Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1)

by John M. R. Gaines

  Klein called Entara to ask her not to go back to the house. She insisted somewhat petulantly that she had no intention of abandoning her domestic rights. She seemed much more confused and distressed in the call, alternating between desperate recollections of the past on Domremy, turbulent confessions that she still desired him, and gloomy statements about seeing no way out of the dilemma. She flatly and angrily refused Klein’s invitation to simply leave Plambo’ and run off with him into the back country until they could escape off-planet. Then she hung up. Klein was about to storm out and begin some more spying when Peebo called on the open link. He was agitated and said Klein should abandon the mission and leave with him soon. There would be no more tramp ships like the Kagahashi Maru in the system for months to come and his backup plan of taking a Tugulean cargo freighter that regularly visited Forlan had fallen through because it had run into a nebular static discharge and was up for a long repair. That meant the only way off-planet was a Hyperion ship, and since the Brotherhood and Hyperion had grown quite chummy lately, Klein’s chances of sneaking aboard after confronting Tays’she were virtually null. Klein repeated to Peebo that he should make his own arrangements, that he would dispose of any evidence himself, and that in any case he thought he would never be leaving Forlan. The call ended awkwardly, with neither of them really wanting to say goodbye.

  Klein’s first spying priority was to find out more about Entara’s actual movements, so he walked to the Passport Administration and followed her when she left work. To his surprise, she went directly to the mahäme! Klein struggled with the idea that she had apparently been spending most of her nights at the same compound where he slept, concealing this information from him. The next day it was Ayan’we’s turn to be followed. He followed her from her health lab to a series of buildings that turned out to be her public school, where she dropped off some materials and picked up others. From there, she went to the home, but her stopover there was very perfunctory, serving apparently to drop off books and pick up clothing. After a brief visit to a shop that served fruity drinks, where she chatted with a ragged group of friends who were all armed with some kind of computer device, she returned to the mahäme, where she talked for some time with her mother and then went to a dormitory area for girls her age. Neither had been harmed, approached, or followed by anyone but himself, as far as Klein could determine. The “neighborhood people” were still on watch, though this time it was an entirely different group. Likewise, the geldings were still posted around the house, and Klein was pretty sure that both Entara and Ayan’we had noticed them, while pretending to see nothing.

  The next afternoon, Klein decided to trail Entara again, but to stop her for a talk before she got back to the mahäme. This time, though, things would be a bit different. She was quite late leaving work and Klein used his usual technique of trailing from a distance, but she surprised him by running up to a tram that arrived and hopping on in a direction he had not anticipated. He could see no more trams on the way, so he figured his only recourse was to wait at the stop and hope the next one followed the same route. By this time the Forlan twilight was thickening and, as often happened after sunset, a fog was beginning to rise. At the edges of the mist on either side of him, Klein soon detected furtive movements, not the limber, dancer-like movement of Forlani females, but a more sluggish and sinister variety.

  Klein deduced he was soon to be visited by some dobutu, so he searched for a weapon. The schedule for the tram was on a pole with a hefty metal base that did not seem attached to the ground. He knew if he could wield it somehow it would have a considerable impact. After that, he would have to improvise, because the shadowy figures were drawing closer. As soon as the one to his right became distinct he latched onto the schedule post. Immediately sensing that it was too heavy to dead lift, he spun around with it as he had done with the hammer on his days on the Gymnasium track team and flung it straight into the attacker’s midsection. Signpost and dobutu went sprawling down the sidewalk. One down. The one approaching from his left was not yet close enough for contact, but Klein could see he was carrying some sort of coiled weapon and raising his hand to use it. Before he could, Klein ran at him several steps, jumped as high as he could and landed a dropkick square in the gelding’s face, making him collapse in a heap. Maybe I can’t leap into a tree, but I can still get it done, he was congratulating himself, when he heard a sharp cry of “Klein, watch out, behind you!” and turned to see a coiled thing lashing out at him. Before he could move or withdraw another body dashed in front and took the blow. Neutralize, neutralize. Without even looking at his benefactor, Klein side-stepped, grasped the approaching arm of the gelding, twisted under it until he was behind the body, stretched it until it was an unmovable pinion, and smashing down on in, drove the dobutu’s face into the pavement. Neutralize meant neutralize. He kept twisting the arm until a snap told him it was useless and dislocated.

  He bent over to examine the dobutu’s weapon when another voice warned him, “Be careful, Klein, it’s a poison whip and you don’t know how to handle it. Here, help me.” It was a female Forlani who was trying to lift the one who had taken the blow meant for Klein. Up close to their faces, Klein could tell it was the cousins from the day in the Orchard with Entara.

  “Spomonthi’s badly hurt,” said Viga. “We must get her to the hospital at the mahäme.”

  It was clear that the poison whip had not just immobilized Spomonthi, but had opened a nasty suppurating wound where it struck her torso. It reminded him of someone he’d seen long ago at a beach who had been stung by a Portuguese man o’ war. He hefted her into a fireman’s carry and told Viga to lead the way. When the mahäme was in sight he shouted to Viga to run ahead and get some hospital staff and the cousin sprinted off like a rocket. They were met at the entrance by a group of females who took charge and whisked Spomonthi away before he could ask many questions.

  After a while, a girl wearing the red cape that stood for all sorts of organizing staff came down to talk with him. “We don’t get many wounds like that. The Brotherhood is only supposed to use those whips for rituals in their own compounds and they are strictly illegal on the streets. Fortunately, you acted quickly and the wound had not spread to any vital organs. It would have been deadly if it had time to act, especially on your human body if it had hit you.”

  “Will you take good care of her?”

  “Of course. Viga would thank you herself, but she wants to stay in the recovery room. Spomonthi will need much sedation. We will keep you informed.” Then Red Cape got a sort of smirk on his face as she said, “Tell me, Teacher Klein, you have a reputation for… shall we say, thoroughness? Are there any corpses out there that we should take care of before they attract more attention? It’s the law here.”

  “I think I hurt somebody’s feelings, but there are no corpses.” Not yet.

  Having had enough cloak-and-dagger for a while, Klein rested the next day, confining his walks to a stroll through the nearby Gardens of Fulfillment. He felt so tired when he returned after dark that he thought about dropping right into bed, but his body suddenly grew taut as he realized he was not alone in the room. Quetzalcoatl was banging away on his cage and clicking like a demented Geiger counter. Goons right here in the monastery? But it was all right. The shape silhouetted against the window was female. “I’ve been to see Spomonthi,” sighed Entara.

  “It was your idea, spies trailing the spy?”

  “The poor girls were being run ragged the last few days. And then this happened. My unfortunate cousin can be disfigured and once again, it is all my fault.”

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself. It’s doubly my fault, first for spotting the dobutu too late, then for not spotting the girls at all. I should have taken the poison.”

  “If you had, you wouldn’t be over in the hospital, you’d be dead, wrapped in a shroud about to be shipped off-planet like a block of ice, and my worst nightmare would have become real.”

  “Entara, I…”

&n
bsp; “Oh, I’ve been so wrong, so consistently. Thinking you could give up love without hating me, thinking I could give you up and act like such a little moral hero. I had to come tonight. Take off your clothes.”

  Klein quickly slipped them off and Entara pushed him gently down backward onto the bed. “Now you’ll see how useless I am. Right there. You remember. No, it’s not like before, but never mind, never mind. Tonight you’ll see that at least I wasn’t lying to you. Yes, just like that. Don’t speak, don’t try to say anything reassuring. If you feel like opening you mouth you just kiss me right here. Remember? And I will kiss you right here.”

  “I won’t let you go away again ever.”

  She gasped as she kissed his eyelid. “Is that a tear?”

  They lay together for a long time, neither of them having reached the shiver that douses the soul with joy. He wondered whether she was going to weep, too, but then remembered she couldn’t. OK, I’ll cry a little for both of us.

  “Do you want me to go?” she finally murmured.

  “No. I want to lie right here on me until the entire Milky Way falls from the sky. You realize this changes nothing. You’re mine. You’ll continue to be mine. And vice versa. There will be other nights. This kind of thing happens all the time among my folk. We’ve both been under a lot of stress. And frankly, I’m not sure I’m up to all this training.”

  “Oh, Klein, I can see what you’re trying to do. I don’t want you to just boink me for charity and kiss me as some kind of stupid penance. I’d rather that you just go crazy with ecstasy with all those girls every single day. I don’t want to just sip tea with you and pretend neither of us misses what we had.”

  “It can be better, as great as it was before.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Please tell me you’ll come back tomorrow night. And every night after that.”

  “The day after tomorrow is when you need to confront Tays’she. If we wait any longer we won’t be able to stop FastTrack. It has something to do with a Hyperion ship that’s arriving. One ambush as already happened. Once you see Tays’she, there may be no more tomorrows for us. I have a bad feeling.”

  “That’s why it has to be us. Tomorrow night. And if you come, I will prove to you that there will be no end. We will have lots of tomorrows. As many as we want.”

  “Wait for me tomorrow night,” she muttered in an odd tone of voice.

  Early in the morning, Klein attached a note to his door announcing there would be no training and grabbed a tram to the ag station to see Peebo to make important preparations. The farmer greeted him warmly, maybe because he had feared his friend might already have gotten into trouble, but he shared some very disturbing news. Peebo had been to the Spaceport to book passage on the Hyperion ship that had just arrived and talked with some disembarking passengers, who told him that the ship had a piggy-back attack craft with it. Very unusual and very dangerous, considering that the Song Pai had a ban on foreign military vessels in the system and they loved to shoot to kill. Peebo was worried that the Brotherhood planned to use their company allies to launch some kind of a strike to take out Entara. When Klein shared with him all that he had learned about FastTrack, just to insure documentation in case worst came to worst, Peebo was more positive than ever. He urged Klein to find a safe haven in the matriline properties for Entara and her children, but Klein came up with a little deceptive plan that he thought might ensure even better safety for them and they reviewed it carefully before parting.

  Back at the mahäme, he found a packet of video tabs and a note from the three guardians of the institution telling him to view them and come see them if he had any questions. He quickly found that the tabs contained training sequences for the girls, but not of the type he had become familiar with. They were for the classes that dealt with mating and birth, obligatory for the entire matriline, since even non-mated women were almost always called to serve as post-mating or birth attendants. The mating videos shocked him with their goriness. The piercing of the female Forlani body by her aroused mate was more than any earthly woman could even endure. As the ventral diaphragms were ripped apart by the stiffened and knife-like male organ, there was an incredible loss of blood and tissue. As soon as the male had satisfied his rutting rage, an automatic sensor in the room summoned attendants to help the unconscious mother-to-be. The knowledge they needed to preserve her life went far beyond first aid and made human obstetrics look like a child’s tea party. Lifelike animation showed how Forlani sperm was preserved almost indefinitely in a particular area of the wife’s body and continued to be released to fertilize her ova through a periodic hormonal process that lasted for decades and decades. The number of pregnancies possible from a single mating reached into the hundreds. The birth videos were equally shocking, but in a different way. Instead of human delivery, with an Earthling woman grunting, pushing, screaming, and sometimes writhing in agony, the Forlani mother experienced an orgasmic thrill that could last the better part of a day, as the emerging fetus stimulated an entirely new nervous network that had formed, also through the silent miracle of hormonal change, as her body reorganized itself in the months after mating. Klein thought of a famous sculpture of the passion of St. Teresa of Avila, but the expression of rapture projected by that marble could not begin to capture the happiness of the Forlani delivering her child. The video explained that this nervous discharge had its biological function as it simultaneously ramped by lactic production in the mammaries and began the process of releasing another ovum for fertilization high up at the top of the birth organs. Not only that: the expression on the face of the birth mother indicated more than an orgasmic pleasure, for there was clearly some kind of psychic enlightenment that accompanied the physical transformation, a surprise that was also a confirmation, a liberation that was also a redemption. Klein groped for concepts to express what he saw but came to the frustrating conclusion that his own emotional vocabulary would always be too limited to translate it.

  As a last resort, he decided he needed to get some advice from the mahäme-ki. They awaited him in their office, behind a typical Forlani crescent-shaped table, adorned in the glowing robes that indicated their rank and function.

  “Your honors,” he began in confusion, inwardly cursing himself for addressing them as though they were human judges, “Before I leave this place, I want to thank you for all you and the matriline have done for me, but I have one urgent question. You obviously know of my affection for a certain member of your lineage. But recently I have found it difficult to … express that affection… in a way that I can consider adequate. Please tell me: for a woman, no, a wife among the Forlani, is there a way that I can please her so that I restore the joy we felt before she was mated?”

  “You have reviewed the videos we sent?” asked the first speaker.

  “Very carefully, but they do not seem to give my answer.”

  “Because you do not wish to hear it. You might as well ask if you could scoop up the Eastern Sea with a dessert spoon.”

  “Or capture the clouds in a bucket,” remarked the second speaker. “Your own expectations cloud your vision. Can’t you cease to be a slave to your own sensuality?”

  “But I am not just talking about a physical reaction!” blustered Klein. “I don’t seek anything for myself.”

  “Are you so sure of that?” retorted the third speaker. “Do you not recognize that this shiver of passion you seek is only a key, and also a cloak, for a deeper desire, an unquenched desire, that you have never truly faced?”

  “There can’t be anything deeper for me than Entara. With her I know I can be truly happy and demand nothing else.”

  “You create your own illusion, like our pets who play with a ball of fluff and imagine it is prey,” explained the second. “That ball of fluff you wish to capture has a mind of its own, and that mind has now gone to a place where you cannot accompany it. You will drive yourself mad by trying, and whether you wish to or not, whether you know it or not, you will bla
me Entara for failing to be that which you desire, and which she has now surpassed. She is an extremely compassionate person. How do you think it will affect her when she senses this?”

  “Because she will!” blurted the first speaker, striking the table with her fist. “In fact, I’m sure she already has. Do you want to destroy the very thing of beauty you want to hold?”

  The third speaker paused a bit before intervening. “Make yourself grasp, Teacher Klein, that in order for you to truly cherish memory, you must allow it to dwell where it belongs, in the past, and not distort it by placing it in the prison of an imaginary future.”

  “I have trouble dealing with all this. Especially now.”

  “Then do now what you must,” said the first speaker. “Live in your actions for the present and be mindful of all that you do. When you turn to your memories again, force yourself to understand what my colleague has just said, if you cannot come to those thoughts naturally. It is a discipline, a challenge, that I impose on you.”

  “You can’t give me orders as though I was one of your members.”