Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  Sarah switched her paz off and sat in the dark. After a while, Fagin came back in and lay down beside her. She rested her hand on his shaggy back and stared into space, listening to the echoes of their dual breath in the empty room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was dark when they came in from the Heaps, and the first thing Sanford saw when he turned onto the litter-strewn road leading to his house was his door standing open.

  Robbed. Again. Living this close to the wall, the risk of home invasion was far less than it might be in the unpatrolled middlegrounds of the prison, but it still happened and he had more to lose than most. He swore, waking his son, who had dozed off against his shoulder. T’aki looked around, at once tense and alert. Sanford clicked reassuringly, told him it was nothing and tried to mean it, but the words were bitter in his throat and his son’s anxiety did not lessen.

  “What happened?” he asked, his tiny hands slipping between the plates armoring Sanford’s neck, seeking comfort by touching skin, wanting to be touched in return. “Why is the door broken? Did the vans come?”

  “Kids,” a voice clicked.

  Sanford didn’t look around. He knew it was Sam—Samaritan. Yls’a’thq really, but the human names got in, didn’t they? Like sand under chitin, digging and eroding and bleeding you out. Sam was one of those he’d had a very vague recollection of back on the ship, and that connection made them closer than any of Sanford’s other neighbors in Cottonwood, even though Sam was an irritating handful of sand himself. Sanford didn’t like him or trust him, but they spent at least two nights a ten-span together anyway, sitting on Sam’s rusted-out vehicle and drinking, because without companions of any kind, why bother surviving at all?

  “They came in just after you left,” Sam continued now. He didn’t get up. He’d lit a fire in the empty place where the vehicle’s engines used to be and was cooking a thick strip of meat. Sam ate real meat almost every night, but that didn’t make him careless of it. Surely there were eyes all around them even now, waiting for Sam’s attention to wander just long enough for a leap and a grab. “Carried off about ten cans between them.”

  Sanford swore again and put his son down. Thirteen cans had been all the food he’d had stockpiled in what he thought of as ‘the open’, even though he’d hidden them. The chit exchange office would be closed by the time he reached it—they shut their windows an hour after the men at the Heaps shut the gate—so unless he felt like walking all the way back to the merchant-grounds and paying the exorbitant price for the meat sold there, there would be no dinner tonight. Until last ten-span, there had been extra cans of bug food hidden in the secret room, but, ha, he’d been robbed and so he’d brought them up.

  Sanford sent his furious stare both ways along the causeway, even knowing the culprits were long gone with their prize, and cursed every pair of watchful eyes he spied as the eyes of thieves and cowards. And bugs.

  Still. Kids. Starving children, no doubt. A herd of them, either at the direction of their parent or a psuedo-parent, or a fatherless pack surviving as best they could. Either way, only children, hungry children.

  “IBI was here,” Sam said, turning his bit of dinner. “IBI was everywhere, I understand.”

  “Contraband search?”

  “Never got out of the vans. It was eerie. They drove around all day, slow. Hundreds of them, I keep hearing, and not just here, but everywhere.”

  That was bad. Strange behavior for humans meant trouble for yang’ti. Sanford could see his son shifting restlessly beside him, wanting to hurry up and be home, but this news disturbed him. “They weren’t out as far as the Heaps,” he said.

  “I don’t explain it, I just report it.” Sam stabbed the meat on the end of a twisted length of metal and pulled it out of the fire, laying it across his thigh to cool. He looked at Sanford, antennae low and palps snapping. “They’ll be back and when they do come, they’ll get out and come on their little pink feet. I have stuff for you to hold.”

  Sanford buzzed curtly, looking around. The causeway was never empty, especially when good meat was roasting out in the tempting open. “Not now.”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Sam said.

  “It’s too dangerous. I’ll be searched.”

  “Your boy’s shell is looking mottled.” Sam picked up the strip of meat and just held it, dripping juices onto the dirt. “Too late now to turn in your chits. You got anything to feed him?”

  Sanford buzzed again, less shrilly. He really did not like this man.

  “Fresh cow, right off the shoulder. Good enough for humans.” Sam dangled the meat out, inviting a snatch from a tiny hand. “You hungry?”

  T’aki hugged onto Sanford’s leg and said nothing. Of course he was hungry.

  Sam glanced up, gave the strip a toss, and Sanford caught it out of the air. “I’ll bring the stuff by tomorrow,” he said again, and kicked the lid down over the fire to smother it. He hopped down from the vehicle’s roof and went into his own house, where, for all Sanford knew, he had plenty more strips of meat and crates of contraband for Sanford to risk his life over.

  He gave the meat to T’aki.

  “I’m not mottled,” the boy said, eating it.

  “I know you’re not.”

  “Just dusty.”

  “I know.”

  Crawling on the Heaps all day no doubt made them both look like they were on their last hour before molting…or dying. And yes, it still made Sanford sick to look out over the valley of garbage and see his small son digging merrily through human waste for one scrap of metal casing, one cache of wire, one uncorrupted circuit board, all so he could fit it together and trade it in for the soft, greasy meat the humans made for bugs. His son, who was not starving, perhaps, but who was always hungry. His son, who played in dirt with rusted hunks of metal while Sanford rebuilt the human machines that brought in that unappetizing nourishment. His son, who did not know how wrong this all was.

  They went home.

  All thirteen cans were gone, of course, and some of his tools, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced. They hadn’t broken anything out of spite and, more importantly, they hadn’t found the trapdoor and ransacked the chamber it hid. They must have been very young; older children knew how to search.

  Sanford set down his sack of parts and picked T’aki up. They shared breath briefly, and then he carried the boy outside and over to the aqueduct wall, to the crack where water was always trickling out. He kicked away some broken glass and heavy coils of wire, set the boy down, and helped him out of his clothes.

  A naked child outside, bathing in the street. His heart hurt. He caught palmfuls of water and passed them over his son’s head, thinking of the house where he’d been born, of the tall spitting fountain in the bath-house, of splashing up to his chest in warm, clean water and swinging from the spout until his father threatened to bind him up in a sack and wash him in the laundry vat. The tall fountain, with soap and sponge-cloths and a sprayer arm and blue stones pressed all around it and his father afterwards with hot oil to rub into his chitin, all the while swearing that he was dirty already and who could do that, who could come out of a bath dirtier than when he went in?

  “Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re chirring.”

  “Was I? It’s been a long day.” Sanford wet his son’s clothes and rinsed them out as best he could. The breeches were thinning over the hips already and he’d found nothing in the Heaps to replace them with. In another year, they would be rags held on with tape, as his own were.

  They walked back to the house, stopping at the ditch so that his naked son could piss outside in the garbage and then run on in and get into bed. Not a true bed, just a pile of sheets too torn and stained for human use, but all that the boy had ever known.

  “How many moons does our world have?” T’aki asked, pulling it all over his head in happy swaths.

  “Three.”

  “One of them is blue.”

  “Yes.” />
  “And two are white like this moon!”

  “Yes. Go to sleep.” He lifted a fold of the bedding to expose T’aki’s small face and bent close to share breath. “Go to sleep,” he said again, tucking him in.

  He should not have had a son, he thought, watching the boy thrash and kick and grumble and finally curl for sleep. For many reasons, and surely the best of them was simply not to bring a new prisoner into this human hell, an innocent and happy life to grow crushed under human boots. He should not have done it, could remember feeling the pangs of shock and bitter fury whenever he saw a child jumping about some stranger’s knees, wanting to run and grab that selfish it’gaz and scream, “Why? Why, when you know it is as good as murder?”

  But time erodes one. Time cuts and bleeds. And shuffled for years and years and empty years, from camp to camp with no friend, no family, had become a killing thing. After moving here to Cottonwood, the newest camp with the tallest walls, set down among his suspicious neighbors, it occurred to him that if he had a child, at least he would have someone to live for. His family on yang’Tak had ceased to exist; they offered him no hope, no sense of purpose. Earth’s reality had killed that memory and all he had was here, and it was Hell.

  So it was here, in Cottonwood, before the causeways had filled with trash, before the aqueducts had cracked, before the ditch of reeking piss flowed beside his house, that Sanford surrendered to loneliness and decided to have a child.

  He took the sheets where his son now slept—old and stained and torn even then—and tied the corners to the roof of his house. He tied it securely, not too tightly. He wanted it to flap when the wind came, but not blow away. And when he was satisfied, he stepped back, opened his urovens, and sprayed it with piss.

  “You know there’s a Blue House just twenty rows up.” Sam. The first words Sam ever spoke to him. He’d come up the causeway in the morning heat, drinking ferment from a plastic jug that had once held machine oil. He’d been fighting. His left shoulder-plate was cracked. And he’d looked familiar…not enough that he had even a sense of a name, but enough that he felt he’d ought to. Later he would learn that Sam paid for his fine house and fresh meat by making drugs and ferment, not only for yang’ti, but for humans (and if certain rumors were to be believed, that wasn’t the only thing he did for humans), but at the time, he was just another stranger.

  Sanford did not answer him. Bad enough to have to make piss in public (but after so many years, even that shame was dulling), he did not want to talk about it. He moved a few steps over and sprayed again, drenching as much of the fabric as he could. The scent was not strong yet, but it would carry. Healthy male piss, full of pheromones.

  “You’re crazy to be doing this.” Sam tipped back the jug and poured half its contents down his throat. “And if anyone answers, she’ll be crazy. So you’re bound to have crazy cross-eyed kids.”

  A final spray, just a spurt, the best he could manage. The first patch was beginning to turn blue in the open air, but not very. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There was supposed to be courting, affection, trust, or at the very least, a sense of play and excitement. He remembered the house on yang’Tak, his father’s father and Y’si’di, his bondmate, who had lived together forty years, had made six children, and still exchanged breath every morning, touched hands every night.

  The memory stabbed at him and he opened his urovens and sprayed hard, some of it blue even wet. I want a baby, that blue stain said. I want to breed.

  “Crazy,” said Sam, this stranger who watched him piss. Then he clapped him on the back—human gesture, unsettling—and said, “I live six cars down, the big one, raised up. Come by tonight. I have a bucket of cow guts and some beer.”

  He didn’t think he would, but when night came, yes, Sanford went. That was how it was here. Things…eroded you.

  A bucket of cow guts sounded good tonight. Sanford left T’aki now soundly sleeping and went outside to sit in his doorway and catch whatever breeze there was. It was still a little light, enough to see the dark blocks of the houses they were fortunate enough to have here in the ‘good’ part of the prison. The humans were happy to provide free housing, of course, where yang’ti were forced to share quarters with as many as nineteen other people, without electricity or windows or even room to hang a curtain between nests for privacy. And some chose to go on living there because the two thousand chits a month it cost to rent a private lot was so far out of their grasp it might as well be a home on yang’Tak.

  Sanford paid. It was more money than any honest man could come by on Earth, but it had been a long time since Sanford thought of himself as an honest man. He paid for the lot and he’d paid for a house to put on it. The one they delivered to him wasn’t too bad (although it would never even begin to compare with Sam’s), but it wasn’t new. Just a plain metal box with a hole in the roof he’d patched with plastiglass to let in some light, a hole in the wall he’d made into a window with the cracked glass from a television set, a flimsy door he’d rebuilt with fiberglass panels he’d found in the Heaps, and of course, the hole in the floor which he’d covered over with carpet…and improved on. But it was private and it had an electrical hookup. He could live here comfortably for years yet.

  And he might.

  He thought of T’aki growing into his final molt here in this place, sitting side by side at the work table fixing human media players for cans of greasy meat and bone meal, believing this was the way it was supposed to be. He never should have had a child.

  On the fifth night, she came. She darted into his house and shut the door too hard behind her, startling him badly enough that he’d nearly kicked her. They stood, both of them with jangling nerves and snapping antennae, until Sanford cautiously untucked his claspers and brushed her female scent from the air.

  “I can’t keep the egg,” she said. Her first words.

  “I want it,” he said, and did. He wanted to hatch his child himself, as his father had done for his sons. Silly, sentimental reason, but true.

  They undressed. She stayed nervous, jumping at every sound outside. She had good reason. This was riskier for her than for him. They couldn’t go outside now, so he pissed on the wall, just a little, to reassure her that yes, it was him. Her claspers tasted it and she relaxed just enough to crack her urovens and piss in return.

  They sniffed. Old enough. Healthy enough.

  Good enough, for this place.

  “Will you touch me?” she asked, quivering, offering her hands. And he did, grateful. They held each other for a long time, now and then fanning palps for quick breaths and caressing one another with their claspers, but not speaking. They had nothing else to say. He was ready before she was, but he waited.

  At last she released him and hunkered down, her legs tight against her body, arms securely braced from knee to floor. He mounted, settling his weight by degrees, soothing her with chirrs and gentle touches along her joints. His claspers opened around her narrow waist, slowly fanning, tasting mainly her anxiety. He waited.

  After nearly an hour, her cloacal vens opened. He relaxed his belly flaps at once and inserted his spermatogus. Only halfway. The sphincter that closed off her ovaduct remained tight.

  “Do you want to leave?” he asked quietly.

  “No, no, I…I can do this. Just…”

  He stroked her joints.

  Another hour. She opened. He finished penetration. She ejected her catalyst at once, as if in apology for the wait, and he followed, closing his eyes in the paralysis of orgasm. When it faded, he uttered some reassuring chirrs, his claspers patting and stroking along her belly seams. Hers brushed at the base of his spermatogus, where they joined, painting him with her pheromones.

  “Again,” she said. “To be sure.”

  Yes. More matings meant a larger, healthier egg. She was terrified, but determined, stimulating him with scent-taps until he filled and ejected again.

  “One more?” she whispered.

  “You don’t have to.
”

  “I want to be sure.”

  He reached his hand down. Hers were locked in place, but she rubbed her palps over his palm. It helped. They twined their claspers together as his spermatogus slowly filled.

  She never told him her name, not any name at all.

  He climaxed a third time and dismounted. She paced around his work table nervously as her belly swelled. Finally she came to him, her ovipositor fully extended. He knelt down to catch the egg she laid in his hands.

  His child.

  Her eyes were anguished as she stared at it, milky white and soft in the open air. Then she skreed quietly, picked up her clothes, and turned away to dress. He wanted to ask her then how many times she’d done this, if she’d ever seen the child hatch, if she wanted to know if this one did. In the end, her pain was too obvious, too raw. He said nothing.

  She left. She had not asked his name either. They were not bondmates, not even really broodmates. They were only two desperate people who came together one night to make a baby. He thought of her now and then. He wished her well.

  T’aki had been the first precious thing hidden in the hold he’d scratched beneath the hole in his floor. Four months tended until the larval mouth pierced the thick skin and he heard his child’s voice for the first time, blindly chirring. Six months more, fed regurgitate and daily turned, kept warm and dry and safe. Then, the molt. A son. And going to the checkpoint gates with that treasure in his arms and one thousand chits in his breeches to pay the fine, and having to watch the humans strap his squalling son to a board so they could etch his identification number on the side of his tiny head. And now he loved again. Now he had hope. Now he had someone to do all this for.

  But he never should have done it, and it hurt his heart at times because after twenty years on Earth, he knew that it was a selfish love and a crazy one, and just the same as murder.

  Sanford stood up and found his son’s wet clothes. He tied them to the corner of his roof where once he’d hung the sheets. If it didn’t rain, they would be dry by morning. If it did, they would be cleaner, and T’aki would just have to go without for a day, another naked child crawling on the Heaps.