by R. Lee Smith
She looked off, to his eye. Not injured, not in any obvious manner, but worn down and pulled thin. He saw this, but did not remark or give it deeper thought. Something bad had happened, but something bad was always happening and he had heaters to fix.
“I don’t see T’aki,” she remarked, sitting in her usual place in the green chair. “Is he at school?”
“Yes.”
“How does he like it?”
“He doesn’t. He considers it a punishment and a great unfairness for the small reward of reading.”
Her soft brows arched. “Is he actually reading already?”
“He is. I’ve found him with several magazines.” Sanford finished one heater, set it aside, took another, and began unscrewing the outer case. “Unfortunately, they were all pornographic.”
“Oh.”
“He insists he was only reading the…” He tipped his antennae forward, clicking as he tried to think of words the translator could manage. “…the humor pages. The little drawings with jokes.”
“Oh! Well, that’s not so—”
“Those were also pornographic.” Sanford bent over the exposed coils, cleaning them with puffs of compressed air. “And he hides them, which is suggestive in itself. I suppose it is only natural that he should be curious, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Sounds like it might be time for the talk.”
There was a curious emphasis in her last words, a hint of embarrassed color in her cheeks, but neither was enough to tell him her meaning. “What talk?” he asked.
“You know.” Her color deepened, which only emphasized the dark smudges under her eyes. He wondered again what was wrong. “The big sex talk.”
He clicked, feeling out his immediate discomfort. “I suppose that could be part of the problem.”
“I know he’s young, but like you said, it’s everywhere in here. Better he get answers from you than from Ass Freaks Weekly.”
He clicked, acknowledging this, then shook it off and bent over the heater determinedly. “I’m not sure I’m ready to have that discussion even if he is. And yet, if he does not come to me with his questions, where will he go? Sam is altogether too willing to educate him on the subject of human sexuality.” He blew distractedly through his palps, concentrating on his work.
“Maybe he’ll forget about it once you get him away from all the dirty pictures. Have you fixed your machine yet?”
“Rebuilt, Sarah, please. Fixed implies it may have been broken all this time and I simply could not deal with that very well.”
“You don’t know?”
“Certain components have to be charged.”
“Oh God, now you have to build a charger?”
“I have one, pray Ko’vi,” he added under his breath, and tapped his brow with the curled back of his hand—a genuflection he sincerely thought he’d forgotten until he did it. He looked at his hand in some bemusement, clicked, and removed the heater’s old power cord. “I know a man, a real engineer, as opposed to this…hobby of mine. I told him I needed a charging dock and he claimed he could build one from two deconstructed incinerators.”
“Can he?”
“It seems to be working, although, having deconstructed my share of incinerators, I can say with confidence that he only used the parts from one of them.” He clicked with absent-minded disdain. “I’ve known this man eleven years across three camps and he cheated me without hesitation.”
“When will it be ready?”
“Patience,” he murmured, moving on to the matter of the wiring. It was more than just the cord on this unit; everything would have to be changed. “Patience is more than a word, as my father would often say.”
“Did he?” A reluctant smile twitched at one corner of her mouth. “How irritating was that growing up?”
“Profoundly. But no less true. Consider it this way: the more time it takes, the more time I have to plan the escape.”
“Right. The plan.” She shifted in the chair, rubbing restlessly at her arms and then her knees. “Have you got the broad strokes worked out yet?”
“Have you ever seen a movie called…” He stopped working to focus on finding the right words, then carefully said, “…Three Bricks?”
She frowned at the ceiling for some time, but ultimately shook her head. “Must not be bad enough for my taste. A prison movie, I take it?”
“More or less. I suppose it’s best that you not see it, actually. It did not end well.”
Her frown deepened.
“The plan itself was sound,” he assured her. “And easily adapted to my purposes. So. Friday next, before you leave, I’ll give you a series of explosives—”
She sat up sharply to give him a look of horror. “Oh, please be kidding!”
“—for you to place at certain locations. I’ll set them to detonate Sunday, during the morning shift change at seven. You’ll have to acquire one of their vans and enough of a uniform that no one will question you driving it. T’aki and I will be waiting at the wall between Checkpoints Eleven and Twelve. When I hear the explosions, I’ll wait three minutes and blow the wall from our side. You’ll pick us up and get us out. Have a second vehicle waiting outside Cottonwood for the remainder of the journey. It would be best if it were not your van.”
“Sanford, who do you think I am? Where am I supposed to get a car?”
“I’ll give you money with the explosives. With luck, and contraband,” he added, waving at the heaters without taking his eyes off the one lying open under his careful hands, “I hope to have at least twenty thousand dollars.”
“Holy shit, Sanford! Before Friday?”
“Next Friday. The real money will only come from the guns and I have to be careful how I sell them.”
“Next…oh.” She sighed and settled into the chair, looking over the mess of heaters with a discouraged eye. “That long.”
“Haste is not our friend. I need time to work out the last details. Besides, even if we left tomorrow, we would still have to eat tonight.” Sanford picked through a plastic tub filled with loose wires, shook it, and picked through it some more, adding dryly, “And my son will want to buy more pornography to read on the way home. It will be a long trip.”
“I’ll see if I can find some books for him in town. And some board games.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“Yeah, but I’ve to go anyway. I’ve got a…thing.” She turned her head toward the window, not really looking through it, but just avoiding the sight of him. “I was really hoping we’d escape before then so I wouldn’t have to go through with it. Now I not only have to go, I have to price getaway cars.”
Sanford changed wires. Sarah fidgeted and would not look at him. At length, he indicated a well-used rag. “Wipe down the heaters for me, please. They sell for more if they’re clean.”
Sarah obeyed at once, but one sure sign of her distraction remained and the more she busied herself, the more obvious it became.
“My radio seems to be broken,” he said finally.
“Is that was these are?” She peered at the heater she was cleaning, then checked herself and laughed. “Oh, you mean me. Sorry. I’m just thinking.”
“If you were only thinking, you’d be humming,” he countered. “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head, cleaning the heater with renewed vigor, but eventually, she had to put it aside and when she did, she was in no hurry to start in on a new one. Instead, awkwardly, she said, “Do you get TV here?”
Odd question. What was this about?
“Yes. Some can even be repaired. But you’ve been with us to see movies,” he reminded himself. “You mean, do we receive transmissions? No. Although the humans are happy to sell programs to those with registered media players, we are not permitted ‘news’ in any format.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Denying prisoners access to current events is a fairly standard psychological control, but it’s not particularly relevant to our si
tuation. Most of your news has nothing to do with us and what few opinions they do express are considerably more civil than what I’ve heard in the camps.”
“So you do watch TV.”
Sanford bent under his work table and brought out a digital tablet. Its screen was cracked and most of its innards had been salvaged, but it was the only one of its kind he had at the moment. “We find these sometimes with credits left on them. I used to watch them, but no more. They’re too valuable. And I already know what the humans think of us.” He tossed the tablet back under the table and picked up another length of wire. “Why do you ask?”
She sighed heavily and slumped back in the chair. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“Having said that,” he remarked, “I think you might as well. It can’t be a worse reason than what I’m sure to imagine if you don’t.”
She was quiet. After a minute or two of silence, Sanford decided she meant it and that he would not press. She had seen something, clearly, some atrocity the humans either were planning or had already inflicted upon his people. Something new to her, perhaps, but he doubted it was new to him and since he could do nothing more about it than he was already doing, he saw no point in dwelling on it.
But just when he thought she would sit and brood forever, she suddenly said, “They took Baccus.”
“Yes.” He hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard. They’d taken her at the Heaps, when she grew hungry and desperate enough to risk working there. The soldiers didn’t scan everyone, not even every tenth yang’ti who passed the checkpoint as the regulations posted there warned, but they scanned her and then they took her. She did not resist, he heard. He was not surprised. When the worst finally happens, it can seem like a relief.
“They’re saying she was the one who attacked me,” Sarah said softly.
Sanford acknowledged this without emotion. The wiring had become tricky and was of far more interest to him at the moment. Later, he may feel some shame over this. Or he may not. Regrets could not put money in his hand and this heater could. Time eroded all things and sentiment too often went first.
“She says she attacked me too.”
“Denying it would not save her.”
She watched him change out a connector in silence, but as soon as it was in and secure, she said, “She said she did it and I let her say it.”
Sanford looked at her. “Denying it,” he said, “would not have saved her.”
“They put me on TV so I could tell everyone that the bug who hurt me got caught by the brave men and women of IBI.”
“And you did.”
She folded her arms, hugging herself like a parentless child…which she was, he recalled. That stirred some feeling in him, but it was not fatherly. He went back to work on the next heater.
“The way she looked at me…” Sarah closed her eyes. “She knew I wasn’t going to help her.”
“Couldn’t. She knew you couldn’t.”
“Stop trying to forgive me! You weren’t there!”
“No,” Sanford agreed mildly. “I was here.”
She quieted, color rising in her cheeks, and for several minutes, that was all.
“Sorry,” she mumbled at last.
“Don’t apologize.”
“I’m not saying…I don’t know what I’m saying.” She slumped back in the chair and rubbed her face, combed her fingers through her hair. It did not neaten her overall appearance at all, but he found the sight oddly agreeable. “I just…feel…awful.”
“It does no good to dwell on it.”
“I can’t pretend it never happened. I can’t…Tell me what to do, Sanford! I think about it until I make myself sick and then suddenly I’ll realize I’m not thinking about it and I’ll feel even sicker because how can I just forget something like that?” She picked up her cleaning rag, but only held it, twisting it weakly back and forth. “I’ll never make it right. If I could magically save a thousand other people, I still let her die. And don’t tell me she’s not dead. I know she’s dead.”
He did not fill the silence that followed with empty assurances. He simply dusted out the last heating unit.
“Tell me what to do,” she said again.
“What makes you think I know?”
Her brows puckered, confused. “Haven’t you ever done anything bad?”
Sanford coughed up a laugh. “No,” he said gravely. “Never.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you know where I am. You know no one survives here without regret.” He removed the electrical cord and found a good one in his much-depleted box of parts. “You don’t need to hear the details.”
“I don’t want to hear the details, I just want to know how you…” She gestured futilely and let her hands drop, slumping back in the chair in defeat. “Forget it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Sanford finished the last heater and replaced the casing. He found another rag and as soon as he started cleaning heaters, she joined him. The work went quickly with two sets of hands, but the quiet troubled him. He wished she’d hum.
He said, “I volunteered for this mission. The colony.”
She looked up, blinking rapidly, as if she’d been brought too suddenly into the light. “Huh?”
“Only the most elite soldiers were permitted to apply, but mine is a very old military family and even though it has been hundreds of years since the caste laws were rescinded, the old privileges linger.”
“Lucky you.”
“I thought so at the time. When I received my orders, I had them mounted on the wall so I could look at them every day. My father and his father came with me on the day of departure. My father’s father told me he was proud of me. When I looked back after boarding the ship, they were still there. My father saluted me.”
Sarah sat motionless, one hand resting lightly on one half-cleaned heater, listening.
“That is the moment where I choose to live,” said Sanford. “Someday, I will return to yang’Tak and see my father before me. I will stand in that moment again and finally move on.”
“And it will be like none of this ever happened?”
“Of course it happened. But I will leave it on Earth where it belongs. I will take my son and I will move on.” He glanced at the window, where the failing light served to remind him of time, and stood up. “Thank you for your help. Will you come to the Heaps tomorrow?”
She accepted his unspoken dismissal in good grace, finishing her heater and folding her rag atop it. “Sure. I guess it’s not a good idea to meet at your house every day, huh?”
“Probably not,” he agreed with a flick of his antennae. “But that isn’t why I ask.” He opened a drawer on his work table and brought out a scuffed plastic disc-case.
She took it, puzzled, turned it over…and clapped a hand to her mouth to muffle her breathy scream. In the next instant, she had thrown herself against him, bouncing on her toes even as she embraced him. “Aliens From Outer Space! Oh my God, Sanford! Where did you find this?”
He picked her hair out of his mouth, scraping his palps and clicking with satisfaction. “I’ve arranged for a private viewing room from noon until four.”
“I don’t believe it! Aliens From Outer Space!” She tore herself away, gazing into the scratched face of the movie case the way the television programs insisted women were supposed to look at jewelry and suddenly, she was crying. “I don’t believe it,” she kept saying, smiling, weeping. She hugged him again, her fingers slipping deliberately between his plates to brush at his sensitive pads, wanting him to feel her. “Thank you so much!”
It didn’t change anything. He knew she would still lie awake tonight, thinking of Baccus and all the things she might have said or done, and she might hate herself then for the joy she felt now, but for right now, this moment, she was happy. He had made her happy.
Sanford closed his eyes, letting all his world be her touch—just the tips of three fingers, the fluttering of a fourth. His heart throbbed.
; “It’s a terrible movie,” Sarah wept.
“I know. I watched some of it, to be certain it was the right one.”
“How far did you get?”
“The wooden cage. And that…thing.”
“The starfish.” She pulled back, wiping at her eyes and smiling. “With an eye in its stomach. The one she seduces. You are definitely going to want to have that talk with T’aki.”
“I appreciate the warning.” He stepped toward the door and put his hand on its latch, but didn’t open it yet. “Tomorrow, then.”
She nodded, stroking the scratched face of the disc-case before reluctantly returning it to him. “Tomorrow. Be careful, okay? I mean, I know you are, but…”
She didn’t finish her thought. She didn’t have to. Being careful didn’t always mean staying safe in Cottonwood.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that she did at least some of what she did for him. Some things she would do because she could see the evil here and, being Sarah, she wanted to ‘make it right’, but there must be ways she could fight IBI at a distance. She chose instead to walk Cottonwood’s causeways and smell its stink. To see him.
On impulse, Sanford leaned closer and gently breathed. She giggled—of course, what had he expected?—and then she tipped back her head and deliberately exhaled.
They shared breath. His claspers twitched; he kept them tightly tucked. ‘Not here,’ he thought, even as he refused to too closely examine just what he meant by that. ‘Not here. Not now.’
They breathed.
From somewhere in the folds of Sarah’s clothing came an electronic chirp. Her day was done.
Sarah’s expression at once faded and closed. She stepped away from him. “I have to go. Tell T’aki I said hi and I’ll see him tomorrow.”
Sanford opened his door. She touched his hand once more in passing, just the outer plates this time. If he hadn’t been watching, he would never have known. He watched from the doorway as she walked up the road and around the corner out of sight. Only when his vision began to drift out of color and into shades of grey did he realize he’d been holding his breath—holding the last breath she’d given him.
