Cottonwood (17 page)

T’aki took her paz without relinquishing the ship. Head down, eyes fixed on the screen, he started walking.

Sanford was still watching her.

“Slow it down, jellybean,” she advised, grinning.

“I can’t!” And laughed himself. “This is slow!”

“It really is. By my calculations, when the sludge finally does rear up to blow bubbles at them, the kids should have had time to get up, walk around the couch to the kitchen table, sit down, and finish their conversation. Instead, they run screaming out of the house, get in the car, drive ninety miles an hour across two towns to the observatory, run up to the magnescope, and
there’s the sludge
, and all I could think was, ‘What, did he catch a
cab
?’
That’s
Charles M. Fortesque. I loved those movies!”

“Tell me another one!” T’aki said, leaping up onto the arm of the chair beside her.

“Well…” Sarah looked at his father, dimly aware that not everyone in the world was entertained by having some zealot recount old movie-plots, but he merely turned around and went quietly back to work on whatever he was fixing today. That left her with T’aki, bouncing in place and staring at her with his pleading, pale eyes and his brand-new spaceship. “Okay,” she said. “One more. My favorite Fortesque of all time:
Aliens From Outer Space
.”

T’aki chirped loudly and drew up his legs, all attention.

“Okay, so one fine evening, a spaceship comes to Earth and starts sucking people up in beams of light. Where the aliens come from is never explained. Why they are abducting people is never explained. What happens to all the people they have abducted, with the exception of our plucky heroine—”

“Is never explained,” T’aki said.

“You’re starting to get the hang of a Fortesque flick. So okay, our heroine is a simply amazing young actress who plays a physicist who is abducted out of her laboratory and wakes to find herself aboard the alien craft in a wooden cage. Now,” began Sarah, warming to the tale. “Far be it for me to wonder why a civilization advanced enough to master interstellar flight can’t build a decent holding cell, but in addition to having a
wooden
cage, the bars are clearly wide enough for our heroine to climb out through. I mean,
clearly
.”

“Does she?”

“Clearly not,” murmured Sanford.

“No, she doesn’t. She decides she’s trapped and spends several minutes looking very distressed while pulling on bars that are actually further apart than her shoulders. And then the door opens and in comes our first alien, who is in fact a giant starfish with an eye in his stomach. Our heroine takes two seconds to ponder this—one, two—and goes strutting over to seduce the starfish—er…” she amended, suddenly remembering she was talking to a three year-old. “To make him think she’s his friend so he’ll let her out of the cage.”

“That isn’t very nice,” said T’aki solemnly.

“No, but neither is abducting people off their planet, so I guess it evens out. The thing that always got me, however, is the speed with which she came up with this plan. I’m sorry, but if you can come to terms with the idea of seducing a giant starfish in just two seconds, this has to be a notion you’ve pondered long before you ever met one.”

Sanford made a noise, a kind of rattling cough. She paused expectantly, but he kept his back to her and his hands at work.

“Did she get out?” T’aki asked.

“Yes, she did, thanks to the starfish and the extremely liberal Italian censorship restrictions on film. Then off she runs in her underwear through a ship that looked, when it was on Earth, about the size of a schooner, but which is big enough on the inside not only to support an entire civilization of different aliens, but to have its own climate. She actually comes to one room that has a jungle in it. My dad and I once had a ripping good discussion trying to figure out the jungle,” Sarah recalled, smiling. “I argued that it was useful for producing oxygen.”

“There are far more efficient ways,” Sanford remarked.

“Which is what my dad said, but if they used machines, where would they get the wood to build their cages? See, the fun of watching Fortesque’s movies isn’t
finding
the holes, it’s
patching
them. Or at least admiring them. It takes real talent to be that bad.”

T’aki laughed, drumming his feet on the arm of the chair. “Bad is good.”

“Sometimes. But back to our heroine, who, after seventy minutes of various shenanigans, has made it to the command deck, where she finds that all the controls for operating the entire ship are neatly contained not just in one place, but in one device. And it’s a bathtub.”

“A bathtub?”

“A bathtub. Oh, it’s a nice bathtub,” she admitted, smiling dreamily into space. “And Fortesque went to great lengths to disguise the shower head with lights and the spigot with futurific plastic panels, but it is blatantly a bathtub. And while our heroine is trying to figure out whether the ship’s engines run on hot or cold running water, in from the shadows comes the king of the aliens. Remember the scene with the kids on the couch and the killer sludge?”

T’aki nodded, giggling.

“Same scene. The king comes gliding forward in a single sustained shot for four and a half minutes, which is plenty of time for you, the viewer, to be bored out of your skull, and also to see that the king is—” Sarah hesitated, looking around the room. She pointed. “See that magazine, honey? Can you hand it to me?”

Before T’aki could hop down, Sanford stretched across to the indicated shelf and passed her the mangled
Cosmopolitan
. He didn’t look to see what she did with it, but just went back to work.

Some of the pages were ripped out, presumably for Sanford to use as writing material, but it wasn’t long before Sarah found what she wanted. “There’s the alien king,” she said, pointing. “Otherwise known as a common household floor lamp.”

T’aki stared at it, clicking and purring, delighted.

“They painted up the glass globe to look like a giant eyeball, and wrapped the rod with pipe cleaners or something to make it look fuzzy, but yeah, it was a still very obviously a lamp, and there were three different shots where you could see the cord trailing behind the little dolly or whatever they had it standing on so they could roll it evilly around. First time I saw it, I actually fell off the couch laughing.”

She passed the magazine back to Sanford. He took it without comment, glanced once at the photograph, and continued to work.

“Now after four and a half minutes of failing to operate a faucet, our heroine looks up and sees the king. She takes two seconds to ponder this—”

“One, two,” chanted T’aki.

“—and struts over to seduce the king, and this is the sheer brilliance of Fortesque’s movies, because while the
ideas
are bad and the
writing
is bad and the
effects
are bad, the casting is
phenomenally
good. Our heroine is able not only to hipshot her way over to a household appliance while staring smolderingly into its eye, she puts her hand up on this glass globe, which as I’ve said has been burning with at least a hundred-watt bulb in a continuous shot for four and a half minutes, and never loses an ounce of her panther-like heat and intensity, in spite of the fact that her hand audibly sizzles on contact. That is an amazing actress, and that is one of only two things I can ever think while watching that scene.”

“What’s the other think?” T’aki asked.

“To wonder why the king’s first words are, ‘So, you think to throw yourself upon my mercy,’ and not, ‘Ouch, bitch, my eye!’“

Sanford erupted in laughter. Both hands slammed down on the table; he rocked back, spraying the strange mix of rattles and broken whoops straight up at the ceiling. Sarah and T’aki both jumped, but he recovered first, joining his father in peals of giggles while she just sat and blushed.

“Bitch is actually a vulgar word,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to myself.”

Sanford flapped a hand at her, still laughing. He picked up his tools, wound himself down to chuckles, and got back to work.

“Fortesque’s movies were the best, but they were twenty years old by the time I even discovered them so they’re hard to find. They don’t even play them on TV anymore. I had a bunch on tape and they released a few on DVD, but the bottom dropped out of the sci-fi movie market when your ship showed up.”

“Can you bring some?” T’aki asked. “Father can fix a media player! I want to see the Fortesque!”

“Sorry, jellybean, but I had to sell my collection a few years ago when things got tight. I hated to do it, but I needed the money.” She sighed, playing with the wing of the
Freeship
. “I’d give anything to see one again. Especially that one. It was my all-time favorite.”

“Mine, too.” T’aki climbed down, swooped his ship, then looked hopefully at his father. “Outside and play?”

“Stay close.”

And off he went, ship raised high and idling like a truck.

In his absence, the room became a lot smaller.

“I hope I didn’t bore you too badly,” she said at last.

“No.”

Silence.

He clicked quietly to himself, one hand moving absently over whatever it was he had laid out on the table, not working now, but only picking at it. “These are your own possessions.”

“It’s been a long time since I played with toys.”

“All the same, I thank you.” He glanced at the window and through it, watching the
Fortesque Freeship
swoop by, clutched in T’aki’s small hand. “But I am not entirely comfortable accepting gifts from you.”

“Oh.” Sarah looked down at her briefcase, somewhat thrown by this unforeseen development. “That’s too bad, because there was kind of something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

Reserve locked back into his eyes. He turned around on the stool to face her fully, one hand on the table, the other curled at his thigh, wary.

Suddenly nervous, Sarah pulled her case onto her lap and opened it, searching inside. “The situation here is…is bad and I wish I could tell you that I could change it. I want you know that I know what you’re going through. I don’t mean to say that I
know
, because obviously I go home and you…but I know. I see it, I guess is what I’m trying to say. I know it’s…wrong.”

He waited, watching her shuffle paper, not making a sound.

“I’m not ignoring it,” she said. Her voice seemed too loud, too insistent. She bit at her lip, staring into her briefcase until black letters and white papers blurred out into so many nonsensical stripes. “But I can’t stop it. If I thought I could, I’d try. I hope you believe that. I know that if I could just get pictures out, if I could make the world see this place, people would stop it, but I have this non-disclosure agreement.”

The excuse—and that was just what it was, and a whiny, feeble one at that—hung uncontested in the air, daring her to say it again.

“Every time I go through the gate, I’m scanned for electronics. My paz is the only thing allowed through, because it’s keyed to their system, but that’s just it. It’s keyed to their system. If I use it to take pictures or even try to post something online, they know and they can stop it before anyone else sees it. Even if I miraculously got something out, my ISP number is attached to everything, so they’d know it was me who did it. Maybe someone who knew about this stuff could get around that, but I just don’t know how. I want to help you, but it’s just…It’s complicated.”

He was still waiting.

“So as much as I’d like to tell you that I can make them stop dumping trash in here, I can’t. I don’t even think I can make them clean up this causeway and I’m afraid that if I push them too hard—”

“I understand,” Sanford said, without discernible emotion. “All you could possibly accomplish is to make them notice you.”

She picked up the papers she wanted, closed her briefcase, and set them on its surface, pressing them in place as if to keep them from slipping away. “But I think there’s a way I can get them to give you something without them noticing, as long as they think they’re really giving it to me.”

“A propane oven?” he guessed, his eyes narrowing.

“I was thinking a bit bigger than that.” She passed her papers over to him. “I want to throw a party.”

The plates above his eyes expanded slightly.

“A block party,” she went on. “I mean, IBI throws parties all the time and I just happened to get one of these applications so I can throw one of my own and let IBI pay for it. I read over the rules at least ten times, and I’m pretty sure it’s legal…kind of the same way it used to be technically legal to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, right up until some bone-head did. It’s what we call a loophole.”

“An omission of law,” he said, and looked at the papers. He read them in silence: her three-page itemized list of everything she was ready to requisition. The gravity of his expression killed what little excitement she’d had for the plan, which she’d spent all weekend researching and was really quite proud of. After he’d finished with the last page, he picked them all up and stared at them some more. “Explain.”

“First, I have to tell them what kind of event I’m having and how many people I want to invite. I wrote I wanted to have an outdoor social event for my clients…only I kind of spread it out so I had an excuse to squeeze the ‘client’ part in sort of small and sloppy,” she admitted.

“Sort of,” Sanford echoed. She wasn’t imagining the disapproval in his clicks; T’aki opened the door and peeked in, confused but ready to be contrite, and was dismissed again with a soft rumble of sound. Then Sanford looked at her again. “With this paper, you think you can steal extra food chits for all of us?”

“It’s not stealing and no, not all of you. I’m sorry. If I have to justify myself, I have to have a plausible reason for my answers. I only have two hundred and thirty-six clients, so that’s how many people I invited to the party. But I’m hoping…Okay, here’s how it works. First, I tell them how many people are coming. Then I figure out how much food I’m going to need, assuming each person at the party gets one burger and two drinks. Then I requisition any non-food items necessary for the event, like plates and coolers and stuff. Next, I need to provide three estimates for everything I want them to buy, which I took from, like, JC Foods, Cook Nook, places like that.” She broke off, blushing as she realized he wouldn’t have any way of knowing what a ‘place like that’ meant, but Sanford merely looked at her. “The point is,” she said hurriedly, “they’re all ridiculously overpriced, but if I get approved, I don’t actually have to shop at those places. All I have to do is justify the cost and they give me a pre-paid credit card that I can take anywhere, even to the ShopALot, where chicken is only 99 cents a pound. So I can actually get two or maybe three times the food for what they’d charge at JC Foods.”