by R. Lee Smith
He let it go and went back inside. Tomorrow was just another word until he finished the work he had to do tonight. He sat down at his work table, picked up a rag and a heater and, without realizing it, began to hum.
* * *
It was just as bad as she remembered. No, it was worse. And it was wonderful.
The ‘private room’ was one of a series of pre-fab tool sheds shoved up against the movie house of the Heaps, with only a curtain and a narrow plywood hallway separating them from the main theater. She could hear War of the Worlds on the big screen TV there. Not the original, not even the Tom Cruise reboot, but something cheap and generic and entirely appropriate. The yang’ti who ran the place took Sanford’s chits and led them to their room. It had no lights. It had nothing at all, apart from the TV, a stack of various media players, a sagging sofa and a bucket. Sarah guessed the bucket might be the bathroom; there was a smell, not quite the stale-urine smell of Cottonwood’s ditches, but she pretended not to notice and as soon as the movie started, she honestly didn’t.
It was Fortesque at his finest, from the opening shot of the top-heavy physicist bending waaaay over her microscope to the heavy-metal end credits. It was all there, everything she remembered and little things she’d forgotten: the jungle room, with the tentacles coming out of the steamy pond to snatch away more of the plucky heroine’s clothes; the belly dancing scene at the banquet, where she used napkins as veils, somehow ending up less naked at the end than she’d been at the beginning; the thrilling golf-cart chase down empty halls, terminating in a death-defying leap across that inexplicable chasm. There was plenty of screaming and running and gratuitous boob-shots until finally, the eyeball-lamp king of the aliens came gliding across the floor towards that futurific bathtub. As the girl sensuously lay her hand against his glowing bulb, T’aki piped up with, “Ouch, bitch, my eye!” and instead of giving him a lecture on vulgarity, they’d laughed so hard that someone opened up the curtain and told them to be quiet.
It felt like the first time and she held on to that as hard as she could, because it felt like the last time too.
When it was over, Sanford took them all the way across Cottonwood for dinner. The eating place was all open-air and there was no menu, only half a dozen chain-link kennels displaying the stock they had available: goats, pigs, dogs, geese and chickens. There was also, their server informed them, half a cow in the back that was still ‘fresh enough’.
T’aki was all for beef, but the qualifier unnerved Sarah and even though she tried not to show it, after a glance in her direction, Sanford ordered goat. While they waited for it to cook, T’aki chattered happily about the movie and flew the Fortesque Freeship in circles around their table. When he at last bounced off to talk to the dogs, the quiet was like a weight.
“This is a bit extravagant, isn’t it?” Sarah said at last.
“Food chits are no use to me where we’re going.”
“Still waiting for Sunday?”
“Next Sunday.” Sanford looked away, watching T’aki at the kennels. The dogs didn’t know they were on the menu; tails wagging and tongues lolling, they tumbled over each other in carefree play. Dogs, like children, could be happy anywhere.
She thought of Fagin, felt a little guilty for missing her dog while thousands of aliens were imprisoned all around her in the slum built by the company she worked for…and missed him anyway. Sanford’s hand brushed hers on the small table. Without thinking, she found the soft skin between his hard plates and brushed her fingers back and forth just once.
T’aki eventually exhausted the options for playing with dogs through a chain link fence and came back to them, sprawling across his father’s lap and sticking his feet out for Sarah to hold. “That was a bad movie,” he declared.
Sarah didn’t argue, but said simply, “I like it.”
“I like it too, but it was bad.” He wiggled his toes in her hands, encouraging her to find his sensory pads and tickle. “And I only like it because you do. Why do you like it?”
It was almost, but not quite an accusation, as if he honestly felt she’d ought to have an excuse before she went around inflicting bad movies on the rest of them, with a faint undertone that suggested disciplinary action may be in order. Kids.
“I don’t know. Because it’s so silly, I guess. And because Fortesque never seemed to realize how silly they were even when he was the one making them. In his mind, it was all so gloriously possible.”
Sanford gave her an odd look—pensive and wistful and somehow smiling in spite of his alien mouth—but said nothing.
“I know they’re bad,” she said and laughed. “I know they’re awful. I don’t have any excuse for why I like them as much as I do. I was young, sure, but I was old enough to know what bad movies look like. If I have to blame someone…I guess I blame you. Not you specifically, just…you guys had only been here a few years and they were just breaking ground on the first camps beside Fairfield and it seemed like all the talking heads were saying that any day we were going to see you walking down our streets, living in our neighborhoods, shopping at our stores…” She gave T’aki an extra tickle and let go of his feet, letting him climb boisterously up his father’s back and jump off again. “Your kids going to our schools,” she said, and sighed.
“How frightening,” Sanford murmured.
“Yeah, I realize that’s what they were doing now, but at the time, it was wonderful. I couldn’t wait to go to school with all the little alien kids. That was the worst summer of my life, having to wait, believing every day that when school started again, half the class would be aliens. I drew all kinds of crazy pictures—little aliens with little lunchboxes and little bows in their hair…”
“Hair?”
“I was ten, Sanford. And they weren’t releasing pictures. Well, they were, but my parents wouldn’t let me see any.” She thought back to her orientation day and the video van Meyer had made sure they all saw. “Which is probably a good thing. The point is, I was ten, I was literally on my knees every night asking God for aliens when school started and then I saw this ridiculously bad, thirty-year-old science-fiction disaster and I just…” She groped for words and finally had to give up with another laugh. “It was like they tell you falling in love is supposed to feel like. That swoosh. That amazing electric suckerpunch. You know?”
“Yes.” Sanford pulled T’aki off his head and dangled him upside-down. “When everything seems possible.”
“I was ten,” she said again, still lost in memories of that summer, that wonderful movie and all the equally terrible movies to follow. “What I love the most is how unflappable everyone is. Aliens swoop in and abduct people, but beyond that first, ‘Huh. Aliens,’ moment, no one really seems to mind. In Sea Terror Attack, after the very first monster crawls out onto the beach and kills someone, a girl runs up to a lifeguard and screams, ‘Squidmen!’ and he just turns to his partner and says, ‘Get Mahoney.’ Like they had a protocol in place for squidmen all along. I loved that. Nobody ever panics in his movies. They just buckle down and deal with it.”
“Was there much panic when we first arrived in your world?” Sanford asked, allowing T’aki to arrange one of his arms so that he could swing from it.
She looked at him, startled. “Come to think of it, no, not really. I mean, I guess there was a little rash of incidents when you very first came in, mostly in the big cities…riots and stuff…but no.” She thought about it, putting herself back in the mind of the small child she had been, still smelling like campfires and fish, staring in wonder at the TV in the living room while her mother whisper-panicked at her father in the kitchen. “The military was already there. I guess there didn’t seem to be much point in freaking out. You guys were just floating there, not doing anything.”
“Ah.” He rocked his arm back and forth, helping T’aki swing higher. All his attention appeared to be fixed on his son, but he still had that weird un-smile. It was something in the lie of his antennae, the position of his facial pl
ates.
“We just dealt with it, didn’t we?” Sarah leaned away from that a little, not quite amused, not quite appalled. “We just buckled down and dealt with it. Who would have ever known Fortesque would get something like that right? Yay for us.”
“Yay!” T’aki kicked his heels up all the way to the level of his head and let go, easily clearing the table with this impressive display, only to land on his back and skid a good meter across the ground. He giggled.
Their food came, delivered on fresh paper plates without the distraction of side dishes. In spite of her misgivings, it was perfectly fine—gamy, but tender, with a strong smoky flavor. Sarah usually took her barbeque smothered in sauce, but this wasn’t bad, if you liked it dry and didn’t think too hard about the condition of the kitchen.
T’aki devoured his as fast as his disapproving father would let him and, refueled, ran back to the dogs in their kennel.
“You still do, you know,” Sanford said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Believe in the possible.”
“It’s different now. I used to be optimistic. Now I’m just gullible.” She shrugged that off and ate some more goat.
“There are worse things to be.” Sanford shifted around to watch T’aki. “Sometimes I wonder if he’ll miss this place.”
“He may not even remember it. He’s only three.”
Sanford raised his eyes to follow the line of the wall that surrounded Cottonwood. “He’ll remember.”
“We choose the moments we live in,” she reminded him.
He glanced at her, coughed out a laugh and resumed eating. “That sounds ridiculous when you say it in human.”
“Clicks make everything sound more profound.”
“You don’t mean that, but yes, they do.”
Her briefcase chirped. Sarah looked down at it in surprise, then opened it and pulled her paz out. She wasn’t expecting any calls and it certainly wasn’t late enough that anyone should be looking for her. She was out of her territory and she knew it, but when she tapped the screen, it wasn’t a security guard looking out at her, but only an e-memo telling her to come to the check-in desk at the Administrations building as soon as possible.
“I have to go,” she said.
Sanford clicked acknowledgement, already appropriating what remained of her smoked goat. “You should not come tomorrow,” he said. “You should be seen with your other clients.”
“I know. I will. Jellybean, I’m leaving!”
“It was a good day,” Sanford said as T’aki came to throw himself against her knees for goodbye. He didn’t look at her, appeared to be utterly absorbed with folding her paper plate around their combined leftovers.
She started to agree, to thank him again, and a new thought struck: Dinner and a movie. She laughed. “Do we count this as our first date?”
He neither laughed along nor seemed surprised, but simply said, “Our second. I count the night you took me home for first.”
T’aki leaned back to catch his father’s work-belt, then let go of Sarah with his feet and deftly climbed up to perch on Sanford’s shoulders. “I know where eggs come from,” he informed her.
The comment, so oddly/aptly juxtaposed with Sanford’s own, put a blush in her cheeks. “I have to go,” she said again.
Sanford still didn’t look at her, but he did scratch out a low chuckle of sorts, which prompted T’aki to join in with giggles of his own. Leftovers in hand, Sanford started walking, leaving Sarah to make her way out alone. She and T’aki exchanged final waves and then she got moving too, following her blinking dot on her paz through the maze of Cottonwood’s streets to the nearest checkpoint.
The guard there didn’t know her. While he ran her IBI pass-card and paz through his computer, Sarah leaned up against the gate and watched the yang’ti watch her. She didn’t realize she was humming until some of them started buzzing back at her, but they didn’t seem to be doing it in a mean way. The guard may not know her, but clearly, they did.
Eventually, the guard decided she really was who she claimed to be, even though she had no business being that person at his gate. She took the monorail to the main station and the elevator up to the lobby where she saw to her immediate disquiet that Piotr Lantz was waiting, watching the front doors.
“You’re not here for me, are you?” she asked, coming up behind him.
He put a hand on his rifle fast, then looked at her, and finally smiled (but didn’t move his hand). “You bet that sweet ass I am. The old man wants you.”
“Should I be worried?” she asked, as casually as she knew how.
“Naw. He doesn’t fire people in person.”
“So what’s it about?”
“He didn’t say, I didn’t ask.” He stepped onto the elevator, bodily shoved the intern already waiting there off, and beckoned impatiently. “I just know he’s been in meetings all day while I been trying to show the local rubes how to shoot one of these.” He hefted the rifle, which he still hadn’t let all the way go of. “You shoot, Pollyanna?”
“BBs and Lazer-Tag, both of them, like, ten years ago.”
“Figures.”
“I was good, though.”
“Sure you were. Those pop cans never stood a chance.”
The car continued up past the office levels to the top floor: van Meyer’s suite. Rumor had it that he lived here whenever he was in town and it certainly looked more like a five-star hotel than an office when the elevator opened. Piotr headed off down the hall and Sarah followed, glancing over each framed magazine she passed on the way. People. Time. Newsweek. National Geographic. Scientific American. Everything but Betty Crocker’s Kitchen and Rolling Stone, and for all she knew, he had those at some other camp.
Piotr knocked on the wide door at the end of the hall and opened it without waiting for an answer. The room beyond was easily the size of the whole house back in Brookings, tastefully decorated, but lifeless. Kansas didn’t offer much of a view, but what it had, it gave to van Meyer. He took it without compliment, standing at the glass wall overlooking his domain, shoulders straight, hands clasped behind his back, serene.
Was she supposed to wait for him to talk? Piotr was no help; he’d already found a good stretch of wall to lean up against while he went gaily shooting up Memory Lane.
Oh, what the hell.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Van Meyer stirred and turned, brows raised, smiling. “Miss Fowler! You catch me gathering wool. Please, come.”
She sat on the sofa he indicated, politely declined the drink he offered, and pretended not to be extremely creeped out when Piotr slipped silently up and stood behind her.
“I have exciting news,” van Meyer said, fixing himself a drink (but a small one, mindful of the early hour, quite proper). “But first, a question. What would you say is the purpose of Cottonwood? Piotr?”
“Containment,” he said without hesitation or interest.
“Miss Fowler?”
“Integration.”
Van Meyer smiled broadly. “Very good. And what would you say is the greatest obstacle to our success?”
This time, his question was directed solely at her and Sarah wasn’t sure what to say. “Public…opinion?”
He considered that, shrugged and nodded. “IBI do not suffer quite the same antipathy as police force, military force, but we do receive our share. In this country especially, it is encouraged to question authority. Ja, it is almost a suspicious thing when one do not. And yet, even here, public do respect us, admire us, and do you know why?” This time, the question was rhetorical. Van Meyer raised a hand to forestall answers and gravely said, “Because they need us. They need us to contain the bug, whom they fear. And after twenty years of our good work, I must confess they are quite correct to fear him. Even you, for all your admirable conviction, even you must agree.”
He sipped his drink. After an awkward moment, it occurred to her that he was waiting for her to do just that—to agree. Her throat
tightened. She forced her head up and down, nodding. It was the best he was going to get.
He smiled warmly, pleased. “This is indeed our greatest obstacle and is a particularly thorny one, ja? Public resist integration because they fear the bug. They fear the bug because they believe him dangerous. They believe this because he is dangerous.” He spread his hands—a lone man, unarmed, helpless. “What are we to do?”
Again, he waited. She had no answer for him and finally had to admit it.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“But you do know, Miss Fowler. You intuit.” He tapped her on the forehead for emphasis, smiling his grandfatherly smile. Proud of her. And that was surely a part of his dark power, because even though she knew him, knew what he was and what he was doing, still it gave her that childish thrill to know she’d made him proud. “Every day, you go into Cottonwood. To see the bug? Nee. To see his young ones.”
Her blood chilled. Impossible as that should have been physiologically, she could feel it, cold creeping upward from her fingers towards her heart. She said nothing.
Van Meyer nodded again, as if she’d answered and her answer pleased him. He stood up and took his empty glass to the bar for freshening. “Some time ago, you tell me that you know it is not wise to love them. But the young one do come to see you in hospital, such is its devotion, and I begin to think I am wrong on one point. Perhaps they can love you back. So.” He turned around, raising his glass in an unspoken toast. “So, it is my pleasure to announce inception of new program in IBI!” He came back to the sofa and sat beside her, patting her knee. “You open my eyes to new possibilities. It is only right that you take largest role in this new reform.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Sarah said, but she thought she did. “You want me to…to come up with a curriculum for—”
“Nee, nee, such a big word. What I want from you is so simple a thing. As you know, the bug do not often make good parent. Young ones must be removed from his care with disturbing frequency and what to do with them? I want you to love them, Miss Fowler. And by doing so, perhaps you will train them to love us back. When they love us, when they want to make us happy, we will give them ways to prove it, ways that allow them to integrate more effectively.”