Cottonwood (56 page)

They were surprised to see him. After so long, the only sensible assumption had been that the ship had failed and all lives had been lost. There was a monument garden in the governor’s district. His name was carved onto one of the white bricks that built it. Now the ship was home and the men they took off it were telling them that the ship had indeed failed, stranding its cargo of lives in a strange and hostile world. There was life in the universe other than yang’ti, a planet called Earth, a race called humans, unimaginably different. Some of the humans—and Sanford fought to make it clear it was only some—had seized power enough to lock the yang’ti away in places of terrible captivity. He did not describe them too closely, although he knew that the others likely would. He had escaped
only
with the help of a human and now they must go back, at once, to rescue those left behind.

He was taken to yang’Tak’s governor. Not to the Hall of the Senators, but to Governor Ro’zhe’t herself, and before her and her consuls, he told the story again.

She did not ask questions. She did not interrupt. When he had said it all, she offered him a seat and, at his refusal, said simply, “Go home.”

He stared at her.

“Your part in this is over, Nk’os’a’knko, and you have the thanks of our beleaguered people. Go home and be healed.”

He was escorted from the consulate, too stunned to argue, and taken home.

The reunion was a haze across his mind. He remembered his father seizing him, sharing breath for the first time since his fifth molt, when he’d decided he was far too grown for such intimate displays. His brothers running to embrace him…and his younger brother had children, the youngest of them nearly to his fourth molt! His father’s father had died, and Y’si’di left for her family House according to custom, but she came to see him and tore off her veils to touch him with her naked hands. They all exclaimed over T’aki, wanting to touch and hold him until the boy fastened himself to Sanford’s leg and would not let go. Finally, his father took him to a room—his uncle Ka’wuta’s room, it used to be—and left him alone.

“When are we leaving?” asked T’aki.

“Soon, I hope,” Sanford replied.

The next day, he was back at the consulate. They admitted him. He waited in the Great Yawn until Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and he had his say again. Again she listened, asked no questions, made no interruptions. And again, she sent him home.

He went. But he came back.

Every day, he woke, he ate, he placed T’aki in his family’s care, and he made the journey to yang’Tak’s commanding seat, where he climbed the hundred steps to the consulate door and demanded entry. Every day, he got it while lobbyists, reporters and senators were turned away. Every day, Governor Ro’zhe’t agreed to see him and every day, she sent him home once she had.

It rained. It stormed. It began to freeze. Sanford stood stubbornly in the Great Yawn with ice dripping off his palps and freezing to his chest-plate. Ro’zhe’t sent security out with hot drinks and a wrap on the worst days, but she always sent him home when his impassioned words to her were done.

He returned to his family’s House one night to find that T’aki had molted, and he had not been there to see it, explain it, rub warm oil into the pale new chitin or carry the old one proudly out to be burnt. He saw accusation in his brother’s eyes—his brother, who had done a father’s duty while Sanford stood about all day in the consulate for nothing—but when he went in to tuck his son into his nest, all T’aki said was, “Will she still know me?”

“She will always know you,” Sanford said.

“When are we leaving?” asked T’aki, clutching at his hand.

“Soon,” said Sanford. “I hope.”

And the days passed.

At last, as spring’s thaw began to push back the grey sheets of ice on the consulate steps, the governor said, “It is not so simple as just going back. We cannot go to such a place, meet with such a people, and make such a demand unless we are prepared to go to war.”

“Not every human is responsible for the atrocities of our captivity.”

“But they are atrocities,” she said quietly. “And those who are responsible would seem to be in power. I will not go to this world with empty hands and snap my palps and hope for compliance. I will go only when I know I can see the thing done. Bloodlessly, if possible, but I will be prepared for war. This requires a fleet of warships.”

He threw up his hands and skreed frustration so piercingly that guards burst in and had to be coolly dismissed by the governor.

“It is nearly done,” she told him once they were gone. “They tell me within the next two ten-spans, we will be ready to launch. Our military forces have been called and fitted, and stand ready to board. These things take time, Nk’os’a’knko, but we will have our people home. Your part is done, and done very well. Go home.”

He did. And he went back again the next morning.

For six days, she refused the single request he made. On the seventh, with a certain bitter resignation, she gave in and allowed him two places on the flagship for the return to Earth, on the condition that he not bother her between then and launching.

He agreed. The next twelve days saw silence between them.

On the thirteenth, the launching of the fleet. Two hours after the ships were underway, Sanford was standing outside the command center. He had a new request to make. She heard him out, her antennae twitching slightly with incredulity. She refused.

The flight to Earth was every bit as lengthy as it had been to yang’Tak, but Sanford spent very little of it with his son. Every day, he went to the command deck and down the hall to the governor’s suite and asked to see her. Sometimes she made him wait all day, but eventually, her doors opened. She always listened. She asked no questions. She did not interrupt. She just said no.

“How long are you going to do this?” the ship’s commander asked him once, leaning against the sealed hatchway to the command deck.

“I spent twenty years rebuilding one code-bank,” Sanford replied. “I have learned the value of patience.”

The commander clicked thoughtfully and stepped aside.

Governor Ro’zhe’t said no.

They came to Earth (“You say they can understand us, that they have devices for translation?”) and seized the signals of every media satellite in orbit around the world. Across the planet, every television broke into a flurry of static and came back with Ro’zhe’t’s voice.

“People of Earth,” she said. “Many years ago, a ship came to you in desperate trouble, its people stranded, helpless, afraid. You took them by force from their failing ship, detained them, imprisoned them and tortured them. What might have been a dawning of historic peace and unity has become an outrage to our every sense! Our offspring, burned alive or branded! Our injured, starved or slain outright! Our people, forced to live in squalor under the shadow of your guns! No more!”

In the hall outside the command deck, Sanford paced, listening.

“Our ships even now are targeted upon these camps of slavery and death. I strongly advise you to assist in the evacuation in any way that you can, because
any
resistance from
any one of you
will be viewed as an open declaration of war and answered accordingly. This is not a negotiation of terms. Do not doubt we have the power to annihilate your people without ever setting foot upon your soil, and do not doubt the vehement will of my people to do just that. This is my only mercy, humans. Comply or be destroyed.”

Following the termination of this speech, control of the satellites was relinquished, where it promptly began to be re-broadcast by the terrified population of a planet that somehow never thought this day would come. The ships drove down through the atmosphere and separated to hover above each teeming mass of yang’ti life-sign that indicated a camp. There were more of them now. The first transport freighters disembarked, and eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t left the deck, stopped, and stared at Sanford in the hall.

He made his same request.

She listened crossly, refrained from interruption, and refused. Her guards escorted him to his room, where he sat with his son and watched Earth’s media feeds try to make sense of what had just happened.

He was glad he watched. Over the next several hours, he saw IBI’s people in panic, and as many of them fled, more and more of Earth’s reporters managed to get into the camps that had been off-limits for so long. Images were taken, broadcast. People saw for the first time the world in which the yang’ti had been condemned to live: Charred hatcheries, crumbling houses, naked children crawling over refuse for rats, mutilated yang’ti lying in rubble, corpses abandoned in the fly-blown streets.

And they were horrified.

As the world leaders scrambled to both contact the orbiting fleet and console their own panicking people, other humans—the true population—mobilized. Within an hour, they were there: the Red Cross, the PeaceCorps, the National Guard, the Salvation Army, even private citizens in their own vehicles, working under the suspicious eyes of the yang’ti soldiers to help organize the evacuees, to provide food and water, or just to help carry the injured to the waiting freighters. It was good to see what he’d once never imagined he would ever see, and what he’d known he would, having known Sarah.

It was not entirely bloodless. IBI, seemingly leaderless in these last desperate hours, engaged in violent fits both against the evacuating yang’ti and the humans who tried to help them. The native armies of several countries where camps had been established also attempted to confront and disarm yang’ti soldiers, and were dealt with mercilessly. Those few belligerent individuals who came to lob rocks at the departing aliens were also destroyed, but the violence seldom escalated once it became apparent whose weaponry was superior.

By working two freighters at each camp, with one shuttle on standby for those requiring severe and immediate medical aid, and sending out Sweeps on foot with DNA-scanners once the population began to thin, the camps were emptied in only three days. Sanford watched it all, excepting the time he took to sleep and to hunt down Ro’zhe’t to make his day’s request. At the end of that time, there was a lull, as human leaders again attempted contact with apologies and lies, human reporters speculated on what could come next, and yang’ti concerned themselves with organizing hundreds of thousands of frightened, agitated, and malnourished refugees into the ships brought to hold them. Eventually, Governor Ro’zhe’t returned to the media.

“Perhaps I was not clear,” this second broadcast began. “And in the interests of preserving whatever peace can be preserved with a race as murderous as yours, I will endeavor to clarify. We will not leave even one of our people in your hands. We demand the return of all. I give you one more of your days—just one—to bring those you are holding in sadistic captivity to one of the prearranged evacuation points. At the end of that time, I will release my patrols to sweep your planet for victims you may foolishly think to hide. With the use of certain devices, be assured, we can detect even one of our people from among your own, even under twenty kilometers of electronic baffle and rock, and I promise you a vengeance to equal holy Ko’vi’s wrath should we find one. Do not attempt to plead for time. You have had better than twenty years already and see what you have done with it.”

When she emerged from the command deck, there was Sanford, and for the first time in her political career, utterly unmindful of who might be watching (or recording; the evacuations were not only historic news to Earth), Governor Ro’zhe’t snapped, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you
want
?”

“You know what I want,” he answered.

“No! No! A thousand times, no! By Ko’vi, I think it’s
been
a thousand times! We are here for our people, Nk’os’a’knko,
ours
! I have neither the time nor the resources, nor, the truth be known, the slightest inclination to allow you to run about on Earth chasing a human when
our people
are still dying! No!”

There was only one more argument he could make. He made it.

She stared at him.

Her guards, highly-trained to discretion and hand-picked to show no reaction to the delicate things said in her presence, glanced his way. One of them even clicked.

Sanford stared right back at her, refusing either to plea further or to explain.

At last, at very long last, she said, “You couldn’t possibly hope to find—”

Sanford pulled a medical canister of genetic preservative from his satchel and slammed it down on the short ledge that ran along the hall’s panels. He said nothing.

Ro’zhe’t’s antennae flattened. She pressed hard on the soft plates above her eyes. “You are putting me in an ugly position, Nk’os’a’knko.”

“I could say the same for you.”

“Yes…I suppose you could.” She paced away, muttering something that sounded like, “Piss in a cup and drink it.” But then she came back and said, “Take command of a Sweep. You may deploy with the rest of them after the given period of grace has elapsed and you may stay only,
only
, until the last of them has reported back. After that, whether you are successful in your search or not, I will order your men to bring you back to the ship. Am I understood?”

“Yes, Governor.”

“Your persistence has been sand under my shell for years now, Nk’os’a’knko. Years.” She looked at him, oddly softened, though no less annoyed. “You should have told me the reason long before this.”

“Should I?” he shot back. “I thought the rescue of a good person reason enough.

“Don’t snap those at me, son. You have only one to account for. I have millions.” She held his stare until he dropped his eyes, then clicked a kind of peace-making goodbye and sent him away.

Sanford went to his room, sat on his bed and rubbed at his eye plates until he became aware of T’aki huddled at his side. The boy’s antennae were flat and tensely quivering, but he did not ask the question which had to be burning in his throat. Nevertheless, Sanford answered it.

“Tomorrow,” he said.