Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  The image on the screen returned to that of the bug simply standing, staring into the camera with eyes that were so much like that of humans…and which were not entirely defeated, no matter how quiet or still he stood. Van Meyer gave his new sheep some time to look with new eyes on this docile monster and then went on.

  “You will notice the arms and legs also being quite long and slender. And strong, as we’ve seen, far out of proportion to their size. Please note the sharp, thorn-like protrusions along the bug’s forearms and thighs, along the hip and side of chest, and especially those along the underside of forearm and elbow-joint. These are not poisonous, as I have heard many rumors, but are very sharp, so be careful when engaging bug to remain facing them, for as I’ve said, they have no sensory perception in their shell and can swiftly cause very bad cuts brushing sidelong against you.”

  “Now what are those?” someone asked. “The twitchy things on its stomach? Are those…more arms, or…?”

  “You refer to small, jointed appendages here along the lower region of the body? These we call plumapods, which they tell me mean ‘feathered foot’, but these are neither feet nor feathers. Some also call them claspers, as they resemble that appendage somewhat, although their function is very different. True insect clasper is used in reproduction. These, we surmise are involved somehow to bug’s sense of smell. You see when he extend them fully, there are brushes along the tip which contain very powerful chemical receptors. Very delicate, you see how he keep them snug up, just so, against his shell where it fit into small concavity evolved for this protective purpose. Although we do not understand precisely why, we do know that removal of these appendages has caused death in many of the bug.”

  Pollyanna looked up.

  “But please, we are getting ahead of ourselves.” Van Meyer brought out a pen-light to pinpoint specific areas on the viewing screen. “The body of the bug can be compared to that of many Earth insects, most notably the ant, at least in outward appearance. It has three main regions: the thorax, or chest; the abdomen; and the metasomal node. Now the thorax, the chest, is comparable to human ribcage in size, but waist tapers to exceedingly narrow, here, at what science calls the petiole, and this is because the bugs possess very few actual organs. Rather, they have very complex blood and very large heart whose many chambers do the work also of stomach and lung to metabolize oxygen, food, and all his needs. He requires only a very few extraneous glands in addition, and of course, the bladder and sexual apparatus, contained here, in the lower abdomen.”

  “I thought they were drones,” someone said.

  “Nee, they are unisexual, having one gender, which would appear to be the male gender, so indicated by certain sexual organ which the bug carry internally.”

  Piotr, in the corner, reached down with a toothy grin and gripped his crotch. Some sheep tittered. Van Meyer did not approve.

  “And so, as our language does not admit unisexual personal pronoun readily, for sake of simplicity, we call the bug ‘he’. But although the bugs do not mate in a sexual fashion, they can and do reproduce. Sadly. Now, the metasomal node contains mainly the posterior chamber of the heart and certain glands which circulate digestive juices and nutriment back up into the abdominal region for expulsion. The legs attach at the post-petiole segment, between the abdomen and metasomal node, which is itself entirely inflexible. Please again note the thorn-like protrusions here and here and remember that these are not venomous, but can inflict considerable damage.”

  Pollyanna raised her hand. “Sadly?”

  “My dear, the population control of the bug has been our greatest challenge from the beginning. Proceeding, the leg is the leg of a large, powerful insect, as that of a cricket or a—”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse?”

  “Why are you controlling their population growth? I mean—” She blushed again, not so prettily. “If they live here now, shouldn’t they be free to—”

  “Hell, no,” someone else said, and there were sheepish bleats of agreement. “I’m sorry, lady, I’m all for peace and love and all that, but I want Earth for humans. I don’t want a bunch of bugs breeding my grandkids off the planet.”

  Pollyanna seemed surprised. “But…They live here now. If someone came to your house and told you—”

  “Hey, lady, they came to my house. I get to tell them not to boink under the fridge.”

  More laughter. Pollyanna looked startled by it at first, and then disturbed.

  “What we have done for the moment is a kind of compromise, nee? We attempt foremost to educate bug upon restraint, but the bug, sadly, merely hides his offspring and continue to propagate. Therefore, we control the population growth with special squads whose job it is to locate egg farms and destroy them.”

  “Destroy?” Pollyanna recoiled.

  “Only the eggs, which are no more alive than the egg you have for breakfast, ja?”

  “Never eating that again,” someone muttered.

  “When the egg hatches into little bug, of course we do not destroy. To the contrary, safety of young bug is of great concern to us, because adult bug…well, it is perhaps presumption to say inattentive parent, but clearly, bug is more interested in producing child than rearing. Who knows what is situation on home planet, what high infant mortality there must be to help keep explosive procreation in check? Some bug develop almost mania, making many, many eggs. If allowed to breed unsupervised, bug would soon swarm over all Earth. Even so, despite our best effort, bug population has risen with disturbing speed. If we do not control this, it is possible they outnumber our great-great grandchildren, nee?”

  The sheep were outraged, all but Pollyanna, who still appeared puzzled.

  “Nee, it is not our wish to stamp out bug as so many cockroach,” van Meyer said gently, looking directly at her. “Only to make him think about the consequence of thoughtless reproduction. And safety of the young bug is of paramount concern also, which is why your duties to report child endangerment are so boldly outlined. Nee, nee,” he concluded, soothingly, smiling. “This is not police state and we are not Evil Uncle. We are IBI.”

  Polly returned his grandfatherly smile tremulously.

  “We do good work.”

  * * *

  “You should have heard it, Kate. It was subtle, but it wasn’t my imagination. The guy spent five hours essentially telling us that the aliens are retarded.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “Not in so many words, but—hang on.” Sarah moved the paz to her other hand so that she could lay her right arm over Fagin’s back, since he was being insistent about it. The long drive and the unfamiliar house had made him emotionally needy, and so naturally, as soon as he had the arm, he took the lap too, wedging his massive bulk over both thighs and instantly putting everything from her hips down into pins-and-needles land. “But he just really drilled it in,” she continued, resigned. “Over and over, really soft and gentle. ‘They’re not smart, they don’t take care of themselves, they need to be controlled.’”

  Kate’s tiny image on the screen flickered as she shifted her own paz and had trouble restabilizing. The two weren’t exactly compatible anymore. She really needed to get a new one. “So? Maybe they do.”

  “And maybe they don’t. Kate!” she said, trying to laugh through her frustration. “These people came to us in a spaceship! A planet full of stupid layabouts does not master intergalactic space travel!”

  Kate’s image flickered again and snapped to black. She didn’t need it. She could hear the distraction in Kate’s voice, and the tight I’m-pretending-I’m-not-angry tone that had been her default setting pretty much since Sarah told her she was really moving to Cottonwood. “Okay, so the guy who’s been studying them for twenty years is wrong and Sarah Fowler, who hasn’t even met one yet, is right. Congratulations. You’re that good.”

  Sarah felt herself blush. “It didn’t sound right, that’s all I’m saying. Some of the little things he said just…just really got to me.”

/>   “Like what?” Kate asked, sounding concerned now and not big-sister patronizing.

  “Like…Like he said that if their claspers came off, they’d die.”

  A short pause. “What are claspers?”

  “Oh, that’s not the point, they’re like tiny little extra arms that smell things. The point is, how many aliens had to lose their claspers and die without having any other…What’s the word I want? Variables?”

  Kate was quiet for a while. The picture tried to come back a few times, showing Sarah glimpses of her sister through a haze of multi-colored distortion. “These guys are professionals, Sarah. It’s their job to make connections that people like us miss.”

  “Yeah, but how did so many aliens lose their claspers in the first place, that’s what I really want to—”

  “Did your house come with a phone?”

  “Huh? Um, yeah.” She twisted to look up at it, clinging to the wall like a shiny, black beetle. “But it’s patched into the IBI switchboard. I can’t figure out how to get a line outside the village. I could look it up in the manual, but—” She laughed. “—I’m kind of manualed-out. I had to set everything, you have no idea. All the faucets are TruTouch. Who the heck even knows off-hand how many degrees they like their shower? Or their drinking water? Plus, I got my Fahrenheit and my Celsius screwed up and practically steamed-cooked my face off the first time I…Why?” She checked the paz’s signal, but it looked good. “Can’t you hear me okay?”

  “I hear you. I was just curious. So this is your own paz?”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah, still trying to see where this was going. “But they scanned it in through the company server when I got here. You know. So I can’t take pictures or blog about company policy or stuff. They said it wouldn’t affect my performance. I mean, I can barely see you, but—”

  “That’s normal for the fossil you’re using,” Kate agreed. In a new, hearty voice, she added, “TruTouch faucets, those are awesome!”

  “They gave me all sorts of things, it’s hilarious. There’s a plasmapanel TV in the living room, and all the appliances, even a coffee machine.”

  “Another TruTouch?”

  “No, it’s one of the Konaluv models and it’s crazy, I don’t know what half of those settings even mean. I tried to make a simple cup of coffee when I got home. I think I programmed it to spit out sixteen double-caff cappuccinos at midnight on the first day of 2045. Happy New Year.”

  Kate laughed.

  “I keep trying to fix it and it keeps adding more coffees to the order and blinking its timer at me. I’m scared of it. And oh, dig this! I’m driving through Wyoming and I see this garage sale, so I stop and buy this ultra-cheap bed because it comes with the mattresses for free, and I spend, like, an hour, trying to wedge it into the van—”

  “I think I know where this is headed,” Kate said. She sounded as if she might be smiling.

  “The house comes with a bed! A huge bed! One of those memory-gel beds with a heating and cooling feature, can you believe it?”

  “What’d you do with the other one?”

  “I put it in my spare room so you have a skanky place to sleep when you come to visit. But I tell you, it’s weird what they gave me and what they didn’t. TV, but no sofa. Bed, but no sheets. There’s no dining room table or anything like that, but there’s a centerpiece with plastic fruit sitting smack in the middle of the floor. Fagin ate the orange already.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “And barfed it up on the bed. Thank God memory-gel washes off easy. And did I tell you about the tests yet?”

  “What tests?”

  “They tested us before they even let us go to the first seminar, and not just the standard drug-and-disability tests, but weird ones.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…I don’t know. They asked all these questions, like, did I like school and would I rather watch the news or read about it? How do I answer that?”

  “How did you answer that?” Kate asked quietly.

  “I said I pretty much just read the comics. And then she asked me if I was usually happy and if I thought I was normal or important. I’m going to be an alien’s social worker; what’s normal? I don’t know,” Sarah sighed, rubbing Fagin’s neck. “It just felt weird. And they took blood and saliva swabs for a gene-test, too. Who does that?”

  “Lots of places,” Kate said, but she sounded uneasy. “It just means they’re looking for long-term employees, that’s all. So you must have passed, that’s reassuring…when do you start work?”

  “Monday, officially, but there’s another seminar tomorrow that I have to go to, and tours all weekend long for people who want to take one. I don’t know, I may skip out on that. I’ve got a map and anyway, I’d rather go to town, find some Chinese food, maybe get some sheets. I want a good night’s sleep before I meet my first alien.”

  “Good plan.”

  The paz finally succeeded in loading up a decent picture of Kate, but it didn’t show much. They watched each other breathe for a while as Sarah wondered how to bring them out of it without hanging up. The move and the job had been such a sore point between them, and they were trying hard not to keep pushing at it now that it was over and done, but not talking about it just seemed to make it swell up bigger. She wanted assurances now, not ‘I told you so’. She needed her family and Kate was all she had.

  “IBI does lots of good things,” she said finally.

  “Yeah?” Kate uttered a short laugh. “Besides paying for your training, giving you a house, and, oh, taking care of all the roaches so the rest of the planet doesn’t have to?”

  “Yeah, besides that,” Sarah said, frowning. “They also have this great recycling program. I read about it in my manual.”

  “Ooo, recycling. What stimulating reading.”

  “Hey, it saves this camp’s community eighteen million dollars every year, apparently, plus it helps teach the aliens our basic work ethic.”

  “Work ethic?” Kate frowned.

  “No, it’s all voluntary. Anyone who wants to can join up and they get paid, even.”

  “That’s nice,” Kate said dimly.

  “Well, it’s a start. Think about it, as kids, we start doing chores for nickels, and then get paper routes, and work fast food in our teens, so by the time we’re ready to enter society, we have a unified work ethic, but—”

  “My God, are you reading this to me?”

  “No,” said Sarah defensively. “It was a really good chapter in the manual. I was interested.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a step, that’s why! Maybe once they understand the work ethic and get a good feel of our economy, they can, I don’t know, go out and get jobs. They can live with us—”

  “Not a chance.”

  “—just like it should be,” Sarah said stubbornly. “Integrated.”

  “I can already hear people screaming about aliens taking their jobs.”

  “Well, why not? They live here now, they’re going to need jobs.”

  “Honey…”

  More silence. This time, Kate broke it first.

  “Honey, I really think you need to focus right now on just doing the job they give you and not trying to change the world and buy it a Coke. You…You are one person. And IBI is a big corporation who…who knows what they’re doing.”

  “I know,” said Sarah, stung. Something in her tone woke Fagin. He licked her cheek, concerned, then heaved himself up and went out to investigate the yard. His departure left her alone on the floor, alone in the house…alone in Kansas.

  Silence, silence. They breathed.

  “Maybe you should just come home,” Kate said quietly. “Please, Sarah. I’d feel better.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. Put everything back in the van, grab Fagin, leave the possessed coffee machine…if you need money, I’ll wire you some, just—”

  “Seriously, I can’t, Kate. I’m on contract.”

  “You what?”
>
  “IBI’s employment contract. They explained it like…like a studio contract for an actor? I can’t go get it because it’s filed at the office, but the thing is, they hold my employment rights for one year, with an option to renew for ten years, up to five times.” She laughed, a little nervously. “If they like me.”

  Kate’s picture wavered wildly. She was shaking it or smacking it, trying to make her own picture come in clearer. When it settled, she was closer, all eyes and a pinched wrinkle between them. “You can’t quit?”

  “I can, but it’s breach of contract and they can sue me. Also, no one else will be able to hire me, whether I’m working for them or not, until my contract expires.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They can also…” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. This part had bothered her all day. “They can also redirect me within the company without my consent. Like…they can move me to any other camp, or to any other department where they need people…even security, it said.”

  Only it hadn’t said ‘security’ in the fine print. It said ‘military applications’.

  “But that’s not right, is it?” Sarah asked, rubbing at her tingling, dog-free legs anxiously. “I mean…they can’t really make me carry a gun, can they?”

  Silence.

  “Kate?”

  “I think you’re being silly,” Kate said, crisply and with finality. “That clause is only in there to apply to all the ex-cops and army reservists who join up. IBI is a…like the PeaceCorps, for Christ’s sake. Sure, they have to have people with guns, because the bugs are dangerous, but arming a bunch of untrained yokels is even more dangerous. Look, I have to go. You go have a fun weekend, eat your Chinese food, and just don’t be such a goose, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sarah said in a little voice.

  “It’s a good job. You’ll do well, make lots of money…and when the year’s up, you can come home and we’ll…we’ll figure out where to go next, okay? But stop freaking out about little things. You do your job and let the big boys do theirs, okay?”

  “I—”

  “I love you, Sarah,” Kate said, almost vehemently. “Get a new paz.” And hung up without waiting for an answer.