimum of effort. Entara remembered Klein, who for all his vulgar, violent human emotion, possessed a single-minded drive and sense of purpose she had never seen in any Forlani male.
“Good day, honored Tays’she,” Entara said as she touched his left hand in the traditional Forlani greeting. Tays’she nodded and asked her how her day’s work at the Interstellar Passport Center had gone. “Oh, pretty much a normal day. Just screening some prospective workers for the Forlani enclaves on human colonial worlds.”
“Any interesting prospects?” Tays’she asked, as he stabbed at the screen of his tablet.
“No, that is, none of the ones today had a troubled childhood or adolescence. None of the applicants from this group were rejected,” Entara answered.
“How disappointing,” Tays’she said. “I was hoping for another mandatory rejection like that one fleeing her family. The histrionics you described from her in the evaluation were…quite entertaining.”
Entara gave an exasperated sigh. “Not all workers in the enclaves outside Forlan would have the advantages I had. A wealthy, supportive family, contacts that guaranteed me an excellent job with the Passport Center when I returned…what kind of a runaway or exile would have that? If Domremy is an example, many of the humans that went to the enclaves were dangerous and violent men. I would not trust an emotionally damaged young woman with them.”
“Might make for an entertaining show,” Tays’she said languidly as he turned his attention back to the holoscreen. He was fixated on watching the angry woman screaming at her children as they revolved around her, firing back insults. Realizing that the chances of having an intelligent conversation with her husband had just dropped to zero, Entara walked downstairs to the lower level where the bedrooms were located. She saw stains remaining from an alcoholic beverage Tays’she had spilled a couple of weeks ago.
“I asked you to have this spill cleaned up yesterday! How long before I must ask you again?”
“The servant was late today and was not paying attention. It’ll get done when it gets done,” Tays’she replied from upstairs, not bothering to come down to look at the stains. Entara gave a frustrated snort and went to take a look at the room her three daughters shared on the rare occasions when they did not spend the night with her or their friends at the mahäme.
Entara was startled to see her eldest daughter, Ayan’we, sitting on her bed in the room. “What are you doing here at home, Ayan’we? You are still supposed to be at the Leadership Academy!”
“The teacher suspended me,” Ayan’we replied. Her eyes were downcast, and she was fully anticipating her mother’s frustration. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Ayan’we continued. “Only a week-long suspension, not a year like Volana got a couple of months ago.”
Ayan’we had predicted her mother’s response well; Entara was furious with her. “How can you have such an arrogant disregard for your future? You were always the best student among your sisters, the one with the greatest hope for social advancement, and you choose to sabotage your own academic record for the sake of some sophistic argument with your Instructors? Even the smallest infractions at the Leadership Academy will stay on your academic record forever! After all we’ve done for you…”
“After all you’ve done for me,” Ayan’we said. “Father hasn’t done anything and I doubt he ever will. Not that he’s been good to you – I heard him threaten to make you a Second Wife last month, he makes you do all the work – he …” she paused as though she was going to say something more, but stopped herself abruptly when she saw the sudden look of embarrassme
nt and shame on Entara’s face. Finally she blurted out, “He doesn’t care about any of us.”
“I will not hear you talk that way about your father,” Entara snapped, as she collected herself. “He has…many issues on his mind that trouble him. His clique is very wealthy and perhaps the Brotherhood forced him into our marriage a bit too early...even if he were to take a new First Wife in my place, it is still his right to do so as husband, according to our ways. However, he would lose so much standing, I’m sure he’d never do that.”
“And our laws also say that he has to be the one to maintain this private house, as the husband and owner, while you go out and do your job. He has those gelding servants, after all. I’ve been paying attention in class, Mom, even if it looks like I haven’t. I just don’t agree with all the teachings. Look at you. You’ve done everything the laws tell us to do for Father, and he still gets to threaten to reduce you to Second Wife, even when he lounges around all day and contributes nothing? It’s not fair to anyone, and I’shan and Tolowe know it too, even if they’re too shy to tell it to you in person like I will.”
Ayan’we’s speech only served to further fan the flames of Entara’s rage. Her feelings mixed with anxiety as she wondered if the two younger daughters really shared Ayan’we’s attitude. On Earth, the three would still be considered rugrats, like the screaming brats in Tays’she’s melodramas, but children matured so rapidly on Forlan. “You must start writing the Letter of Atonement to your Instructor right now. Perhaps if you do a good enough job, the Overseer at the Academy may pressure your Instructor into letting you back early.”
“Can I clean up that beverage stain on the rug first?” Ayan’we asked. “It’ll just stay there until Dad gets sick of looking at it and whines for you to clean it up otherwise.”
“As you wish,” Entara said. “But be sure to have your Letter of Atonement in before the end of the day, or else the school might…”
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 12