Cottonwood (6 page)

At last she released him and hunkered down, her legs tight against her body, arms securely braced from knee to floor. He mounted, settling his weight by degrees, soothing her with chirrs and gentle touches along her joints. His claspers opened around her narrow waist, slowly fanning, tasting mainly her anxiety. He waited.

After nearly an hour, her cloacal vens opened. He relaxed his belly flaps at once and inserted his spermatogus. Only halfway. The sphincter that closed off her ovaduct remained tight.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked quietly.

“No, no, I…I can do this. Just…”

He stroked her joints.

Another hour. She opened. He finished penetration. She ejected her catalyst at once, as if in apology for the wait, and he followed, closing his eyes in the paralysis of orgasm. When it faded, he uttered some reassuring chirrs, his claspers patting and stroking along her belly seams. Hers brushed at the base of his spermatogus, where they joined, painting him with her pheromones.

“Again,” she said. “To be sure.”

Yes. More matings meant a larger, healthier egg. She was terrified, but determined, stimulating him with scent-taps until he filled and ejected again.

“One more?” she whispered.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to be sure.”

He reached his hand down. Hers were locked in place, but she rubbed her palps over his palm. It helped. They twined their claspers together as his spermatogus slowly filled.

She never told him her name, not any name at all.

He climaxed a third time and dismounted. She paced around his work table nervously as her belly swelled. Finally she came to him, her ovipositor fully extended. He knelt down to catch the egg she laid in his hands.

His child.

Her eyes were anguished as she stared at it, milky white and soft in the open air. Then she skreed quietly, picked up her clothes, and turned away to dress. He wanted to ask her then how many times she’d done this, if she’d ever seen the child hatch, if she wanted to know if this one did. In the end, her pain was too obvious, too raw. He said nothing.

She left. She had not asked his name either. They were not bondmates, not even really broodmates. They were only two desperate people who came together one night to make a baby. He thought of her now and then. He wished her well.

T’aki had been the first precious thing hidden in the hold he’d scratched beneath the hole in his floor. Four months tended until the larval mouth pierced the thick skin and he heard his child’s voice for the first time, blindly chirring. Six months more, fed regurgitate and daily turned, kept warm and dry and safe. Then, the molt. A son. And going to the checkpoint gates with that treasure in his arms and one thousand chits in his breeches to pay the fine, and having to watch the humans strap his squalling son to a board so they could etch his identification number on the side of his tiny head. And now he loved again. Now he had hope. Now he had someone to do all this
for
.

But he never should have done it, and it hurt his heart at times because after twenty years on Earth, he knew that it was a selfish love and a crazy one, and just the same as murder.

Sanford stood up and found his son’s wet clothes. He tied them to the corner of his roof where once he’d hung the sheets. If it didn’t rain, they would be dry by morning. If it did, they would be cleaner, and T’aki would just have to go without for a day, another naked child crawling on the Heaps.

Sanford went inside to the rear room where he lay down hungry beside his son and watched the boy’s limbs twitch, dreaming, until he slept.

CHAPTER FOUR

Monday morning. All the confidence she’d had over the weekend evaporated with the buzzing of her alarm. Suddenly, the outfit Sarah had painstakingly selected the previous night was all wrong and she spent so much time picking out a new one that she didn’t have time for breakfast. Which was just as well; since there probably wasn’t room for food in her stomach, on account of all the butterflies. She fed Fagin, opened the glass door enough for him to pass back and forth from the yard, checked her reflection a final time in the bathroom mirror, and walked to the office. She hummed as she walked, although she was only peripherally aware of it. Billy Joel’s
Uptown Girl
, for no particular reason. Not the words, just the tune, although she did stop humming to sing the Whoa-oh-oh part, a place she frequently got stuck over and would sit for hours, whoa-oh-ing under her breath while crosswording or reading until either she realized she was doing it or Kate came along behind her and whacked her in the head.

It was a warm morning already, warm and muggy, enough to make her wish she’d driven after all. The van was too big and used too much gas, the belts squealed and the engine rattled, the brakes were mushy and it took forever to get up to speed, but by God, the air conditioner worked fine. Growing up in western Oregon had given Sarah absolutely no defense against the kind of oppressive summer heat they apparently had here in the Midwest and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

Immediately upon arrival at her building, Sarah ducked into the ladies room to freshen up before she sweated all over herself. She was therefore six minutes late checking in, but she had to stand in a long line anyway, so maybe no one noticed. They gave her a brand-new leather case with the letters I-B-I embossed on it, about twenty pounds of forms to go in it, her gate pass, and her permanent badge with her picture on the front, still warm from laminating. From there, she was sent up to the third floor, where she followed the blinking light on her paz’s flickering screen to her assigned cubicle. It held a little baggie of generic-looking candies with a plastic pick stabbed through it that read
Welcome
down the side.

Sarah sat down, spent a few minutes adjusting the chair’s height, and logged herself in. Her paz chirped immediately, informing her that her client list and their case files were now available and ready for download. While that was happening—she really needed a new paz—Sarah located the third-floor lounge. She’d had hopes of a cup of coffee, but the machine was another KonaLuv. She stood in front of it awkwardly with her smiley-face mug in her fist but ultimately retreated, coffeeless. Never mind. She still had a desk and she could sit there and look professional until she had the opportunity to follow someone into the lounge and watch them make coffee.

Her paz was chirping away when she got back to her cubicle. It was still downloading, but now she also had an alert from her floor supervisor. Several alerts, actually. Wincing, Sarah snatched up her paz and followed the blinking light to his office. The man waiting for her inside was forty-ish, pudgy, bald, and expensively attired in a very nice suit that did not quite encapsulate his neck.

“Miss Fowler,” he said, except that he really said, ‘Miss Fowwer.’ All of a sudden, she was looking at Elmer Fudd in a three-piece suit, and Sarah had to bite down hard to keep from bursting out in horrifically inappropriate laughter. “I’m Edward Beechum. Welcome to IBI’s Social Services department. I hope you’re ready to jump right in.”

Weady to jump wight in. God help her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, biting her cheeks.

“Excellent.” He picked up a thick stack of papers and held them out. “We want an updated census here in Cottonwood, so you’ll be going door to door and taking detailed reports from each of your clients. We’ve tried to keep the questions simple but don’t be surprised if some of the bugs act like they don’t follow. Trust me, they all know English. Most of them speak half a dozen languages by now, so if they give you the dumb routine, don’t try to argue with them, just call in a security team and watch them miraculously understand you.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” he went on, returning to his side of the supervisor-sized desk and sitting. “You are probably about to have the worst first day of your young life. Try not to let it get to you. One thing you learn in a hurry around here: The bugs do not come in peace. Do not go in there expecting to make friends. Just do your job, be professional and polite, and never let them give you guff. I cannot stress that last part enough. If they realize they can push your buttons, they will never stop. Now.” He pointed at the papers she was holding and she obediently looked at them. “Your first priority is to make sure your clients are really your clients. Don’t just ask their names, get their numbers. It’s etched on the sides of their heads.”

“It’s what?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, I know how that sounds, but it’s fine. They don’t have feeling in their outer skin.”

“That’s not…I mean…Etched? Like…cut?”

“That’s right. With a laser,” he added, looking just a hair more impatient. In his mouth, it came out ‘waser’. The urge to giggle washed over her again and left her feeling a little sick. “It’s not like someone went at them with a machete. Look, we needed a reliable way to identify them. They don’t have fingerprints and putting together a DNA bank was just too expensive and time-consuming back when they landed. We tried to give them ID cards, but—” He flung up his hands and slapped them down again, shaking his head. “They made it impossible to keep track of them any other way. This is what we
had
to do, because
they
made it necessary.”

Sarah said nothing, but her expression must said a few things for her because he rolled his eyes again.

“Would you like to know how the bugs have responded to having their heads engraved with their registration numbers?” he asked, leaning over the desk with his hands folded. “As far as I’m aware, the only real impact has been that the three biggest forms of contraband inside the camps are unauthorized eggs, weapons, and heads.”

“W-What?”

“Heads,” he said again, smiling thinly at her shock. “We find them so often, in fact, that we had to designate one of the evidence rooms for heads only. See, they molt. Every few years, they split out of their old skin, which means they have to bring in the old head-plates to get their number re-applied. So whenever you get a bad bug who wants a clean slate, all he has to do is kill another bug, cut off his head, peel away the top plates, wait to molt, and there you go: Mr. John Smith becomes Mr. Bob Jones. The only thing we don’t find a lot inside the camps are headless bugs. Now, I suppose they could be burying them or burning them…but it’s odd that we’ve never found a grave.” He paused to gauge her reaction. “The only reasonable theory is that they’re eating each other.”

“That’s horrible.”

“They
are
horrible. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better off you’ll be. Stop thinking of them as these super-advanced star babies in some kind of intergalactic prison. These are
bugs
.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say to that, so she put the census papers in her briefcase.

“You’re working in a pretty good part of town,” he went on, looking over his own paz where, presumably, her client details were displayed. “I doubt you’ll have much trouble, but just remember, if they think they can pull one over on you, they’ll try. Never give an inch. That’s the secret to working with them,” he said wisely, holding up one finger. “Never. Give. An inch.”

“Got it.”

“Section Seventeen is single-occupancy only, which means one bug per residence unless they have a family housing permit and then only one child per adult bug. Report all evidence of egg farming and make sure every child is licensed and has a legal residence. If they try to argue with you…” His pointing finger aimed itself at her.

“Never give an inch?”

“Right. Make sure the living conditions are safe and relatively sanitary.  The bugs rent the lots in your section and they’re supposed to buy the housing units, but most of them build their own, so at the very least, make sure their power hook-ups have a valid inspection tag. Report all violations on the spot and…?”

“Never give an inch.”

“All right then.” He offered his hand and, with no comfortable way to ignore it, she shook it. “Good luck to you. Whose team will you be with today?”

“Sir?”

“The security team you’ll be accompanying,” he amplified, enunciating in that way that suggested he was running out of nerves for her to get on. “Are you with Hollister? Seeney? Lantz?”

“No one told me I had to go with a team,” said Sarah, blinking.

“What, you were planning to go in there alone? On your first day?”

Sarah’s shoulders twitched, not quite shrugging. She didn’t say anything.

He waved her off, shaking his head. “It’s your funeral. If you change your mind, just dial 99 and they’ll get a team out to you right away. Go on. Idiot,” he muttered as she was leaving his office. She chose to believe he didn’t think she could hear him.

She was one of those randomly searched on her way out of the building, chatting nervously with the security guards whose job it was to scan her for electronic devices. She offered up her paz when they asked for it, accepted the inevitable teasing about its age with good grace while they made sure the video apps and upload functions were still locked down, showed them her translator, signed the digipad where they told her to, and then went on her way to take the elevator down to the tracks.

It was a fun ride, zipping through the cramped tunnels with orange safety lights flashing by every twenty seconds—very Bladerunner, very futurific. There seemed to be a lot of soldiers standing around on the platforms, not just in uniforms, but in flak vests and helmets, carrying all kinds of guns, but they smiled when she smiled, so it must be okay. They let her out at Station Seventeen and she climbed the stairs to the surface, humming under her breath.

Outside, she was waved down almost immediately by a soldier standing by a white security van with handful of nervous-looking civilian-types inside. He was vaguely familiar to her—the same soldier who had been at the orientation seminar with Mr. van Meyer—and he already appeared to be completely out of patience with the van-load of caseworkers he was babysitting. “You Fei Yen?” he asked, jogging over to her.