Cottonwood (59 page)

* * *

Although Sweetwater was meant, like all of the immigration camps, to be isolated from the human population, its construction meant the relocation of several remote villages in northern India. With nowhere else to go, the former residents began to trickle back almost immediately, where they became a cheap source of labor and recreation for IBI’s workforce, and soon their many decrepit houses were built all the way up to the containment wall. The human settlement grew, like the yang’ti population within the walls. At times, there were benefits—the humans often disposed of their dead by tossing them over the wall, where their meat and clothing were very welcome, and the yang’ti quickly learned that their salvage had more value to the humans on the other side of the wall than through IBI’s official channels—but all too often, they were only competitors for the same sparse resources. The uneasy truce that existed between them was one of desperation, not friendship.

So it was an inexplicable impulse, when U’us’ka picked through a deposit of fresh refuse and found a young human, that he should not simply kill it, eat it, and move on. He didn’t. Couldn’t. It wasn’t dead, wasn’t meat…it had just been thrown out.

U’us’ka picked it up for closer inspection and the young human squirmed, clutching his fingers in its tiny fists. He had never seen one so small. It had seemingly just molted out of its egg-stage, still wet and bloodied, squalling weakly in the open air. Although perfectly formed, the child seemed to have no control over its limbs and no understanding of its surroundings. When U’us’ka spoke, it did not even try to answer.

It did not occur to U’us’ka, then or ever, to hand the child over to IBI. What is found on the Heaps is for yang’ti, that had always been the law. He took the baby human back to his poor house, built it a nest in his bed, and cleaned and oiled the tiny limbs to try and minimize the damage of the bad molt it had surely suffered. When it lived, he fed it bug food mixed with the milk of goats whenever he could afford it, and regurgitate whenever he could not. It never did molt again, but did eventually come to hold its head up, and then walk, and finally learn to speak.

U’us’ka called his foundling Arva’u’us’k, and seven years later, the evacuation of Sweetwater found this strange trophy of the Heaps dressed in rags and taped newspapers clinging to U’us’ka’s leg and crying in perfectly clear, if strangely-accented, yang’ze, “Do not take me from my father!” while U’us’ka stared frostily into the startled eyes of the yang’ti rescuers, his hand upon the boy’s thin shoulders, saying over and over, “I am not leaving without my son.”

And with the evacuation stalled and time passing them by, the soldiers had no choice but to allow it. Arva’u’us’k was the first human to board a yang’ti freighter, but there were dozens of others like him waiting to be found. It made Sweetwater’s evacuation slow and difficult, but by the end of it, not a child was left behind, which was more than could be said of the place when humans ran it.

* * *

Agata McDowell, a fifty year-old retired music teacher, first saw the conditions of IBI’s camp Buena Vista on a pirate website while searching for cheap guiros and claves for the playroom at the shelter where she volunteered. The photographs smuggled out of the camp spent less than six hours on the internet before the site was shut down, but made a tremendous impression upon Agata. At her own expense, she traveled south, crossed into South America legally and Buena Vista quite illegally, and for years helped to smuggle in clean water and canned food, livestock, furniture, clothes, and even guns.

By happenstance, she witnessed the horrific raid of a hatchery by IBI’s Population Enforcement Squad, and made it her mission thereafter to never see another. For years, carefully-marked eggs were passed into the old woman’s hands after the day’s smuggled soup was ladled out, and eggs in soup pots were taken back to Agata’s ramshackle hut—no larger or finer than any to be found inside the camp—and tended. Despite the danger, Agata was determined that every child know his father, and through her tireless efforts, kept them all in touch through photographs, letters, and midnight meetings at cracks in the containment wall. She taught them all to speak and read Spanish and English, and quite a few to play piano, and did whatever she could to keep them safe and happy in exile.

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 his 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.