by R. Lee Smith
But he didn’t, and it really didn’t matter because soon afterwards, they gave up on voluntary procreation and moved her to the lab to harvest her ovaries. God alone knew what they did to get material from the yang’ti, but they must have done something, because there were plenty of implantations.
And of course it hadn’t worked. No matter what they did, no matter what ‘treatment’ they used, nothing they put in her grew. After so long (years, she thought, although she didn’t know how many), she dared to hope they’d given up on the idea, and certainly, they’d given up on her as brood-queen of this new race. It had been months since the last attempt, months since anything big, really. Sometimes she went days entirely untouched, just fed and watered and occasionally hosed down. Cared for, as minimally as possible, until van Meyer could think of something new to do with her.
And then something happened. What was it? Some commotion in the halls, all frightened voices and shouting and slamming doors. They took the yang’ti away, but not her. She slept, she woke, she dreamed. Then Piotr came, not with van Meyer, but all alone. She thought he shot a doctor in the doorway, but maybe she dreamed that part. She didn’t dream what happened next, though.
God, he really hurt her this time. Pounding on her, kicking and stomping on her, screaming something about it being her fault. She’d blacked out a couple of times, but he kept bringing her back out of it. When she finally woke alone, she couldn’t believe it. She remembered being terrified of the emptiness, knowing he was still there somewhere, invisible. She crawled under her bench where it was small and safe and no one could find her, and there she slept again, and dreamed, and maybe died.
Had she died? She really didn’t think she was sleeping, so what did that leave? This had to be one of the other dreams, the waking dreams. If so, it was a really nice one.
Sarah worked her eyes open. The room was dark and swam with peaceful color. She thought she was in bed, a soft bed, softer than any she’d ever been in. Except maybe her bed at Cottonwood. Memory gel. With heating and cooling functions. Where Fagin barfed up a wax orange the very first day.
Oh Fagin…
A blur of bluish-green swam closer. She drew it into focus, feeling no urgency. Urgency had a way of splintering the waking dreams back into the cell, into reality. She wasn’t crazy yet, couldn’t live in these worlds all the time. It took effort.
T’aki. T’aki’s little round head and big eyes peeking over the side of the mattress. She guessed she knew where she was now. Dreaming of the cabin, the morning after the Great Escape. Lemon jelly doughnuts on her pillow and Sanford’s arms around her like prickly bars of iron. But it wasn’t quite the same. It was a nicer bed, for one thing. For another—
“I’m forgetting what you looked like,” Sarah croaked, gazing at him mournfully. “You were shorter.”
“I grew,” the ghost of T’aki said.
Then he put his arms up and crawled onto the side of the bed. Sarah groaned, shrinking back. The dreams talked to her all the time and that was fine, but they couldn’t touch her. When T’aki touched her, when his arms passed insubstantially through her own, he would wink away and her heart would break all over. Her heart was always breaking. It just couldn’t keep doing that before it gave up and stopped.
And then, cool chitin touched her shoulders. She gasped hard (a sure way to wake up these days, but her broken ribs didn’t hurt; nothing hurt) and lay frozen as the small body snuggled up against her, pulling his arms and legs up small between them.
“Hold me,” T’aki chirred, pressing his head against her chest. “You can’t hurt me. Hold me tight. I have to feel you hold me, okay?”
She didn’t want to move. Moving would wake her up. She didn’t want to touch him. Touching him would wake her up. But he was here. She brought her arms up slowly, pressing her shaking fingertips to his smooth shell, and neither he nor the room around her vanished. She squeezed, squeezed until her disbelieving arms ached, but he stayed solid. Sobbing, she rolled onto her side and curled up around him, her hands cupping and patting at his head, rubbing his back, pricking themselves on the first tiny thorns growing from his little arms and legs. He chirred, tiny palps vibrating against her breastbone, and he stayed real.
“You are bigger,” she managed to say at last. “You did grow. You’re not going to be my jellybean much longer.”
“Always always.” He uncurled and cupped her face in his strange, centipede-like fingers, staring anxiously into her eyes. “You were in a long time. They wouldn’t let me see you. And then you slept and slept. But you’re better now, right?”
Her head swam. She shook it and touched him again, stroking his soft throat under his palps so that he closed his eyes and chirred again. He felt so real. She had to be awake.
“Can you get up?” T’aki asked. “I want to show you.”
“Show me…” She pulled her hand back and stared at it, her head swimming harder. She had fingers. She touched them as T’aki climbed down from the bed. Perfect fingers, all ten of them, baby-pale and smooth against her thin, rough palm.
Hesitantly, she touched her mouth and felt teeth, all her teeth…even her wisdom molars, and she’d had those pulled when she was fourteen. She ran her hands down her chest and her ribs were all solid beneath her skin. She was wearing…wearing…what was she wearing? A soft white tent, with holes for her arms and neck, faintly shiny, thin but heavy. Heart pounding, she pushed back the bedsheets (same fabric, she noticed), pulled up her gown-thing, and stared in awe at her straight, white legs. Even the scar from falling off Kate’s bike that summer was gone. Her hair…no, her hair was still gone, but so were the scars left by Dr. Chapel’s electroshock ‘treatments’.
“Sarah?” And he bounced, that absolutely fundamental T’aki-bounce. “Come and see!”
She got up (white gown, soft bed, new body…I’m dead) and let him take her hand and lead her to the window. She could see the stars outside, so beautiful, brighter than they’d ever been, even in Brookings. Stars and stars and then the cool, blue curve of the glowing Earth.
Sarah’s breath puffed out of her. She put her hand up to touch the glass, but it wasn’t glass. Just like the walls weren’t plaster, she supposed, and the sheet she was wearing wasn’t cotton. She looked at Earth and saw, hanging suspended all around it, sleek black ships alive with lights.
‘The Fortesque Freeship is right outside…’ Had she dreamed that? Sounded familiar. She felt T’aki’s hand reach up to catch hers; she found the receptor-pads in his palm and stroked them gently.
“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said.
“Did you…Did you get everyone?”
“Yes.”
And she turned, because that wasn’t T’aki, that was—
He’d been sitting on a bench in the darkest side of the room. Now he stood and came a few steps toward her. Just a few. She knew him at once, and then wondered how she knew, because all his clothes were different. Gone was the flannel shirt and cargo shorts patched with duct tape. Gone were the carpenter’s belts and the ammo strap full of batteries. His vest was black and green and shimmered, not ostentatiously, but just enough to be both bold and striking. His breeches had a herringbone texture pressed into the dark fabric and a front panel of more shimmery black. His feet were covered; she hadn’t been able even to imagine the shoes that could fit over the yang’ti foot, but there they were. And his clothes were moot, they were entirely moot, because even in the dimness of this strange room, those were Sanford’s eyes.
“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said again. “To the big house. It has a yard like yours did, only bigger. Father’s father says you can have the green room.”
Sarah looked out the window at Earth. ‘I’m not ready,’ she thought, surprised. Even in the Great Escape, she’d only thought about getting them away, never about what would happen after. Leave Earth?
No more cheeseburgers, no Chinese food? No new dog chasing Fagin’s old rubber ball, no more hope of ever catching a Forte
sque B-Flick on the late-night sci-fi station? No Halloween, no Christmas. No car that she could drive, no favorite book she’d ever pick up at a garage sale. No garage sales, maybe. Leave Earth.
“Or Father says…we can have a new house. If you like that better.”
Sarah tickled at his palm, smiling at Earth, her last look at Earth. “It really doesn’t matter, jellybean,” she said. “We’re family wherever we go.”
He hugged her thighs, both together, no longer just a knee-high hopper, but nearly as tall as her hip. She rubbed his head and then his shoulder-joints, and looked at Sanford over her shoulder, thinking, ‘I’m going to have to meet this man’s father,’ but how bad could the in-laws be when they were willing to give her the green room? She heard herself laugh a little. Actually laugh. What had happened to the last four years?
Sanford clicked, unlocking T’aki’s reluctant arms. Then the boy was leaving, and no sooner had he cleared those whooshing Star-Trek doors than Sanford began to remove his totally moot clothes. She laughed again, her hand pressed flat against the sleek non-glass surface of the window, and watched him come for her. She didn’t think it was possible to remove pants while walking, but he did it. Easily.
He pulled the gown over her head. She raised her arms to help and lowered them again around his neck. His palps fanned. They breathed together. He lifted her into his ridiculously stick-like and thorn-spiked arms and carried her to the bed.
“I’m not dreaming, am I?” she asked as he lay her down. “I dream this one a lot. Please be real.”
He breathed again, then touched his palps along her neck, the very tips lightly drumming as he maneuvered himself atop her in the most painful, least comfortable, and perfect position. He was real. He was real shifting her legs wide around his thorny thighs, real when she felt him enter and plunge deep. He looked into her eyes and came at once, his hard chest pressed firmly over her breast, trembling slightly in his paralytic spasm.
She held him until it cleared, and when he blinked and softly chirred, she reached up and found a place beside his mouth to kiss. They shared breath again and she relaxed back into the bedding, wonderfully at peace.
“Here I have been, in this moment,” he said, “since I left you behind me. Now you are here. I am ready to move on. Come with me.”
She nodded once, and he reared back and began to move inside her.
Oh, he would. Out of reach so there was nothing she could do but lie there and take it. Sarah arched, hands slipping over his smooth shell, giving in first to strained whimpers and then to full cries. Why not? This was what he wanted and the walls seemed pretty thick to her. She surrendered up to it entirely and lived in that moment, cumming easily and inexorably as the tides, long after time and place ceased to having any meaning.
It ended as it began, with him lowering himself tight against her heart and washing her aching womb with his cool release. When he was back, he pulled the sheet up over both of them and lay close, still joined, motionless, sealed together in his cocoon and breathing one another’s air.
“I am you,” he whispered, soft against her skin. “I have always been you.”
“And I am you,” she answered, feeling silly, but in a good way, the best way.
“Tell me when you are ready for more.”
“I’m ready now,” she said, embracing him.
And so, apparently, was he.
* * *
He made her go to dinner. She didn’t want to go, but not even her protests swayed him. He donned his clothes relentlessly, draped her in hers, stuck his head out into the other room to order T’aki to wash up, and came back to pull the sheets off the bed. Dinner was not negotiable.
“But why do we have to go out?” Sarah grumbled, stubbornly lying on the bare bed. “Don’t tell me that your advanced technology can shoot you across the galaxy faster than the speed of light but you still have to walk all the way down to the cafeteria to make a sandwich. Can’t we just…press some magic buttons and bring dinner to us? Then we can stay in and make love all night.”
“On every night hereafter,” he promised, coming to tow her gently but decisively onto her feet. “Tonight, we go out.”
“Why?”
“It’s a party!” T’aki chirped, bouncing on the bed with one shoe on and one held over his head. “A big party!”
“How big?” Sarah asked, alarmed.
Sanford caught up his son and set him firmly down again. “They know who you are,” he said, strapping on the errant shoe and tightening the other. “They expect to see you at my side.”
“Sanford, I—I can’t do that to them. A human at your big rescue party? Seriously, no. Some of them are bound to hate me.”
“No. Not where we are going. This, I promise you.”
His promise was good enough. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.
They left his rooms and went out into the hall, Sarah walking in between Sanford and T’aki, one of her hands held by each of them. They looked good, she thought, all dressed in green and black, their chitin shining and heads held high. She looked like a bald lady in a bed sheet.
They passed a lot of yang’ti in the hall. Too many. Not going anywhere, but just standing there, crowded together, as if they’d been waiting just to see them. Some of them buzzed when she passed them, a buzz that came in pulses through fanned palps, almost as if they were spitting the sound at her, except…it didn’t sound angry. She thought she saw faces she knew among them, even thought she saw John Byrnes—John Byrnes, the first alien she’d ever met—and she tried to stop and see if it was really him, but whoever it was merely raised one hand in a slight wave and ducked away.
Sanford took her to an elevator (an elevator on a spaceship!) and as soon as the doors shut on the buzzing hall, she sagged back into the wall and whoofed out breath.
“You’re doing fine,” Sanford said.
“They like you,” added T’aki.
“It doesn’t feel real, any of it. All those people and…” She touched her gown, rubbing nervously over her stomach and feeling it smooth and whole beneath the fabric. She tried to laugh. “I was in the cell just yesterday.”
“No, you weren’t,” said T’aki. “You were in the vat. For days and days and—”
“Hush. Sarah. You have left the cell, Sarah.” Sanford touched her hand. “I have left Cottonwood. We are here now. We are moving on and we do not have to bring that with us.”
The elevator finished going up and went sideways for a while. Very futurific. She giggled, watching the lights fly by. “Tell me about the green room,” she said, just to say something.
“It has a big window,” T’aki chirped promptly. “Over the yard. And a big, big bed. Father’s father said that was important.”
“Hush,” Sanford said again, in that tone that meant he’d be smiling if he could.
“Okay, so…they’re all clear on that, uh, that aspect of things.” Sarah rubbed at her blushing cheeks. “Good.”
“If not entirely at ease, I warn you. But they will be happy to welcome you home.” He hesitated, clicking. “If you would prefer a house of our own—”
“After so many years, I would never dream of taking you from your family.” Her stomach tried to twist; she forced it calm and smiled for him. “I’m sure we’ll…we’ll all get along just fine.”
“Yes.”
“There are fourteen people in the house,” T’aki inserted. “And five of them are children, but I’m the youngest.”
Dear Lord. That was a lot of in-laws to win over.
Sanford squeezed her hand.
The elevator stopped, went up three more floors, and then opened the doors. Sarah looked up and got hit in the face by a wall of pulsating buzzes. Not a hallway now, not a hundred yang’ti in single file waiting to watch her walk by, but a room, a huge room, so full of them that there were guards—not armed, but still obviously guards—keeping a path clear to the doors at the opposite side. To her shock, she actually did know faces in this crowd
, not many, but more than a few, from both Cottonwood and the bio-lab. It threw her, badly. She’d guessed by now that the buzzing was some kind of cheering, but she’d assumed it was for Sanford, the hero, the bringer of the cavalry. Now she realized with a hot flare that they were also cheering for her.
Her legs buckled. Sanford’s arm slipped around her waist, holding her up in an unobtrusive way. T’aki still kept his grip on her hand, waving and buzzing cheerfully back at the crowd, oblivious.
“Do you see the doors?” Sanford asked. “We will go through the doors. We will sit down. We will eat. We will hear a few stories. You are not expected to speak. We will go back to our room. We will put T’aki to bed. We will copulate many times—”
She laughed.
“—and we will sleep. It is the only time, do you understand?” He clicked in her ear, then added, “Until we are home on yang’Tak. Then, one more, my family only.”
“Okay.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
She started walking. The buzzing got louder. They were on every side of her, some of them slapping rhythmically at their chest plates or shouting as she passed by. If there were words in what they were chanting, she couldn’t make them out. All she heard was noise; all she saw were armored bodies and vibrating palps. That dream-like sense of unreality began to well up, trying to tell her this wasn’t really happening, that she would close her eyes and open them back in the cell, smelling the stink of old urine and rotten meat, hearing nothing but the stuttering of her stubborn heart and the rasp of her shallow breaths echoing off the empty walls. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t over; it was just a matter of time until she woke up.
And just then, like an iron spike through her rising panic, came a voice she knew, a voice she never thought she’d hear again: “Sure, just walk on by, caseworker. Don’t even say hello.”
Sanford tried to keep her walking (his antennae snapped flat, annoyed), but Sarah dug in her feet and made him stop. She turned around, searching the mash of yang’ti faces and there he was, just behind one of the guards, his arms folded human-style, looking at her.
