Cottonwood (10 page)

“Fine.”

A short pause. A gentler Kate said, “I love you, Sarah. You know that, right? You’re all I’ve got.”

That was better. Sarah made herself let go of the tightness in her chest and breathed it out as a sigh. “I love you too, Kate. Bye.”

But it wasn’t forgiveness and it still bothered her.

Sunday’s dinner was take-out in front of the TV, sitting on her new sofa. Then she and Fagin went to bed, where she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and wished she didn’t have to get up in the morning and go to work. Eventually, she slept.

Woke up.

Went to work.

She bumped into Mr. van Meyer and his soldier-friend in the halls at the office, said polite things when he asked how she was getting on, and really thought she was doing quite well at coasting through the conversation when out of nowhere, van Meyer said, “We do not see you at the weekend social, Miss Fowler. Why?”

“Weekend…what?”

“We do enjoy our outdoor leisure, while the weather is good. It is such a narrow window here, they tell me. I am accustomed to the heat, myself—it is for me a homesickness—and so I enjoy it more than most. Not all of my camps are so agreeable to outdoor recreations.”

“I didn’t know there was a party,” Sarah said, doing her clumsy best to sidestep his question. “I guess I’m still getting settled in.”

“I see. Of course, we wish our employees to be comfortable in their work.” He paused, his eyes as dark and empty as a shark’s. “Where is it you are from, Miss Fowler? Did you say Sacramento?”

“That’s where we were camping that one time, but I’m actually from Oregon.”

“Ah yes. Far from home,” he mused. “Have you any family with you? Children?”

“Just a dog.”

He considered that for some short time and finally sighed. “This concerns me, Miss Fowler.”

“Sir?”

“IBI is not a company, do you understand? We are not a job here. We are not the work of one summer, weekends and holidays. We are doing the work of the world. We are all that protects the bug from Earth and Earth from the bug. We cannot do this with strangers. We must be a family. You will come to the next social,
ja
? Meet your family. There is swimming and sports.” He thought about it, hunting out the word he wanted. “Barbeque.”

“Yum,” Sarah said weakly.

He looked at her while his soldier friend shifted restlessly beside him. “You like barbeque, of course?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t,” the soldier remarked. “Even when the wind is blowing, the smell is fucking rank. You could cook up a whole fucking pig, it would still taste like that canned shit the bugs eat.”

Sarah didn’t think she reacted, but van Meyer’s vaguely disapproving glance snapped back to her and narrowed. She had to say something, so she said, “Yeah, I’ve seen their food. It’s pretty gross.”

Van Meyer studied her.

“But they seem to like it,” she added, feeling the lie all the way down to the pit of her stomach, which still wanted to clench at the memory of that greyish, greasy meat and the smell of it cooking over Samaritan’s makeshift stove. Good enough for the bugs, he’d told her. Good enough for one of them to steal, anyway.

“
Ja
, the food.” Van Meyer nodded sympathetically. “I see that it bother you. Bother me as well. Or did. When I was young and idealistic and still trying in my well-intentioned way to force the bug to be human.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It is this: the bug’s nutritional needs are not ours. They require protein foremost, salts, fats. The Bureau of Immigration does not merely house bug, but must feed him. We give the bug his daily requirement of nutrition at our cost, our considerable cost.”

“I understand that, Mr. van Meyer. I mean, there’s so many of them, but—”

“
Ja
, so many. I make what deals I can with companies that, as abhorrent as the idea once was to my sense of justice, provide the best and most complete nutrition. And is not so terrible as it appear. Here at Cottonwood, we have canning plant on site. We contract to all local farm and ranch, to purchase any surplus animal or other material USDA deem unfit for human to consume. For human,
nee
? Not bug. For bug, is perfectly suitable. Optimal. We process and package here, use all local labor and recycle all we can. There is no profit here. Is it pretty plate we set before him?
Nee
. It is not the quality I should prefer, but we choose to compromise appearance rather than nourishment.”

Sarah nodded, not convinced, but unable to argue. She kept seeing Samaritan, hearing him tell her to eat it, it was good enough for fucking bugs, just eat it.

“Now, if we find pretty name to call it, use pretty label, this takes away even more of our budget—”

“No, I see that perfectly now, Mr. van Meyer. It’s all cosmetic anyway.”

“Precisely so! Cosmetic!
Ja
! Now.” He patted her hand with his leathery one and squeezed once, still surprisingly strong. “The bug is permitted to keep livestock,
ja
, but so few do. They have no desire to care for themselves, as so many drone species found on Earth. Not intelligent. Not motivated.”

She saw Sanford and his r/c racer, his computer and that bizarre homemade adapter. She nodded anyway.

“We can only do what we can. Have you other concern at all?”

Plenty, but she could tell from his tone that the question had been largely rhetorical. “No, sir.”

“And your work?” he pressed. “Do you find rewarding?”

“I haven’t really started working yet,” she admitted. “I’m still trying to get my census done.”

“Just like any other roach,” the solider remarked. “Snap on the light and they all run. Tell you what, Pollyanna. Give me five minutes and I’ll take you in. They see me—” He hefted his rifle with a modest grin. “—and they’ll answer all your questions.”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. Too quickly. She thought hard as the soldier’s smile turned sullen. “I couldn’t possibly take you away from your job to do mine. I feel bad enough already. But thank you for the offer.”

The soldier did not reply.

Mr. van Meyer tsked. “The bug, perhaps he hide because he knows you will not create consequence. Perhaps Piotr should accompany.”

God, she really did not want to spend the morning with this man and his giant gun. “If you say so,” she said tactfully. “But I really would rather do my own work. It’s just a matter of finding them all.”

Van Meyer nodded once, solemnly. “You see for yourself how the bug avoid us, deceive us. The census is very important to our efforts here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how many do you complete so far, may I ask?”

Sarah winced. “Thirty-nine.”

“But this is very impressive, Miss Fowler.”

She blinked. “It is?” She’d thought it was pretty awful, herself.

“Oh
ja
. They must like you there. You do good work,
nee
?”

She smiled tentatively, then more honestly.

“Good work,
ja
. And now, good day.”

And as he walked away, his security guy, still standing there and staring at her, suddenly spoke up with a contemptuous, “Bet you’re a vegetarian.”

Startled, and oddly offended, Sarah shot back, “Bet I’m not.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” And without warning, out popped a little ditty of her dad’s, something which had lain dormant and forgotten inside her for nearly ten years: “Carnivores win wars.”

Van Meyer stopped in his tracks midway across the floor and looked back at her, smooth-faced with surprise for one instant before he erupted in hearty laughter. The soldier’s smile was slower to spread, but it did, and with a certain reluctant admiration. “I like that one,” he said.

“Oh
ja
! That is good! I must remember, and so true besides!
Danke
, Miss Fowler, what a pleasant way to begin day. Piotr, at your convenience?”

The soldier gave her an unlooked-for and unwelcome clap to the arm which hurt a little, but actually seemed sincerely cheerful, and went to catch up to his boss. Sarah watched them go, still smiling, hoping what he’d said about good work was true even though some part of her (a damned broad part of her) didn’t trust him.

She was singing to herself on the monorail again (
My Baby Takes the Morning Train
, just the chorus, over and over), shut up to swipe her card at the Checkpoint gate, and started in again on the other side (Dolly’s
Nine to Five
). The cry went out. The smell closed in. She got started.

She found Will Hobart and Jules Verne at home today, although Verne was just leaving and didn’t want to answer the questions. When she asked if she could come back again the next day, he took her case and threw it on top of his house, then stalked off.

She spent two hours trying to climb up and get it down. The ladder that had been a part of the trucking trailer he lived in had rusted out. She tried to climb it and went flat on her ass with shards of metal in her hands. There were no trees to climb, nothing light enough to drag over that was still sturdy enough to stand on. The roof remained two feet over her head even when she jumped. Two hours.

Bang. Tak-tak-tak-tak. Samaritan looked over the edge of the roof and down at her.

She stood, dirty and sweaty and already thoroughly miserable, and finally said, “I lost my case.”

He looked back over his shoulder. “What a coincidence. I just found one.”

“May I have it, please?” she asked, without much hope.

“I love to hear you beg.” He walked back along the trailer, out of sight, and returned with the case in his hands. Samaritan said, “Catch.”

She reached up for it.

He popped the latch and flung the case’s contents wide. Hundreds of carefully-arranged papers flew, caught wind, rattled out over the reservoirs and down the causeway. Requisitions, incident reports, case notes, resident files, Hobart’s completed questionnaire, all of it. The heavier stuff—her paz, manuals, her map of Cottonwood, some pens—rained down over the road. Samaritan closed the case, hopped down to stand beside her, and gave it to her.

“Say thank you,” he prompted.

“You know, it is possible to be oppressed and still be an asshole!” she snapped, snatching up her paz and wiping rust-red dust on her thigh.

“I’m sure it is, but why tell me? No one’s oppressed in here, caseworker. We all need to be taken care of, right? We’re all just a bunch of dumb bugs.”

She left him there and started cleaning up as much as she could. Useless effort, useless. The papers were ruined, garbage. They belonged where they lay, indistinguishable from all the other garbage, but she couldn’t just leave it. She grabbed soggy handfuls from the culvert’s crumbling bank and started stuffing them back into her briefcase. Papers floated on the dark water just below her. She knelt down on the cracked and unstable ground, leaning out over the rancid pollution of it, and tried to reach them.

“You know we piss in that,” Samaritan said, no longer out by Verne’s house, but directly in her ear.

She yelped shrilly, jerking away from him, and the bank gave way beneath her. She had a moment’s disbelief and weightlessness and then she splatted down face-first into ten inches of tar-black garbage water and alien pee. It got in her hair. It went down her shirt and soaked into her slacks. It splashed into her ears and her nose and her mouth. Right into her mouth.

He started laughing as she sat, spitting and gagging in shock. Not mean laughter, either, not really. Great big, delighted laughter. The kind that ought to have a joke attached to it.

She burst into tears, hating him, and started snatching up papers.

From there into the field, dripping and reeking, stumbling over rocks and half-buried debris, chasing every fluttering flat of white into the reservoirs, wading knee-deep in sticky sediment that sucked the shoes off her feet and kept them, climbing through the rusted pipes, limping over jagged spears of metal and broken chunks of concrete, and hearing at every step the gleeful hoots and mocking buzzes of Samaritan, watching her.

It felt like it took hours.

“You missed a few,” he said when she crawled back over the culvert.

“Fuck you.”

“Ordinarily, I’d be tempted.” His claspers twitched outward and retracted with an exaggerated flinch. “But that is really killing the mood.”

She turned her back on him, started walking.

“Where are you going?” He stepped in front of her and again when she tried to go around him. “You don’t have to go.”

“I nuh-need a sh-shower.”

“You certainly do,” he agreed. “But you don’t have to go. I’ve got a shower.” His claspers brushed at her, flicking up under the hem of her skirt to nudge with surprising force at her bare thighs. “Don’t play coy,” he said as she stumbled back. “You’ve been showing me your ass all day.”

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. Shouted, at a client. She tried to push past him, but he caught her by the arm and his grip was as good as handcuffs. “Get off me!”

“I’m not on you.” His palps spread and snapped. “Yet. Come on, caseworker. Let’s get those nasty things off you and get something nasty in you.”

She swung her briefcase at him. He knocked it aside, pushed his claspers a final time under her skirt, and let her go.

“Run,” he said.

She fled, fresh sobs tearing from her chest and Samaritan’s buzzing laughter chasing her down the causeway. The checkpoint guard saw her coming and still made her wait, sauntering out from his little hut to look at her badge like he hadn’t just seen it, like she wasn’t clinging to the gate while the sun baked the stink of ditch-water and alien piss into her clothes, her shoes, her hair.

When he finally let her through, she ran to the monorail station, but her efforts to wash up in the restroom there were grossly insufficient. She couldn’t bring herself to board, knowing that every other passenger in that narrow, closed car would have to see her, smell her. She walked home, half a mile through IBI’s clean, ultra-modern homes, bringing the stink of Cottonwood with her. There were kids in the landscaped yards, staring. There were cars, slowing down as they passed her by.