Cottonwood (60 page)

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 eternities 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.”

But he didn’t, and it really didn’t matter because soon afterwards, they gave up on voluntary procreation and moved her to the lab to harvest her ovaries. God alone knew what they did to get material from the yang’ti, but they must have done something, because there were plenty of implantations.

And of course it hadn’t worked. No matter what they did, no matter what ‘treatment’ they used, nothing they put in her grew. After so long (years, she thought, although she didn’t know how many), she dared to hope they’d given up on the idea, and certainly, they’d given up on her as brood-queen of this new race. It had been months since the last attempt, months since anything big, really. Sometimes she went days entirely untouched, just fed and watered and occasionally hosed down. Cared for, as minimally as possible, until van Meyer could think of something new to do with her.

And then something happened. What was it? Some commotion in the halls, all frightened voices and shouting and slamming doors. They took the yang’ti away, but not her. She slept, she woke, she dreamed. Then Piotr came, not with van Meyer, but all alone. She thought he shot a doctor in the doorway, but maybe she dreamed that part. She didn’t dream what happened next, though.

God, he really hurt her this time. Pounding on her, kicking and stomping on her, screaming something about it being her fault. She’d blacked out a couple of times, but he kept bringing her back out of it. When she finally woke alone, she couldn’t believe it. She remembered being terrified of the emptiness, knowing he was still there somewhere, invisible. She crawled under her bench where it was small and safe and no one could find her, and there she slept again, and dreamed, and maybe died.

Had she died? She really didn’t think she was sleeping, so what did that leave? This had to be one of the other dreams, the waking dreams. If so, it was a really nice one.

Sarah worked her eyes open. The room was dark and swam with peaceful color. She thought she was in bed, a soft bed, softer than any she’d ever been in. Except maybe her bed at Cottonwood. Memory gel. With heating and cooling functions. Where Fagin barfed up a wax orange the very first day.

Oh Fagin…

A blur of bluish-green swam closer. She drew it into focus, feeling no urgency. Urgency had a way of splintering the waking dreams back into the cell, into reality. She wasn’t crazy yet, couldn’t live in these worlds all the time. It took effort.

T’aki. T’aki’s little round head and big eyes peeking over the side of the mattress. She guessed she knew where she was now. Dreaming of the cabin, the morning after the Great Escape. Lemon jelly doughnuts on her pillow and Sanford’s arms around her like prickly bars of iron. But it wasn’t quite the same. It was a nicer bed, for one thing. For another—

“I’m forgetting what you looked like,” Sarah croaked, gazing at him mournfully. “You were shorter.”

“I grew,” the ghost of T’aki said.

Then he put his arms up and crawled onto the side of the bed. Sarah groaned, shrinking back. The dreams talked to her all the time and that was fine, but they couldn’t touch her. When T’aki touched her, when his arms passed insubstantially through her own, he would wink away and her heart would break all over. Her heart was always breaking. It just couldn’t keep doing that before it gave up and stopped.

And then, cool chitin touched her shoulders. She gasped hard (a sure way to wake up these days, but her broken ribs didn’t hurt; nothing hurt) and lay frozen as the small body snuggled up against her, pulling his arms and legs up small between them.

“Hold me,” T’aki chirred, pressing his head against her chest. “You can’t hurt me. Hold me tight. I have to feel you hold me, okay?”

She didn’t want to move. Moving would wake her up. She didn’t want to touch him. Touching him would wake her up. But he was here. She brought her arms up slowly, pressing her shaking fingertips to his smooth shell, and neither he nor the room around her vanished. She squeezed, squeezed until her disbelieving arms ached, but he stayed solid. Sobbing, she rolled onto her side and curled up around him, her hands cupping and patting at his head, rubbing his back, pricking themselves on the first tiny thorns growing from his little arms and legs. He chirred, tiny palps vibrating against her breastbone, and he stayed real.

“You
are
bigger,” she managed to say at last. “You did grow. You’re not going to be my jellybean much longer.”

“Always always.” He uncurled and cupped her face in his strange, centipede-like fingers, staring anxiously into her eyes. “You were in a long time. They wouldn’t let me see you. And then you slept and slept. But you’re better now, right?”

Her head swam. She shook it and touched him again, stroking his soft throat under his palps so that he closed his eyes and chirred again. He felt so real. She had to be awake.

“Can you get up?” T’aki asked. “I want to show you.”

“Show me…” She pulled her hand back and stared at it, her head swimming harder. She had fingers. She touched them as T’aki climbed down from the bed. Perfect fingers, all ten of them, baby-pale and smooth against her thin, rough palm.

Hesitantly, she touched her mouth and felt teeth, all her teeth…even her wisdom molars, and she’d had those pulled when she was fourteen. She ran her hands down her chest and her ribs were all solid beneath her skin. She was wearing…wearing…what was she wearing? A soft white tent, with holes for her arms and neck, faintly shiny, thin but heavy. Heart pounding, she pushed back the bedsheets (same fabric, she noticed), pulled up her gown-thing, and stared in awe at her straight, white legs. Even the scar from falling off Kate’s bike that summer was gone. Her hair…no, her hair was still gone, but so were the scars left by Dr. Chapel’s electroshock ‘treatments’.