by R. Lee Smith
He would ask after her butt fell asleep.
Sarah struggled onto her knees and then up (“I told you they were backwards,” said the boy, breezing on by into the house), and managed a dignified stagger until she could collapse on the green, overstuffed chair. The boy climbed up and sat on the arm of it. His father resettled himself on the stool, but facing her.
“I found a paper of yours,” he said, and passed it to her.
“Oh.” Dull heat flooded her cheeks. “I must have missed that one.”
“Can you really order these things for me?”
“I don’t think so,” she admitted, scanning it. “It’s for emergencies only. Like, if a tornado sweeps your house away, that sort of thing. Then you can order them. In theory.”
“I see.”
“What did you want? Maybe I can get it through another channel.”
“I wanted to know what qualified as an emergency condition.”
She felt herself blush again and dropped her eyes.
“How do you do that?” the boy asked.
“Mr. Sanford, I’m trying—”
“Sanford only. I know you are.”
They sat there, the three of them. The boy kept touching her hair, surreptitiously, watching closely to see if she could feel him.
At last Sanford stirred himself, looked at the child, clicked to himself for a moment, and then said, “His name is T’aki.”
“T’aki,” said the boy, stroking her hair.
Surprised, she tried, minus the click in the middle. Hard, short T; broad a; strong ‘key’ sound. It wasn’t the same.
“Close enough,” said Sanford. He looked away.
They sat.
“You did not write it on your form,” he said finally.
“As far as they’re concerned, he has a name.” She hesitated. “Do you want me to change it in his file?”
“No. But I will not stop you.”
“I work for you, remember?”
He clicked, staring at her. The boy, T’aki, touched her ear, tracing it in quiet awe.
“So, um, I don’t mean to offend you,” she began, very aware that she was probably about to. “Do you have garbage service in Cottonwood at all?”
Sanford’s head cocked.
“Trucks?” she asked. “That come for the garbage?”
T’aki made the engine-idling sound.
“Yes,” said Sanford.
“There is?” Gosh, what a relief. “Do you know when?”
“Every day.”
“Now see, this is something I can help you with!” she said, excited. “I can pick up some heavy bags and maybe some tags for the larger stuff and we can start cleaning up, um, around your house, because the situation here with the trash is kind of terrible, but I can help!” she finished quickly.
“Put in bags?” T’aki chirped. Now his head was cocked too.
“For what reason?” Sanford asked. He didn’t look as though he didn’t know. His eyes were calm on hers.
“To take it away. Sanford, I can see that you work hard at keeping things in check, but some of what you’ve got lying around here is dangerous, particularly for a small child to—”
“Trucks don’t take away,” T’aki said, utterly baffled.
“That’s because you have to bag it up, jellybean, then they’ll…”
Sanford was just looking at her.
The trucks came every day.
How did busted lawnmowers and old refrigerators even get into Cottonwood?
The Recycling Program.
Sanford stood up and opened the door. “Would you like to see?” he asked.
“No,” she said numbly. She felt like she’d been socked hard in the stomach; her guts twisted on her, sick and cramped and sinking. “But I think maybe I’d better.”
T’aki jumped down and ran out the door ahead of them, chirping something her translator gave back as, “Heaps! Heaps! Heaps!” Sarah’s feet carried her out the door and she walked behind Sanford on the rust-red road out beyond where it turned at the end of the causeway and followed the aqueduct wall.
It was a long walk, past the trailers and storage sheds where aliens who could have been her clients watched them pass and sometimes followed for a while. They left her territory and continued walking on streets she knew only from her map. It wasn’t until they’d left the tenebrous borders of Section Seventeen that Sarah understood how it could be considered the ‘upscale’ side of town. The droning shrill of summer insects scraped across the constant click-and-buzz of alien speech until she might as well be deaf, but she still had her eyes and she saw it all—row upon tumbled row of ramshackle structures resembling chicken coops more than homes, choked with flies and with people. The streets were nothing but tire-tracks in the garbage where noisome fluids pooled, forming swamps of filth knee-deep around the leaking aqueduct Sanford followed as he led her even deeper into Cottonwood. She pulled out her paz, holding it before her like a talisman against the terrible power of this place, as if the tiny blinking light she saw in its little screen was the only proof not only that she was really here, but that she could get out again.
The houses did not appear to be thinning out, but they must be, because beyond their rusted, sunken roofs, Sarah could see the razor-wire coils of a tall mesh fence, and beyond that, nothing. But the smell was getting worse. She tried to brace herself, because by now she knew what she was going to see, but the mere intellectual idea of the Heaps could do nothing to prepare her when she squeezed out between two miserable shacks and saw it.
It was a pit. A pit the size of ten city blocks, surrounded on all sides by a tall chain fence crowned with razor wire. The roads where the trucks came through criss-crossed mountains of compacted trash, forming an intricate pattern which was almost pretty at this distance. Up close, she supposed it would be like disappearing into a maze, walls of unstable garbage on every side, and only one true path up and out.
There were hundreds of aliens in there, hundreds of them. They crawled over the trash, over the Heaps, picking through the human waste for treasures to put into sacks, into boxes, or even into their own mouths. She saw children as small as T’aki burrowing in and out of crevasses, chasing things that eluded adult eyes, or just chasing rats, which they squabbled over like candy bars. She saw someone pull a scum-heavy swath of fabric out of a mound of rotten food gone black with decay, shake the worst of it off, and wrap it around his own waist to wear. She saw three aliens together leap on the same broken section of aluminum sheeting and begin a fight so fierce, she thought someone was going to be killed. And everywhere she looked, there were more of them.
Sanford’s hand closed on her shoulder. She realized she’d been walking slowly forward into the fence, hypnotized by the horror of it. When she looked at him, he pointed up, at the sign that showed cartoon lightning bolts and a cartoon alien with Xs for eyes.
“You have to use the pass,” T’aki explained, bouncing restlessly ahead of them, anxious to move. “These wires are for don’t touch. You have to go to the Heap-station. Come on!”
“This way.” Sanford kept going, giving the fence a wide cushion, but following its perimeter towards the sound of shouts and crashes and thumping music, all closed in by crude lean-tos and trailers.
Realizing this was about to get even worse, Sarah followed him into Mr. van Meyer’s award-winning Recycling Program.
There were a lot of humans here, all of them soldiers with flak vests and guns. They lined one side of the wide road, walking back and forth in a bored way, manning stations with signs like Colored Glass and Newspaper, and passing out white food chits or unlabeled cans of bug food while they smoked and watched TV. Most of them were congregated by the tall gateway to the Heaps, where armed guards checked passes and waved aliens through, selling garbage bags and cardboard boxes to those who hadn’t brought any, and occasionally driving someone out of the line with kicks and blows from the butt of a gun. One of them saw her, nudged another guy, and suddenly they wer
e all staring her way. It wasn’t a good feeling.
Aliens passed in and out of the Heaps, running empty bags in and dragging bulging ones out to be sorted at the recycling stations. Of course, the really good stuff—the doors, the wood, the sheets of plastic—they kept for themselves, but most of it was sold for chits. A lawn-bag filled with glass bottles went for two chits. Six lettuce boxes full of magazines, each dragged by a child T’aki’s size, went for only one altogether. Three adults carried out an honest-to-God thresher blade over to the Scrap Metal station and received just five chits for it.
But recycling wasn’t all that was happening here. The road was lined on both sides with slapped-together huts and kiosks where aliens loudly bought and sold. Trade your sundries here, they bellowed. We buy cloth scraps and sell clothes. Building supplies here—glass, planks, bricks, tape, siding, nails, rope! She saw a butcher’s stall where a father hacked apart enormous rats and his son served up raw chunks in paper cups for two chits, whole roasted ones for ten. One enterprising alien had built a water tower and sold two-minute showers under its spigot for five chits, ten with soap. Multitudes of stalls operated as thrift stores, selling worn but working items like fans, radios, televisions and media players, toys, clothes, books, even bicycles. Most of them seemed to know Sanford; she saw quite a few beckon to him before spotting her and then hesitating. Sanford ignored them all and watched her.
This was the recycling program. How many trucks came in each day? From how far away? Was it all household garbage, or was there hospital waste, chemical waste, fun toxic acids stewing away at the bottom of the Heaps and just waiting for the right sunny day to combust? Saves the surrounding communities eighteen million dollars a year, the manual said. Gives the bug a means of income, to teach him about our economy and our system of trade. Six boxes of magazines for one chit; three chits for one can of food whose main ingredients were probably bones and guts and whatever vermin fell into the grinders.
“Sanford, I…” She swallowed hard, suddenly miserably certain she was going to throw up. When it passed, she made herself look at him. “I don’t think I can stop this.”
“I know.”
“We find it there!” T’aki called at some small distance, pointing out on the Heaps. “And Father fixes it! Then—” He ran down the road to point at the stalls. “—we sell it there!” Hop hop hop, happy T’aki. “Want to? Want to? I’ll show you how to find things!”
“Not today,” Sanford said. He was still watching Sarah.
‘I didn’t know,’ she wanted to say. ‘I’m not part of this. This can’t possibly be happening, not here, not now. This is wrong. This is so wrong.’ But in the end, she said only, “I have to go. I have…other clients.”
“Will you see us again tomorrow?” he asked.
She dragged her mind out of the Heaps and stared at him. “Do…Do you want me to?”
“The boy likes to see you.”
“I like to see you,” T’aki agreed, wringing his hands.
“Then I’ll be back.”
Sanford turned around, clicked to bring his child into step, and walked away into the confusion of the alien marketplace. He did not look back, but Sarah stared after him until long after he had vanished. Then, because she still had so many census reports to take and because IBI’s guards were all watching and mostly (no matter how guilty and human it made her feel to admit it, even in the confessional of her own silent thoughts) because it smelled so bad here at the Heaps, she left them there and got back to work.
* * *
Van Meyer spent the day engaged in video conference, which was not, in all truth, the worst way to spend one’s day. As men in monitors droned on through their mostly unnecessary reports, Van Meyer meditated upon his youth. It amused him that he felt stirrings of nostalgia for that lost time, for smoke and blood and the taste of gun-oil, for sweat by day and freezing night, for bombs and burning and always the threat of treachery. But yes, he could remember pleasure as well, that kind that only comes from seeing what one’s own hands make or unmake. It was very different now, to direct the work of ten thousand hands while his own grew soft.
Over the course of that day, eleven long hours, two fine meals, and the midday attentions of a skilled woman (he did not often feel these urges—ah, lost youth!—and indulged them with delight and gratitude whenever convenient), he heard from the operators of each camp, reporting what progress there was to report in his absence.
In Fox Lake, his developers had succeeded in recreating the bug’s incendiary weapon and in five of eight tests, had successfully melted a surplus Iranian tank to slag almost instantaneously. Of the remaining tests, twice the weapon had misfired and lastly, exploded. Fortunately, the testing grounds were quite remote and the developers hoped to have an improved model ready for demonstration when van Meyer made his annual return to their facility.
One of his mines at Brackendale had collapsed, halting production there and killing some three or four hundred bugs, as well as half a dozen human guards. Van Meyer expressed polite condolences and was assured the mine would be reopened when and if feasible. In the meantime, shifts could be increased at their sister-camp, Silverbrook, to keep the Russians whose homeland the camps occupied from seeing any decrease in mineral profits. Van Meyer gave his approval at once. He was close to finalizing a similar arrangement with the Chinese and he knew their informants would be watching this development very closely.
In other news, construction at Cedar Creek was once more back on schedule and was expected to be ready for its first shipment of bugs by the end of the year. Now that the Australians had repealed their long-standing ban on bugs, he could break ground on two more camps there, at which point Fairfield, his first immigration camp, would close for a much-needed remodel. There had been, he was told, a Name-the-Camps contest in Queensland schools. The winning entries were Beauty Gunyah and Cobber’s Corner and one of them had been submitted by an eight year-old girl. In a wheelchair, no less. The possibility of a photo opportunity was cautiously raised and van Meyer gravely acquiesced. He thought he might arrange for a child-bug to be present, perhaps to give the girl some small award. The young ones were easily trained and mostly trustworthy.
Finally, the current leader of his operation at the ship gave his usual report of enduring incompetence, but after so many years of such reports, even that was losing its sting. It did no good to rail against the men who worked on his behalf; men could not open the doors and the ship defended itself quite efficiently against those who tried to cut their way through. Only the bugs knew the ways and means of access and damned few had ever surrendered their knowledge. In all these years, van Meyer had seen less than ten percent of the great prize hovering over Earth and of that, never an engine, never a power source, never a weapon beyond what could be held in one’s hand (and most of those still eluded him as well). It was a fine line he was forced to walk—while the ship continued to hover, he must be patient and work slow, knowing that at any hour, some unseen mechanism within might fail and he would lose it all to the hungry sea.
There, his mind wandered while the reports continued, rousing only as the conference came to an end. There was some small chit-chat. Van Meyer acknowledged whatever came his way, but did not hide his distraction. Soon the monitors were black and he was alone with his restless hyena.
“And what of our own progress, eh?” Van Meyer switched off his own console and leaned back in his broad, leather throne. “Do we call social reform of Cottonwood success?”
Piotr looked away, perhaps unmindful that his sneer was caught and ably reflected by a dozen conference monitors. “If that’s what you want to call it,” he said, civilly enough.
Van Meyer smiled and gave his dog a pat. “Ah, but there is a need. I know how tiresome it is, to pander to these overfed notions of, ha, inalienable rights. But it is a small inconvenience to endure so that I may acquire thousands of fresh sheep under the very eye of homeland shepherd.”
“Yeah.”
/> “You do not approve.”
Piotr shrugged, using the gesture to scratch at his neck and adjust the fit of his shoulder holster. He was not afraid to have his own opinions, his Piotr, but he did not put them before those of his master.
“Perhaps you think we do not need more sheep. Perhaps you think this—” He gave the barrel of Piotr’s plasma rifle, reverse-engineered from a bug weapon, a small shake. “—is all we need.”
Piotr put his hand protectively over his violated rifle and glowered, saying nothing.
“The arms race will never be won, my friend. There will always come bigger guns and more men to hold them. Come. It is late.” Van Meyer rose and made his way stiffly out into the dark hall, trusting his hyena to follow.
Piotr did not speak until they were waiting together for the elevator. Even then, his face was calm and his voice level when he finally said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be selling them.”
“Nee?” van Meyer said tolerantly.
“The bug-guns. The ones we’ve rebuilt. And the ones we haven’t,” he added after a moment’s hard thought. “Yeah, especially those.”
“It would be a bad mistake to ever appear that we hoard these things,” van Meyer told him. “Understand, we have friends in other nations only for so long as we share our toys.”
Piotr grunted a sullen acquiescence and punched at the elevator buttons again.
“It is a delicate act of balance,” van Meyer said, watching him. “We must always be prepared for war, but we must never be the first to strike. When the moment come, we take the hero’s role. This is why we must not underestimate the power of public opinion. You may not see the value of bringing sheep into our fold, but every person who wear IBI badge is a person who may someday hold IBI gun. We must be sure they fire it for the right reasons against the right people.”