Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “Oh, you want to believe he’s scuttling, I’m sure you do,” she said. “But if I were you, sir, I’d get out there right now and start making some big changes. You’d better start feeding them right, build some decent homes, and clean up your so-called recycling program, because they are coming back, and when they do, it’ll be with warships and well-trained, well-armed, pissed-off soldiers who will have heard all about what you call integration!”

  One of the yang’ti spat. Two others buzzed quietly, tensely.

  Van Meyer glanced at them, then returned his eyes to her. He said, “You make it very difficult to help you when you are so eager to betray your people.”

  “My people? You’re not my people! You…You’re nothing but a thug! A lying thug!”

  “Ja?”

  “That’s why you don’t let cameras in! You’re afraid to let people see what you’re really doing and you’re right to be afraid! No matter how much you scare people with your lies, you know no good and reasonable person would ever let you get away with this!”

  “Such naiveté.”

  “If they could see this place, they would take you down and you know it! Even the people who believe your lies would stop you if they ever set foot on this ship!”

  “You think so?” Van Meyer looked indulgently around the room at the men and women sharing it with him. “It hasn’t happened yet, but then, it’s only been…what? Twenty years?”

  “It’ll happen,” Sarah insisted. “Sooner or later, people will always do the right thing!”

  He laughed at her, long and hearty laughter as rich as coffee. So did his soldiers.

  “Well,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. “While I wait for mob of townsfolk with torches, there is still small matter of what to do with you, Miss Fowler. I am afraid I have no opening for spunky young speechwriter, nee? So. So.”

  He stood up and came around the table to sit down again before her, thinly smiling, eyes cold. “Before your unwise mischief is made, Dr. Chapel is finding some very interesting DNA…in a very interesting place.”

  Confusion took a little of the fire out of her, and then icy understanding came sweeping in to cover it. She didn’t want to, tried not to, but shrank back slightly into her chair.

  His smile broadened, never touching his eyes. “And so once again, you surprise me. Once again, it take you to make me think. So long I have been searching for some new boogeyman to show my frightened sheep. The bug himself is no more enough, but the bug who mate with human? And the monster that he produce, ah!”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I’m sure it comfort you to think so,” he said, patting her cheek. “But it is simple science only…and much easier than to take apart a spaceship and rebuild. We just give a little injection now and then, ja? To soften you up, make you, ah, receptive. Then we find nice bug to fuck you. Ja. Piotr will be disappointed, but there are several ways yet that he can amuse himself without disruption to my plans and I think he deserves small reward for his efforts on my behalf, don’t you?” His eyes shifted to a guard behind her. “Take her and, oh, that one to Cell Four. We begin gene-treatments tomorrow. Tonight is for…getting acquainted. You, bug.”

  A sour click on her right as Sarah was pulled to her feet.

  “Do your part and I send you back to Buena Vista, ja? What heaven it is, after two months here! You think about it. Think hard.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I regret that I must leave you now, Miss Fowler. I have scheduled press conference and since you will not be able to watch for yourself, I feel it is only fair that I tell you what I will be telling them. I will tell them that due to circumstance beyond our control, we lost control of the bug mothership.”

  Sarah huffed out a laugh, shaky and tearful as it was. “That’s one way to spin it.”

  Van Meyer came around the table and leaned in very close, almost kissing-close, and his eyes were flat and dead. “So we shoot it down.”

  The breath caught in her throat, solid enough to choke on.

  “We shoot it down and it fall into the sea, lost to us forever.”

  “You’re lying,” she said, but she wished she hadn’t. Her voice next to his was thin and fragile, the voice of a stupid child who had seen the escape pod arcing up into the sky…and no more.

  “I am sure it comfort you to think so.” He stroked her hair once and then turned around. “No one is coming back, Miss Fowler,” he called, moving calmly and unhurriedly out the door. “No one got away.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The first flight was a short one, only as far as the system’s sixth planet, where Sanford put them into orbit and went immediately to the medical bay with the wounded. He had no medical training and no idea how to use the more advanced surgical equipment, so anyone whose injuries required more attention than he knew how to give went into a Sleeper. That left him with thirteen men to make the ship ready for its final flight, but even so, it did not take long. The yang’ti prisoners were all technicians, engineers and mechanics; it was plain that they had been at work here, repairing and maintaining the ship’s systems under the watchful eyes of their captors, all the while carefully sabotaging their own efforts so that the ship was never quite functional. The humans had scavenged all they could, but their access was limited and the dark man had clearly been unwilling to damage his prize in the stripping of it. For that, he supposed he should be grateful.

  They went to work. There was no sense of time in space, but he was sure that days passed. At last, the engines were primed and the Sleepers charged. Sanford set their course and once the ship was in Slipspace, he put the others in hibernation and took himself to the command deck, alone, standing watch over a navigation’s system that had betrayed them once already. T’aki had not protested when Sanford ordered him into the Sleeper; all the wonder for this ride, the home-going dreamed of even in the egg with Sanford’s whispers against his shell, had all been left on Earth. They were the same family now that they had been before, but now it felt broken.

  He found tasteless rations in the officers’ supply deck and ate, more out of habit than hunger. He wandered the ship during his more restless hours, occupying his hands with maintenance and systems tests, but more often only sat in the commander’s chair and watched the stars bend around the ship in impossible streams of light. He stood over T’aki’s Sleeper and talked to the health monitor as if it were his son. When the solitude became more than he could bear, he woke one of the others and Slept, but only for short spans of time. He dreamed too often of hearing Sarah humming somewhere in the dark and never finding her.

  Home. Yang’Tak. A world of red and green, wrapped like a jewel in the sky. He felt no relief at the sight of it, only an anxiety to do what he had to do and get back. It would only be home when he came for the second time, when his people were saved and his family was restored to him.

  They were surprised to see him. After so long, the only sensible assumption had been that the ship had failed and all lives had been lost. There was a monument garden in the governor’s district. His name was carved onto one of the white bricks that built it. Now the ship was home and the men they took off it were telling them that the ship had indeed failed, stranding its cargo of lives in a strange and hostile world. There was life in the universe other than yang’ti, a planet called Earth, a race called humans, unimaginably different. Some of the humans—and Sanford fought to make it clear it was only some—had seized power enough to lock the yang’ti away in places of terrible captivity. He did not describe them too closely, although he knew that the others likely would. He had escaped only with the help of a human and now they must go back, at once, to rescue those left behind.

  He was taken to yang’Tak’s governor. Not to the Hall of the Senators, but to Governor Ro’zhe’t herself, and before her and her consuls, he told the story again.

  She did not ask questions. She did not interrupt. When he had said it all, she offered him a seat and, at his refusal, said simply, “Go home.”
r />   He stared at her.

  “Your part in this is over, Nk’os’a’knko, and you have the thanks of our beleaguered people. Go home and be healed.”

  He was escorted from the consulate, too stunned to argue, and taken home.

  The reunion was a haze across his mind. He remembered his father seizing him, sharing breath for the first time since his fifth molt, when he’d decided he was far too grown for such intimate displays. His brothers running to embrace him…and his younger brother had children, the youngest of them nearly to his fourth molt! His father’s father had died, and Y’si’di left for her family House according to custom, but she came to see him and tore off her veils to touch him with her naked hands. They all exclaimed over T’aki, wanting to touch and hold him until the boy fastened himself to Sanford’s leg and would not let go. Finally, his father took him to a room—his uncle Ka’wuta’s room, it used to be—and left him alone.

  “When are we leaving?” asked T’aki.

  “Soon, I hope,” Sanford replied.

  The next day, he was back at the consulate. They admitted him. He waited in the Great Yawn until Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and he had his say again. Again she listened, asked no questions, made no interruptions. And again, she sent him home.

  He went. But he came back.

  Every day, he woke, he ate, he placed T’aki in his family’s care, and he made the journey to yang’Tak’s commanding seat, where he climbed the hundred steps to the consulate door and demanded entry. Every day, he got it while lobbyists, reporters and senators were turned away. Every day, Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and every day, she sent him home once she had.

  It rained. It stormed. It began to freeze. Sanford stood stubbornly in the Great Yawn with ice dripping off his palps and freezing to his chest-plate. Ro’zhe’t sent security out with hot drinks and a wrap on the worst days, but she always sent him home when his impassioned words to her were done.

  He returned to his family’s House one night to find that T’aki had molted, and he had not been there to see it, explain it, rub warm oil into the pale new chitin or carry the old one proudly out to be burnt. He saw accusation in his brother’s eyes—his brother, who had done a father’s duty while Sanford stood about all day in the consulate for nothing—but when he went in to tuck his son into his nest, all T’aki said was, “Will she still know me?”

  “She will always know you,” Sanford said.

  “When are we leaving?” asked T’aki, clutching at his hand.

  “Soon,” said Sanford. “I hope.”

  And the days passed.

  At last, as spring’s thaw began to push back the grey sheets of ice on the consulate steps, the governor said, “It is not so simple as just going back. We cannot go to such a place, meet with such a people, and make such a demand unless we are prepared to go to war.”

  “Not every human is responsible for the atrocities of our captivity.”

  “But they are atrocities,” she said quietly. “And those who are responsible would seem to be in power. I will not go to this world with empty hands and snap my palps and hope for compliance. I will go only when I know I can see the thing done. Bloodlessly, if possible, but I will be prepared for war. This requires a fleet of warships.”

  He threw up his hands and skreed frustration so piercingly that guards burst in and had to be coolly dismissed by the governor.

  “It is nearly done,” she told him once they were gone. “They tell me within the next two ten-spans, we will be ready to launch. Our military forces have been called and fitted, and stand ready to board. These things take time, Nk’os’a’knko, but we will have our people home. Your part is done, and done very well. Go home.”

  He did. And he went back again the next morning.

  For six days, she refused the single request he made. On the seventh, with a certain bitter resignation, she gave in and allowed him two places on the flagship for the return to Earth, on the condition that he not bother her between then and launching.

  He agreed. The next twelve days saw silence between them.

  On the thirteenth, the launching of the fleet. Two hours after the ships were underway, Sanford was standing outside the command center. He had a new request to make. She heard him out, her antennae twitching slightly with incredulity. She refused.

  The flight to Earth was every bit as lengthy as it had been to yang’Tak, but Sanford spent very little of it with his son. Every day, he went to the command deck and down the hall to the governor’s suite and asked to see her. Sometimes she made him wait all day, but eventually, her doors opened. She always listened. She asked no questions. She did not interrupt. She just said no.

  “How long are you going to do this?” the ship’s commander asked him once, leaning against the sealed hatchway to the command deck.

  “I spent twenty years rebuilding one code-bank,” Sanford replied. “I have learned the value of patience.”

  The commander clicked thoughtfully and stepped aside.

  Governor Ro’zhe’t said no.

  They came to Earth (“You say they can understand us, that they have devices for translation?”) and seized the signals of every media satellite in orbit around the world. Across the planet, every television broke into a flurry of static and came back with Ro’zhe’t’s voice.

  “People of Earth,” she said. “Many years ago, a ship came to you in desperate trouble, its people stranded, helpless, afraid. You took them by force from their failing ship, detained them, imprisoned them and tortured them. What might have been a dawning of historic peace and unity has become an outrage to our every sense! Our offspring, burned alive or branded! Our injured, starved or slain outright! Our people, forced to live in squalor under the shadow of your guns! No more!”

  In the hall outside the command deck, Sanford paced, listening.

  “Our ships even now are targeted upon these camps of slavery and death. I strongly advise you to assist in the evacuation in any way that you can, because any resistance from any one of you will be viewed as an open declaration of war and answered accordingly. This is not a negotiation of terms. Do not doubt we have the power to annihilate your people without ever setting foot upon your soil, and do not doubt the vehement will of my people to do just that. This is my only mercy, humans. Comply or be destroyed.”

  Following the termination of this speech, control of the satellites was relinquished, where it promptly began to be re-broadcast by the terrified population of a planet that somehow never thought this day would come. The ships drove down through the atmosphere and separated to hover above each teeming mass of yang’ti life-sign that indicated a camp. There were more of them now. The first transport freighters disembarked, and eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t left the deck, stopped, and stared at Sanford in the hall.

  He made his same request.

  She listened crossly, refrained from interruption, and refused. Her guards escorted him to his room, where he sat with his son and watched Earth’s media feeds try to make sense of what had just happened.

  He was glad he watched. Over the next several hours, he saw IBI’s people in panic, and as many of them fled, more and more of Earth’s reporters managed to get into the camps that had been off-limits for so long. Images were taken, broadcast. People saw for the first time the world in which the yang’ti had been condemned to live: Charred hatcheries, crumbling houses, naked children crawling over refuse for rats, mutilated yang’ti lying in rubble, corpses abandoned in the fly-blown streets.

  And they were horrified.

  As the world leaders scrambled to both contact the orbiting fleet and console their own panicking people, other humans—the true population—mobilized. Within an hour, they were there: the Red Cross, the PeaceCorps, the National Guard, the Salvation Army, even private citizens in their own vehicles, working under the suspicious eyes of the yang’ti soldiers to help organize the evacuees, to provide food and water, or just to help carry the injured to the waiting freighter
s. It was good to see what he’d once never imagined he would ever see, and what he’d known he would, having known Sarah.

  It was not entirely bloodless. IBI, seemingly leaderless in these last desperate hours, engaged in violent fits both against the evacuating yang’ti and the humans who tried to help them. The native armies of several countries where camps had been established also attempted to confront and disarm yang’ti soldiers, and were dealt with mercilessly. Those few belligerent individuals who came to lob rocks at the departing aliens were also destroyed, but the violence seldom escalated once it became apparent whose weaponry was superior.

  By working two freighters at each camp, with one shuttle on standby for those requiring severe and immediate medical aid, and sending out Sweeps on foot with DNA-scanners once the population began to thin, the camps were emptied in only three days. Sanford watched it all, excepting the time he took to sleep and to hunt down Ro’zhe’t to make his day’s request. At the end of that time, there was a lull, as human leaders again attempted contact with apologies and lies, human reporters speculated on what could come next, and yang’ti concerned themselves with organizing hundreds of thousands of frightened, agitated, and malnourished refugees into the ships brought to hold them. Eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t returned to the media.

  “Perhaps I was not clear,” this second broadcast began. “And in the interests of preserving whatever peace can be preserved with a race as murderous as yours, I will endeavor to clarify. We will not leave even one of our people in your hands. We demand the return of all. I give you one more of your days—just one—to bring those you are holding in sadistic captivity to one of the prearranged evacuation points. At the end of that time, I will release my patrols to sweep your planet for victims you may foolishly think to hide. With the use of certain devices, be assured, we can detect even one of our people from among your own, even under twenty kilometers of electronic baffle and rock, and I promise you a vengeance to equal holy Ko’vi’s wrath should we find one. Do not attempt to plead for time. You have had better than twenty years already and see what you have done with it.”