Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “I’m doing the right thing,” she said, and carried T’aki out to the van.

  “We’re going home!” he chirped, bouncing into the back and under the blanket. “Finally! Finally!”

  Sanford came next, touching her arm as he climbed in behind his son, and she shut them away. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. She walked back around to the driver’s side and swung up behind the wheel. She started to close the door; Samaritan caught it.

  He looked different with a gun in his hand. Bigger. Meaner. And he was already plenty of both.

  “I think you’re crazy,” he said. “And you’re going to be killed. Since I’ll never get another chance, I want to tell you that I think that’s a damn shame. And I just want to add that I think we both know that if I’d had you another five minutes in my house that day, I’d have fucked your brains out and you’d have loved it.”

  “I’m going to miss you most of all,” Sarah snapped and slammed the door, half-hoping she caught a few of his fingers in it.

  She didn’t. He waggled them at her as she turned around, and then she left him in the rearview mirror with the rest of Cottonwood.

  Larry’s pass got her through the Checkpoint again, then through the village gate at IBI’s border. Then she tossed it and drove sensibly and well to Wheaton. At her bank’s ATM, she emptied her account, added the few hundred dollars she got out of it to Sanford’s thousand or so, then threw away her bank card. She threw away her paz as well, since she knew it had been through IBI’s hands for keying. She held it for a little while before she let it go, thinking of all the pictures and videos it still had saved to it…that voice-mail from Mom…that goofy frog cartoon her dad had done up on the animator app clear back when she was ten and it was brand new…even a picture of the house, unburned, and the four of them out front on the lawn, a family. But it had been keyed, she’d seen them do it right in front of her, so in the end, she opened her tight fingers and let it drop into the trash. Last of all, she took off her translator, which had been such a fixture to her head that it made her feel slightly off balance just having it off her ear. It sat in her palm like a spider, its tiny point-light gently blinking.

  Ridiculous to think it was anything but a translator. Ridiculous to think that IBI could just punch in this thing’s serial number and home right in on her. They could get that through her paz; why would they need it in her translator too? Life was not James Bond and Mission: Impossible, and she had two aliens sitting in the car who talked mostly by pushing air out through vibrating mouth-palps.

  She dropped it in the garbage next to her paz. Then she got back in the van and gripped the wheel tight. “Say something,” she said. “Please.”

  “Then are we leaving?” T’aki asked, not quite whining, but bouncing with excitement, and Sanford said, “Can you still understand us?”

  It was actually almost easier without the translator’s distracting echo talking in her ear, although she had to pay closer attention to the clicks. Still, she relaxed, just a little.

  “Okay,” said Sarah, and started up her engine.

  She drove, and the world kept right on spinning.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  He had never had a plan for the escape itself.

  In the beginning, on the boats beneath the shadow of the ship, he had hopes of assembling the code-bank, creating some sort of diversion, destroying the humans’ floating city and being away in just a few days. Back then, his fantasies included the whole of his people—every one of them, saved—and himself back on yang’Tak a hero. But M’orr’ak had been killed and the rest of the code-bank thrown into the sea with his body. Then they had all been moved and eventually, all hope—had died. He no longer knew where the ship was or had any way to find it. The dream of escape and home-going had become just that, a dream, something to keep the will to live within him, a pretty story to tell the son he never should have had, a tiny light to hold against the dark reality of the immigration camps. No, he had never had a plan for the escape, but even so, Sanford was stunned that (for the second time) Sarah’s idea of simply throwing them in the back of her van and driving away had worked. Stunned and, honestly, a little offended.

  All that night, she drove. At daybreak, she stopped to fuel the vehicle and to buy cold drinks for them to share. Then she drove again. She made only two stops that day—once, in the privacy of a wooded place for her and T’aki to piss, and once more at another fuel stop. She hummed a little in frantic fits, and twice he saw her wiping at her eyes, but she rarely spoke or even seemed to hear T’aki’s bursts of excited chatter.

  Adrenaline can move a body only so long.

  “You can’t drive, can you?” she asked suddenly, her voice strained.

  “I can’t even fit in that chair,” Sanford replied. He’d been expecting the question.

  The world rolled by.

  “I have to stop,” she said finally, sounding both dismayed and apologetic.

  “Of course you do.”

  But she drove another two hours at least, looking for ‘a good place.’ She found it off the main road, in a small, spread-out town, at a place she called a ‘campground.’

  “They’ve got cabins,” she said. “We need the privacy. We’ll spend the night. Just…Just one night and get a good, early start tomorrow.” She consulted her maps as she spoke. She looked terrified.

  He wanted to touch her, to make her stop and see him, to make her move her mouth in a human smile. The sun was still bright and they were not the only vehicle parked in front of the campground offices. He could hear humans moving around them, calling to each other and laughing, some of them very close by. He stayed under the blanket on the floor and eventually she got out.

  The place of cabins was very secluded and quiet, surrounded by tall trees and thick bushes. Sarah was gone a long time procuring one. She returned with several packages, some smelling of good cooked meat, looking only slightly calmer.

  “Burgers for tonight,” she said. “And breakfast for tomorrow. Mostly doughnuts. I know you hate sweet things, but it’s the best I could do. There’s some bran muffins in there, they’re not as bad. I can…”

  And then she just sat, staring out the window. At last she turned on the engines and drove a little further on, away from the road and the offices, to the cabin.

  It was a larger building than his home in Cottonwood, but smaller than hers. It had been set well back from the others, and Sarah parked very close to the door and at enough of an angle that the necessary run from van to cabin was not so risky. The insides were comfortable and clean, if well used and sparsely decorated. It had a television, a tiny kitchen, a room with a hot shower, two beds in separate bedrooms, and a large brick alcove for a fire. T’aki, bound up too many hours in the back of the van, ran room to room flying his ship until Sanford made him sit and eat. It was good food, but Sarah only picked at hers. Ultimately, she put it aside and excused herself to a bedroom, claiming fatigue. She took her maps with her to sleep, he noticed. Sometime later, T’aki (who had eaten all his meat, but only half his bread and one vegetable slice) climbed down from the worn sofa and flew his toy ship away.

  Sanford sat and watched television. The news mostly, for any report from IBI in general and Cottonwood in particular, switching over on every commercial interruption to run a restless eye over the other programs. There were far fewer channels than had been available at Sarah’s home.

  The quiet unnerved him. When had that happened? He remembered enjoying quiet Before, on yang’Tak. It was what made him such a good prospect for lengthy missions in deep space, such as accompanying colonists to a new world and seeing them safely begun. But now it made him nervous. The small rooms seemed too big, too empty, too clean. Through the drawn curtains, the trees towered, moved, whispered. The scents were all wrong. There were no other yang’ti. None. Not for miles.

  Sanford clicked despondently and heard his son’s answering rattle in the other room. Good boy. Just as he’d been taught. Stay close an
d always answer. Sanford switched off the television and went to see him.

  The bed was the same size as the bed they’d slept in at Sarah’s house, as large as the rear room in his own at Cottonwood. T’aki sat in the center, swaddled clumsily on every side with sheets and blankets. Sanford neatened the nest, then knelt down on the mattress and watched his son run the toy spaceship back and forth over the same fold of cloth. Usually, this was an exciting game, less play than practice for the real thing, the home-going. Tonight, it was reserved.

  “Will we be there tomorrow?” T’aki asked finally. His palps quivered. He was frightened, but trying to hide it.

  “Three days, Sarah said. Perhaps longer. She has to be careful how to go.”

  “Are they chasing us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Back and forth went the ship. An endless flight. For a moment, Sanford could almost feel the hum of the engines under his feet, that comforting subsonic hum that meant the course was true, the universe at rest, and all was right.

  T’aki let go of his toy and rolled onto his back with the impossible flexibility of the very young. He looked up at Sanford with arms and legs drawn up, and eyes deeply solemn. “Sarah is coming too,” he said. He tried to say it firmly, tacking it into place with clicks of certitude, but his fear betrayed him—in flat antennae, in too-soft tones, in the unhappy shine of his wide eyes.

  “Of course,” said Sanford. He put his hand on his son’s chest and let it be clutched in relief. “She is you and she is me. We all go together.”

  “—and she is me,” T’aki chanted, playing with Sanford’s fingers now, wiggling them one after the other all the way down to the inflexible points just before the line of his true spikes began. Sanford could recall doing just that with his own father’s hand when he was T’aki’s age. His heart throbbed a little, but in a good way. He realized he felt for the first time that this was going to work. They had not escaped yet…but they would. They truly would. His heart throbbed again, harder. He got up and took the spaceship out of his son’s nest, to set it on the small table nearby.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, and came back to tuck blankets in around the obedient curl at the nest’s center. He bent to exchange breath and held T’aki’s a long time before letting it out again. Hope was in him like the heat of a living thing. “Go to sleep,” he said again, and turned his son’s lights off.

  A bar of yellow under the opposite door told him Sarah was still awake as well. He didn’t need it. He could hear her mutters through the wood, her voice rising and falling in restrained tones of worry. He knocked twice, quietly, and went in.

  “Sanford,” she said, but didn’t look up. She had her maps spread out on the bed before her. He was reminded of his son’s nest. “Did you watch the news?”

  “Yes. There was no mention of us. They talked about crime, about your politics, about gas prices, and about dangerous bugs and why we must never be allowed to leave the immigration camps.” He snapped his palps to show what he thought of that. “There is a lot of smoke over Cottonwood. They called it a riot, which has been contained. I suppose that must be Sam’s work, but they didn’t mention an escape. There are no names, no pictures.”

  “But IBI knows I’m gone. They have to.”

  “By now, they must.” He knelt on the edge of the mattress to watch her in her anxiety. Her eyes seemed fixed, no longer seeing what she stared at as her hands shuffled papers around. The vein along her soft throat jumped, jumped. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are pursuing us.”

  “Sanford, they have to be. They have to. But they want to keep the cops out of it, which means they want to take me down pretty…pretty hard.” She took a swift, shuddering breath. “Or maybe the cops are involved, but they’re keeping it out of the media. Maybe they’re putting up roadblocks or…they can’t block every road, can they? We’re going to lose time if we can’t use the freeways. And what if…What if they know where we’re going?” She looked up, her eyes huge and ringed with glassy white. “I mean, there isn’t much point in escaping if you don’t leave the planet, right? They have to know where we’re going!”

  “Please calm down.”

  “Sanford, tell me what to do!” she whispered. Threads of harsh sound cut through. She was fighting panic, did not want T’aki to hear her. “I’m not a soldier! I’m not even a social worker anymore! I’m…I’m ridiculous! Did you see what I packed? I’ve got my hairbrush and, like, ten bottles of water! I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  “The best you can.”

  She laughed. It cut his ear like a razor, rusty and too sharp.

  “Breathe,” he said.

  “I am in mortal terror.” She said it like she was reading it somewhere, in some amazement. Her eyes stared at him, through him. “I have never felt this way before.”

  “Just breathe.”

  “I’m scared to death I’m going to get us all killed. I can’t make even one mistake and I don’t even know what the mistakes are! I look at T’aki in the rearview mirror and I just want to throw up.” She started to say more, stopped, and rather obviously replayed her words, then turned pink. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “But they’re going to kill us if they catch us.” She looked at him again, that panic rising to take back her face. “So if they catch us—” Her mouth worked. “—then I’ve killed you!”

  There. Named. She clasped a hand over her mouth and then the other over her eyes, which had begun to pour water. She made the sounds, the crying sounds, but softly, as softly as she could. It was all right. It was misery, but misery was better than panic.

  Sanford took her maps away. She protested, but could not do so loudly without waking T’aki, so she was easy to ignore. He set them on the little table beside her just as he had done with his son’s spaceship, and then went into the washroom. He found a cloth and wet it, then looked at himself in the mirror. The thought came to him that he looked pretty good, all things considered.

  She was still crying when he returned to her bedside, but her tears seemed to be running themselves out. She put out her hand for the washing cloth. He ignored it and moved back her hair to clean her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “God, you’re so calm. I’m trying to be strong, believe it or not, I really am, but wow, I am not cut out for this soldier-of-fortune crap. I just keep coming back to what could happen—”

  He hushed her with soft chirrs.

  “—and it just boggles me,” she went on. “How can this be happening? That’s what hurts the most…how can people be so mean?” She looked up, beseeching him, and he wiped down her cheeks. “First Contact was supposed to be this beautiful thing. I was happy when you guys showed up. I was happy when I heard about IBI forming and the camps being built.” Her face pinkened, turned away; he cleaned it, chirring. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

  More tears.

  Sanford put the cloth aside and wiped them with his fingers.

  “I have seen things that I could not imagine. Could not. And I’ve always thought I was pretty imaginative.” She tried to laugh and couldn’t. Her breath was very hoarse now. He could taste it when he moved his palps. It tasted of tears. “Stuff I can’t imagine is the stuff you’ve had to survive for years. I feel awful, Sanford. All the time. I…I hate myself for being human.”

  He put both hands boldly on her face and made her look at him. “Do you see yang’ti?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He moved his head closer. His antennae twitched in her hair. Her face filled all his field of vision, as his must hers. “Do you see yang’ti?” he asked again, quietly but with sharp snaps. “Is this all you see when you look at me? A yang’ti who must be saved?”

  Comprehension filled her eyes with horror. “No! No, that’s not what I m—”

  “What do you see then?”

  “I see Sanford,” she whispered. “My…M-My best friend.” A confes
sion, naked and vulnerable. “I see a good father and a…a good man. The best man I know.”

  His heart throbbed twice, hard enough almost to hurt him. Man. She saw a man. He said, “And I see a woman who has only ever tried to do the best she could. I see Sarah and we are the same.”

  She reached up and touched his shoulder. Her fingers were small and very warm as they found the joint and the soft pads to receive her. She saw a man. Not a person, not a male of another species, but a man. She looked at him with the candor of a woman who looks at a man. And he wanted her—skin, bones, hair and all. He wanted to be with her. He’d wanted that for some time.

  When he released her, she let her hands and her gaze drop back into her lap, sitting like a child who has been chastened. She did not seem to notice when he stood up and pulled away his worn shirt, unbuckled his belts. “I’m glad it’s you,” she was saying. “Don’t get me wrong. But if I was really a good person, shouldn’t I be willing to do this for anyone? I mean, I drove right past Mr. Samaritan’s house to get you and I never even thought—”

  Her ramblings stuttered to a startled end as he lifted up the sheet and climbed onto the mattress beside her. She looked open-mouthed at his bare body. He leaned in to share her breath and began to unfasten her blouse. His heart was throbbing at every beat now, every beat.

  “W-What are—? I mean, I can s-see what you…B-but you can’t po-possibly—” She looked down in astonishment as he exposed her bare chest, as if even she had never seen the human swellings there, with the colored tips he covered now with his hands. He stroked in short, gentle downward pats. The ridges of his fingers brought her tips out erect, just like in the programs. “S-Sanford!” she gasped, flinching back. Her hands flew up, but did not cover. They hesitated there, trembling slightly. “You can’t mean this! We’re not even s-s-sexually c-com-compat—”

  “We could be.” And when she gaped at him, he clicked reassuringly and began to guide her up onto her knees to face him for another shared breath. This one, she answered, her lips parting even as she cringed uncertainly back. He stroked her swellings again and she shivered, arching her back so that she pressed against his hands, only to pull away again, her eyes huge. “I know what to do, I think,” he said. “I know your skin is fragile and I will remember this. I want to copulate with you, Sarah.”