Cottonwood (32 page)

“Is Fagin your only friend?” T’aki asked.

Sanford clicked hard.

But she smiled. “There’s always you, jellybean.”

“Don’t you have a father?”

Her smile became pained. Sanford clicked again and added a brisk tap to the top of the boy’s head.

“Not anymore, baby.”

“What happened to him?”

“Go to sleep,” Sanford said brusquely.

“But I’m not tired!”

“It’s okay, Sanford.” It wasn’t, anyone could see that, but she sighed and got up to fetch something from the small shelf above an unused fireplace. A picture, pressed under glass. Four humans. She sat down again and passed it into T’aki’s hands. “That’s me, about ten years ago. And that’s my sister, Kate. And this is my father and my mother.”

“Mother,” T’aki murmured, running his fingers over the glass.

“About two years after that was taken, there was a bad thing.”

“Did the vans come?”

Her face seemed to crumple slightly. She looked away again and finally back, composed. “No, nothing like that. But while Kate and I were away from the house, there was a fire and…both my parents died.”

“Oh.” T’aki traced the uneven edge where the photograph had blackened and blistered, then gave it back.

“The house burned down and just about everything was gone except some old boxes of junk in the basement and that picture, which was right on the living room wall.” She stood and placed it back on the shelf, turning it minutely back and forth until she had achieved the perfect angle. It stood alone, the only item in all this room that seemed to be for decoration’s sake alone. “Your toys were in the basement,” she remarked. “I guess that’s really why I kept them all this time. It’s not like I play with them anymore.”

“Do you want them back?” T’aki asked. “I can give them…some of them back.”

“No. Toys don’t want to be keepsakes, honey, they want to be toys. And I want them to be useful.” She turned around and looked at them, at the boy curled small in Sanford’s arms. She raised her eyes in a knowing and oddly fatherly way, to meet his, smiling. “Think you could sleep if you had to, jellybean?”

“Well…” T’aki picked at a toe dolefully. “If I had to.”

“Come on. I have a spare bed in here.”

Sanford followed her down the short hall to a room easily twice the size of his home in Cottonwood. The bed would have occupied the entire space he used for working. Its sheets were white. He had not seen anything so white in years.

Sarah withdrew while Sanford helped his son arrange a nest, returning in a short while with a glass of clear water and cushions. The dog came with her, but did not leave again when she did, electing instead to climb the mattress and curl itself possessively at the bed’s center, side to side with T’aki. Seeing the animal’s open mouth and sharp teeth exposed in a yawn unsettled him badly, but T’aki was not afraid to share the nest and Sarah seemed not to think the creature dangerous.

Sarah had not thought IBI dangerous.

“I’m sorry I made Sarah sad,” T’aki said softly, under the sheet. “I didn’t know she was all alone.”

Sanford found a foot in the swaddles and stroked a pad.

“She looks scared in this house.”

“Perhaps,” said Sanford, thinking of the phone call, and what he had heard of the other voice, the dark voice.

“I would be scared to live here, too,” came the next confession. “It’s too big.”

“It only seems so because it is empty. My home on yang’Tak is even bigger than this one.”

The sheets pulled back to reveal his son’s fascinated face. “Bigger?”

“Much bigger, but—” He bent to share breath, which the dog reverently shared as well. “—even our home in Cottonwood is a home with a family inside it. I am you and you are me. Go to sleep.”

“Yes, Father.” The sheets went up.

Sanford returned to the sofa in the front room, and to the monitor where Earth’s stories were told. He’d seldom received as good an image on the monitors that fell into his hands in the Heaps, despite his best repairs, and he enjoyed watching it, if only for the one night.

“You don’t have to sleep out here,” Sarah said behind him. “You can have my bed, if you want. I don’t mind the couch.”

“I would be more comfortable with my son.”

“Oh. Okay. Well…you know where everything is. If Fagin annoys you, just shove him out into the yard, he’ll be fine. If you need me for anything, don’t be shy about waking me up. Just get some sleep and tomorrow…”

He waited.

“Tomorrow…” She turned away, took a few steps, turned back. She glanced once at the door to the room where T’aki slept and lowered her voice. “I was thinking maybe we should just—”

“You will take us back,” Sanford said.

“I…don’t think I can do that.”

“I don’t have the code-bank, Sarah. Even if you went in and fetched it out for me, it isn’t yet repaired. I need my tools to do that work. I need salvage. I am not ready. You saved us tonight, but one night is nothing.”

“What if…” She checked the empty hall again and said, even softer, “What if it’s gone? What if they—Piotr and the rest of them,” she added hurriedly, although he could all but see the yang’ti rioters shining in her eyes. “What if they blew your house up? What if they burned it all down?”

Just as if these thoughts had not already occurred to him, Sanford held up his hand to stop her flood of fears and said, “What is merely buried can be recovered. Tools can be replaced.”

“But we’re already out! What if…” She raised and dropped her empty hands helplessly. “What if I can never get you out again? If tonight has shown me anything, it’s that I really suck at planning! If I can’t throw a barbeque, I sure won’t be able to mastermind an escape. It’s mind-boggling that I got you out tonight, I could never do it again!”

“My escape only matters if it ends in the ship.”

She raised one hand and brushed at her eyes. “Will you think about it?” she asked softly. “Please?”

“Yes. Will you take us back if that is my decision?”

“Yeah. God, I…” But that was all she said. She stared at the empty wall beside her and finally turned around again.

“You think you won’t sleep tonight,” said Sanford, watching humans take enthusiastic bites out of the things Sarah called ‘burgers’. Now that he’d had one, their enjoyment seemed slightly less ridiculous. “But I hope you do. And I hope you understand that it has been a good day, in spite of everything.”

“I’m sorry, Sanford. I just don’t think I can see it that way.”

He watched her unhappy retreat until she put a door between them and then returned his attention to the television, switching through programs and waiting for sleep to settle on his own tight nerves. There were many different feeds, some of which addressed the problem of the bugs. Hatred and fear radiated from these humans, who kept them penned in as prisoners and who still accused them of spreading disease, of inciting riots, of engaging in criminal acts, of kidnapping and eating children. Even those few who spoke on their behalf seemed to be capable of only condescending kindness—the bugs should be cared for, because human intervention was necessary to keep the bugs from their own inherently dangerous lifestyle. Much in the manner of stray dogs or cats, they should not be summarily destroyed, but rather rescued, neutered, and placed in adoptive homes where they could be more effectively domesticated.

An idle thought: Sarah had never once used the word ‘bug’ in his presence. Like the names the humans had assigned him and T’aki, it stuck in her palps like a shard of bone and choked her.

Sanford gazed broodingly down the dark hallway, listening to the television rant. No one must ever tell. These were the agreements made when Commander Tlee’tathk stood before them in that last terrible hour, with the humans at the door and colonists weeping softly throughout the hold: Protect the women and never admit to their existence; offer up no aid if asked to open the ship and never allow a weapon to fall into their alien hands; above all things, never speak of the homeworld or its people. Let the humans draw what conclusions they wished to draw, take whatever they could take, but give them no more power.

Sanford moved through the channels, eyes fixed, listening only a few seconds to each program before moving on. He saw humans who were angry, who were laughing, who were sad. He saw tender parents with children, medics healing injured, the criminals engaged in murder and the soldiers who brought them down. He saw warmth and indifference and violence and hard work and games and pretend foolishness and deadly seriousness. He saw a world of people like any other people…and he was glad he saw it.

‘I gave her my breath,’ he thought suddenly, and clicked at himself in rueful amusement. Why had he done that? What had he expected, really? She didn’t know yang’ti ways.

He scrolled through the channels on the monitor. Talking. Fighting. Laughing. Eating. Mating. Shouting. Singing. Even the contorted half-jumps and bouncing they called ‘dancing’. Human life, naked before him. Honest, as Sarah was honest.

Idly now, lost in introspection, he dialed back several feeds to the program showing humans in copulation. Male and female, lying close together, mostly hidden in sheets, but plainly mating. He’d seen naked humans only in the pictures that came to the Heaps, and most of these were so unsavory that he could not stand to touch them even to recycle them, but he’d never given much thought to how they copulated. He hadn’t realized there would be so much movement. The touching, yes, but not the shoving, the biting and licking, the squeezing. They used their mouths, their hands, their chins and cheeks and thighs and maybe even more to touch each other everywhere. Because human skin could always feel everything, all the time.

Perhaps instead of breathing, he should have touched her. She might have understood that better.

Understood what, exactly?

He turned his palm over and stroked his fingertips along his own wrist-pad, back and forth, watching the monitor. It seemed a decidedly rigorous way to copulate, more like battle than mating. And it went on and on and on. He wondered if human bondmates copulated every day. And if so, if they had time to do anything else.

‘What is wrong with me?’ he asked himself suddenly, but it was a ridiculous thing to ask even in the quiet of his own mind. He’d touched Sarah’s hand, and yes, friends touched, they touched all the time and it was not strange to do so, but he’d shared his breath also, he’d
wanted
hers, and that act was intimate. There was nothing
wrong
with it. It may be unnatural to some degree (a fairly large degree), but it wasn’t
wrong
.

He liked her. He trusted her. And more than that lay some deeper emotion he could not put a name to. It was almost a craving. Not a sexual desire, there was nothing in her soft human body to arouse him, but sex was certainly a part of it, because…

Because…

Because he wanted to be with her.

Oh, that was an unpleasant revelation. When had that happened? And what was he supposed to do with it? He’d gone to the Blue House because of Sarah and there was no point trying to deny it. It had been
her
touches he’d been seeking in that miserable place, some part of him had known even then that he wanted to be with her. And Sam! Ko’vi help him, he’d hated to see Sam’s hand on her,
hated
it, not just because it humiliated her, but because…because…because Sam knew how to touch her and he didn’t.

He did not
want
to copulate in that fashion. It was on some level abhorrent to him, but he thought he could. He wanted to hear those sounds coming from
her
throat, see
her
hands reaching back to embrace
him
. He wanted to please her when they mated.

When.

Enough of this.

He switched off the television. He went outside—unlike his son, he did know what the toilet in the bathroom was for, but like so many things in this world, it was not made for him and he didn’t want to use it—and stared up at the sky for some time after he was done. He could not see yang’Tak’s star from this place, but the stars were still beautiful. It seemed to him that he didn’t always think so, but they were tonight.

Sanford went inside, shut and locked the glass door, and walked down the hall to Sarah’s room. She didn’t wake until he put his hand on her shoulder, and when she did, it was not with the frantic lunge of an anxious mind, but merely a hum and a sleepy query.

“We are yang’ti,” he told her. “Our people are called yang’ti.”

She looked at him in the dim light, her eyes catching the moon through the window. “Thank you,” she said, taking his hand.

He touched her palm, where her seams might be if she had them.

She touched his, her fingers small and smooth and hot on his receptor-pads.

They parted hands and he went away to sleep.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sanford woke to the smell of food. That alone was a phenomenon unvisited in many, many years, but it was doubly hard to ignore T’aki’s reaction. The boy came kicking and struggling out of the nest, immature claspers dashing at the air and a look of wild hope across his face, just as though he had not feasted to the very limits of his shell the previous night.

“It smells good. What is it?” T’aki asked, crawling to the edge of the bed (Sanford was pleased to note the dog had at some point departed their company. It had a rude habit of hoarding bed-space and it made loud noises in its sleep). “Is it for us?”

“I don’t know,” Sanford said honestly. “But you must not ask if you are not offered. This is not our home.”

“I wish Sarah lived with us.”

“That is not possible.” Sanford made an effort at neatening the bed, then gave up and left it rumpled. He watched his son huddle at the door, sniffing the aroma that came from whatever the human was cooking. He himself was perhaps a little hungry, but still nicely fed and beginning to concern himself more with how to get back behind the walls without endangering either his tactless son or the woman who had stolen them away. “Perhaps we should leave,” he said slowly.