by R. Lee Smith
Samaritan.
Shock held her in place for a second or two. Then Sarah let go of T’aki’s hand and started toward him. Sanford caught at her arm. She waved him back distractedly and kept going. The other yang’ti buzzed louder, some of them slapping at their chest-plates now. The guards looked at each other and stepped uncertainly aside to let her pass if she wanted, leaving her target open to her. Samaritan, exposed, uncrossed his arms and looked wary.
“Go ahead,” he said when she reached him. “I love that rough pre-play.”
“I heard your voice a lot in that cell,” Sarah said, looking straight into his eyes. “And it got me through the worst days of my life. I told myself that if I lived, I’d find a way to tell you that, and that you are the biggest asshole I have ever known.”
He blinked, thought about that, shrugged a little.
“And I guess sometimes that’s what it takes,” said Sarah, as quietly as the buzzing room allowed. “I’m glad I got to see you again.”
She put out her hand.
He looked at it, then beyond her, presumably to where Sanford watched. He clicked a few times. Then he took it, carefully, and moved his thumb to press awkwardly down into her palm. She touched his receptor-pads in return, still holding his gaze. He flinched a little and then just looked at her, not leering, not doing much of anything. Just looking. And suddenly, from someplace deep and lost inside her, she caught a fragment of something that felt like a memory: blackness, weight all around her like a wet fist, and his voice, Samaritan’s voice…come back sarah stay with me…
But surely that was one of the dreams. He never called her by her name.
No, he had once, hadn’t he? The day he picked her up off the causeway and carried her back to his place, the day he’d stabbed her with that shiny machine…“Sarah, look at me”…but even now, most of what she remembered was Sanford bending over her, Sanford holding her down. Still, those were Samaritan’s eyes back then, looking at her now the same way.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Sarah said, frowning as she tried to clear the fog and find that memory. “You were the one who fixed me.”
“The vat did all the hard work,” he said. “I just put you in it. Naked,” he added.
She yanked her hand back. “Prick.”
“Oh, I had my hands all over you, caseworker.” He waggled his palps. “And if I’d known you were that into chitin, I’d have climbed right in with you.”
She turned around, stalking back to Sanford and T’aki, trying not to swear. She told herself not to do it…and then she swung around, ready to have it all out right here in front of the whole damn room.
He wasn’t leering at her. He was just standing there, looking at her. And before she could say anything, before she could even think of something to say, he turned around and pushed his way into the crowd, vanishing right in front of her.
Sanford took her arm, asking a question with his eyes that she didn’t know how to answer. Yes, she supposed she was all right, but this, all of this…began to feel like too much again. The cheering grated on her ears; they always cheered at war’s end, but then the recriminations started, and she was going to wear the same human face that had devastated countless lives. It was too much.
The buzzing stopped.
Sarah looked up, moving instinctively closer to Sanford, enough to feel his sharp side-thorns digging at her arm.
The doors had opened and a yang’ti was coming toward them. Taller than Sanford, and older, she thought, wearing a complicated harness and half a dozen loin-cloths in pale robin’s egg blue wrapped around his abdomen and thighs. There was never any question who this imposing figure aimed for, and even T’aki stood quiet and respectful as Sarah found herself bored down upon.
There was only one person she could think of who this could be. Softly, trying not to press too obviously into Sanford’s side, she whispered, “Is this, um, your f-father?”
“No,” he said at once, comfortingly. “She is the governor of all yang’Tak.”
Panic swelled, but she had nowhere to run. The stranger, the governor, reached them and stood, looking down at her for a very long time. Her palps snapped now and then. Her antennae were low.
Sanford’s finger stroked her palm.
“I have heard a great deal about you,” the governor said finally. “I have, in fact, heard little else for years.” Her eyes snapped to Sanford, who gazed back blandly. She clicked and looked at Sarah again. “Nk’os’a’knko is quite convincing. If he were not so persistent, I would demand no less than the eradication of your people after what horrors have befallen my own.”
Sarah opened her mouth. Sanford squeezed her hand hard.
“But I saw you carried in. And I have met with some of the others.” The governor relaxed the stiff set of her legs, lowering herself perhaps three inches. It gentled her expression some and softened her hard tone. “And I begin to realize that even though great evil moved through your world, still there were persons of good and courageous heart who tried to stop it. I should hate to see our own race judged by the darkest deeds of the worst men at the most evil hours of our history.”
The governor raised herself up again, still facing Sarah, but managing somehow to address the whole room anyway. Her hands spread, not quite touching either her or Sanford, but certainly adopting the posture of a benevolent and rehearsed embrace. She began to wonder if this was being recorded somewhere.
“And so,” the governor said clearly, “after much thought, I can say that we will leave your Earth whole behind us, not for fear of those who imagined themselves our superiors, but for the sake of them who tried against terrible risk to prove our friends. The atrocities of Earth can never be forgotten, but we must not allow those atrocities to dictate our futures. I have come to believe, Sarah, Nk’os’a’knko, that the alliance of human and yang’ti has been intended, has been ordained, and though it may have been repelled through evil acts for many years, still it triumphs today and we shall both be better for it.”
She lowered herself again, looking back into Sarah’s eyes and speaking directly to her. “And I can welcome you among us, Sarah—” She couldn’t seem to say the name without clicking, and judging by the quick downwards flicks of her antennae, it annoyed her. She must have been practicing. “—and ask sincerely that Ko’vi bless this union.”
The governor offered her hands as the room erupted in ear-splitting buzzes, and Sarah took them, touching and being queasily touched in return. Not thrilled, she saw, but okay with it, with her. If the in-laws were anything like this, she thought she’d be okay.
Sanford took her arm and they walked on, following the blue-wrapped yang’ti through the doors and into the other room, which was empty at the moment, but beautifully-set, with shiny metal and glass dishes and sparkling lights hanging on filaments as thin as spiderwebs across the ceiling. Every long table was decked out with swaths of black and green fabric, dotted with tiny white-metal decorations that almost looked like little flowers. There was plenty of food, but it didn’t look or smell too bad, and there was even a little bowl of what she thought might be bread at the smaller center table where Sanford seemed to be steering her. It was all incredibly light and delicate and beautiful and suddenly she was laughing all over again, because it had started to look weirdly familiar too.
“What is it?” Sanford asked quietly, waving to the yang’ti who were beginning to file in behind them and find their seats.
“It looks like a wedding reception,” she said, knowing he probably didn’t know that word and she’d just have to explain it, not knowing how she could possibly do that.
But Sanford merely glanced at her, that oddly smiling glance, and kept waving.
She stared at him, stunned.
“I couldn’t explain the cake,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“When…When did we get married?” she blurted, and laughed. “Was it…Was it out there just now, that speech?”
“No.” He stroked h
er palm. “It was four years ago, in a cabin by the water, with our son asleep in the next room. You spoke an oath to me. I gave you mine.”
She could feel herself starting to smile. “You drink water from my hand,” she murmured, remembering. “I bare my back to you.”
He chirred softly, hesitated, and looked directly at her, as if this room and the dozens—God, hundreds—of people watching them had ceased to matter, ceased to exist. “I told Governor Ro’zhe’t you were my bondmate to force her to allow me to search for you,” he said. “But I did not lie to her.”
“No,” she agreed, smiling. “You didn’t lie.”
“This is only a formality.” He brought her to the table and sat her down on the incredibly bumpy yang’ti chair, then sat beside her. “A show. The one my father plans will be much smaller and far more traditional. Be warned. You will be expected to take ownership of the hatchery. I will teach you what to say.” He clicked, watching her closely. “Will you be happy?”
“Hatchery? You…you know I can’t give you children.”
He clicked. “I shall have to be content with gratuitous sex. Will you be happy?”
“It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?”
She took the cup he gave her and drank the unbelievably tart and unpleasant liquid it contained so that the whole room could buzz and carry on, then lifted T’aki onto her lap and let him start piling things onto her platter. It was all very strange and uncomfortable, the first alien day of her new alien life, but she had her family here beside her and the worst of days behind her, and so Sarah took her husband’s hand and with him, she moved on.
August 2009
November 2012
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD…
This author’s note (like most author’s notes, in my personal opinion) is not necessary to read in order to understand the story that precedes it. You can skip it. My next book will also have an author’s afterword. You can skip that one too. But if you are one of those people who like to know where the writer got his or her idea, please continue reading. If not…close the book and move on with your life, I guess. You’ll only hurt my feelings a little bit.
I have the dubious pleasure of living with a medical condition that frequently necessitates prolonged periods of lying around and recovering. It gets very boring. I watch a lot of bad movies. I write a lot of bad books.
One day, I found myself watching yet another movie in the theme of “humans land on alien planet and proceed to heroically slash/burn the existing civilization because aliens are bad even when you bust in on them at home and the human spirit is indomitable!” It occurred to me, as ending credits rolled on humans triumphantly kissing over a heap of smoldering alien corpses, that I would really like to see the tables turned, just once. Say the humans crash on the alien planet and discover that they are not the superior race and that ransacking their way through the population is, in fact, a bad idea that goes very badly for them. That idea percolated until it spit out a corollary idea: Say the aliens do come to Earth, but not on purpose. Say they aren’t invaders at all, but just colonists who crash on our inhabited planet. That one’s been done before (Alien Nation springs immediately to mind), but I thought I could put a new spin on it.
So I went back and forth between those ideas and ultimately decided that I would do both. We-go-there became The Last Hour of Gann. They-come-here became Cottonwood.
Now that I had stories, I needed aliens. Real aliens. Obvious, unavoidable, holy-crap-that’s-a aliens. I didn’t want to go the easy route of just having something that was essentially human but with weird eyes who could otherwise blend right in (you know, like I did with my aliens in Heat), but I lack the imagination to pull off a truly alien alien, like a cloud of gas or crystalline parasite. So I took the tried and true sci-fi path of taking an existing animal here on Earth and thinly disguising it as an alien. Back I went to the Waffle Iron, this time over whether I wanted bugs or lizards as my base alien model. Again, I split the difference. The Last Hour of Gann got the lizards simply because I wanted my crashed humans to walk through a more relatable environment than alien hives. The bugs came to Earth.
I wrote the first draft of Cottonwood in two weeks. It’s funny what you can accomplish when you can’t get out of bed. I typed it up over another two weeks. And then a little movie called District 9 came out and the story I thought was so original became a blatant ripoff literally overnight. So I threw the whole thing in a mental woodchipper and tried to forget it. Here I thought I’d had an original idea…damn you, Neill Blomkamp. Just…damn you.
Eventually, I saw District 9. And after I’d finished my rough draft of Gann and needed something else to do, I decided to give Cottonwood another shot. Yes, there are similarities (There were a lot more before I started editing), but I like to think that there’s room in this wide world for two stories about alien arthropods stranded on Earth. Neill Blomkamp wrote a profoundly moving political work that uses the concept of aliens to spotlight the very real plight of apartheid in South Africa. I cranked out some smexxy bug sci-fi in two weeks. So…yeah. The only thing that strikes me as uncomfortably similar anymore is the fact that Blomkamp’s bug hero had a kid, too…but I just didn’t have the heart to write T’aki out of existence. Whether or not that was the right decision, only time will tell, but the bottom line is this: If I let every book I ever read or movie I’ve ever seen censor my own work, I’d never write again. So here’s Cottonwood. Read on for an excerpt from The Last Hour of Gann, available soon.
R. Lee Smith
AMBER
The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce’s official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed.
Amber sent Nicci in to bed while she stood out in the hall and read. The eviction gave them thirty days to either vacate or sign under the terms of the new lease, a copy of which was attached. Amber read them. Then she folded up the notice and slipped it into her pocket. She made herself a pot of coffee and sipped at it while watching the news. She thought. She said hello when Nicci woke up and that was all. She went to work.
The funeral was held three days later, a Tuesday. The insurance company covered the cost, which meant it was a group job, and although it was scheduled ‘between the hours of eight and eleven,’ the other funerals apparently dragged long and then there was lunch and so it was nearly two in the afternoon before Mary’s name was called and the cardboard case with her label pasted on the side slid by on the belt and disappeared into the oven. Nicci cried a little. Amber put her arm around her. They got a lot of dirty looks from the other mourners, even though it had only been sixteen years since Measure 34 had passed—Zero Population Growth, Zero Tolerance—and they had both been born by then.
Amber was used to getting dirty looks when she went out with Nicci. Sometimes siblings could pass themselves off as cousins or, even better, as just friends, but not the Bierce girls. Even with different fathers, they were each their mother in miniature and the three years between them had an oddly plastic quality: in the right light, they could be mistaken for twins; in the wrong light, Amber had occasionally been addressed as Nicci’s mother. Part of that was the size difference—Nicci was, as their mother used to be, fine-boned and willowy below that round, cherubic face, while Amber was pretty much round all over—but not all of it. “You were just born old, little girl,” as her mom used to say. “You were born to take care of things.”
She tried to take it as a compliment. The only part of Mary Bierce that knew how to be a mother had been cut out years ago and tossed in a baggie with a biohazard stamp on the side. The parts that were left after that didn’t give a damn about homework or lunches or scrubbing out the toilet once in a while. Someone had to be the responsible one and if Amber wasn’t actually born knowing that, she sure learned it in hurry.
* * *
There
could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn’t been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had never been the careful sort. Amber had been putting out cigarettes, sweeping up broken bottles, and making sure the door was locked since she was six; she knew damned well that her mom wasn’t going to lose a good tip by insisting her clients wore a condom when she was working. Bo Peep had been to the aborters three times that Amber knew of and there had probably been others, but that all ended with the Zeros and Measure 34. One day, she went off for her regular monthly shots and came staggering home three hours later wearing a diaper. She sort of collapsed onto the sofa, sprawled out like she was drunk, only she wasn’t loud and laughing the way she ought to be. Her mouth had hung open slightly and there was some kind of gooey paste caked at the corners of her lips. All her makeup had been wiped away and none too gently; she looked haggard and sick and dead. Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.
“Spayed!” their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. “Spayed me! Those motherfuckers spayed me!”
At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom’s black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment’s uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn’t quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.
