Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  When she emerged from the command deck, there was Sanford, and for the first time in her political career, utterly unmindful of who might be watching (or recording; the evacuations were not only historic news to Earth), Governor Ro’zhe’t snapped, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you want?”

  “You know what I want,” he answered.

  “No! No! A thousand times, no! By Ko’vi, I think it’s been a thousand times! We are here for our people, Nk’os’a’knko, ours! I have neither the time nor the resources, nor, the truth be known, the slightest inclination to allow you to run about on Earth chasing a human when our people are still dying! No!”

  There was only one more argument he could make. He made it.

  She stared at him.

  Her guards, highly-trained to discretion and hand-picked to show no reaction to the delicate things said in her presence, glanced his way. One of them even clicked.

  Sanford stared right back at her, refusing either to plea further or to explain.

  At last, at very long last, she said, “You couldn’t possibly hope to find—”

  Sanford pulled a medical canister of genetic preservative from his satchel and slammed it down on the short ledge that ran along the hall’s panels. He said nothing.

  Ro’zhe’t’s antennae flattened. She pressed hard on the soft plates above her eyes. “You are putting me in an ugly position, Nk’os’a’knko.”

  “I could say the same for you.”

  “Yes…I suppose you could.” She paced away, muttering something that sounded like, “Piss in a cup and drink it.” But then she came back and said, “Take command of a Sweep. You may deploy with the rest of them after the given period of grace has elapsed and you may stay only, only, until the last of them has reported back. After that, whether you are successful in your search or not, I will order your men to bring you back to the ship. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, Governor.”

  “Your persistence has been sand under my shell for years now, Nk’os’a’knko. Years.” She looked at him, oddly softened, though no less annoyed. “You should have told me the reason long before this.”

  “Should I?” he shot back. “I thought the rescue of a good person reason enough.

  “Don’t snap those at me, son. You have only one to account for. I have millions.” She held his stare until he dropped his eyes, then clicked a kind of peace-making goodbye and sent him away.

  Sanford went to his room, sat on his bed and rubbed at his eye plates until he became aware of T’aki huddled at his side. The boy’s antennae were flat and tensely quivering, but he did not ask the question which had to be burning in his throat. Nevertheless, Sanford answered it.

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  * * *

  “…You have had better than twenty years, and see what you have done with it.”

  The bug’s image left the screen. The President’s returned, considerably more aged than it had been on the golf course last week, when van Meyer met with him to discuss the outwork programs in Cottonwood and Palmside. He had laughed then, made jokes about burning citronella along the roads to keep the bugs from wandering. Now he gazed earnestly at the camera and told his fellow Americans that they had all been lied to. The United States was a land of freedom and equality and would never condone the slavery of any people. The perpetrators of these heinous acts would be rooted out and prosecuted, and the hearts of the American people naturally went out to the Visitors and their much-abused people.

  The Visitors now. Ja.

  Outside, somewhere in the compound, gunfire and shouting briefly tore the air. Another retreat, halted. He had given no orders to execute deserters, but the loyalists did anyway. It made them feel better, less prone to panic themselves. He did not mind, but it bothered him that no one had yet thought even to ask for orders. He had none to give them anyway.

  It was all falling down.

  The camps were empty. Even before the conclusion of the bug’s first stirring speech (the networks relayed it with subtitles within the hour, but van Meyer did not require them. His ear had long been attuned even to the delicate tonal nuance of click and chir), his allies had abandoned him. The rats know first when the ship sinks, they say, and van Meyer had known it was over when his operation’s manager in Silverbrook called to say his men had left. They took their guns, left their whores, and abandoned all posts, as fickle as any common shiprat. Brackendale was next and then Fox Lake and Sweetwater, and by noon of that first day, he had no friends left in any country and no place to go.

  He came here, to his Zero, to his home upon the sea. And it was business as usual here in the laboratories, for a time. His captive bugs had not, of course, heard the transmissions, and his worker-sheep were all intent on doing all the research they could now that supply seemed about to dry up. All was, if not good, at least a comforting false front.

  And then the second broadcast, and all the worker-sheep who had spoken so convincingly of the pure pursuits of Science suddenly became concerned also with their lives. If the bug did indeed have such devices as they claimed, then Zero was a death warrant the size of a city.

  No one asked van Meyer for instructions. There was fighting, but only amongst themselves, and at its sorting-out, the cells were emptied. All the bugs were placed in trucks, driven onto aircraft, flown to an evacuation point. The young bugs had to be loaded in swaddles, unable to adjust to open space and stimulation after four years in little boxes. Several died in transport from the shock alone. Now they were all gone, and still it was not enough. Of a sudden, his faithful sheep recalled that the prisoners who had gone scampering home had come from this very laboratory, these very cells, and they may remember it. They may come back.

  And they may, in all honesty.

  For the first time in many weeks, van Meyer thought of Pollyanna. Pretty Pollyanna, no longer so pretty, but still nicely contained, who had once called him a common criminal, doomed to be overthrown, or words to that effect. That sooner or later, people will always do the right thing. Precious. To that, he would now make a correction: When no other alternative remains, people will do the right thing.

  That time had come, it would seem. And now it was all falling down.

  More gunfire. Van Meyer went to the window and gazed out at the lot, watching his sheep slaughter one another. He thought of Pollyanna, who had told him this day would come. And he’d told her the ship had been shot down. She hadn’t believed him, not at first, and it had never broken her quite the way he’d hoped. He wondered if she knew this was finally happening, if it made her happy, gave her peace. He hummed a little, thinking of her. Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

  The door opened. “Oh Christ, here you are!”

  “Piotr. Come in. Drink?”

  “Drink?” His faithful hyena surged forward, wild-eyed, incredulous. “Are you seeing what’s happening out there? I can’t find anyone! The lab is a mess. People are stealing the computers, the files, the fucking dead bugs! You have to get down there!”

  “I see.”

  “Now!”

  “Of course.” Van Meyer straightened his jacket and turned away from the window. “Have you another gun, my friend?” he asked.

  Piotr checked himself, blinking rapidly, and raked his hand over his head. “Yeah, yeah, I do.” Belt, shirt, breast…there, an Italian pistol tucked into his boot, fifteen rounds in a plastic grip. He passed it over, already looking calmer, almost reverent, and why not? In all the years of their partnership, he had never seen van Meyer fire a gun. He owned the men who fired them. To see him take one now must seem to him like Christ taking up a whip to cleanse the temples.

  “Thank you,” van Meyer said, and clasped his hyena’s shoulder. “Men like us, nee, we control our own destiny and do not cry when the check come due.”

  “No, sir.”

  “We were close, nee? We were at the cusp.”

  “We still have it all,” Piotr said intently. “We’ve got the weapons, we’ve got the ships…we can
still get it all out of here. We can start over.”

  “Ja, you encourage me. You have always been good and faithful dog. Say goodbye, please, to our pretty Pollyanna. Tell her for me, no bug lick up the blood of Damek van Meyer. To the end, human spirit remain indomitable.”

  He smiled, put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  So the Sweep went on, just as planned—or just as threatened, depending on one’s perspective—with one exception: one soldier at the head of one patrol had calibrated his DNA-scanner not in general, but to a precise and individual match, a match made with blood wiped from Sarah’s brow four long years ago. Before the ship’s engines fired, before the escape from Earth had been realized, that blood had been raced to a medical station and preserved for this day, the day he returned.

  The scanner found her; the signal existed and the signal gave signs of life. It was his only hope and encouragement. The scanner could not tell him if she were whole and well, if she were captive, sick or injured. The soldier who still thought of himself as Sanford knew where he had left the woman the signal tracked, and he thought captivity and injury only too likely. This so, no matter how near she was or how smoothly the Sweep was going in other parts of the world, he hurried now.

  There was too much smoke when they landed for him to see the ocean and no sense of waves underfoot when he first ran out onto the deck. He did not recognize the floating city, not even when he led them at a run up the short ramp and blasted a hole through the sealed hatchway into the very room he had escaped from. Only when he was inside it, in an old storeroom for munitions and armor, did the first twinge of recognition prick at him. Here, after securing the empty room and stepping aside to allow the Sweep to open the door and explode out into the hall, Sanford’s eye was distracted, first by old charring and bullet-sign tattooed into the walls, and then, to his shock, the small room he had just come through, where the pod that had been his escape craft had been stored. Only then did he realize he had come back to the terrible place called Zero.

  And she had never left it.

  T’aki ran on ahead, calling to him in frightened tones. The other soldiers responded aggressively, spilling out into the halls with weapons aimed, too ready to fire. They had seen things no soldier, no matter how well-trained, is every truly prepared to see, and the sound of a small child’s fear had become as good as a killing command to them.

  He shouldn’t be here, T’aki. The governor had been against it, and he had family enough on yang’Tak to have cared for him while this return flight was made, but Sanford had not allowed their arguments to sway him. They thought he was afraid to lose sight of his son after the horrors of Earth, and he let them think so. He was not. He let T’aki return to Earth and he had fought for the boy’s presence on this Sweep for one reason: T’aki deserved to be here. He had suffered and risked just as much as any of them, and he deserved to be here at the end and not shut worlds away where he would have to wait four more years just to hear someone else tell him about it. Perhaps that made him a bad father. He chose to believe it would also make T’aki a better man.

  The signal led him through the laboratory. It had not changed much. Seasoned soldiers stared around them in horror at the victims IBI had not believed they would discover. He supposed they had believed that dead flesh would not be targeted by a DNA-Sweep. Humans had been very wrong about most things when it came to yang’ti.

  “Destroy it,” said Sanford, knowing the men under his command would not leave the labs until they had, not for his fool’s errand. “But quickly. She’s this way.”

  Humans caught in the laboratory screamed as soldiers opened fire, but they were not targets. Not yet, anyway. If Sanford had not been there, perhaps the story would have another ending. It was so easy to see an alien as less than a person, easy to kill, and these men more than most, as they ran and tried to hide under tables where their own dead kin lay, chitin open and hearts removed. Fire was the best they could do for their unnamed brothers and sisters now, but they used that fire until nothing, no drop of blood or scrap of tissue, remained for the humans to test. Then they moved on, more furious than before.

  The cells.

  The first they passed was the worst of them, not because of what they saw, but of what they had missed seeing. It was a large room, ten meters tall, fifty meters long, but only five, perhaps, deep. Across that longest wall were boxes, metal boxes just one meter cubed, featureless apart from a single door and a few air holes, stacked floor to ceiling in a single layer. Each was numbered. A cart on a robotic arm ensured human access to every box, if desired, but tubes were in place to provide nutrition and pipes to take waste away. No hand need ever touch the young yang’ti locked inside.

  They had all seen the children whose captivity had been spent in these boxes—grey-shelled, hollow-eyed children who started at every movement, and who would sit for hours touching their own receptor pads, speechless—but they had not been able to imagine the cages. This was what the Dark Man had planned for T’aki.

  What followed after that was almost easier to bear. Row upon row of empty cells, marked by years of graffiti. Prisoners using blood, chaw, and even piss for paints kept calendars, drew pictures, and wrote words of seething hate, plaintive confusion, and utter despair across the walls that had hemmed them in so many years. My name is still In’d’keo, said one. Another, beneath the shakily-drawn image of tall and small figures, wrote, I am not afraid. I am ready to hold you again. But it was the third, in the style of the old poets, that gave Sanford the first flare of hope: I hear her singing / human throat like a flute they cannot break / Now when she is silent / I know / it is for me to sing / and her to hear. And the fourth, even more telling: If they can do this to their own kind, what hope is there for us?

  She had to be close.

  The signal, leading him on as humans scattered before him, until he reached the only door still locked in this terrible prison.

  “Open it,” he said, when a human was caught and brought to him.

  “We complied with the evacuations,” the human told him, stinking of fear and still defiant.

  Sanford pulled his after-burner and pushed it close enough to the human’s face that the hair above his enormous eyes smoldered. “Open this door.”

  “There’s no bu…There’s none of your kind in there!”

  Sanford’s finger moved to the kill-switch.

  “I’m doing it!” the human yelled, fumbling in his clothes. “But there’s no bugs in there! You’re wrong! No bugs!”

  He swiped his card. The heavy metal door rolled back.

  She was singing.

  It was no more than a whisper of sound in the dark cell, strengthless, tuneless, but she was singing. He shoved the human into the arms of one of his men and took a step forward, seeing only empty corners and fresh bloodstains. It was the voice of a ghost.

  “Touch me where’m bleedin…kiss me where’m torn…love is…love is…love is dang’ris…”

  And silence.

  “It’s not a bug,” the human stammered.

  Sanford gave the DNA-scanner blindly to a pair of hands behind him. He took another step, breathing too hard and too fast. “Sarah?”

  “Love is…love is dang’ris…”

  “I see her!” T’aki ran and dropped, peering under the room’s only furnishing—a metal plank, bolted to the wall for use as a bed. And she was under it, impossibly small, lost in shadow. T’aki reached in, drew back, and wrung his hands for the first time in years. He shook his head, reduced in the extremity of his anguish to human gestures yet again. “I—I can’t touch her, Father.”

  Soldiers held the human at the cell’s door, shifting nervously from leg to leg as they watched Sanford approach and hunker low. He saw flesh, torn, opened, decaying upon her living bones, too many injuries to be counted. The sound of her breath was ragged and uneven; she did not respond to her name when he spoke it. He reached in and, like his son, hesitated because he cou
ld not see a place whole enough to touch.

  Whispering her name, he drove his hands in anyway, caught her arms close to her body, and pulled her out across a slick of her own blood into the light.

  “Blessed Ko’vi, pray for us sinners,” muttered a soldier.

  “It’s not a bug,” said the human again, and the soldier holding him cracked him in the head and sent him unconscious to the floor to be kicked away.

  They’d taken her hair off, done something to her head; there were burns all around her temple, burns that almost looked electric in origin. They’d starved her, yes, and beaten her until her human bones stretched out her skin in lumps and angles. They’d cut her belly at least ten times, the scars criss-crossing into mindless roadwork. They’d cut her fingers off, all but two on her left hand, and those two were black and broken. There were wounds all over her body, but the worst was on her leg, where infection had eaten her open down to the bone. She looked like nothing human, nothing yang’ti, nothing that could live.

  Sanford pulled a mister from his belt and held it up before her swollen mouth. He pressed the switch and released a cloud of stabilizer on her next ragged inhalation. She coughed on it, opened her eyes, and did not know him. She closed them again and her lips moved in silent song.

  “Is that going to help?” one of his men asked.

  He didn’t know. He eased her carefully up into his arms and held her, counting down the seconds he would have to wait.

  “Sarah.” T’aki touched her cheek, the only span of unbruised flesh he could see. “Sarah, listen. Sarah.”

  She opened her eyes again, head lolling, and groaned. She blinked, focused. Her lips trembled. “Oh,” she said. “I’m dreaming.” Her words were strange, softened. They’d broken away most of her teeth. She reached up and touched him with her two remaining fingers. She smiled. “And you carry me to the bed and lay me down,” she said. Her hand dropped. She began to drift away.