Cottonwood (27 page)

So the days passed. He ate because he was hungry. He slept because he was tired. He went to Sam’s house sometimes after T’aki was in bed to drink ferment and share that crude company because he was on edge and lonely. That was how the world turned, one day at a time.

And so, in what had become routine for both of them after what was, realistically, a dangerously short length of time, when Sanford heard the distinctive sound of Sarah’s van grumbling down the causeway toward him, he opened his door without coming all the way out of the television he was working on. She was smiling when she entered and took her usual seat on the green chair. She was also limping.

His first thought was to go and crack the chitin on Sam’s head again. She read it in his face and laughed.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.

He turned his attention back to the television. “What am I thinking?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it isn’t that I slipped in the ShopALot bread aisle. They had, like, an inch of wax on the floor. I was flying past the tortillas before I even hit the ground. Where’s T’aki?”

“At school.”

“You have a school here? That’s great!”

“No,” he said. “But I know someone who cannot work the Heaps and who can teach my son to make his letters and do his sums. He’s young for it, but he seems ready.”

“He’s smart.”

“I’m not a fair judge.” Sanford carefully traded out a damaged circuit board. “But yes, he is. And he will be handsome. And when he molts twice more and realizes these things, he’ll probably be insufferable for several years. I know I was.”

She laughed, then sighed and picked up one of T’aki’s toys—not the
Fortesque Freeship
, which was still in its place of honor in their shared sleeping space, but the yellow-haired human doll that usually piloted it. “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask…Is there another word that I could be using instead of ‘he’ or ‘him’ or ‘boy’?”

Sanford tensed and looked at her.

“I mean,” she went on, blushing, “I realize that it’s easier for humans to use those kinds of words, but I don’t think it’s right to be inflicting our gender bias on you when you don’t have a gender. So if there’s another word that’s less offensive, I’ll use it. I don’t click very well,” she admitted with a nervous laugh, “but I could try.”

Sanford picked up his tools and looked at the television. It was the paramount rule, the paramount warning. No human must know.

“I’m picking up a lot of your language, actually,” she said after a moment, no longer laughing, but trying gamefully to converse. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak it, but I understand a lot more than I thought I did, which I know because I’ve managed to leave my translator at home like three times now. Mr. van Meyer says we can shower and sleep in them, and sometimes I do, but they don’t always stay clipped where they’re supposed to.”

He had already told her he meant to escape, to leave Earth, to betray this world’s existence to his people. How much less did he trust her now?

“So I’ve left it in the bathroom twice and once it just fell off. I found it in the bottom of my coffee cup after I got home, which was great because that was the one thing I absolutely did not want to have to order a new one of. But the bright side is that I’ve come to work three times without a translator and I bet you can’t even tell me which three days, can you?”

It was one thing to tell her about the code-bank. If IBI learned of it, they could only kill him and T’aki. To betray the truth of yang’ti was to betray all yang’ti. It could change everything.

“Sanford?” she said in a small voice. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” He put his tools down again, but did not look at her just yet. “We have gender.”

“What?”

“We have gender. Male and female.” He glanced around; she seemed stunned. So was he, to no small degree. “It was decided that we should keep this secret. The population controls…we feared that if it were known, our women would be gathered together and destroyed.”

“Oh.” It was not a sound of understanding, but of one receiving a hard blow.

“There are very few females among us. A handful to every thousand births. It would be so easy to destroy us.” He touched his tools, then turned and looked at her. “But we have gender. T’aki is my son. I am a man.”

And why did he phrase it that way, he wondered at once. Why not, ‘I am male’?

She met his gaze, troubled. “Baccus…is a woman?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder she ran.” Sarah stared away out the window. “She must have been terrified. And you could be right…about what would happen if…if they knew. I’ll never tell, Sanford.”

But he knew that already, didn’t he?

He started in on the television again. A man, he’d said.

“Have you got the tables?” she asked finally.

“Yes. When do you need them?”

“Sunday.”

So soon. He clicked, thinking, but she seemed to misread his troubled silence, because she hurriedly added, “That’s the day after tomorrow, I mean. Around four, four-thirty. I’d love to do it tomorrow, but there’s just too much to do.” She managed a laugh, but it was too strained for real humor. “I’ve done half the shopping already. Getting buns was what killed me in the ShopALot and it didn’t even occur to me until after that, you know, do you even eat bread?”

“Yes.”

“Oh good. Mr. Samaritan said something about bread once, but I wasn’t sure.”

Sanford snapped his palps and then snapped them again because he’d snapped them at all. “Meat is all the humans seem to think we need,” he said, savagely soldering a wire. “Perhaps it is meant to keep us malnourished.”

Silence. She looked at the case in her hands.

“We eat a little grain,” he said, more gently. “Whenever we can find it. And vegetation. Very small amounts sustain us normally, but we have been for many years deprived.”

“Well, I bought some. For the hamburgers. And I got some chips too, they were on sale. And cookies. And lots of soda. I know you guys like beer, but there’s no way I could float bringing alcohol for my clients if I ever get called on this, so I decided I’d better not.”

“That is best.” It was likely to be stressful enough without half the attendees getting drunk.

He finished setting wires, rebuilt the guts, turned the set around and plugged it in. He left the backing off for now, but when he switched the monitor on, the screen slowly bled to color and sound came through the speakers. He clicked, pleased.

“It’s so amazing to watch you do that,” she murmured from behind him. “I can’t even program my coffee machine.”

“I could teach you,” he said, and had to wonder at himself.

“I guess if you can fly a spaceship, fixing a TV is pretty small potatoes.”

“It isn’t quite the same thing.”

“No, I guess it’s not, but it’s still amazing that you can do it at all. I mean, it’s alien technology, isn’t it?”

“Of a primitive sort,” he agreed.

“Did you used to build stuff on your planet?”

“I took a standard mechanics and engineering course in preparation for this mission, but beyond some small home repairs, no.”

“You’re awfully good at it.”

“I’ve had time and practice.”

She was quiet as she watched him unplug the device and put the shell on, ready now to sell. Then she sighed. “I wish I was more useful.”

He looked at her, startled. She was staring out the window, lost in her own thoughts, wistful.

“I wasted my life. Didn’t do so well in school, didn’t go to college…I can’t help thinking that someone who actually did something with her life would be better for you now. The only work I’ve ever done is custodial, fast food and a little cashiering. And look at me. I come to Cottonwood and all I can think of to do is clean up, flip burgers, and rob the boss’s till.” She shook her head and sighed again. “You deserve better.”

“There is no one better.”

She looked at him, pained.

“There is no one better,” he said again, drumming in each word with hard clicks.

They stared at each other in the dim and stuffy room.

He stood up, and for a long, dizzying moment, had no idea what he was about to do. Then he said, “I have to fetch my son,” and it cemented into truth, leaving him feeling somewhat disorientated.

“Oh. Okay. I just wanted to let you know. Remember: Sunday, around four.” She stood up and gathered her case, but paused just outside and looked back at him.

For no reason at all, he thought she would come back inside. For no reason at all, he thought she might touch him. For no reason at all, he thought of Sam flashing his claspers and making that obscene comment about pushing her down, getting inside.

“Tell T’aki I’m sorry I missed him today,” she said. “And I’ll see him Sunday.”

“Yes.”

She lingered.

“Is there something else?” he asked.

She came back half a step, only half. “What’s your name, Sanford?” she asked softly.

His heart gave a pang, not quite a throb, disturbing. “You couldn’t pronounce it.”

“I could try.”

“Nk’os’a’knko,” he said, slowly, hopelessly.

She blinked several times. Her lips worked in silence, then fell into a defeated smile. “I can’t pronounce that,” she said.

“I know.” And when she turned around, heard himself blurt, “I like to hear you call me Sanford.”

“It’s a joke.”

“Not when you say it.”

“Sanford.” She flashed him a sad smile and walked away.

He watched her go, in no great hurry either to collect his son or to deliver her message. The sun turned the top of her yellow hair to white. The wind blew it back and forth across the dark scar near her ear. ‘I told her I was a man,’ he thought. ‘Not a male.

‘A man.’

It bothered him. He turned away before she was entirely gone and went quickly down the path.

O’bek’we held lessons four rows south of the Heap-station. The smell was strong, but the wind was with him today and it was tolerable enough. He stood outside the crude tent where O’bek’we made his school, knowing he was very early, thinking of the human, watching the children settle in a half-circle around their legless teacher. Afternoon lessons were just starting.

“In the beginning, all was emptiness and Ko’vi.” O’bek’we reached out to tap T’aki, who had hunkered off by himself and looked bored. “And Ko’vi commanded light and set it apart from darkness.”

Sanford watched his son draw in the dirt, trying not to show disapproval. He had understood that lessons would be useful subjects only, reading and writing, making numbers, the basic scientific tenets. Talk of Ko’vi was best reserved for home.

“He filled the universe with suns and from them spun orbs of substance to revolve around them, but the emptiness remained, for Ko’vi was alone. And so He passed among the many orbs and mounted them, and they became as eggs—” And this was exactly why. Sanford forced his antennae higher and kept quiet. “—and hatched from His seed into worlds teeming with life, but yang’Tak was that which He loved best and made its children in His own image.”

One of the young ones raised a hand, a human request for speech. “Does Ko’vi hate humans?” he asked.

O’bek’we clicked reprovingly. “Ko’vi hates none of His children.”

“But if He likes one best, He must like one least. Is it humans?”

‘Yes,’ thought Sanford. ‘Dig out of that.’

O’bek’we decided to notice him. “T’aki, your father.”

The boy looked around, then leapt up with embarrassing speed and ran to him. Sanford paid the young man who did the teacher’s walking, and took his son away, leaving O’bek’we to drone on once more about Ko’vi and His great works in the age of creation. He told himself not to think too harshly of the curriculum. He might feel differently if he were more religious, and certainly belief in a benevolent and watchful god made a heart-lifting contrast to the reality of the camps.

It didn’t seem right to teach children not to look too closely at reality.

Of course, given that reality, it wasn’t right to have children in the first place.

“Did you enjoy school?” he asked, hoping his mood didn’t show in his tone.

“It was okay.” T’aki ran ahead to dig through a small heap of empty cans at the side of the road. “We did numbers and looked at pictures of fish. Are there fish on our world?”

“Not exactly, but there is life in our world’s waters.”

“Fish swim. Can we swim?”

“No.”

“None of us?”

“None.”

“Humans can. We saw pictures of that with the fish. Can Sarah swim?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

But now she was back in his mind and restless energy continued to bite at him. He did not want to go home yet. He watched his son scramble through another little pile of trash, and then decided to go crawl the Heaps for a while. T’aki was delighted by what was, for him, a treat. For two hours, the boy filled boxes with scrap metal and papers while Sanford mostly just watched. His son. Clever and fated to inherit the good looks of his bloodline. Honest, so far. And maybe it was still true that he should have never had a son, but he could not help but be proud.

When the bell rang to call them in, he sold what little T’aki had so proudly gathered and dug into his pockets to pay for two showers. T’aki protested, he always did, but stood with great tolerance under the spout and let Sanford soap and scrub his chitin. Afterwards, still oddly reluctant to go home, he splurged and traded fifty credits for a sheep’s head, and took it to a communal fire to cook.

He didn’t know anyone at the fire by name, not Earth-name and not true-name, but the company was good. T’aki was bored, but fairly well-behaved, and endured the frequent cursing and chaw-spitting without emulating it. One of the others had a can of beer and passed it in exchange for the sheep’s tongue. The beer was warm, but still alive, sour but good. Sanford took four swallows, gave T’aki one, and thought of Sarah.

Restless. Too restless.

Night fell. The figures at the fire came and went. The company was still good, but not enough. It occurred to Sanford that he wanted to be touched. He picked up his son—sleepy with food, T’aki curled against his chest and drew up small, chirring—and felt immediately better.