Cottonwood (42 page)

“If you were only thinking, you’d be humming,” he countered. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head, cleaning the heater with renewed vigor, but eventually, she had to put it aside and when she did, she was in no hurry to start in on a new one. Instead, awkwardly, she said, “Do you get TV here?”

Odd question. What was this about?

“Yes. Some can even be repaired. But you’ve been with us to see movies,” he reminded himself. “You mean, do we receive transmissions? No. Although the humans are happy to sell programs to those with registered media players, we are not permitted ‘news’ in any format.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Denying prisoners access to current events is a fairly standard psychological control, but it’s not particularly relevant to our situation. Most of your news has nothing to do with us and what few opinions they do express are considerably more civil than what I’ve heard in the camps.”

“So you do watch TV.”

Sanford bent under his work table and brought out a digital tablet. Its screen was cracked and most of its innards had been salvaged, but it was the only one of its kind he had at the moment. “We find these sometimes with credits left on them. I used to watch them, but no more. They’re too valuable. And I already know what the humans think of us.” He tossed the tablet back under the table and picked up another length of wire. “Why do you ask?”

She sighed heavily and slumped back in the chair. “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Having said that,” he remarked, “I think you might as well. It can’t be a worse reason than what I’m sure to imagine if you don’t.”

She was quiet. After a minute or two of silence, Sanford decided she meant it and that he would not press. She had seen something, clearly, some atrocity the humans either were planning or had already inflicted upon his people. Something new to her, perhaps, but he doubted it was new to him and since he could do nothing more about it than he was already doing, he saw no point in dwelling on it.

But just when he thought she would sit and brood forever, she suddenly said, “They took Baccus.”

“Yes.” He hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard. They’d taken her at the Heaps, when she grew hungry and desperate enough to risk working there. The soldiers didn’t scan everyone, not even every tenth yang’ti who passed the checkpoint as the regulations posted there warned, but they scanned her and then they took her. She did not resist, he heard. He was not surprised. When the worst finally happens, it can seem like a relief.

“They’re saying she was the one who attacked me,” Sarah said softly.

Sanford acknowledged this without emotion. The wiring had become tricky and was of far more interest to him at the moment. Later, he may feel some shame over this. Or he may not. Regrets could not put money in his hand and this heater could. Time eroded all things and sentiment too often went first.

“She says she attacked me too.”

“Denying it would not save her.”

She watched him change out a connector in silence, but as soon as it was in and secure, she said, “She said she did it and I let her say it.”

Sanford looked at her. “Denying it,” he said, “would not have saved her.”

“They put me on TV so I could tell everyone that the bug who hurt me got caught by the brave men and women of IBI.”

“And you did.”

She folded her arms, hugging herself like a parentless child…which she was, he recalled. That stirred some feeling in him, but it was not fatherly. He went back to work on the next heater.

“The way she looked at me…” Sarah closed her eyes. “She knew I wasn’t going to help her.”

“Couldn’t. She knew you couldn’t.”

“Stop trying to forgive me! You weren’t there!”

“No,” Sanford agreed mildly. “I was here.”

She quieted, color rising in her cheeks, and for several minutes, that was all.

“Sorry,” she mumbled at last.

“Don’t apologize.”

“I’m not saying…I don’t know what I’m saying.” She slumped back in the chair and rubbed her face, combed her fingers through her hair. It did not neaten her overall appearance at all, but he found the sight oddly agreeable. “I just…feel…awful.”

“It does no good to dwell on it.”

“I can’t pretend it never happened. I can’t…Tell me what to do, Sanford! I think about it until I make myself sick and then suddenly I’ll realize I’m not thinking about it and I’ll feel even sicker because how can I just forget something like that?” She picked up her cleaning rag, but only held it, twisting it weakly back and forth. “I’ll never make it right. If I could magically save a thousand other people, I still let her die. And don’t tell me she’s not dead. I know she’s dead.”

He did not fill the silence that followed with empty assurances. He simply dusted out the last heating unit.

“Tell me what to do,” she said again.

“What makes you think I know?”

Her brows puckered, confused. “Haven’t you ever done anything bad?”

Sanford coughed up a laugh. “No,” he said gravely. “Never.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know where I am. You know no one survives here without regret.” He removed the electrical cord and found a good one in his much-depleted box of parts. “You don’t need to hear the details.”

“I don’t want to hear the details, I just want to know how you…” She gestured futilely and let her hands drop, slumping back in the chair in defeat. “Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Sanford finished the last heater and replaced the casing. He found another rag and as soon as he started cleaning heaters, she joined him. The work went quickly with two sets of hands, but the quiet troubled him. He wished she’d hum.

He said, “I volunteered for this mission. The colony.”

She looked up, blinking rapidly, as if she’d been brought too suddenly into the light. “Huh?”

“Only the most elite soldiers were permitted to apply, but mine is a very old military family and even though it has been hundreds of years since the caste laws were rescinded, the old privileges linger.”

“Lucky you.”

“I thought so at the time. When I received my orders, I had them mounted on the wall so I could look at them every day. My father and his father came with me on the day of departure. My father’s father told me he was proud of me. When I looked back after boarding the ship, they were still there. My father saluted me.”

Sarah sat motionless, one hand resting lightly on one half-cleaned heater, listening.

“That is the moment where I choose to live,” said Sanford. “Someday, I will return to yang’Tak and see my father before me. I will stand in that moment again and finally move on.”

“And it will be like none of this ever happened?”

“Of course it happened. But I will leave it on Earth where it belongs. I will take my son and I will move on.” He glanced at the window, where the failing light served to remind him of time, and stood up. “Thank you for your help. Will you come to the Heaps tomorrow?”

She accepted his unspoken dismissal in good grace, finishing her heater and folding her rag atop it. “Sure. I guess it’s not a good idea to meet at your house every day, huh?”

“Probably not,” he agreed with a flick of his antennae. “But that isn’t why I ask.” He opened a drawer on his work table and brought out a scuffed plastic disc-case.

She took it, puzzled, turned it over…and clapped a hand to her mouth to muffle her breathy scream. In the next instant, she had thrown herself against him, bouncing on her toes even as she embraced him. “
Aliens From Outer Space
! Oh my God, Sanford! Where did you find this?”

He picked her hair out of his mouth, scraping his palps and clicking with satisfaction. “I’ve arranged for a private viewing room from noon until four.”

“I don’t believe it!
Aliens From Outer Space
!” She tore herself away, gazing into the scratched face of the movie case the way the television programs insisted women were supposed to look at jewelry and suddenly, she was crying. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying, smiling, weeping. She hugged him again, her fingers slipping deliberately between his plates to brush at his sensitive pads, wanting him to feel her. “Thank you so much!”

It didn’t change anything. He knew she would still lie awake tonight, thinking of Baccus and all the things she might have said or done, and she might hate herself then for the joy she felt now, but for right now, this moment, she was happy. He had made her happy.

Sanford closed his eyes, letting all his world be her touch—just the tips of three fingers, the fluttering of a fourth. His heart throbbed.

“It’s a terrible movie,” Sarah wept.

“I know. I watched some of it, to be certain it was the right one.”

“How far did you get?”

“The wooden cage. And that…thing.”

“The starfish.” She pulled back, wiping at her eyes and smiling. “With an eye in its stomach. The one she seduces. You are definitely going to want to have that talk with T’aki.”

“I appreciate the warning.” He stepped toward the door and put his hand on its latch, but didn’t open it yet. “Tomorrow, then.”

She nodded, stroking the scratched face of the disc-case before reluctantly returning it to him. “Tomorrow. Be careful, okay? I mean, I know you are, but…”

She didn’t finish her thought. She didn’t have to. Being careful didn’t always mean staying safe in Cottonwood.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that she did at least some of what she did for him. Some things she would do because she could see the evil here and, being Sarah, she wanted to ‘make it right’, but there must be ways she could fight IBI at a distance. She chose instead to walk Cottonwood’s causeways and smell its stink. To see him.

On impulse, Sanford leaned closer and gently breathed. She giggled—of course, what had he expected?—and then she tipped back her head and deliberately exhaled.

They shared breath. His claspers twitched; he kept them tightly tucked. ‘Not here,’ he thought, even as he refused to too closely examine just what he meant by that. ‘Not here. Not now.’

They breathed.

From somewhere in the folds of Sarah’s clothing came an electronic chirp. Her day was done.

Sarah’s expression at once faded and closed. She stepped away from him. “I have to go. Tell T’aki I said hi and I’ll see him tomorrow.”

Sanford opened his door. She touched his hand once more in passing, just the outer plates this time. If he hadn’t been watching, he would never have known. He watched from the doorway as she walked up the road and around the corner out of sight. Only when his vision began to drift out of color and into shades of grey did he realize he’d been holding his breath—holding the last breath she’d given him.

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.