Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1)

by John M. R. Gaines

  There was something else left in the thallop packs – a sniper’s rifle and a lot of ammunition. Not as good as his old M221, but still serviceable. At first, he thought it might be useful for keeping varoneys out of his path, but in truth, amid the silence of the prairie, he found that they heard his approach from far off. He barely could catch a glimpse of them as they scuttled off into the tussocks. His first real use of the rifle was when the rations finally ran out. After living on some roots and seeds for a few weeks, he decided to kill what looked like the oldest of the three thallops and managed to butcher and smoke it inside a little tent he took from the packs. He used up all the salt and pepper he had in order to jerk it and congratulated himself that it wasn’t too bad.

  Even though he felt a contentment as never before, Klein’s senses sharpened to the point that he could feel a presence in the grasslands beyond his little sphere of activity. Even without sophisticated goggles and sensors, his own organs had become attuned to changes in the sounds of bugs in the wild, to nuances of odor. Soon he could sniff out waterholes almost as well as the thallops. He swore he had become sensitive enough to air pressure to detect the approach of a storm without even looking for one. So he knew he was being watched and he had a pretty good idea what it was.

  He had to devise a lure to catch sight of the first Local. He staked his animals near a water hole and crept around in a big arc downwind until an oily odor told him the Local was near. For hours he crouched in the reeds watching it, until his thallops began to snort to call him back. The Local must have understood this, too, because he vanished out of sight with a couple of low bounds. Klein pondered what had happened for a long time. This Local, complete with its up-close scent, confirmed what he had suspected for months about being monitored. Yet there was no hint of aggression in the creature. The Local had, in fact, placed itself out at what must have been the maximum extent of its line of observation. So it was watching, not hunting. Why had it not snuck up and attacked? Back in his days at Stafford Station and afterwards when he had worked with Cashman, Locals were quick to jump on any exposed human or thallop and carry them away to serve as hosts for their larvae. A few of these larval arrays had been exposed and destroyed after a massacre, providing humans their scant knowledge of Local reproduction. Why spare him? Wasn’t he good enough to feed to their newly hatched spawn? And if they had no appetite for him, why not go for the two thallops, especially when they had been left unattended?

  Later that night, as he listened carefully, he heard a far-off drone a little different from the wind and knew that the Local was communicating with its kind. Perhaps it was alerting a troupe that would descend on him at sunrise. At first light he made a little scarecrow out of reeds and used it to sight in his rifle. He would hold up the human end to the last and take out at least one Local before he succumbed. He even made an improvised grenade from some explosive and bits of scrap metal in order to take himself out so they couldn’t carry him away as a living host. Then he got an idea and took off his clothes to put on the scarecrow, lying it down like a sleeping dummy. He washed his own scent off as best he could before slipping half-naked into the tall grass, hoping he had not yet been seen. In this way, he hoped he could fool the beasts with an upwind approach they would not expect. Neither the thallops nor the dummy brought forth the expected pouncing attack.

  After several hours, as the sun neared its zenith, Klein decided he was tired of swatting flies and moved to take the initiative. After all, this was a kamikaze mission. As he slowly crept far outside the perimeter of his camp, he finally spotted a single Local. It was moving around a little, about fifty yards away, as though puzzled about what could be happening in the inactive camp. His target was almost head-on, hiding the vulnerable spot on the back, so Klein decided to try to cripple it with a leg shot and then approach to finish it off at close quarters. His first bullet hit it square in a joint of the foreleg and it reared back in pain or surprise but did not flee. The second shot brought out a gush of fluid from the widening wound, leaving the foreleg dangling by a thin bit of tissue. It still made no move to flee, nor did it start keening to call its pack to help it and kill the human. It only stood as erect as it could and faced him as he approached for the coup de grâce.

  What was this crazy creature up to? Did it want to die? From a short distance he shot off the rest of the foreleg. Bluish ooze dripped from the joint. The Local made no move to lunge at him, but braced itself on its remaining legs. Klein could not chase from his mind the odd impression that it seemed proud.

  “You think I’m afraid to kill you?” he yelled. “I might just pick you apart limb by limb.” He aimed at a rear leg, thinking he could topple it over on its side, The thing made a noise. It was not plaintive nor challenging. It wasn’t really a rattle or a rasp, but something in between.

  Klein lowered his weapon a bit. “Is that how you say yes?” It made the sound again.

  “My name is Johnson.” It stood stock still and silent.

  “No, it’s Willie Klein,” he ventured, and the thing made the same sound a third time.

  He could be imagining this whole thing. Even now another Local might be inching up behind him to grab his in its jaws, but he knew there wasn’t one. “I’m not going to harm you anymore,” he shouted.

  The Local again made its sound of assent. Klein waved his rifle at it in a gesture to chase it away. “Now get out of here or I may change my mind. Get out, and don’t come back. I mean it!” The Local began to go backwards, turned around, and crunched off through the grass, leaving its inert foreleg as a trophy to Klein’s anger. He thought about bringing it back to camp, but then, for some reason that escaped him, he quickly gouged out a hole in the ground and buried it before returning to his animals.

  Although Klein stayed longer than usual in that camp, three whole days, nothing further happened and he resumed his trek to the southwest. Having gotten the Local scent into his nostrils, he knew that he continued to be shadowed, but not by many, since the scent was faint and sometimes disappeared for a time. Months later, he was running out of jerky when the Middendorf Hills loomed up from the low horizon ahead of him. A few days out, he saw something in the sky that he had only seen before in old videos – a blimp. It was almost silent, making a soft, whirring sound, as it flew over him straight toward the hills. They wouldn’t take all that trouble to look for me, and didn’t even circle, so there must be something up ahead. The next night he could see little lights up in the hills and the day after that he saw some smoke. He came across the track of a wheeled vehicle, the first he had seen in maybe three years. After several hours walk along the trail, he came into what looked for all the world like an Alpine village. He had to stop and blink a couple of times to convince himself that he wasn’t going crazy. He looked right and left and saw terraces with grapevines contoured into the slopes. Shit! I must have died and heaven is in Switzerland. Or maybe it’s hell with cuckoo clocks. It’ll definitely be hell if they only speak Schweizer Deutsch!

  But it turned out they didn’t speak any kind of German. French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic, but no German. They were all Dissenters who had set out to grow grapes and make wine in the Middendorf Hills. They looked at him as though he were from another planet, which, technically, was true. He heard a few of them murmuring his name behind his back, but they all had the good manners not to ask for it and he didn’t want to give it. They simply addressed him as Traveler, offered him new clothes (they took the old ones and promptly incinerated them), and gave him plenty to eat and drink. It wasn’t Kölsch but neither the red nor the white wines were at all bad. He asked them if they weren’t afraid of Locals and they said there were quite a few that migrated through the hills, but they always stayed away from humans. They explained the blimp, too. A metal shop had been set up at one of the old Sites by some Dissenters and a few clever ex-cons. They knew Hyperion had a helium well nearby that was still used to fill up balloons for passive lifts, so they cobbled together an airship and m
ade infrequent but fairly reliable visits to the most remote settlements of the Circle. They would come for a couple of tons of wine to bring back for barter with the crews of freighters that stopped at Domremy. The vintners offered Klein his own cave-house in their settlement (the facades were Alpine, but the homes were conveniently troglodyte). He declined, swapping his older thallop for a younger one, loaded up on compact supplies, and departed in the direction of the ocean. As nice as these folks were, Klein had grown to value his solitude and freedom more than creature comforts.

  The latest -- and likely last -- shipment of supplies from Earth courtesy of Hyperion had brought with it the usual contraband items for Bill Hollingsworth. Various types of “enhanced” cigarettes, cleverly disguised digital viewing devices, and junk food from Earth that Hyperion’s biochemists had banned for having “no nutritional value” were all smuggled aboard. But one particular bit of contraband was something very unique, something Bill held dear. It was one of the last bottles of merlot from Argentina bottled before Earth’s climate changes had altered the quality of the grapes from the region. Hollingsworth had spent almost of his remaining credits on the illicit transactions required to smuggle the item in from Earth, but he felt very little stress from his newfound poverty. His body had been telling him that he would soon enough have no financial worries at all.

  He couldn’t be certain whether the stress of his trip to Domremy had prematurely aged him—he was one of the few men who had been shipped to the colony in his senior years—or whether the harsh life of a Domremy colonist had put too much wear and tear on his old bones. Over the course of the last few years, his legs had grown weak to the point that he had developed a dislike of walking, and he found that the cool of the capital city winters fatigued him more and more each season. His memory had grown increasingly erratic, and he found himself making mistakes with his calculations and forgetting the correct format and vocabulary Hyperion recommended for statements. Even with his deteriorating health, he had maintained his regular working hours up to the day his first heart attack had occurred. In the months since, he had felt wearier, more reluctant to finish his assigned hours each day. He had finally resolved to resign his position and take whatever retirement Hyperion would allow him on Domremy, only to find that Hyperion had effectively severed its contacts with the planet. He had been working for months for a boss that no longer required his services or seemed interested in his carefully filed archives.

  Nevertheless, he was still a company creature. As he filled in the resignation forms on his computer’s screen, his hazy memory drifted backwards, recalling the events of his time on Domremy. That bastard Alek, he got me sent here, now he’s dead. Who was that guy who visited me that said he’d kill him? Kling? Clive? Someone from a past he vaguely remembered. Too bad he rated no robot organizer. Who gives a damn, he probably wasn’t the one who killed Alek anyway.

  Considering his choices of a reason for resigning his post. Hollingsworth briefly considered his short list of credible options before settling on “declining health.” Might as well tell them the truth, since it’s not like they give much of a damn what happens to me anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken a chance and explored more of this world while I had the chance. It seems like I spent all day cooped up in this tiny room. Planet’s probably all a bunch of deserts with nothing interesting anyway, I doubt I missed much.

  Hollingsworth had reached the point on the form that instructed him to sign his name. Such a simple command, compared to all the job interviews, meetings, office politicking, and performance studies he had gone through to keep a job with the Corporation. One small form to sign on the dotted line with that crude scrawl that he called “Business Cursive,” and he’d finally be free of Hyperion for the first time in decades. He gripped the stylus as tightly as he could and slowly went through the motion, writing his name as elegantly as he ever had in his life, savoring every moment of his final victory signature.

  Once he reached the “g” in “Hollingsworth,” he felt an agonizing pain like a dagger in his chest. Damn, not now! he thought as he fell from his chair onto the floor. Blue and red streaks crossed his vision as his breathing became labored. Eventually, his vision ceased, leaving him with only the distorted memories of his past…

  He saw a young child looking up in admiration at the old Hyperion building in New York City, his eyes filled with hope and idealism. A college student preparing to go into Wharton, worrying about his chances at applying to the Hyperion Development Program in his second year. An older man, neurotic with worry, struggling against younger coworkers hungry for his position…

  Dammit! Always that all-consuming corporation, siphoning off all his time! Had there ever been anything in his life but his career with Hyperion? He remembered there was a woman he had briefly been with before he had been assigned to the Domremy project, but he remembered only lust from that time, not love, and it had ended quickly. No children crossed his mind, nor a pet he had loved. There were only endless piles of work and woe over the course of his life.

  As the light of his world dimmed, a comforting image finally emerged in the dusk of his mind. It was a beautiful Mercedes, silvery in color, with an engine that roared like the petrol engines of the auto industry’s 20th Century glory days. It slid through the night, seemingly of its own free will, and came close to Hollingsworth. As everything else in the universe grew dim, and the mental traumas and strife he had faced during his life vanished from his mind, the silver Mercedes seemed to glow ever brighter.

  What does this car mean? What happened in my life that makes me come back to this one object? Hollingsworth’s mind was already too far gone to remember why he was on Domremy, or even what Domremy was. But somehow, he could remember every single contour of this car, even as the last cells of his brain suffocated from lack of oxygen. His mind came to one final realization in the auto’s silvery glow before the last light left his mind.

  Freedom. The only freedom I ever felt in my life was when I was with you. Hollingsworth felt himself driving down a peaceful country road inside the Mercedes, the windows open in the cool air of early spring. For the last few microseconds of his existence, there was no Hyperion, no Domremy, no anguish. There was only the open road, stretching as far as the rising sun.

  As the plague ravaged Earth, Erica had watched the culture around her transform, its hedonistic openness replaced first by a withdrawn resignation to the inevitability of death, then by violent loathing and resentment of the business and cultural institutions humans had once placed their trust in. First had come the protest marches, people walking through the cities yelling and holding up signs that said REPENT and SAVE US. The ruling class had steadily lost patience with the protests until they finally began to send the police out to “ensure the preservation of an orderly society,” as one of the politicians had put it. Erica had given it little thought at the time. Most of the protesters were far away from Hyperion’s new headquarters in the Intermountain Exclusionary Zone. The majority of them were dying or about to die. At first actual violence was limited to looting and the occasional beating. The government thought that once the protests were suppressed by law enforcement, the movement would end, its ability to make its voice heard the only thing keeping it alive.

  Once the protests stopped, Erica began to pay attention. News became rarer, as the people left outside the E-Zones dropped like flies. The few broadcasts were pre-recorded, according to rumor because media personnel were dying in front of the camera. Their chance at political reform via standard methods gone, the surviving protesters turned to newer, more vicious methods as their circles of friends and family dwindled, taken from them by the relentless plague. There was the Oakland sniper, a man who targeted only the few remaining politicians and civil servants, drowning his grief in the blood of the government he had come to loathe. There was the Kamaitachi Brotherhood, a cult of murderers from the subways of Nagoya, Japan, who had abducted and killed a series of young girls in hopes they
would bring about the end of the world and relieve their suffering. And then there was the Great Fire of Washington, where plague-carrier arsonists lit a massive fire in what was left of America’s capitol in an attempt to burn away the hated federal government, even though the White House and the Pentagon had long been abandoned, their staff transferred to bunkers in the E-Z’s. In the aftermath of the fire, any pretense of an open, tolerant government had been forgotten. National defense forces followed instructions to shoot first, beginning with a “surgical” napalm and cluster-bomb strike against the agitators that wound up incinerating everything between Northeast DC and Laurel, Maryland. From then on, all communications were closely monitored for the smallest potential indication of a threat.

  Mr. Samuels had called Erica into his Boise office to discuss what he claimed was a “very important” career opportunity for her. As she greeted him by shaking his hand, he asked her, “How’s your day going?”

  “Well, it’s…okay, I guess. I just noticed in the H-Weekly that Bill resigned due to ill health. Must’ve taken a while for that news to get back from Domremy.”

  “Who’s Bill again?” Samuels asked.

  “Hollingsworth,” Erica said.

  “Oh, I guess it had been so long that I was having trouble remembering you two used to work together!” Samuels said with a chuckle.

  “Part of the reason I was thinking about it,” Erica continued, “was because, for a long time, I felt sorry for him because he would never be able to come back home to Earth. But after the last couple of years here, I guess I’ve begun to feel envious of him. Domremy seems like such a safe place compared to what Earth is turning into…”