Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  Her lips moved. She seemed incapable of sound. Then she touched him, her fingers along his neck seams, where he could feel them tremble. He pulled the sheets away from her waist and found her final cloth layer. She helped him remove it and then knelt, shaking, waiting for direction.

  “Are you frightened?” he asked.

  She thought about it. “No,” she said, her eyebrows climbing as if in surprise. “I can’t be scared of you, Sanford. You’re my friend.”

  “Then turn around, please, and bend forward. I will be careful.”

  She stroked his seam once more, then obeyed, bracing her hands and knees almost in the way of a yang’ti female. He knew better than to mount her as one, however. He touched her instead, soothing her as his claspers tasted the air between her slightly-spread thighs. Her pheromones were alien, of course, but all the same female triggers were there, however faint. His belly-flaps relaxed at once; his spermatogus pushed slickly out, warming as her musk stimulated him. He reared over her, shifting his bent legs on the unstable mattress, and brought them cautiously together, penetrating not the ridged cloacal vens of a yang’ti woman, but the hot, soft, indescribable opening of his human, instantly and fully contained by her in welcome, in friendship, and in shocking heat.

  His eyes shut. Softly skreeing, he brought her back against his chest where he could feel her heart pounding through his plates—a double beat to his triple, and yet somehow still in harmony. He wrapped both arms around her; she brought her hands up like fluttering moths to touch them and find his seams. He could feel her body in constant motion, not struggling against him or even attempting the movements of human copulation, but only twitching and rolling a little, trying to look at him and be still at the same time, just as the little sounds she made wanted to be words without knowing anything to say.

  He began cautiously to move. It took a few seconds to get the knack of using just his hips and thighs without all his body, but the rewards were explosive. Her head rocked back fast, striking his shoulder. She bit her lip, her throat tight against sound, her features pulled strange with surprise, but beginning to soften and to fill with color. His claspers brushed thicker and thicker pheromones from the air, but he did not need it to measure her interest or hold his own. Her hands clenched on his arm, then shivered aside to find the joint of his wrist and his shoulder, to touch him the only way she could. He could not fathom what she must be feeling, but he moved as the male in the programs moved—or as near as he could approximate—and held her close against his heart, chirring.

  There was no friction for him, or for any yang’ti. His pleasure in this endless moment was primarily cerebral. He could release his store of sperm at any time, but he held it for now, reveling in Sarah’s dance of mating. Her body moved, moved, and suddenly she slapped both hands over her keening mouth, moving back at him in rhythmless urgency, flooding the air with her human pheromones. Orgasm, he realized, and it did not paralyze her in place, but drove her to a kind of frenzy.

  Encouraged, Sanford began to explore, trying to puzzle her out, to map and memorize her responses. He was surprisingly successful. Again and again, she climbed and lost herself, until all tension fell away from her imprisoned body. Her head dropped back, resting on his shoulder. She did not move even when he tapped his palps against her slender throat, but she answered his chirrs with humming and smiled. Her fingers twined with his, stroking his receptor pads in tandem with his movements.

  Now, now, it must be now. Sanford picked up the bedsheet and wrapped them both together, holding them close as he injected his fluids uselessly into her body. The contraction keyed his own climax. For a slow count of ten, he swam in chemical bliss, perfectly still, aware only of her heat enveloping him, her heart and his in alien harmony.

  Gradually, he came back. He tapped at her throat. She smiled without opening her eyes and hummed. The sound thrilled him on some level, urging him to stroke up into her in mating ways until she arched and moaned and released a final cloud of pheromones, its colors dampened by her exhaustion. Yes, it was late.

  He retracted his spermatogus and tightened his belly plates, his claspers brushing fastidiously at him and her together all the while. Then he shifted her, lay her down, and lay down beside her. She did not speak, but hummed again, her hand brushing back to catch at his. She touched his pads, lingered.

  Sanford chirred, exhaling over her naked back. He brought the sheet over both of them. ‘Well done,’ he thought, intensely proud of himself. He could not remember a more satisfying copulation. More natural, certainly, and more pleasurable, but never one so satisfying. He pressed his chest to her back, found her heartbeat and followed its song to sleep.

  * * *

  She was on the wrong side of the bed. She was naked. She was sleeping on what felt like a giant thorny log—that must be Sanford’s arm—but none of that woke her. And that was a deep, deep sleep. She had never been so relaxed in her life.

  So why was she awake?

  Felt like it was getting light, but light had never woken her before. She felt…itchy, indefinably itchy. Not on her skin, but on her air, if that made sense.

  Slowly, Sarah opened her eyes.

  And found them staring into T’aki’s.

  His head only just came up to the level of the bed. She could see only the eyes and the round tip of his head, quivering with antennae. When he saw he had her attention, he reached up one arm and silently placed a doughnut on her pillow. His eyes were very solemn.

  Oh dear sweet Jesus, she was naked in bed with this kid’s father.

  Sarah smiled weakly, which T’aki apparently saw as an invitation to join them. He hopped up on the mattress and clambered unselfconsciously against her sheet-swaddled stomach, quietly chirping without words. Sarah made room for him, and Sanford’s other arm lifted from her waist long enough to rub affectionately at the tiny head. His slow, slightly asthmatic breaths had not altered. She hadn’t realized he was awake.

  “Is this for you or me?” asked Sarah, indicating the doughnut.

  “You. I eat too much now. My shell is tight. Besides,” T’aki said, pulling his father’s arm down to partially close him in, “those are gross.” He said ‘gross’ in English, and rolled the R heavily, then fell onto his back and giggled.

  Sarah laughed with him. “That’s lemon jelly, kid, that’s good stuff.” She dipped her finger in it to taste, dipped it again for him—he opened his mouth palps wide to take it, then shuddered and drummed his legs in revulsion, cute kid—and finally sat up a little to let Sanford take back his arm.

  “Well, thank you for the breakfast, that’s a lovely gesture. Think you can go play while I grab a shower and get dressed? We have a lot of driving to do today.”

  “Yes-yes.” T’aki leaned over to breathe on his father’s face, then jumped across the bed and down, scampering noisily from the room. Must have damn near killed him to come in so quietly…

  …and see her in bed with his dad. Sheesh.

  Sarah fished her blouse up and put it on, reached for her panties, and saw them lying over one of Sanford’s tool belts. She stared at that for a while—Good God, we really did it—and then turned around and looked at him.

  “It’s okay,” she said. Blurted, even. “If that was you trying to make me feel better. Last night, I mean. If you were…calming me down or…or something. Because, wow, it worked, I’ve never been so calm, but, um, I just want you to know that it’s okay if that’s all it was and you don’t want to, um…repeat it.”

  His expression had not changed in the slightest all through this clumsy speech. Now he reached across the bed and patted her hand, just like he’d known she was going to do some blathering and forgave her for it, and said, “I learned how to move by watching humans copulate in movies. Do you wonder why I watched?”

  She opened her mouth, blinked, and closed it.

  He pushed back the sheet and got up, walking naked but not exactly nude around to collect his clothes. Where on Earth (so to speak) was h
e hiding his…self?

  “I would not copulate with you in Cottonwood,” he said evenly. “But I wanted to. I don’t know if that act would have made that place seem better, or if that place would have made the act seem sordid, but I didn’t wish to risk it. I’m glad we are here. No matter what happens, I’m glad we copulated. No matter what happens—” He gave his palps a roguish waggle. “—I would like to copulate again.”

  “I never saw this coming,” she heard herself say. “How could I not see this coming?”

  “Because it was obvious,” he told her and sent her on to the bathroom with a pat. “And you remain sweetly above the obvious. Sarah.”

  She stopped, turned around.

  He set the doughnut on top of her little pile of clothes. “Please hurry,” he said.

  Right. Because they were still escaping. Jeez, she really was relaxed.

  Sarah showered, ate, dressed, her mind locked in a pleasant sort of fog—sweetly above the obvious, ha. When she was done, she sat down on the side of the bed and picked up her maps, most of them still pretty new, bought for the trip across country to her perfect new job. She’d even marked the route with her daily mileage and little notes, like Jackalope Museum or Weird Monkey Zoo. Fun tourist traps along the freeway…but there was more to the maps than the freeways.

  When she emerged into the living room, father and son were together on the couch, watching the morning news on television. Some pandas had just been born in San Diego, which was the headlining story, followed by President Dufries’ extremely unpopular environmental reform bill, followed by a ten second blurb on a rash of flu-like illnesses popping up around Golden Plains and whether or not the bugs might carrying some unknown alien disease. No comment on the ‘riots’ in Cottonwood, and no comment on the rogue caseworker of IBI. When she sat down, Sanford switched the set off and looked at her.

  She spread out the maps, one overlying the other, until she had made a more or less complete path to the coast from Kansas. She said, “Here’s where we started,” and drew a circle with her finger over the area where Cottonwood stood, unmarked by Rand McNally. “Here’s where we are now, roughly. And wa-a-a-ay over here…is your ship.” She tapped the ocean.

  Sanford leaned forward, clicking thoughtfully, his eyes darting back and forth between those points. “A long way.”

  “About two thousand miles by freeway, but we can’t go by freeway so it’ll be…I don’t know…twice that at least. And it’ll take God only knows how much longer because they don’t let you tear up those back roads at sixty miles an hour. I realize we’re in a hurry, but we’ve got to be sneaky about this. IBI is big, but they can’t be everywhere.”

  “Agreed,” said Sanford and T’aki echoed, “Agreed!”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask,” Sarah said. “I know we left a lot sooner than we were supposed to. But how much money do you have? Because I have enough for one more full tank of gas and that’s it.”

  “A little less than two thousand dollars.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Sanford said calmly and T’aki hammered it home with a cheerful, “That’s it!”

  Sarah looked down at the map and tried to see it in terms of gas stations and cheap hotels, knowing they would have to pay cash everywhere they went. “It’s probably enough,” she said. “But we better not eat too much. Now for the hard question. What the hell are we going to do when we get there?”

  “Hell is a vulgar word,” said T’aki.

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “What the heck are we going to do?”

  “Heck is a vulgar word.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “No, it isn’t!”

  “It is if you use it to mean hell,” he told her piously.

  Hard to argue with that…

  “What are we going to do?” Sarah asked at last, holding out her hand to invite T’aki’s approval.

  He chirred and rocked onto his back, grabbing himself by the toes.

  “I don’t know,” Sanford replied, having waited patiently all this time for his son’s etiquette lesson to complete itself. “When they removed us from the ship, the humans had a number of flying transports in dock on the floating city. I had it in mind then that one of these could be seized or a human forced to pilot it, but it has been years. The floating city might not be there. Or there might be more of them.” He paused, palps scraping together and antennae low and twitching. “The ship itself may have fallen.”

  “No, it’s still there.”

  “Intact?”

  “Looks that way from the pictures, but IBI doesn’t let anyone get too close. This is the thing,” she sighed. “We need to have a plan when we reach the ocean. Even something as big as your ship isn’t going to be visible from shore, so finding it may not be that easy. Plus, we don’t just have to get over to the ship, we’ve got to get up to it.”

  “Where we may find that the hull has been breached by humans tunneling their way through locked doors or that they’ve pulled out the guidance system or dismantled a fusion nacelle or any of a thousand things I have not allowed myself to dwell on over the years.”

  “Don’t, Sanford,” she said, pulling T’aki onto her lap and hugging him. “Please.”

  He offered his open hand. She took it gratefully and found his sensory pads while he stroked her palm. “I have had no way to make a plan,” he said quietly. “I could not even begin. But the alternative is to do nothing and let it all end here, so the plan is this: We will go and we will do whatever we can. All right?”

  Sarah shook her head and sighed. “Okay, I think you have the right idea.”

  “You do?”

  “About not allowing yourself to dwell on it, I mean. We can only do the best we can do.”

  His hand closed over hers and lightly squeezed. “Yes.”

  She smiled at him, thinking of his hands and the way they’d moved over her. She shook her head again, then leaned over and pressed her lips to the side of his face. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but it made her feel better. “Okay, I’m going to check out and bring the van around. You two be ready to duck in. Where’s the Fortesque Freeship, jellybean?”

  T’aki raised it in one fist.

  “Good boy,” she said, patting him. “Let’s get ready to ride.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Back roads,’ she called them, which made Sanford wonder what forgotten corner of Hell they wound back to. They twisted, climbed, dipped, and sometimes seemed to break away altogether, tossing and jarring him until he was forced to come out from the cover of the blanket and sit instead on the uncomfortable seat, harnessed in next to T’aki, and bounced mercilessly inside his own shell. But no matter how slow the going or rough the ride, Sarah kept her good mood. They passed very few towns and could go for hours without seeing another vehicle, and that made her feel safe.

  It made him feel exposed, particularly when the van seemed to have trouble climbing a hill, or when its engines unexpectedly whistled or ground together. On these occasions, even before he spoke, Sarah found it necessary to tell them that it was old, but it would get them there…a comfort she inevitably followed with disheartening mutters and stroking of the console.

  Come midday, she stopped to refuel, then took them well out of town and found a narrow lane into the trees where they might risk a short recess, hidden from the empty road. This also made him nervous, but after two days curled on himself in the cramped vehicle, he needed the stretch. T’aki, of course, bounded off into the bushes at once, answering Sanford’s clicks as he chased insects and falling leaves, amazed by everything he saw.

  “Ugh.” Sarah came around to sit against the open side door of the van. She picked through the box of food, ate the few crumbs remaining, and leaned back, covering her eyes. “Getting road blind.”

  “Rest awhile,” he said.

  “What, here? It’s broad daylight.”

  “I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”

  “If there’s trouble, I�
�m not sure I want to wake up for it.” She smiled faintly, then shrugged and gave him an apologetic sort of look. “I tried to pick up some food at the gas station for you, but all they had was energy drinks and breath mints. Are you doing okay?”

  For answer, he took her hand and stroked the palm, watching the way her face changed, the color rising in her cheeks, the slow curve of her smile. It was a look he’d seen often when he met her eyes in the van’s mirror, a look he’d first put on her by joining her in her bed.

  T’aki raced by. “Everything’s alive!” he called, and plunged into another bush.

  Sanford watched the branches shake, thinking that in less than two years’ time, T’aki could be playing this way in the same yard where he had played as a child himself.

  Sarah’s fingers tucked under his plates and along his receptor-pads. She too was gazing into the trees. “I figure we’re about a third of the way there,” she said. “Maybe a little more. I guess it’s time to call Kate.”

  “Kate?”

  “My sister. We’re going to pass right through Brookings on the way to Salina, so I figure we’ll stop and change cars, in case they’re looking for this one…which they almost certainly are. Also…she’s my sister. I have to tell her what’s happening to me. She’s already scared half to death, I’m sure, then I just disappeared.”

  “Is it safe?” he asked, knowing it was something of a foolish question.

  “It should be. I picked up a disposable phone at the gas station.” She released him with a snort to crawl back into the van. “Mind-boggling. They didn’t have beef jerky or a soda cooler, but they had disposable phones and sixty different app-cards. Anyway, it’s totally untraceable to me and I’m only going to use it once. Besides, seriously…” She re-emerged, no longer smiling, clutching a package in her hand. “How safe are we, like, ever?”