by R. Lee Smith
It occurred to her in a distant way that no one knew she was here, not really. No one but the driver who had dropped her off and then driven himself away. He’d had his orders, he’d followed them, and what happened after that was really none of his concern.
She looked back, hoping to catch some glimpse of her floor supervisor’s face—still a witness, even if she didn’t know his name—but saw only Piotr in front of a closed, locked door with his arms folded across his chest. Not smiling. Not really paying attention. Idly perusing the ass he’d be tapping Friday night, maybe, but only as a means of passing the time until he was needed again.
Sarah looked back at van Meyer, who simply extended his hand and waited for her. She took a bracing breath of stale, subterranean air, put her faith in her big, honest eyes, and took it.
His hand engulfed hers, leathery and much stronger than it appeared. Not a businessman’s grip. He’d had a manicure recently, square-cut and professional. His thumbnail was warped down at the cuticle; he’d been burnt or scarred or something once, but long ago, and now all that was left was a wrinkle in his manicure.
His other hand came up and closed over the first, trapping her little hand between them. “How do you feel?”
“I’m fine,” she said mechanically and could have kicked herself. She was not supposed to be fine. She was supposed to be broken. “I’m tired, mostly. More than I thought I would be.”
“I will not keep you long. I must say,” he went on, still holding her hand, holding her. “I was surprised to see you so soon. It was expected that you should take time off. Your health is not to be risked.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with myself at home.”
“This I understand very well.” He nodded to prove it, but his eyes showed no sympathy. They just kept prying around the edges of the honesty in hers. “Still, I have concern. IBI is not the family I would like it to be, but you, Miss Fowler, you have become very personal to me.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He stared her down, smiling, stroking her hand, and when her eyes at last dropped, the teeth on that trap tightened. “Piotr tells me you had a visitor during your stay in hospital.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bug.”
“One of my clients. Mr. Sanford. Mostly his child.” There was no point trying to hide their identities, but she hoped to lessen the significance of this information with a tentative smile and half a confession: “I like working with the children. I know it isn’t professional of me, but they’re just so small and cute.”
Van Meyer laughed and nodded. “A devious trait to be found always in nature, nee? Bear cub is soft and fuzzy, crocodile crawling out of egg peeps like chick, and who deny big eyes and ugly-sweet face of young chimpanzee? Ah, but all these animals remain wild. When they grow up, the human who raise them is often only animal, only meat. The creatures we love do not always love us back.”
Sarah bit at her lip, wondering how far to take this, how much risk was too much, or not enough. “But these aren’t creatures, Mr. van Meyer. They’re aliens…they’re bugs…but they’re still people.”
“Ja. And so you form attachment and so perhaps it is true they form attachment to you. Did you go to see your small bug today?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was he glad to see you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And his father?”
Sarah kept her eyes on him with great effort, trusting to her honest face to hide her twisting stomach, her racing heart. “He let me in.”
“This is not the same thing as affection.” Van Meyer nodded, stroking her hand again. “I am pleased to see you understand that.” His expression grew even more serious and he leaned close, uncomfortably intimate in this small space. “I say that you are personal to me, ja? I take personal pride in the good work that you do here. And I take personal offense at the harm that befall you.”
He straightened, released her hand, and opened the door behind him. He gestured. Ladies first; another gentleman. Sarah saw no alternative but to enter. She recognized the room without ever being in it before. She’d seen it a thousand times, in a thousand different bad movies. Sometimes it was in a torchlit cave and sometimes on a spaceship, but the overall function was the same: an interrogation chamber with sinister figures in the foreground and helpless captive behind bars. She may have gasped. She knew she stared. And when van Meyer offered a chair in his concerned grandfatherly way, she sat without really being conscious of his presence.
Baccus. The plates over her chest were cracked and shiny with leaking blood. The side of her face had swollen, pushing one eye shut. She stood with her arms raised and her head down, breathing hard and drooling blood and chaw in a slow trickle down her own chest.
“You are quite safe,” van Meyer was telling her. “It cannot escape, cannot reach you. Piotr, water for Miss Fowler.”
“I’m okay,” Sarah said somewhere in the world and all the fine gentlemen in the room consoled her until Piotr came back with a bottle of water. The thought of drinking it in front of Baccus was obscene; she held onto it with both hands instead, grateful for something, anything, to hold.
“Turn,” van Meyer said, and as Baccus faced the wall, he rested his hand gently on Sarah’s shoulder. “You will wish to enter his number, my dear. You may not realize, but you know this bug.”
“It’s one of my clients,” she managed. She did not bother with her paz. “It’s Mr. Baccus. What is he doing here?”
“A fair question, but I think better question would be where did we find him, hmm? On what side of containment wall?”
Sarah looked up at him, baffled. “He was out? What…How?”
“Another fair question, and another better one: Why?” Van Meyer patted her shoulder and gestured past all these smiling people at the silent, drooling alien in her cage. “Miss Fowler, we have found the bug who do you such grievous injury.”
The words circled several times before their meaning finally found her.
“No,” said Sarah and shook her head for good measure. “No, that’s not…It wasn’t…It was just some guys!”
“Oh?” Deeply concerned, van Meyer retreated to consult his own paz, a Juno model, with a floating holograph screen that made it impossible not to recognize Sarah’s own police report. “Then you do see your attacker?”
“No, but—”
“You hear him, then.”
“Not a word. Not a sound!” Sarah added, pointing at Baccus, whose wet breaths hitched in a flinch. “I would have heard that. I would have heard clicking or…or something! I would have known!”
“Even the bug can be quiet when stalking. But we do not require that you identify, Miss Fowler,” van Meyer said, tucking his paz away in his jacket. “We have indisputable proof already. We have the bug himself and we have his confession.”
“What…?” Sarah looked at Baccus. She would not meet her eyes.
“Speak,” van Meyer said. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
“I did it,” Baccus said, as if he’d pulled a hidden string in her back. She choked on the words a little, spat blood on herself and said, louder, “I hurt the caseworker.”
Sarah’s head began to shake back and forth again. She couldn’t seem to stop.
“Tell us why,” van Meyer prompted.
“She brought food. I thought she would have more food where she lived. I went to her house but I did not find food. When she came home, I hurt her.” Baccus raised her eyes haltingly to van Meyer and dropped them again. “I kicked her. It was me. I ran.”
“No. It…no. How did…How did he know where I lived?” Sarah demanded. Not she. If they found out Baccus was female, it wouldn’t be from Sarah, no matter what they said or did. She would go on a hundred dates with Piotr Lantz stone-cold sober before she let that slip. “How could he possibly know where I lived?”
“This we do not know,” van Meyer admitted as Baccus just stood there. “Aft
er so many years, there is still so much we do not know. Perhaps he track you by scent or perhaps he simply follow you home. Perhaps—”
“Fagin!” Sarah blurted. “They shot Fagin, sir! They hung my dog up on the fence and they shot him!”
Van Meyer glanced at Piotr. Piotr shrugged and said, “The dog was a mess. You told the cops you were robbed, naturally we’re gonna think it got shot up. If we knew it was a bug the whole time, we’d have known the dog really got chewed on.”
“I did it,” Baccus began. “I ate the dog.”
“See?”
“There were shell casings everywhere!” Sarah said, her voice rising. “I had to clean them up! He got shot!”
Some of the other people in the room shifted. Someone whispered to someone else. Baccus breathed and bled. Van Meyer and Piotr just looked at each other.
At last, van Meyer turned and looked at the alien in the cage. He said, calmly, “Where do you get the gun?”
Baccus looked at Sarah. Sarah shook her head. Baccus looked back at van Meyer and said, “I found it in the Heaps?”
“No,” said Sarah. “Oh no. No.”
“Go on.”
“IBI killed my eggs. I killed the caseworker’s dog. I did it.” Baccus looked at Sarah again. She lowered her arms slowly to her sides. “I knew they would catch me,” she said. “So I did what I could.” She wiped at her mouth, studied the blood this left on her hand, and said, haltingly, “I’m not sorry.”
At some signal unseen by Sarah, the other men in the room stepped up to the bars of the cage (which were, Sarah noted with surreal clarity, clearly wide enough for a person to slip through. They had been built only to hold aliens, built to hold bugs) and put Baccus in restraints. They weren’t mean about it, which actually made it seem worse. They gave orders without shouting, refrained from epithets, never even touched their weapons, much less brandished them. Baccus made it easy for them; her head was ducked, her antennae low and her delicate claspers tucked up tight. She followed them from the cell without coaching, walked between them into the hall, and was lost behind the quietly closing door.
‘I will never see her again,’ thought Sarah. It sounded, even in the privacy of her own head, unforgivably theatrical and even a little silly. This wasn’t one of her stupid movies. This was America. This was the twenty-first century and these were visitors. This was the real world so this wasn’t really happening.
“Where are you taking him?” Sarah asked, knowing he would lie.
“To speak with legal advocate and then to counseling center. A very pretty name for prison, nee? But there is no more we can do.” Van Meyer rolled his shoulders in an elegant sort of shrug. “The bug has violent nature which defy all rehabilitation.”
“I don’t believe he did it. I haven’t heard any proof.”
“Loyalty to client can be admirable, Miss Fowler, but please do not be foolish.” Van Meyer studied her as she sat numbly gripping her water bottle and finally sighed. “I had hoped it would comfort you to know that your attacker had been caught, that he would never hurt you again. I would seem to have made error.”
She could only stare at him. She didn’t know what to say. Her eyes could not possibly be honest enough to keep protesting. She…She was going to sit here and let them take Baccus away and she wasn’t going to argue.
She wasn’t sure when she started crying. It was subtle. The tears themselves didn’t come until van Meyer offered his handkerchief with grandfatherly concern. She cried messy, like a child, a stupid child.
“See how I have upset you,” van Meyer murmured. He was patting her back. It was all she could do to keep from shuddering away. “Someone will take you home now, Miss Fowler. You will have the week off now, ja?”
“No!” she wept.
“Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow, to rest.”
“I’m okay!” And she was. She was fine. Baccus was gone.
How was she going to tell Sanford? How could she look him in the eye and admit that she was right there when they took Baccus away and she did nothing to stop it?
And as bad as that thought was, the one that followed was infinitely worse: What if it had been Sanford in the cage? She knew they hadn’t found Baccus running around in her backyard. Most likely, they’d stumbled on her during a random scan and decided being a rogue egg-farmer made her seditious enough to serve as a villain for this scene, but if they hadn’t, if they’d just gone in and grabbed someone from her case-files, it could have been Sanford. He certainly would have been the most ironic choice—why not make the bug who’d visited her in the hospital responsible for putting her there? She could imagine it all too easily: one white security van to take Sanford, one black population enforcement van to take T’aki. Then they’d ransack the house, not searching as much as just trashing it, before they burned it down. The code-bank would be lost—confiscated, destroyed, or just buried in the wreckage—along with the last man who knew how to work it.
It could still happen. It would be easy enough for van Meyer to decree that the attack had been part of a greater conspiracy. She might see Sanford in this room yet.
Sarah cleaned her face one last time and gave van Meyer his handkerchief back. “I won’t forget this, sir,” she said. “I know you think I’m pretty silly, but I do learn from my mistakes.”
He did not correct her presumption. Instead, without taking his eyes from hers or softening them with even the lie of a smile, he said, “To what mistake do you refer?”
Sarah looked at the empty cage, at Baccus’s blood staining the floor, and said what she had to say. “I can’t be their friend. They don’t love me back.”
He patted her head, much as he would a dog who had clumsily performed its first trick, and said, “I have arranged a press conference in the afternoon, to ease public fear now that violent bug is once more contained. They will surely wish some statement from the one most affected by this unpleasant business.”
“You want me to talk to them? At a press conference?” She did not have to feign her dismay. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Van Meyer waved that off. “Something will be prepared for you. You read this, they take pictures and IBI publicist take all questions. Your part is really quite small, Miss Fowler, but I am afraid no one else will do.”
“They want to see a victim,” Sarah said bitterly, thinking she could show them a victim all right, she could show them thousands of victims right on the other side of that clean, white wall.
“Perhaps. But you will not give them one.” Van Meyer squeezed her shoulder with a warm smile that never touched his eyes. “You will stand before them in your scars and you will be IBI in all this enterprise’s strength and compassion. This is why it must be Miss Fowler, ja? Because you are…?”
‘Gullible,’ thought Sarah. Aloud, she guessed, “Nice?”
He tsked, disappointed. “Sincere. Why did you come to work today?”
She blinked. “I…wanted to work.”
“Why?”
“I like my job. This is the most important work I’ll ever do.”
“So you say once before. You still believe?”
Her job at IBI was and would always be a poisonous stain over her heart, but she didn’t work for them. She worked for her clients. “More than ever,” she said.
At the door, Piotr snorted and shook his head.
Van Meyer studied her, unsmiling. “I hope you never lose your conviction, my dear. As I hope you forgive the old man who profit from it.” He took his hand from her at last and waved her toward the door. “I will send a driver at two, if that is convenient?”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Of course you will. You have given your word. And you will find I reward loyalty. Is it not so, Piotr?”
Piotr did not immediately answer. His nod, when it finally came, had more weight without words. It unsettled her.
“So. Tonight, good sleep. Tomorrow, a short statement for cameras. And then it
is back to work, ja?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Piotr, come. It has been a difficult day for our Miss Fowler and it is time to let her go home.”
Piotr pushed himself off the wall where he had been leaning and opened the door. They went back to the lobby—van Meyer just ahead of her, Piotr prowling behind, and Sarah between them like a condemned prisoner being marched to the gallows. There was no more talk, only a polite goodbye and a grunt from Piotr. Sarah’s driver was waiting for her. He opened her door. The world was simply filled with gentlemen tonight.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After so many years of waiting, it seemed unfair that it should take so little time to actually assemble the code-bank. In a matter of hours, it was done and all the rest of his time was free to be filled with the other elements of escape, mundane, but no less essential. With so much still untested, so much that could still go wrong, Sanford was grateful for the familiarity of work.
Here in late autumn, the Heaps gave up few real treasures, so until the post-holiday reaping (which he dared to hope he would not be here to see), Sanford was reduced to picking over what had already been salvaged in the shops surrounding the Heaps. This provided him a predictable assortment of useless technical debris, but eventually, he ran across a human with a large number of heating units in need of some repair who was willing to part with them for a mere two hundred dollars. Sanford paid, knowing the man thought he was cheating him. Yang’ti were largely indifferent to winter cold and heaters were more of a human luxury. Doubtless, this man had been trying to peddle his wares for days with no luck. However, Sanford also knew that eggs needed to be kept warm over the winter. Once repaired, each heater would sell as quickly as he could make the offer. And since the repairs in question amounted to little more than changing the electrical cord and dusting the innards, this was easy profit.
Easy, but time-consuming. For the rest of the day and long into the night, Sanford worked on heaters. After a short sleep, he worked on them some more. When T’aki grew restless, Sanford took him to Obek’we’s school and came back to work on heaters. He was determined not to stop again until he’d finished the last of them, but when Sarah knocked on his door, he welcomed her in.
