by R. Lee Smith
Unaware of the return of the yang’ti (any radio or television she might have owned had long ago been sold for livestock), she went about her dangerous routine as normal, loading up her weathered Jeep with blankets, building supplies, and pots of soup, before saying a curt goodbye/warning to her young charges and setting off. She didn’t get far. From a distance, the evacuation of Buena Vista appeared to be a vast and violent riot, and Agata was forced to retreat to her home and wait it out. She was still waiting when the Sweep began, and mere hours after Ro’zhe’t’s second broadcast, Agata’s hut was smashed open by yang’ti soldiers.
Before she had even seen the invaders, the old lady snatched up her shotgun, shouting, “Get down, babies, get down!” and was promptly shot, her weapon and right arm both vaporized in an instant. In the next instant, of course, thirty-eight young yang’ti leapt onto the veteran warriors with sticks, rocks, and Barbie dolls and beat them back out of the hut.
In the ships above, enough desperate fathers telling the same story finally managed to convince someone with authority to send them back down to Earth for their children and for the crippled and unconscious woman who had faithfully safeguarded them all these years. Agata McDowell was transported to the waiting fleet as a hero and treated alongside yang’ti in the medical bay. As soon as she was conscious, apologies were made and brusquely accepted, on one condition. “I’ve lived sixty years on one planet,” she said, her growing arm still propped up in the medic’s harness and her face white with strain. “I want to spend the next sixty on another and see which one I favor.”
She insisted, however, that someone go back for her piano.
* * *
For four years prior to the Return, Rachel Wymunn of IBI’s biological research department had been performing vivisections that were not, to make up in some small part for thirteen previous years of vivisections that were. Her crisis of conscience had been a long time in building; the catalyst, if she’d ever stopped to think about it (and she tried not to), had come when van Meyer brought, not just more bugs, but a human being to the bio-labs of Zero. She had managed to drink away years of doubts and screams and alien blood, but that shout—“You Nazis!”—haunted her. She had been lapsed in her faith pretty much since her teens, but she began to become aware of herself as a Jew all over again, began to have bad dreams.
She didn’t think about the first one. The bug was brought to her lab and left. She put him to sleep, as she had done a thousand times before, with a whiff of gas. She did her measurements and marks, dictated a few notes…and then, without hesitation, instead of picking up the prybar and getting to work, she had zipped him into a bodybag, rolled him onto a dolly, and quickly filled in the rest of the report with false data she could, by this time, rattle off with ease.
As the bug slept, Rachel Wymunn wheeled him out of the laboratory, not to the hazardous waste chute for incineration, but to her room, where there was no place to hide him, not even a lock on the door. Every day, every hour, until her next weekend leave, Rachel waited in a state of astonishing calm for her treachery to be discovered, but the escape, the loss of the ship, and Mr. van Meyer’s human acquisition kept everyone occupied. With the help of a sympathetic pilot and a crewman with just enough authority in the shipping department, she’d simply crated him up and loaded him onto the transport shuttle, and nobody ever knew he was missing.
He was the first, but by the time of the Return, Rachel Wymunn and her Bug Railroad had spirited away one hundred and fifteen bugs, right out from under Damek van Meyer’s nose. She surrendered herself at once to the Sweep that came for them and, not knowing what would happen to any of IBI’s employees, much less those who had worked in Camp Zero, accepted sanctuary as soon as it was offered.
Six months into the return voyage, her body was found: defleshed, disemboweled, and laid out in the manner of a yang’ti vivisection. Of the more than one hundred yang’ti who had taken Rachel’s Railroad to freedom, less than twenty attended her small funeral. Six knelt before the shrine of Ko’vi to touch a funeral cake to the cloth-wrapped box representing a coffin (by necessity, the true remains had already been sent to the matter reclamator), symbolically taking away and eating whatever sins the decedent had committed in life. One of them spat on it instead.
The investigation into her death ended with her funeral. Those responsible were never found.
* * *
There has always been a thriving trade in flesh and the slavery of those who provide it and it came as no surprise that within days of the aliens’ arrival, there were rumors of bug/human pornography for sale if one knew where to look. And despite the overwhelming attitude of repugnance which met those rumors, a lot of people went looking. In time, more than half the camps would supply steady merchandise for IBI’s own secret production house, ‘bug fux picturez’, but none were as prolific as Siberia’s infamous Silverbrook. The stud of that stable was a huge black-and-yellow bull called by them Ivan the Terrible, kept serviced by thirty-one girls of every flavor, some brought for breaking even before their menses, replaced at the ancient and unworkable age of twenty-two.
At the time of the Return, the military forces of IBI abandoned Silverbrook entirely, leaving yang’ti to be evacuated without resistance. It was several days before Ivan was discovered, deep in the concrete bunkers below the ice, where he had taken over his captors’ abandoned chambers and done his best to keep his girls warm in spite of a failing generator and sub-zero temperatures. At first sight of these yang’ti with weapons, the girls were understandably transformed to a screaming, terrified mob which Ivan rose over in a terrible column of black and burning gold, to roar in a voice like yang’ti thunder, “Put those fucking things down or you’ll be eating them, oslayobs!”
At the end of a lengthy and often violent negotiation, all thirty-one girls and Ivan were loaded together onto an evacuation freighter. Three attempts were made to gently encourage the humans to return to Earth. Three yang’ti negotiators were forcibly expelled through Ivan’s door with split chitin and a new appreciation of the Russian language. On yang’Tak, where Ivan’s reputation for being terrible was more or less well-known even when he was U’we’vos, a modest house with private yard was quickly arranged by his relations, and there he went to live with his strange family in even stranger domesticity, teaching them to cook, to sew, to garden and to write, and sleeping at night all together in a great nest occupying the full floor of his front room. Which may mean little in the great scheme of things, but which may also suggest that no one is always terrible.
* * *
If one man could be named responsible for bringing the plight of the bug home to the public eye, that man would have to be Nik Dimitrius, a freelance photojournalist who spent every day of his life after the first landing of the alien ship sneaking images of the lives and deaths of the bugs onto the internet. His gripping photos of the immigration camp slums, of bugs eating garbage, of executions and abuse, defined for many what First Contact truly meant. They also caused him to be arrested escaping from camp Golden Plains and thrown into a remote prison, unmarked, unrecorded, and unnoticed—save by the yang’ti who shared his cinderblock cell.
Over the years, prisoners came and went as IBI’s research into alien physiology continued, but as resources began to shift toward Zero’s superior laboratories, the need for prisoners at Golden Plains waned. The cells below the camp emptied and were not refilled until no one was left except Nik and one yang’ti. Alone in their black and windowless room for eight years, fed once in a while, drinking water from the leaking pipes that ran through their ceiling, the two had nothing to do but talk. Laugh. Sleep. Touch (episodes that were positively homosexual by yang’ti standards, and which Nik never thought of as more than frightened handholding). And survive solely by one another’s friendship and company.
After the Sweep, this yang’ti carried Nik into the light of a free day and then into a shuttle to a waiting ship, where he could be treated for the devastating effects of hi
s long imprisonment. Offered a home with his cellmate, Nik accepted, saying the war of public opinion was bound to be as vital on yang’Tak as the world he left behind him. He left Earth, where the photograph of his release from prison made front pages all over the world the next day and won some other photojournalist every award in the business.
* * *
With the return of the bugs, panic landed hard on IBI’s overseas operations, and some of the worst horrors happened within hours of the evacuation. After that first broadcast, the soldiers of Cinderhorn declared martial law, locked the entire facility down, and began to systematically shoot every bug they saw and every human that interfered, objected or tried to leave. With this inescapable wave of violence moving across the camp, a young accountant left his office and drove home to his wife, the mother of his three children. “They’re going to kill them all,” he said without preamble. “If you see the chance, take the kids and run, but I’ve got to try and stop this. I’ve stood for a lot, I know I have, but I can’t let them die like this. Please forgive me.” And of course she did, not because he needed forgiving, but because he needed to hear it, and she sent him back to work. Weeping, she waited with the radio on while she fed her children, gave them all a sip of Benadryl, and hid their sleeping bodies around the house.
At one o’clock, the garages where the armored vehicles and ammunition meant to flatten the containment area were minutes away from Operation: Raid Kills Bugs experienced a series of explosions. Several of IBI’s soldiers were killed. So was the accountant, who was caught when his own charges unexpectedly detonated in the second munitions bay, but who left enough remains to be identified.
Fifteen minutes later, six vans descended on his home. His wife was dragged into her driveway and held while her house was ransacked. In broad daylight, before a hundred IBI families, before the barred walls of the camp where countless bugs watched, two of the children were found, pulled into the yard, and executed before their screaming mother. The baby, sleeping in a drawer underneath the accountant’s socks and boxers, was not. The hysterical mother was allowed to howl over the bodies long enough for IBI’s finest to have a nerve-cooling smoke, and then she was shot, raped, shot again, and left in the yard with her underwear in her mouth.
During the evacuation of Cinderhorn, only a few hours later, several yang’ti left the smoking ruins of their camp and crossed the yard to the undisturbed scene of this carnage. Some gathered up the bodies and burned them. Others, who had seen the baby in mother’s or father’s arms before, searched the house. The yang’ti who found it was Sa’oti’nk, father of a third-molt son himself. Not knowing the baby’s name, he named her I’sha’ and took her past protesting neighbors (including her wailing grandparents, held back by yang’ti soldiers) onto the ship. The statue of I’sha’ in her father’s arm with her brother running ahead of them, stands in front of the Prisoners of Earth memorial on yang’Tak, and is perhaps the best known in the world.
* * *
Two years before the Return, waitress Tammy Weeks was walking to the bus when she happened to see a group of teenagers roughing up a bug in a darkened alley. Just how the bug had escaped from the nearby immigration camp did not seem to matter just then (although Tammy was quite frightened of the bugs under ordinary circumstances), seeing as baseball bats were involved and blood was flying. Not thinking—if she’d thought, she wouldn’t have done it—Tammy rushed over, screaming for help. The kids gave their victim a last volley of kicks and blows and ran. Mistaking her for one of his attackers, Ik’n’nok swung wildly at the half-seen shape that loomed over him next, his arm-spikes opening her cheek, neck and chest in a ghastly wound that, despite stitching at the free clinic later that night, turned Tammy’s already rather homely face into a horror mask.
Despite this, she took the bug home (not a brave girl; perhaps she was in shock), to clean him up. There, Ik’n’nok (not a violent man; he’d been half-crazed with pain and terror) spent the rest of the night mumbling apologies through his mangled palps that she couldn’t understand anyway. She fed him and kept him safe in her closet, but his wounds steadily worsened and after several nerve-wracking days, he asked for help getting back home. After dark, Tammy and her suspiciously tall and lumpy grandmother slipped out of her apartment, out of town, and out across the terrifyingly open trash-strewn plains towards the stark white walls of Beauty Gunyah. Hidden beneath a molding mattress heaped with used diapers was a tunnel. Tammy helped him down, covered the tunnel back up, and tried to forget the whole thing after he was gone.
But she was a buggie now and the proof was right on her face. She lost her job and her apartment, was rejected at shelters, chased in the street, thrown out of shops. At last, homeless, hungry and feverish, she crawled back beneath that stinking mattress and through the lightless tunnel into the bug-camp itself. Yang’ti left her alone as she staggered through the slums, until Ik’n’nok heard of the scar, recognized it, and came to get her.
For years, she lived with him in his shack, trying to be useful. She scraped out a little fireplace where she could cook the food he brought home and served it on hubcap plates with hand-carved forks so that she had dishes to wash afterwards. She made curtains out of newspapers and hung them over the rusted holes in his railway car. She found a little wire that wasn’t too badly rusted and used it and some broken glass to make windchimes to hang next to the door. For years, they slept together squeezed onto a sagging fold-out recliner, and eventually, inevitably, she put her arms around him in the night and snuggled timidly close, whispering his name. Ik’n’nok, unprepared and ignorant of human anatomy, made a gallant effort to grievous effect, but she did ultimately stop bleeding and they got better at it. A little. Eventually.
After the evacuation, he took her to the medical bay to have her scars removed and her original homely face restored, and then to his assigned room, where he stood staring nervously out the portal while he told her she could go home now. He did not say that he didn’t want her to feel obligated to stay with him just because he’d made her so dependent on him and he’d gotten used to her…liked her…wanted to be with her. It was hard enough to say the little that he did. Tammy, for her part, managed after several false starts to ask if he wanted her to go, and this was hard enough for her. She couldn’t just come out and say that she thought he loved her, because, well, maybe that was a stupid thing to think. A few clumsy mountings every few days when she put her arms around him might not mean love to them, who knew? But she thought…he brought her things he thought she might like from the Heaps…he seemed to enjoy her cooking (and it wasn’t easy when most of what one had was canned bug food)…and he put his arm around her at night (he put his leg around her too, that chair was tiny). Did he want her to go? Because she would if he wanted that, but did he want her to go? He wanted her to be happy, he eventually said, still staring at the window.
“Can’t I be happy here?” asked Tammy in a whisper, and for her, this was as bold as brass tacks.
“Can you be happy here?” Ik’n’nok ventured cautiously, holding his breath and tucking in all his palps.
“I’d like to try. I…I…I’m happiest with you,” said Tammy, and turned a shocking shade of red which Ik’n’nok didn’t notice because holding his breath had rendered him temporarily color-blind. Instead, he attempted clumsily to embrace her, and she him, which ended in a short, messy, painful bout of nevertheless quite sweet and sincere love-making, which they got better at.
A little.
Eventually.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
She knew it was bad when nothing hurt, but oh, she did not want to wake up. She supposed she knew she was dying, and knew it no longer in an abstract, ‘this is getting really bad’ way, but a dull and exhausted, ‘one day, I’m just going to feel my heart stop’ resignation. She was surprised every time she woke up. Sometimes she wondered if she was dead already and the dreams—those vivid forays into peaceful insanity—were all a part of what came after, the last confused et
ernities as her brain finally fired down for rest.
Rest.
Strange that she didn’t feel tired. These days, she always woke up tired, stole her little sips of real life through a haze of soul-deep exhaustion, and slept again until the pain woke her up. But nothing hurt…and she wasn’t tired.
It felt like the beginning all over again, before they started really hurting her, when all van Meyer could think to do with her was move her from one yang’ti’s cell to another and order them to breed. She spent those first days just sitting, each of them in their separate corners, not looking at each other, not speaking, just passing the time until van Meyer came in with his soldiers to punish them. She wished she could have been like one of those girls in the movies, defiant to the last, the kind of badass bitch that would fight back every time and maybe even win once in a while. She wasn’t. No matter how many times it happened, she always ended sobbing on the floor in a huddled heap, begging them to stop. And then van Meyer would look down on her in his grandfatherly way and ask her why it had to be like this, why so much pain, why not simply do what he knew she had done before and benefit all mankind, because if she did not, the pain would have to continue.
She’d laughed at him once. She had to laugh. “What else can you do to me?” she’d asked. “You killed my sister. You even killed my dog. My whole family is gone. I have nothing left for you to threaten. All you can do now is kill me. Go ahead!”
“No,” he’d said gently. “Not all.” And gave the nod to his men again.
Afterwards, in the dark of the night, the yang’ti sharing that cell had quietly said, “I can, you know. If it makes them stop hurting you.”
“It won’t,” she’d answered wearily. “But you can, if you think it’ll make them stop hurting you.”