Cottonwood (11 page)

Once home, she stripped and showered and hung on Fagin’s neck and bawled until she used up all her moisture and had to stop.

Sitting there on her kitchen floor with Fagin pressed in canine sympathy against her chin and the stuffy headache that comes from too much crying swelling behind her eyes, Sarah thought about quitting. Sure, they might sue her, but they couldn’t take money she didn’t have, so what was the worst that could happen? It’d be a black mark on her permanent record (right there next to that note from the seventh-grade when she’d stolen a dead frog from the biology lab and put it in stuck-up Trina Bridgewall’s pudding), but so what? The places where she usually worked didn’t care whether their employees had references, a prison record or even a green card. She’d get by. Kate would take her back. She’d get the I-told-you-so looks and lectures for the rest of her life, but Kate would take her back. They were sisters. Family meant more than anything and nothing, nothing, was worth this.

Her paz chimed.

Sarah wiped her face, which had been dry for some time but which was almost certainly blotchy and gross, and crawled across the floor to her briefcase to dig it out of the trash. Only after she answered it and saw an IBI security guard’s face did she recall she was still wearing nothing but a labradoodle and a towel. She supposed she should care. She didn’t.

“Sarah Fowler?”

“Yes.”

“Just touching base. You left Checkpoint Seventeen at 11:45 and haven’t passed any checkpoint since. Where are you?”

“Where does the locater in my paz say I am?”

His eyes narrowed. Otherwise, his expression did not change. “It says you’re at home.”

“Then you know where I am. I had to change. I’ll be back soon, just let me get dressed.”

The security guard’s face showed neither surprise nor concern. “If you would like to make an incident report at this time, we can do that right over the phone. Do you know the name of the bug involved?”

She opened her mouth, not to give Samaritan’s name, but to ask why he wanted it, but that was a stupid question, wasn’t it? He wanted it so he could round up a posse of IBI’s soldiers and go handle things. She told herself she wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but without looking at that too closely, she did take a moment to imagine walking down the causeway and never having to hear Good Samaritan’s crudities again.

It was a bad moment, but it ended.

“Involved in what?” she asked.

Impatience carved a notch between the guard’s heavy brows. “Ma’am, can we cut the crap? Checkpoint Seventeen reported you left his gate in great distress—”

“Nothing happened,” Sarah said.

“Ma’am, all hostile action taken by the bugs must be reported.”

“I fell into a ditch, that’s all. If the gate guard thought I was in such great distress, maybe he shouldn’t have made me stand outside the gate dripping alien sewage-water until I had my stupid girly breakdown. Now you want to make me feel even worse about that, you go ahead. I fell into a ditch, I came home and got a shower.”

The security guard’s eyes in the small, flat monitor were blatantly derisive. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m just going to remind you that if you are ever involved in a hostile situation inside the containment area and you fail to report it, action will be taken.”

“It wasn’t a hostile—screw you, then,” she finished dully.

He’d hung up on her already.

Sarah shut off her paz and tossed it back in her briefcase. She sat with Fagin for a few minutes more, then got up and took another shower. She had to go back to work and she knew it, but that didn’t mean she had to go back to Cottonwood. If she could find just one piece of paper that needed filing back in her cubicle, she would find a way to file it all damn day, but she wasn’t going back. Not yet. Not today.

Maybe not ever again.

* * *

Sanford came back from the Heaps close on to dark to find a slip of paper half-under his door. He picked it up, heart throbbing, expecting to read NOTICE OF TRANSFER or something worse in the human language, but it was instead a blank form for the ordering of emergency supplies: food, water tablets, charcoal, light bulbs, soap, even things he’d never seen in any camp, like fire-resistant blankets, propane ovens, and solar-heated portable showers.

Puzzled, Sanford sent T’aki inside and walked down the road to Sam’s house. “Do you know anything about this?” he asked.

Sam glanced at it and gave out a loud laugh. “She missed that one.”

There was only one ‘she’ he could possibly mean and it made the mystery no clearer. Sanford looked at the paper again, thinking of the human, the caseworker, beginning to feel a faint sense of guarded optimism. If he actually had a propane oven, or even just a propane torch—!

And then Sam told him.

“She was out there all day,” he finished, laughing again, so hard that his words were scarcely intelligible. “You should have seen her. God, the stink! Made my eyes burn. Crawling out there in the piss, running water out of her head and picking up papers! I thought I was going to go
blind
laughing!”

“
Zhu’kwe
,” Sanford said, and turned around.

“That’s what she said. More or less. Hey, come on in a second.”

Palps snapping, Sanford followed Sam into the trailer. Open beer cans were everywhere—on the floor, on the counters, in piles knee-deep—every one half-filled with rancid beer. The stink was almost a physical thing, as intended. Humans went where they wanted; the only defense was to encourage them not to want to go where they should not be. Also, the beer drew clouds of flies, which Sanford did not consider a benefit, but he could see a net hanging on the wall next to a box of baggies to indicate Sam did. He could taste chaw in his throat, but he did not spit. Protein was protein and chits were chits, and if Sam found people hungry enough to buy his horrible trade, who was Sanford to condemn him?

Sam popped the false panel to the rear room and the scent of chemicals overblew that of old beer. He’d been brewing, making drugs for the humans most likely, but this was not what he wanted Sanford to see.

There was a yang’ti incinerator on the wall.

“Doesn’t work,” said Sam, watching Sanford heft it down. “Can you fix it?”

“Perhaps. Where did you get it?”

“Under the floor at Jefferson’s. They took him away last week. He had it hidden pretty good too. And he had this.”

Sanford’s glance showed him part of an ancillary output cable in Sam’s hand. Only part, but it was the part with the connector-plate.

“Can you fix it?” Sam asked, tapping the gun. He bounced the cable in his hand, as he’d dangled meat over T’aki.

Could he fix it?
Should
he? Ko’vi the Creator might Himself shudder to think of Sam armed with such a devastating weapon. Sam had been familiar to him even before all…this…which meant he was not a civilian. Not that familiar, so he probably wasn’t a soldier, but he might still know the operating codes for the incinerator, and if so, Sanford would be responsible for whatever damage it went on to do in Sam’s hands. And that was assuming Sam wanted to use it and not sell it. If a functional incinerator fell into human hands…but the cable had a way of drawing his eye.

“Yes,” he said.

Sam tossed him the cable. He caught it with the hand not holding the gun. It felt heavy. Not salvaged as badly as it appeared, perhaps. He could feel his antennae wanting to quiver.

“Want a beer?” Sam asked. “Or something stronger? I got some good ferment in the back.”

“Not now.”

“Something to eat? I can get this shit cleaned up in a minute. Stay awhile.”

“Not tonight.”

“Fuck you then, I’ll go out.” His eye fell on the paper now tucked in the waist of Sanford’s breeches. He chuckled. “Think she’ll be back again?”

“If she does come back,” Sanford said without planning to, “leave her alone.”

Sam paused and drew back, his head cocked and eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“What do you think will happen when you succeed in frightening her?”

Sam blew air through his palps derisively. “She’s not going to do anything, she’s an egg.”

“
She
doesn’t have to do anything,” Sanford said, “except come back in a white van with more humans who won’t be impressed by your games.”

Sam held his arms out stiffly from his sides and trembled them. “This is me, shaking with fear,” he said solemnly. “Oh fine, I’ll ease off. But you should have seen her crawling around with her ass in the air.” Sam laughed again, but his eyes grew distracted. He was quiet for a moment and then he shook it off and gestured at the door, muttering, “Get the fuck out of here, I need to go.”

Sanford left Sam heading north over the rows and returned to his own house, where T’aki sat in the back room, playing. He looked at the cable first, then broke down the incinerator and had a look inside.

“What’s jellybean?” T’aki asked, rolling an empty can back and forth between his hands.

Tapping at the trigger-lock, Sanford clicked a distracted, “I don’t know.” After several minutes’ work, it occurred to him to ask why.

“I think they jump.”

“Perhaps.”

T’aki came out to climb on the table and watch him. It made him uncomfortable, his son and the weapon, but there was no room to perform this examination below and not enough lighting.

“How many suns does our world have?” the boy asked finally.

“Just one.”

“Is it hot?”

“All suns are hot.”

T’aki blew air through his palps and looked away, at Earth’s sun.

“Don’t do that. You’ll burn your eyes,” Sanford said. He thought the problem might be in the channeler, and if so, the gun was dead. The only way to get another channeler was off another incinerator. That was the problem with too many of these things. None of them were built to last twenty years.

That stirred up thoughts of the ship, unpleasant thoughts like strips of funeral wind blowing through his heart. Twenty years was not so unreasonable a time to expect the ship to remain functional…but he doubted it had another twenty years in it. Surely not when it had been left to hover above Earth’s ocean, abandoned and left to deteriorate, save by the humans who might still be prying it apart.

He could not afford to nurture these thoughts. Sanford blocked them stolidly from his mind and focused again on the gun.

“When are we leaving?” T’aki asked, coming to the table’s edge to watch him. “Is it soon?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, reached out and rubbed the boy’s head. “Do you want to go outside and play?”

“No. Father…what’s roach?”

Sanford patted him, then sighed and put down his tools. He picked up his young son and pulled him onto his lap. “It is a word humans use to mean yang’ti.”

“Like bug?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a bad word?”

Sanford hesitated. “It is a lazy word.”

“Do we have bad words to mean humans?”

“Some.”

“What are they?”

“I do not teach my son lazy words.” And suddenly, he thought of the caseworker and how she’d stood in the sun, covering her eyes and silent because she would not speak his name, the unknown joke he had been given. He looked down at T’aki. “Who called you a roach?” he asked.

T’aki was evasive. “I heard it on the Heaps.”

“And who called you—” His mouth could not make the word as easily as his son. “—the other word?”

“The case woman.”

Sanford thought. “Then it is probably not a bad word,” he said slowly, unsure why he believed it. “You can ask her. She may come tomorrow.”

“Will I have to go in back?” T’aki asked cautiously.

“Not if you behave.” Sanford gave his son another pat, then set him down and picked up the gun again. “Go out and play, if you like. Stay close.”

This time, T’aki scooped up his toys and ran outside.

Sanford removed the channeler’s casing and had a look at it through his magnifier-frame. He thought of the woman. Hours in the piss-mires, picking up papers in a land already thick in cast-off paper…

And then he put her from his mind and got to work.

CHAPTER FIVE

She went back. Of course she went back. One paycheck half-spent did not give her the courage to test IBI’s enforcement of that breach of contract clause. She asked for and received (with a heavy sigh and a lot of eye-rolling) new forms and questionnaires, and she rode the tracks, and she walked in through the Checkpoint gate with her head held high past the same jerk guard who’d seen her leave yesterday.

“Still no car?” he asked, smirking at her. “Some people never learn.”

“President Dufries says we all have to do our part to conserve energy,” she replied piously. She refused to use a bodyguard to do her job. She was helping people, damn it.

“Suit yourself, doll. But do yourself a favor and dial 99 the next time someone looks like they’re going to work you over,” he said as she swiped her card. “You get killed in there and it reflects real bad on me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

The gate shut behind her. The howl of alien alarm went up. Sarah heaved a breath and started trudging down her causeway. It seemed to her that the cries howling out of the alleys were different today, just a little bit broken, like whoever was doing it was laughing at the same time. Maybe he’d seen her leave too.

Hobart was sitting in the shade next to his house. He stood up when she came near and walked out to meet her. “You lost my census report,” he said.

She blinked at him, feeling her cheeks crawl with embarrassed heat even though she knew
she
hadn’t lost a damned thing. “I—I’m sorry, there was a—”

“Hurry up,” he said. “I have things to do.”

Startled, she fished out a new form while he stood there, annoyed and impatient, but perfectly polite. She asked the questions and he answered them, leaving out all the nasty remarks and swearing he’d sprinkled yesterday’s census with, trimming it all down to “Yes,” “No,” and, “Is that it?” Then he walked with her three houses down and banged on Jules Verne’s door with his fist.