Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “Well,” she said at last. Her eyes were troubled, solemn. “I don’t know how I’m going to get you up to the ship, but I guess IBI might have an airlift or something we can hijack when we get there. I’ll help you, Sanford. When do you want to leave?”

  Just like that. His heart throbbed. He stood up and paced around his work table, looking at the bits and pieces of human technology lining his walls. “It is not so simple. The code-bank is not functional yet. When I took it—” His words caught in his throat, bitter as chaw. He said them anyway. “I had the choice to take an entire weapon and half the code-bank, or the whole code-bank and half a weapon. I took the weapon.”

  “And the captain took the other half?” Sarah guessed.

  “No. Commander Tlee’tathk took nothing. He surrendered himself to the humans as our leader and they took him into their custody, as surely he knew they would. I have not seen him since.”

  Silence. He looked at her and saw her hand on his unfeeling arm. His heart throbbed again. He touched her briefly, then stepped away and stroked his son’s seams instead. “I took the code chips. And some of the more essential parts. The rest, I gave to another soldier. A…friend.”

  His name had been M’orr’ak and although they had not met before accepting their doomed colony mission, they were of the same House and therefore very distantly related. The days when caste mattered were long, long gone, but it was enough to get them talking and, talking, they had found in one another that rare blend of familial good feeling and irreverent camaraderie. By the time they boarded the ship itself, they were brothers, just the same as the sons of his father, and thinking of him still brought a pang to Sanford’s heart. He had given M’orr’ak the rest of the code-bank’s parts to swallow and hide beneath his plates and M’orr’ak had done so without hesitation, joking that this would be the last order he followed for a while, that he had a feeling once the humans came, he would no longer be a soldier. But when they were taken down to the boats, M’orr’ak found it in him to be a soldier just once more, enough to protest the rough-handling of the colonists he saw being separated from their families. The humans ordered him back in line. M’orr’ak resisted.

  He was shot, the first of them to be shot. Nk’os’a’knko saw his head opened by simple human projectile pellets, laughably crude. He saw his brother’s slack body thrown over the rails and into the sea. All his mourning was stained with thoughts of the code-bank and for that, not-yet-Sanford hated for the first time in his life. He hated humans. He hated this mission. He hated himself.

  “He died,” Sanford said now. One word in his own speech. Only two in Sarah’s. It was not fair. “Nearly half the controller’s parts were lost to me. For twenty years, I have salvaged minutiae to rebuild it—sometimes as little as a wire or a single fastener. I have managed to piece most of it back together, but I still require three parts.”

  She did not ask foolish questions. Three yang’ti parts could take another twenty years to find, if ever, and she knew it.

  “They are absurdly basic parts,” he went on. “I could find them in a child’s toy, if I had one. Unfortunately, most of the pieces that come to me—that come to anyone after all this time—have been stripped of them, because they are such basic needs. So we will wait. As for how to board the ship, if your people have recovered one of the escape pods, I could pilot it.”

  “I know they made a lot of dives,” she said. “But if they ever found anything like an escape pod, they never said so. Just a lot of other stuff…” She thought hard, only to shake her head. “But I have no idea where they’re keeping it. I’ve never seen any of the salvage, except some on TV and those were all guns. I guess if you could get the parts you need off guns, you’d be gone by now.”

  “Yes.”

  “But IBI does own the salvage rights.” Sarah glanced back over her shoulder, as if she could see through the wall, through all the walls, between her and whatever lay beyond the tall, stone borders of Cottonwood. “And they have a research and development department here. I could sneak in and look around.”

  She offered with the same reckless optimism that she’d had when first telling him of her plan to feed five hundred yang’ti against IBI’s orders.

  “Have you any experience in such things?” Sanford asked cautiously.

  “Well, no, but I could at least look. If they catch me snooping, I’m sure I can talk my way out of it.”

  She believed it. She really did.

  She saw his incredulity. Moreover, she recognized it. And still, she said, “They can’t do anything to me, Sanford. In here, with you, that’s one thing, but not even IBI can make humans disappear without consequences.”

  “Are you certain?” he asked quietly.

  She opened her mouth to dismiss the idea…and then slowly closed it again. She thought, frowning. “Pretty sure,” she said at last, but said it in a small, uncertain voice.

  “Do not go looking for this…research department,” he told her. “If you are caught there, even if they do nothing in retaliation—” Damned unlikely. “—they will surely suspect you. After the burning of Baccus’s house—”

  “Baccus’s babies,” she corrected harshly and then looked away. Her hands moved, rubbing T’aki’s back. After a long, uncomfortable silence, she bent her neck and said, “I just want to help. I don’t want to be one of them, Sanford. You have no idea…I just want to make it right.”

  He reached out impulsively and touched her arm. She had no joints for his fingers to dip along. All her body was receptive to him, he thought then, and bizarrely, the thought embarrassed him. He withdrew his hand.

  T’aki looked at him, then at her. He pulled up his legs and giggled.

  “Bring the food,” Sanford said. “For the…the…”

  “Block party,” she said tonelessly, and nodded. “Yeah, it’s not much, but I guess it’s about what I can do. You don’t think it’s ghoulish, though? So soon after…after Baccus?”

  Such things happened here every day, but he could not bring himself to say so. Perhaps she saw it in his eyes. Her own dimmed a little. She set the boy down and opened her briefcase. She handed him some forms. “For Baccus’s mark,” she said.

  He made it.

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good, really, but if you happen to see him around anywhere, just…tell him I’m so sorry.”

  “Your feelings are known.” Oh hell, he touched her again, her hand this time, which seemed more appropriate. “Take care they are not too well known.”

  She smiled for him, took back her papers and her hand, and left his house.

  Sanford went to the window and watched long enough to be certain Sam would not make a nuisance of himself, and then sat down again at his work table. Broken machines stared him down. He had just told a human that he meant to escape and how he meant to do it. In one hour, the caution of nearly twenty years had been undone.

  “She’s coming back,” chirped T’aki, climbing up onto his work table to watch her go through the window.

  “As often as she can,” Sanford agreed.

  “She likes us.”

  “Yes.”

  “She likes me best.”

  “Because you are wonderful,” he said by rote. “Go and play. Stay close.”

  T’aki took his toy ship and ran out into the sunshine. Sanford sat a while longer, then heaved a sigh, took up his tools, and got back to work.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Strange, how the world could move on even when it had been shaken to its foundations. Sanford could remember vividly cracking the plates over his forearm during the ship’s near-crash into this planet and how that ridiculously insignificant little pain had asserted itself over the days that followed, while the ship hung dying in the air and humans gathered in their gunships below. He could remember sitting in the cramped cell on the human’s boat with seven other strangers, M’orr’ak dead not even an hour and his body swollen with weapon parts and his useless code-bank, and being hungry. The body does
n’t care that it may die tomorrow, it only wants what it needs to keep running today.

  So Sanford worked. After taking a human into his secret bunker and showing her the code-bank, speaking openly of escape, he went right back to work like none of it had ever happened. He went to the Heaps and salvaged whatever he could to repair toys, industrial equipment, and kitchen aids, and sold them for chits. The higher-quality merchandise, he sold back to the humans, who paid him with better food, soap, tools, medical supplies, and sometimes money. They laughed at him when they gave him money, knowing he couldn’t spend it, but what can’t be spent can only accrue and Sanford had learned long ago the value of human currency changes when it is offered in quantity and in secret.

  He saw Sarah nearly every day, either in passing out on the Heaps, or at home. Without consciously thinking about it, he attuned himself to her habits, so that at the end of her shift, when she was likeliest to come to his house, he was there to let her in. They did not speak of escape pods or IBI or Cottonwood when she came. She played with T’aki and complained about the weather and said admiring things when she watched Sanford work and that was it. Their time together was understandably brief—she had many other clients to see each day—and ordinary, and it was the ordinariness he missed most when she left.

  So the days passed. He ate because he was hungry. He slept because he was tired. He went to Sam’s house sometimes after T’aki was in bed to drink ferment and share that crude company because he was on edge and lonely. That was how the world turned, one day at a time.

  And so, in what had become routine for both of them after what was, realistically, a dangerously short length of time, when Sanford heard the distinctive sound of Sarah’s van grumbling down the causeway toward him, he opened his door without coming all the way out of the television he was working on. She was smiling when she entered and took her usual seat on the green chair. She was also limping.

  His first thought was to go and crack the chitin on Sam’s head again. She read it in his face and laughed.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.

  He turned his attention back to the television. “What am I thinking?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure it isn’t that I slipped in the ShopALot bread aisle. They had, like, an inch of wax on the floor. I was flying past the tortillas before I even hit the ground. Where’s T’aki?”

  “At school.”

  “You have a school here? That’s great!”

  “No,” he said. “But I know someone who cannot work the Heaps and who can teach my son to make his letters and do his sums. He’s young for it, but he seems ready.”

  “He’s smart.”

  “I’m not a fair judge.” Sanford carefully traded out a damaged circuit board. “But yes, he is. And he will be handsome. And when he molts twice more and realizes these things, he’ll probably be insufferable for several years. I know I was.”

  She laughed, then sighed and picked up one of T’aki’s toys—not the Fortesque Freeship, which was still in its place of honor in their shared sleeping space, but the yellow-haired human doll that usually piloted it. “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask…Is there another word that I could be using instead of ‘he’ or ‘him’ or ‘boy’?”

  Sanford tensed and looked at her.

  “I mean,” she went on, blushing, “I realize that it’s easier for humans to use those kinds of words, but I don’t think it’s right to be inflicting our gender bias on you when you don’t have a gender. So if there’s another word that’s less offensive, I’ll use it. I don’t click very well,” she admitted with a nervous laugh, “but I could try.”

  Sanford picked up his tools and looked at the television. It was the paramount rule, the paramount warning. No human must know.

  “I’m picking up a lot of your language, actually,” she said after a moment, no longer laughing, but trying gamefully to converse. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak it, but I understand a lot more than I thought I did, which I know because I’ve managed to leave my translator at home like three times now. Mr. van Meyer says we can shower and sleep in them, and sometimes I do, but they don’t always stay clipped where they’re supposed to.”

  He had already told her he meant to escape, to leave Earth, to betray this world’s existence to his people. How much less did he trust her now?

  “So I’ve left it in the bathroom twice and once it just fell off. I found it in the bottom of my coffee cup after I got home, which was great because that was the one thing I absolutely did not want to have to order a new one of. But the bright side is that I’ve come to work three times without a translator and I bet you can’t even tell me which three days, can you?”

  It was one thing to tell her about the code-bank. If IBI learned of it, they could only kill him and T’aki. To betray the truth of yang’ti was to betray all yang’ti. It could change everything.

  “Sanford?” she said in a small voice. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.” He put his tools down again, but did not look at her just yet. “We have gender.”

  “What?”

  “We have gender. Male and female.” He glanced around; she seemed stunned. So was he, to no small degree. “It was decided that we should keep this secret. The population controls…we feared that if it were known, our women would be gathered together and destroyed.”

  “Oh.” It was not a sound of understanding, but of one receiving a hard blow.

  “There are very few females among us. A handful to every thousand births. It would be so easy to destroy us.” He touched his tools, then turned and looked at her. “But we have gender. T’aki is my son. I am a man.”

  And why did he phrase it that way, he wondered at once. Why not, ‘I am male’?

  She met his gaze, troubled. “Baccus…is a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “No wonder she ran.” Sarah stared away out the window. “She must have been terrified. And you could be right…about what would happen if…if they knew. I’ll never tell, Sanford.”

  But he knew that already, didn’t he?

  He started in on the television again. A man, he’d said.

  “Have you got the tables?” she asked finally.

  “Yes. When do you need them?”

  “Sunday.”

  So soon. He clicked, thinking, but she seemed to misread his troubled silence, because she hurriedly added, “That’s the day after tomorrow, I mean. Around four, four-thirty. I’d love to do it tomorrow, but there’s just too much to do.” She managed a laugh, but it was too strained for real humor. “I’ve done half the shopping already. Getting buns was what killed me in the ShopALot and it didn’t even occur to me until after that, you know, do you even eat bread?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh good. Mr. Samaritan said something about bread once, but I wasn’t sure.”

  Sanford snapped his palps and then snapped them again because he’d snapped them at all. “Meat is all the humans seem to think we need,” he said, savagely soldering a wire. “Perhaps it is meant to keep us malnourished.”

  Silence. She looked at the case in her hands.

  “We eat a little grain,” he said, more gently. “Whenever we can find it. And vegetation. Very small amounts sustain us normally, but we have been for many years deprived.”

  “Well, I bought some. For the hamburgers. And I got some chips too, they were on sale. And cookies. And lots of soda. I know you guys like beer, but there’s no way I could float bringing alcohol for my clients if I ever get called on this, so I decided I’d better not.”

  “That is best.” It was likely to be stressful enough without half the attendees getting drunk.

  He finished setting wires, rebuilt the guts, turned the set around and plugged it in. He left the backing off for now, but when he switched the monitor on, the screen slowly bled to color and sound came through the speakers. He clicked, pleased.

  “It’s so amazing to watch you do that,” she m
urmured from behind him. “I can’t even program my coffee machine.”

  “I could teach you,” he said, and had to wonder at himself.

  “I guess if you can fly a spaceship, fixing a TV is pretty small potatoes.”

  “It isn’t quite the same thing.”

  “No, I guess it’s not, but it’s still amazing that you can do it at all. I mean, it’s alien technology, isn’t it?”

  “Of a primitive sort,” he agreed.

  “Did you used to build stuff on your planet?”

  “I took a standard mechanics and engineering course in preparation for this mission, but beyond some small home repairs, no.”

  “You’re awfully good at it.”

  “I’ve had time and practice.”

  She was quiet as she watched him unplug the device and put the shell on, ready now to sell. Then she sighed. “I wish I was more useful.”

  He looked at her, startled. She was staring out the window, lost in her own thoughts, wistful.

  “I wasted my life. Didn’t do so well in school, didn’t go to college…I can’t help thinking that someone who actually did something with her life would be better for you now. The only work I’ve ever done is custodial, fast food and a little cashiering. And look at me. I come to Cottonwood and all I can think of to do is clean up, flip burgers, and rob the boss’s till.” She shook her head and sighed again. “You deserve better.”

  “There is no one better.”

  She looked at him, pained.

  “There is no one better,” he said again, drumming in each word with hard clicks.

  They stared at each other in the dim and stuffy room.

  He stood up, and for a long, dizzying moment, had no idea what he was about to do. Then he said, “I have to fetch my son,” and it cemented into truth, leaving him feeling somewhat disorientated.

  “Oh. Okay. I just wanted to let you know. Remember: Sunday, around four.” She stood up and gathered her case, but paused just outside and looked back at him.

  For no reason at all, he thought she would come back inside. For no reason at all, he thought she might touch him. For no reason at all, he thought of Sam flashing his claspers and making that obscene comment about pushing her down, getting inside.