Cottonwood (63 page)

She tried to take it as a compliment. The only part of Mary Bierce that knew how to be a mother had been cut out years ago and tossed in a baggie with a biohazard stamp on the side. The parts that were left after that didn’t give a damn about homework or lunches or scrubbing out the toilet once in a while. Someone had to be the responsible one and if Amber wasn’t actually born knowing that, she sure learned it in hurry.

* * *

There could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn’t been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had never been the careful sort. Amber had been putting out cigarettes, sweeping up broken bottles, and making sure the door was locked since she was six; she knew damned well that her mom wasn’t going to lose a good tip by insisting her clients wore a condom when she was working. Bo Peep had been to the aborters three times that Amber knew of and there had probably been others, but that all ended with the Zeros and Measure 34. One day, she went off for her regular monthly shots and came staggering home three hours later wearing a diaper. She sort of collapsed onto the sofa, sprawled out like she was drunk, only she wasn’t loud and laughing the way she ought to be. Her mouth had hung open slightly and there was some kind of gooey paste caked at the corners of her lips. All her makeup had been wiped away and none too gently; she looked haggard and sick and dead. Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.

“Spayed!” their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. “Spayed me!
Those motherfuckers spayed me
!”

At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom’s black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment’s uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn’t quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.

Spayed.

Later, of course, she had plenty to say—about Measure 34 and the Zero-Pop zealots who passed it, about the insurance company and their fine print policies, and about men. It always came back to the men.

“They’ll spay the hookers, sure they will,” she’d sneer at some point. “But do they ever talk about neutering the fucking johns? Oh no! No, they’re still selling Viagra on the fucking TV, that’s what they’re doing! Let me tell you something, babies, what I do is the most honest work in the world because all women are whores! That’s how men see it and if that’s how they see it, little girl, that’s how it
is
!”

And Amber would nod, because sometimes if you agreed enough early on, the real shouting never got started, but privately she had her doubts. Privately she thought, even then at the age of eight and especially as she got older and Bo Peep Bierce grew more and more embittered, that it didn’t prove a whole lot to say that men thought all women were whores when the only men you saw in a day were the ones…well, buying a whore. If you want to hang with a better class of man, Amber would think as she nodded along with her mother’s rants, quit whoring.

Not that you could quit these days. But it had still been her choice to start.

And these probably weren’t the most respectful thoughts to be having at your mother’s funeral. Amber gave Nicci’s shaking shoulders a few more pats and tried to think of good things, happy memories, but there weren’t many. Her mind got to wandering back toward the eviction and the Manifestors. It had better be today, she decided, listening to Nicci cry.

After the funeral. But today.

* * *

She didn’t say anything until they got back to the apartment. Then Amber sat her baby sister at the kitchen table and put two short stacks of papers in front of her. One was the eviction notice, the new lease, and a copy of their mother’s insurance policy. The other was an information packet with the words
Manifest Destiny
printed in starry black and white letters on the first page.

“Please,” said Nicci, trying to squirm away. “Not right now, okay?”

“Right now,” said Amber. She sat down on the other side of the table, then had to reach out and catch her sister’s hand to keep her from escaping. It was not a gentle grip, but Amber kept it in spite of Nicci’s wince and teary, reproachful look. Sometimes, the bad stuff needed to be said. That was the one thing Mary Bierce used to say that Amber did believe.

“We’re going to lose this place,” Amber said bluntly. “No matter what we do—”

“Don’t say that!”

“—we’re going to lose it.”

“I can get another job!” Nicci insisted.

“Yeah, you can. So can I. And they’ll be two more full-time shifts at minimum wage under that fucking salary cap because we dropped out of school. And that means that the most—the absolute most, Nicci—that we can make between us will be not quite half what we’d need for the new rent.”

“What…? N-no…” Nicci fumbled at the papers on the table, staring without comprehension at the neat, lawyerly print on the new lease. “They…They can’t do that!”

“Yes, they can. They did. Maybe they couldn’t raise Mama’s rent, but they can sure do it to us.”

“How do they expect us to pay this much every month?”

“They don’t. They expect to evict us. They want to get a better class of person in here,” she added with a trace of wry humor, “and I can’t say I blame them.”

“But…But where are we supposed to go?”

“They don’t care,” said Amber, shrugging. “And they don’t have to care. We do. And we’ve only got about four weeks to figure it out, so you really need to—” She broke it off there and made herself take a few breaths, because
stop whining
wasn’t going to move the situation anywhere but from bad to worse. “We need to think,” she finished, “about what we can do to help ourselves.”

Nicci gave her a wet, blank stare and moved the papers around some more. “I don’t…Where…What do you want to do?”

Amber picked up the brochure and moved it a little closer to her sister’s trembling hands. “I went to see the Manifestors.”

Nicci stared at her. “No,” she said. Not in a tough way, maybe, but not as feebly as she’d been saying things either. “Amber, no!”

“Then we’re going to have to go on the state.” She had a pamphlet for that option, too. She tossed it on the table in front of Nicci with a loud, ugly slap of sound. More a booklet than a pamphlet, really, with none of the pretty fonts and colorful pictures the Manifestors put in their own brochure. “Read it,” she said.

“No!”

“Okay. I’ll just run down the bullet points for you. To begin with, it’ll take six to eight weeks before we’re accepted,
if
we’re accepted, so we’ll still lose this place. However, once we’re homeless, there shouldn’t be any trouble getting a priority stamp on our application to move into a state-run housing dorm, so there’s that.”

Nicci put both hands to her face and sobbed harder. Amber’s own eyes tried to sting, but she wouldn’t let them. Crying was a pointless little-girl thing to do and it hadn’t fixed one goddamn thing since it had been invented by the very first pointless little girl. Problems only got solved when you did something about them.

“We’ll only be allowed to take one standard-size carry-case each,” said Amber evenly, watching her baby sister cry, “and we can’t afford a storage pod, so most of this stuff will have to be sold or left behind.”

“Stop it! Please, just stop!”

“And we probably won’t be able to live together. Not in the same dorm room, maybe not even in the same complex.”

“I can’t be alone!”

“You won’t be alone, Nicci. You’ll be rooming with up to seven other women, they’ll just be strangers.”

“No!”

“We’ll lose our jobs and have to work a state-job as partial payment for those dorms, where our salary cap will be half what it is now, so once we move into those dorms, we are never getting out.”

“
No
!”

“
Yes
, dammit!” Amber snapped. “These are the facts, Nicci! We can’t stay here and nothing we do can change that. This place is all over. Maybe if we had enough time, we could find another place we could afford on just what we’re making now, but you know goddamned well that we’d end up on a first-served list and we could be there for years! Where are we going to live in the meantime, huh?”

“You could get more time!” Nicci snatched at the lease, tearing it in her haste. “Did you even ask? There has to be a number that…that you could call and they’ll give us more time if they know we’re…on a list or…”

“We can file for a four-week extension,” said Amber. “That’s what we can do, and only if we can prove we can pay the lease at the end of those four weeks. That’s all they care about and that’s all they have to care about. Everything else is on us.”

“Then I’ll do like Mama did! I’m not leaving!”

“You mean you want to be a whore.”

Nicci flinched. Amber did not.

“You want to do like Mama did,” said Amber, ruthless and calm as her stomach churned. “You want to be a whore.”

“I…”

“How are you going to fuck men—”

That flinch again.

“—for money—”

Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister’s squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff, right, Mama? Right.

“—if you can’t even admit you’ll be a whore?”

“I can do it,” whispered Nicci, but she wouldn’t look at Amber.

“Maybe you could, but you couldn’t do it here, and you had better be sure that’s the way you want to go because they don’t let you stop anymore once you start. You’ll have to get the barcode and you’ll be subject to scans at any time. They’ll cancel your insurance—look at me, Nicci—and garnish your wages to pay for the state insurance and all your monthly tests, plus the initial registration and the operation where they spay you, and you know it took Mama five years to pay all that off. And in the meantime, where will you be living? Because you still won’t be able to pay the new lease on a state-paid whore’s salary and this place will still be just as gone.”

“Stop it!” Nicci shouted. “Stop bullying me! I’m not leaving!”

Amber pressed her lips together and folded her hands. She told herself she wasn’t a bully. “What are you going to do, Nicci? Where are you going to go?”

“Shut up!” Nicci beat her palms on the table loud enough that old Mrs. Simon in the next apartment banged her cane on the wall. “I’m
not
leaving! You can’t make me
leave
, Amber! You can’t make me leave the
planet
!”

“I’m not making you do anything,” said Amber, knowing damned well it was a lie. “I’m just telling you that I’m going, with or without you.”

Nicci stared, her mouth working in silent horror.

“There is no other place for us to go,” said Amber.

And she waited, but Nicci still couldn’t find anything to say, so she picked up the brochure and started to flip through it.

“So I went to see the Manifestors,” she said. She sounded, to her own ears, a lot like the pinch-faced old man at the orientation seminar, trying to be professional while still getting through something deeply unpleasant and perhaps contagious as quickly as possible. Everyone knew about the Manifest Destiny Society and their ship; she said it anyway. “They’ve still got room. I guess they’re having some trouble filling their quota for young women, so we’re actually guaranteed a contract if we apply.”

“They’re having trouble because it’s never been tested!”

“Sure it has. They’ve Tunneled out to all the other planets.”

“Oh what? To Neptune? Saturn?” Nicci uttered a shrill, fearful laugh and shook her head. “They’ve never taken it to this other place! This…This…”

“Plymouth,” supplied Amber, not without rolling her eyes a little. The Director of the Manifest Destiny Society was simply full of the pioneering spirit. “They’re calling the planet Plymouth.”

“I don’t care what they’re calling it! I don’t want to go!”

“You don’t have to. But I am,” said Amber again, and watched her baby sister start to cry. “The trip’s going to take about three years, they said, but we’ll be in Sleepers the whole time. That’s kind of like in the movies, when they freeze you, only we won’t actually be frozen. We won’t feel anything and we won’t age, although the guy said sometimes the umbilical…the place where they plug you in leaves a pretty gnarly scar. Those weren’t his exact words—”

“Amber!” Nicci wailed.

She waited, but that was apparently the sum and substance of Nicci’s argument, so after a moment, she just went on.

“When we get there, the ship lands and becomes like the staging area for the colony. We’ll be building the colony up around it—farms and stuff, I guess—but civilians like me won’t be responsible for much. I guess it’ll be pretty hard work, but it’s only supposed to be a six-hour shift, which is less than I’m working now. I got one of their silver civilian contracts, which means five years—Earth years, that is, and it doesn’t include the transport time. They’re going to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year, plus five thousand just for being a fertile female of childbearing age.”

Nicci looked up, her tears hitching to a brief stop in her throat. “W-what?”