Cottonwood (62 page)

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Sarah said, frowning as she tried to clear the fog and find that memory. “You were the one who fixed me.”

“The vat did all the hard work,” he said. “I just put you in it. Naked,” he added.

She yanked her hand back. “Prick.”

“Oh, I had my hands all over you, caseworker.” He waggled his palps. “And if I’d known you were that into chitin, I’d have climbed right in with you.”

She turned around, stalking back to Sanford and T’aki, trying not to swear. She told herself not to do it…and then she swung around, ready to have it all out right here in front of the whole damn room.

He wasn’t leering at her. He was just standing there, looking at her. And before she could say anything, before she could even think of something to say, he turned around and pushed his way into the crowd, vanishing right in front of her.

Sanford took her arm, asking a question with his eyes that she didn’t know how to answer. Yes, she supposed she was all right, but this, all of this…began to feel like too much again. The cheering grated on her ears; they always cheered at war’s end, but then the recriminations started, and she was going to wear the same human face that had devastated countless lives. It was too much.

The buzzing stopped.

Sarah looked up, moving instinctively closer to Sanford, enough to feel his sharp side-thorns digging at her arm.

The doors had opened and a yang’ti was coming toward them. Taller than Sanford, and older, she thought, wearing a complicated harness and half a dozen loin-cloths in pale robin’s egg blue wrapped around his abdomen and thighs. There was never any question who this imposing figure aimed for, and even T’aki stood quiet and respectful as Sarah found herself bored down upon.

There was only one person she could think of who this could be. Softly, trying not to press too obviously into Sanford’s side, she whispered, “Is this, um, your f-father?”

“No,” he said at once, comfortingly. “She is the governor of all yang’Tak.”

Panic swelled, but she had nowhere to run. The stranger, the governor, reached them and stood, looking down at her for a very long time. Her palps snapped now and then. Her antennae were low.

Sanford’s finger stroked her palm.

“I have heard a great deal about you,” the governor said finally. “I have, in fact, heard little else for years.” Her eyes snapped to Sanford, who gazed back blandly. She clicked and looked at Sarah again. “Nk’os’a’knko is quite convincing. If he were not so persistent, I would demand no less than the eradication of your people after what horrors have befallen my own.”

Sarah opened her mouth. Sanford squeezed her hand hard.

“But I saw you carried in. And I have met with some of the others.” The governor relaxed the stiff set of her legs, lowering herself perhaps three inches. It gentled her expression some and softened her hard tone. “And I begin to realize that even though great evil moved through your world, still there were persons of good and courageous heart who tried to stop it. I should hate to see our own race judged by the darkest deeds of the worst men at the most evil hours of our history.”

The governor raised herself up again, still facing Sarah, but managing somehow to address the whole room anyway. Her hands spread, not quite touching either her or Sanford, but certainly adopting the posture of a benevolent and rehearsed embrace. She began to wonder if this was being recorded somewhere.

“And so,” the governor said clearly, “after much thought, I can say that we will leave your Earth whole behind us, not for fear of those who imagined themselves our superiors, but for the sake of them who tried against terrible risk to prove our friends. The atrocities of Earth can never be forgotten, but we must not allow those atrocities to dictate our futures. I have come to believe, Sarah, Nk’os’a’knko, that the alliance of human and yang’ti has been intended, has been ordained, and though it may have been repelled through evil acts for many years, still it triumphs today and we shall both be better for it.”

She lowered herself again, looking back into Sarah’s eyes and speaking directly to her. “And I can welcome you among us, Sarah—” She couldn’t seem to say the name without clicking, and judging by the quick downwards flicks of her antennae, it annoyed her. She must have been practicing. “—and ask sincerely that Ko’vi bless this union.”

The governor offered her hands as the room erupted in ear-splitting buzzes, and Sarah took them, touching and being queasily touched in return. Not thrilled, she saw, but okay with it, with her. If the in-laws were anything like this, she thought she’d be okay.

Sanford took her arm and they walked on, following the blue-wrapped yang’ti through the doors and into the other room, which was empty at the moment, but beautifully-set, with shiny metal and glass dishes and sparkling lights hanging on filaments as thin as spiderwebs across the ceiling. Every long table was decked out with swaths of black and green fabric, dotted with tiny white-metal decorations that almost looked like little flowers. There was plenty of food, but it didn’t look or smell too bad, and there was even a little bowl of what she thought might be bread at the smaller center table where Sanford seemed to be steering her. It was all incredibly light and delicate and beautiful and suddenly she was laughing all over again, because it had started to look weirdly familiar too.

“What is it?” Sanford asked quietly, waving to the yang’ti who were beginning to file in behind them and find their seats.

“It looks like a wedding reception,” she said, knowing he probably didn’t know that word and she’d just have to explain it, not knowing how she could possibly do that.

But Sanford merely glanced at her, that oddly smiling glance, and kept waving.

She stared at him, stunned.

“I couldn’t explain the cake,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“When…When did we get married?” she blurted, and laughed. “Was it…Was it out there just now, that speech?”

“No.” He stroked her palm. “It was four years ago, in a cabin by the water, with our son asleep in the next room. You spoke an oath to me. I gave you mine.”

She could feel herself starting to smile. “You drink water from my hand,” she murmured, remembering. “I bare my back to you.”

He chirred softly, hesitated, and looked directly at her, as if this room and the dozens—God, hundreds—of people watching them had ceased to matter, ceased to exist. “I told Governor Ro’zhe’t you were my bondmate to force her to allow me to search for you,” he said. “But I did not lie to her.”

“No,” she agreed, smiling. “You didn’t lie.”

“This is only a formality.” He brought her to the table and sat her down on the incredibly bumpy yang’ti chair, then sat beside her. “A show. The one my father plans will be much smaller and far more traditional. Be warned. You will be expected to take ownership of the hatchery. I will teach you what to say.” He clicked, watching her closely. “Will you be happy?”

“Hatchery? You…you know I can’t give you children.”

He clicked. “I shall have to be content with gratuitous sex. Will you be happy?”

“It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

She took the cup he gave her and drank the unbelievably tart and unpleasant liquid it contained so that the whole room could buzz and carry on, then lifted T’aki onto her lap and let him start piling things onto her platter. It was all very strange and uncomfortable, the first alien day of her new alien life, but she had her family here beside her and the worst of days behind her, and so Sarah took her husband’s hand and with him, she moved on.

August 2009

November 2012

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD…

This author’s note (like most author’s notes, in my personal opinion) is not necessary to read in order to understand the story that precedes it. You can skip it. My next book will also have an author’s afterword. You can skip that one too. But if you are one of those people who like to know where the writer got his or her idea, please continue reading. If not…close the book and move on with your life, I guess. You’ll only hurt my feelings a little bit.

I have the dubious pleasure of living with a medical condition that frequently necessitates prolonged periods of lying around and recovering. It gets very boring. I watch a lot of bad movies. I write a lot of bad books.

One day, I found myself watching yet another movie in the theme of “humans land on alien planet and proceed to heroically slash/burn the existing civilization because aliens are bad even when you bust in on them at home and the human spirit is indomitable!” It occurred to me, as ending credits rolled on humans triumphantly kissing over a heap of smoldering alien corpses, that I would really like to see the tables turned, just once. Say the humans crash on the alien planet and discover that they are
not
the superior race and that ransacking their way through the population is, in fact, a
bad
idea that goes very badly for them. That idea percolated until it spit out a corollary idea: Say the aliens do come to Earth, but not on purpose. Say they aren’t invaders at all, but just colonists who crash on our inhabited planet. That one’s been done before (
Alien Nation
springs immediately to mind), but I thought I could put a new spin on it.

So I went back and forth between those ideas and ultimately decided that I would do both. We-go-there became
The Last Hour of Gann
. They-come-here became
Cottonwood
.

Now that I had stories, I needed aliens. Real aliens. Obvious, unavoidable, holy-crap-that’s-a aliens. I didn’t want to go the easy route of just having something that was essentially human but with weird eyes who could otherwise blend right in (you know, like I did with my aliens in
Heat
), but I lack the imagination to pull off a truly
alien
alien, like a cloud of gas or crystalline parasite. So I took the tried and true sci-fi path of taking an existing animal here on Earth and thinly disguising it as an alien. Back I went to the Waffle Iron, this time over whether I wanted bugs or lizards as my base alien model. Again, I split the difference.
The Last Hour of Gann
got the lizards simply because I wanted my crashed humans to walk through a more relatable environment than alien hives. The bugs came to Earth.

I wrote the first draft of
Cottonwood
in two weeks. It’s funny what you can accomplish when you can’t get out of bed. I typed it up over another two weeks. And then a little movie called
District 9
came out and the story I thought was so original became a blatant ripoff literally overnight. So I threw the whole thing in a mental woodchipper and tried to forget it. Here I thought I’d had an original idea…damn you, Neill Blomkamp. Just…damn you.

Eventually, I saw
District 9
. And after I’d finished my rough draft of
Gann
and needed something else to do, I decided to give
Cottonwood
another shot. Yes, there are similarities (There were a lot more before I started editing), but I like to think that there’s room in this wide world for two stories about alien arthropods stranded on Earth. Neill Blomkamp wrote a profoundly moving political work that uses the concept of aliens to spotlight the very real plight of apartheid in South Africa. I cranked out some smexxy bug sci-fi in two weeks. So…yeah. The only thing that strikes me as uncomfortably similar anymore is the fact that Blomkamp’s bug hero had a kid, too…but I just didn’t have the heart to write T’aki out of existence. Whether or not that was the right decision, only time will tell, but the bottom line is this: If I let every book I ever read or movie I’ve ever seen censor my own work, I’d never write again. So here’s
Cottonwood
. Read on for an excerpt from
The Last Hour of Gann
, available soon.

R. Lee Smith

AMBER

The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce’s official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed.

Amber sent Nicci in to bed while she stood out in the hall and read. The eviction gave them thirty days to either vacate or sign under the terms of the new lease, a copy of which was attached. Amber read them. Then she folded up the notice and slipped it into her pocket. She made herself a pot of coffee and sipped at it while watching the news. She thought. She said hello when Nicci woke up and that was all. She went to work.

The funeral was held three days later, a Tuesday. The insurance company covered the cost, which meant it was a group job, and although it was scheduled ‘between the hours of eight and eleven,’ the other funerals apparently dragged long and then there was lunch and so it was nearly two in the afternoon before Mary’s name was called and the cardboard case with her label pasted on the side slid by on the belt and disappeared into the oven. Nicci cried a little. Amber put her arm around her. They got a lot of dirty looks from the other mourners, even though it had only been sixteen years since Measure 34 had passed—Zero Population Growth, Zero Tolerance—and they had both been born by then.

Amber was used to getting dirty looks when she went out with Nicci. Sometimes siblings could pass themselves off as cousins or, even better, as just friends, but not the Bierce girls. Even with different fathers, they were each their mother in miniature and the three years between them had an oddly plastic quality: in the right light, they could be mistaken for twins; in the wrong light, Amber had occasionally been addressed as Nicci’s mother. Part of that was the size difference—Nicci was, as their mother used to be, fine-boned and willowy below that round, cherubic face, while Amber was pretty much round all over—but not all of it. “You were just born old, little girl,” as her mom used to say. “You were born to take care of things.”