Here, though, there seemed to be a problem with either the cameras or the holographic generators because the figure opposite the Warden was shrouded in shadow where the table between them was bathed in light. A small blue rag was laid out on the surface of the table. Shadowy holographic blurring or not, one thing that was crystal clear about the other man was the menace that he projected. There was something about the way that he did nothing that was very threatening. The man was still, in the way that a panther is still just before pouncing on its helpless prey. Not a movement was wasted. This was not the stillness of the calm before the storm, or even of the eye of the storm. This was the calm that the storm allowed you on the understanding that you did not mess with the storm because that would be very, very bad.
“What you are saying,” the Warden amended irritably, “is that someone has escaped from Srindar Djem, something that we know to be impossible.”
“A thing is impossible only until someone does it,” the shadowy figure pointed out.
“But the guards said that the pig ate him,” the Warden insisted doggedly. One way of avoiding awkward truths is to continue to refute them until everyone else gives up trying to convince you to see it their way and goes off to bother someone else instead. It was a strategy that had served him well in his political career so far.
“Of course they did,” the other man replied calmly, “and I am sure they believed that.”
“Well then…” the Warden started, but the other interrupted smoothly.
“But I did not believe it. I am paid not to believe things. The contents of the pig’s stomach...”
“You pumped its stomach?” the Warden asked in astonishment.
The shadowy figure waited patiently.
“You pumped the stomach of a Djemese pig? I mean how would you..?”
“It was not easy,” the other man admitted.
“I’ll bet,” the Warden said with feeling.
“You will have the first hospital bills in the morning,” he was told. “The pig was not co-operative. The results, however,” the fuzzy hologram hurried on to prevent further interruptions, “show clearly that there are no signs of recently digested inmates of any species. The pig didn’t eat him.”
The Warden took only a moment to shrug that off. He was a politician after all and so ignoring facts was his stock in trade. “So he is hiding out somewhere on the planet.”
“Quite possibly,” the still man conceded, “but to what end?”
“Well I’m sure that I can’t be expected to understand the criminal mind,” the Warden declared.
“Of course,” the other man nodded understandingly. “What would it serve a jailer to understand those in his charge?”
“Exactly,” the Warden echoed the gesture and then caught himself. “Are you criticising me?”
“The bars in the drain were interfered with,” the other man sidestepped the question. “That drain led to the tanks and those tanks are the only way off the planet.”
“Are you seriously suggesting...”
The holographic figure stirred slightly.
“...saying that this prisoner hid in a tank of pig...”
“The bars were interfered with. The only thing the drain leads to is the tank and there is only one reason to gain access to the tank. Without a body you can be sure of nothing,” the flickering image reiterated. He was used to dealing with petty power brokers like this one. There is no man so blind as one who has had his eyes removed with red-hot pokers, but a bureaucrat with his job on the line comes a close second.
“All right,” the Warden finally conceded with a sigh that seemed to originate deep within the sofa that supported his portly frame. “What course of action do you sugg... propose?”
“I propose that you pay me to bring back that body.”
“But you said that he isn’t dead!”
“Is that a problem?” the still man inquired.
The warden supposed not. “Don’t I pay you anyway?”
“Not for this and it won’t be cheap.”
The Warden’s sallow complexion paled considerably, “How ‘not cheap’?”
“Does it matter?” the other asked him. “What price would you put on keeping Srindar Djem’s reputation as being inescapable, what price the absence of a Republican review?”
A chill colder than that of total vacuum on the dark side of the moon swept through the Warden’s whole body, causing several parts to shrink. A Republican review would certainly follow news of an escape and it would look at all aspects of the running of the prison planet, including all the financial records. That would not be good for his political career, nor for his third concubine who wanted to change the colour of the beach at her new beach house to match the colour of her new bikini.
“Take whatever you need,” he quickly authorised, “but I want a quick and quiet resolution.”
“That tank could have been shipped to a hundred worlds, but you can be sure that I will waste no time.”
And to prove it, he wasted no time in breaking the connection.
FERTILISER GOD OF DUNES
The first indication to reach Haynes that his journey was over was when he started to sink. There had, no doubt, been several other signs before that, but it was the fear of the end of the breathing straw being submerged under the re-liquidised surface that broke through into his self-induced coma. The body’s self-defence mechanism is a remarkably powerful thing and the idea of taking inside any of the material that currently surrounded it outside was more than enough to spur Haynes’ into action.
Emerging from the trance, he quickly reached for the edge of the tank and hauled himself up out of the noxious contents. He was dangerously weak, which gave him some idea of how long he had been trapped. It took the last reserves of his energy to twist himself over the edge of the tank and drop to the ground beyond.
Free ground.
He turned around to find himself facing several people, all of them staring at him with jaws open in astonishment, awe or fear.
“Are you the God?” one of them finally asked.
Haynes knew better than to get caught out like that again. “Of course not,” he was surprised that his throat could even carry sound let alone form intelligible words. “I am merely his prophet.”
The audience sighed audibly.
Haynes collapsed.
The world, he found out later, was called Hochnar, which translated in its own language as the Nowhere Planet. The inhabitants weren’t being modest either, just accurate. Hochnar really didn’t have a lot going for it. A small planet, light years off the space lanes, it had been colonised by farmers looking to return to a simpler age. They soon found out that simpler also meant harder. With no unique or valuable cash crops to barter, the new Hochnarians found themselves quickly forgotten by the Republic’s bureaucrats to scratch out a survival and struggle towards becoming prosperous enough to pay tax. After decades, the harvests had improved to the point of being good enough regularly enough for the planet to invest in a bit of machinery and a lot of fertiliser. Djemese pig fertiliser.
All of this he learned later. What he first learned on waking up was that he was alive, he was free and the taste in his mouth was almost worth cutting his tongue out to be rid of.
He groaned and leaned over the side of the bed to try and spit out whatever tasted so bad, but restrained himself when faced with a pair of feet in wooden clogs. An enamelled basin was placed in front of him, so he spat into that instead.
“Thank you,” he rolled onto his back and looked up at the owner of both feet and bowl. It was a young woman in a simple shift.
“My pleasure,” she looked down demurely and took the bowl away.
“I rather doubt that,” he said after her, but her place had already been filled by a small deputation of very worried-looking men wearing clothing made from material similar to that of the girl’s smock.
“Are you feeling better?” one man, probably the leader as he was in the centre o
f the group and all the others remained a pace or two behind him, inquired.
“Better than unconscious?” Haynes replied. “Yes, I think so.” He struggled into a sitting position so that he could better see his surroundings. He was in a small room that contained the bed, a single chair and pretty much nothing else. The walls were painted spotless white and the sunshine of the day was streaming in through the single window.
It was a hospital room, he was certain. He had expended enough time and energy avoiding such places to be able to recognise it immediately.
“How long...?”
“You first appeared to us four days ago,” the lead, and so far only, speaker announced.
“Ah yes, about that...” Haynes thought to prepare himself for a quick getaway, but found that he was naked and too weak to outpace anyone, even with the element of surprise in his favour. “I know that my, erm, mode of arrival must seem a little strange to say the least.”
“Why?” one of the audience wondered.
“How else would the God’s prophet choose to appear to us?” another added, genuinely confused.
“All right,” Haynes tried valiantly to regroup, “so not so surprising. I am sorry that the manner of my manifestation has left me somewhat weakened, but I am sure that you will understand.”
“Of course,” there was a general nodding of heads and muttering of agreement.
“Well I don’t understand,” a small voice said from the back of the room. The rest of the men froze with looks of horror on their faces. The group parted to reveal a youth dressed in the same fashion, but with much less facial hair. “I don’t understand how anything could weaken a prophet of the God.”
“Ssssh!”
“Be quiet!”
“You mustn’t challenge him.”
Haynes cut through the babble of disapproval. One way to tackle dissenters was to agree with them. They didn’t like that. It undermined them later on for more important issues. “No, he is right to question. There is much that is not as it appears. Not in this case of course,” he added quickly. “I am exactly what I appeared to be.”
‘“What, a man covered in sh...?”
The others bundled him out of the room and closed the door firmly behind him. One of them kept a tight grip on the handle.
‘“We apologise for Simeon’s words Master,” the man who had originally appeared to be the leader of the group grovelled effectively. It was clearly something that he was good at. “Please do not think that he speaks for any but himself.”
“Good master...?”
“Bentham”
“Good master Bentham,” Haynes wanted to stand and put one arm companionably around the man’s shoulders, but was uncomfortably aware that this would expose more of him than was seemly for a God’s earthly representative, so he settled for smiling expansively. “I need to make my first request of you.”
“I am honoured,” the man bowed so low that Haynes feared he would hit his head on the foot of the bed. “How may I serve?”
“I’m going to need some clothes.”
Hochnar was bleak. There really was no other word for it. As he toured the sights (which consisted mainly of wide-open, windswept fields where the crops struggled to reach knee height and large barns full of thin and bad-tempered cows) one word kept occurring to Haynes over and over again and that word was ‘bleak’.
The problem was the soil. In technical terms, it was rubbish. There were barely enough nutrients in it to grow weeds let alone food crops. Only the carefully managed use of fertiliser allowed anything to grow at all and the only fertiliser available was the naturally occurring kind. Basically, all life on Hochnar relied on manure and so the inhabitants had built their lives around it. And their religion too.
Finding out about the religion had been the trickiest part of Haynes’ performance yet. He was, after all, supposed to be the Prophet. Most prophets at least knew the name of the God that had sent them. Haynes asked one of his now-constant companions to recite the holy book only to be met with blank faces. So much time, it seemed, was spent tending to the crops and cows (not to mention the collection and distribution of the all-important manure) that there had been no time to develop a written history. The religion was passed on by an oral tradition.
“Now that you are here,” one of his companions from the hospital had told him, “there will be time for such things.”
And that was the thing - the Hochnarians believed. They believed in community spirit, family values, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and anything else that might make their bleak lives a little less...well, bleak. What they most believed in was Manure. Not the manure that they forked onto their fields or washed from their clothes every day (and their skin, and their hair and from under their fingernails - that stuff gets everywhere), but Manure with a capital M. It is not often that a race becomes so utterly dependant on one resource that it quite literally becomes their god, but that is exactly what had happened on Hochnar. It was even rarer that the material in question was the one that came out of the back end of Djemese pigs and the mouths of galactic politicians.
The people of Hochnar believed utterly, something that Haynes could harness, but also something that could turn and bite him faster than a rattlesnake on steroids.
“Master Bentham,” he summoned his senior advisor. The Hochnarians had taken to calling the men that accompanied him ‘apostles’. Everywhere that Haynes and his new companions went their progress was watched with fearful hope (or hopeful fear, Haynes wasn’t sure yet) by everyone they passed. To have so many pairs of eyes watching his every move made Haynes very nervous indeed. “I have now seen so much of your lands, but there is one thing that you have not shown me.”
The man looked panicked, which seemed to be his default state, “but I...”
“Be calm. The failing is in myself for not stating my wishes clearly enough,” Haynes forestalled another round of base fawning. He wondered how real prophets stood all the fear and worshipping all the time. “I wish only to see the spaceport.”
“Spaceport?” Bentham asked, confused, which seemed to be his other default state.
“The place where spaceships land and take off,” Haynes expanded.
“Spaceships don’t stop here,” he was told.
“They don’t land?” All of a sudden the future looked as bleak to Haynes as the landscape around him.
“No, I do not be believe that you understand,” Bentham proceeded to make it even worse. “They do not even stop. The one that brought you to us dropped you from low orbit on its way past. Ah, here we are.”
“Here we are where?” Haynes asked the question on autopilot, focussing his attention on the vista of a lifetime stranded on the Republic’s largest dirtball, mostly spent in prison, or worse.
“When they heard that we would be passing these parts, the regional governors requested an audience, well more of a sermon really.”
“What?” Haynes’ attention rapidly refocused.
“It will be only a small group, no more than a couple of hundred people.”
“A couple of hundred?” A quick glance was all that was required to discount the possibility of a quick getaway. They were stopped outside a large barn situated in the middle of a plain that was planted with a mix of the crops that managed to scratch a barely successful harvest out of the infertile soil, which meant mainly a low vegetable not unlike cabbage, but without the flavour, and a hardy strain of wheat that barely reached to knee height even when fully grown. The variety of dishes that could be cooked from these two staples was surprisingly large, but tasted surprisingly the same.
A large number of farm vehicles were parked outside the barn.
“Ah,” Bentham reassessed, looking at the vehicles, “We might have underestimated the number.”
“You think?” Haynes snapped.
Just then, a small figure darted out from between the parked vehicles and almost plunged straight into them. It was a girl and her young laughter died abruptly. H
aynes had barely enough time to recognise her as the young woman who had attended him in the hospital before a young man emerged with equal haste behind her, nearly knocking her off her feet.
She curtsied clumsily, “I am sorry my Lord.”
“Youth and laughter are not things to apologise for,” Haynes told her. He was becoming so familiar with his new persona that it was almost natural. That was the time to be most careful, when mistakes were the easiest to make. “It is fortunate that we meet again. I can now thank you for your kind consideration in the hospital. What is your name?”
“Keely,” the girl smiled, the expression lighting up her whole face, already flushed from her earlier flight, and making her momentarily beautiful.
“My sister,” the young man who had been chasing her added significantly.
Haynes belatedly realised that it was Simeon, the boy with the awkward questions.
“That figures,” he muttered to himself. Finally finding something on the planet worthy of interest, it was inevitable that she would come with in-built complications.
Simeon scowled at him and Haynes noticed bruises and swelling around his face.
“Had an accident there, Simeon?” he asked, hoping to defuse some of the boy’s dislike with a display of concern.
“No,” Simeon responded. He took the girl’s hand, “Come on Keely.”
Keely smiled widely at Haynes as she was pulled away into the barn.
“There goes trouble,” Haynes mused to nobody in particular, looking after her departing figure.
“Few people think as Simeon does,” Bentham told him mistaking the focus of his gaze, “and even fewer like to hear his views.”
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