Cottonwood (61 page)

“Sarah?” And he bounced, that absolutely fundamental T’aki-bounce. “Come and see!”

She got up (
white gown, soft bed, new body…I’m dead
) and let him take her hand and lead her to the window. She could see the stars outside, so beautiful, brighter than they’d ever been, even in Brookings. Stars and stars and then the cool, blue curve of the glowing Earth.

Sarah’s breath puffed out of her. She put her hand up to touch the glass, but it wasn’t glass. Just like the walls weren’t plaster, she supposed, and the sheet she was wearing wasn’t cotton. She looked at Earth and saw, hanging suspended all around it, sleek black ships alive with lights.

‘The
Fortesque Freeship
is right outside…’ Had she dreamed that? Sounded familiar. She felt T’aki’s hand reach up to catch hers; she found the receptor-pads in his palm and stroked them gently.

“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said.

“Did you…Did you get everyone?”

“Yes.”

And she turned, because that wasn’t T’aki, that was—

He’d been sitting on a bench in the darkest side of the room. Now he stood and came a few steps toward her. Just a few. She knew him at once, and then wondered how she knew, because all his clothes were different. Gone was the flannel shirt and cargo shorts patched with duct tape. Gone were the carpenter’s belts and the ammo strap full of batteries. His vest was black and green and shimmered, not ostentatiously, but just enough to be both bold and striking. His breeches had a herringbone texture pressed into the dark fabric and a front panel of more shimmery black. His feet were covered; she hadn’t been able even to imagine the shoes that could fit over the yang’ti foot, but there they were. And his clothes were moot, they were entirely moot, because even in the dimness of this strange room, those were Sanford’s eyes.

“We’re going home soon,” T’aki said again. “To the big house. It has a yard like yours did, only bigger. Father’s father says you can have the green room.”

Sarah looked out the window at Earth. ‘I’m not ready,’ she thought, surprised. Even in the Great Escape, she’d only thought about getting them away, never about what would happen after. Leave Earth?

No more cheeseburgers, no Chinese food? No new dog chasing Fagin’s old rubber ball, no more hope of ever catching a Fortesque B-Flick on the late-night sci-fi station? No Halloween, no Christmas. No car that she could drive, no favorite book she’d ever pick up at a garage sale. No garage sales, maybe. Leave Earth.

“Or Father says…we can have a new house. If you like that better.”

Sarah tickled at his palm, smiling at Earth, her last look at Earth. “It really doesn’t matter, jellybean,” she said. “We’re family wherever we go.”

He hugged her thighs, both together, no longer just a knee-high hopper, but nearly as tall as her hip. She rubbed his head and then his shoulder-joints, and looked at Sanford over her shoulder, thinking, ‘I’m going to have to meet this man’s father,’ but how bad could the in-laws be when they were willing to give her the green room? She heard herself laugh a little. Actually laugh. What had happened to the last four years?

Sanford clicked, unlocking T’aki’s reluctant arms. Then the boy was leaving, and no sooner had he cleared those whooshing Star-Trek doors than Sanford began to remove his totally moot clothes. She laughed again, her hand pressed flat against the sleek non-glass surface of the window, and watched him come for her. She didn’t think it was possible to remove pants while walking, but he did it. Easily.

He pulled the gown over her head. She raised her arms to help and lowered them again around his neck. His palps fanned. They breathed together. He lifted her into his ridiculously stick-like and thorn-spiked arms and carried her to the bed.

“I’m not dreaming, am I?” she asked as he lay her down. “I dream this one a lot. Please be real.”

He breathed again, then touched his palps along her neck, the very tips lightly drumming as he maneuvered himself atop her in the most painful, least comfortable, and perfect position. He was real. He was real shifting her legs wide around his thorny thighs, real when she felt him enter and plunge deep. He looked into her eyes and came at once, his hard chest pressed firmly over her breast, trembling slightly in his paralytic spasm.

She held him until it cleared, and when he blinked and softly chirred, she reached up and found a place beside his mouth to kiss. They shared breath again and she relaxed back into the bedding, wonderfully at peace.

“Here I have been, in this moment,” he said, “since I left you behind me. Now you are here. I am ready to move on. Come with me.”

She nodded once, and he reared back and began to move inside her.

Oh, he would. Out of reach so there was nothing she could do but lie there and take it. Sarah arched, hands slipping over his smooth shell, giving in first to strained whimpers and then to full cries. Why not? This was what he wanted and the walls seemed pretty thick to her. She surrendered up to it entirely and lived in that moment, cumming easily and inexorably as the tides, long after time and place ceased to having any meaning.

It ended as it began, with him lowering himself tight against her heart and washing her aching womb with his cool release. When he was back, he pulled the sheet up over both of them and lay close, still joined, motionless, sealed together in his cocoon and breathing one another’s air.

“I am you,” he whispered, soft against her skin. “I have always been you.”

“And I am you,” she answered, feeling silly, but in a good way, the best way.

“Tell me when you are ready for more.”

“I’m ready now,” she said, embracing him.

And so, apparently, was he.

* * *

He made her go to dinner. She didn’t want to go, but not even her protests swayed him. He donned his clothes relentlessly, draped her in hers, stuck his head out into the other room to order T’aki to wash up, and came back to pull the sheets off the bed. Dinner was not negotiable.

“But why do we have to go out?” Sarah grumbled, stubbornly lying on the bare bed. “Don’t tell me that your advanced technology can shoot you across the galaxy faster than the speed of light but you still have to walk all the way down to the cafeteria to make a sandwich. Can’t we just…press some magic buttons and bring dinner to us? Then we can stay in and make love all night.”

“On every night hereafter,” he promised, coming to tow her gently but decisively onto her feet. “Tonight, we go out.”

“Why?”

“It’s a party!” T’aki chirped, bouncing on the bed with one shoe on and one held over his head. “A big party!”

“How big?” Sarah asked, alarmed.

Sanford caught up his son and set him firmly down again. “They know who you are,” he said, strapping on the errant shoe and tightening the other. “They expect to see you at my side.”

“Sanford, I—I can’t do that to them. A human at your big rescue party? Seriously, no. Some of them are bound to hate me.”

“No. Not where we are going. This, I promise you.”

His promise was good enough. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.

They left his rooms and went out into the hall, Sarah walking in between Sanford and T’aki, one of her hands held by each of them. They looked good, she thought, all dressed in green and black, their chitin shining and heads held high. She looked like a bald lady in a bed sheet.

They passed a lot of yang’ti in the hall. Too many. Not going anywhere, but just standing there, crowded together, as if they’d been waiting just to see them. Some of them buzzed when she passed them, a buzz that came in pulses through fanned palps, almost as if they were spitting the sound at her, except…it didn’t sound angry. She thought she saw faces she knew among them, even thought she saw John Byrnes—John Byrnes, the first alien she’d ever met—and she tried to stop and see if it was really him, but whoever it was merely raised one hand in a slight wave and ducked away.

Sanford took her to an elevator (an elevator on a
spaceship
!) and as soon as the doors shut on the buzzing hall, she sagged back into the wall and whoofed out breath.

“You’re doing fine,” Sanford said.

“They like you,” added T’aki.

“It doesn’t feel real, any of it. All those people and…” She touched her gown, rubbing nervously over her stomach and feeling it smooth and whole beneath the fabric. She tried to laugh. “I was in the cell just yesterday.”

“No, you weren’t,” said T’aki. “You were in the vat. For days and days and—”

“Hush. Sarah. You have left the cell, Sarah.” Sanford touched her hand. “I have left Cottonwood. We are here now. We are moving on and we do not have to bring that with us.”

The elevator finished going up and went sideways for a while. Very futurific. She giggled, watching the lights fly by. “Tell me about the green room,” she said, just to say something.

“It has a big window,” T’aki chirped promptly. “Over the yard. And a big, big bed. Father’s father said that was important.”

“Hush,” Sanford said again, in that tone that meant he’d be smiling if he could.

“Okay, so…they’re all clear on that, uh, that aspect of things.” Sarah rubbed at her blushing cheeks. “Good.”

“If not entirely at ease, I warn you. But they will be happy to welcome you home.” He hesitated, clicking. “If you would prefer a house of our own—”

“After so many years, I would never dream of taking you from your family.” Her stomach tried to twist; she forced it calm and smiled for him. “I’m sure we’ll…we’ll all get along just fine.”

“Yes.”

“There are fourteen people in the house,” T’aki inserted. “And five of them are children, but I’m the youngest.”

Dear Lord. That was a lot of in-laws to win over.

Sanford squeezed her hand.

The elevator stopped, went up three more floors, and then opened the doors. Sarah looked up and got hit in the face by a wall of pulsating buzzes. Not a hallway now, not a hundred yang’ti in single file waiting to watch her walk by, but a room, a huge room, so full of them that there were guards—not armed, but still obviously guards—keeping a path clear to the doors at the opposite side. To her shock, she actually did know faces in this crowd, not many, but more than a few, from both Cottonwood and the bio-lab. It threw her, badly. She’d guessed by now that the buzzing was some kind of cheering, but she’d assumed it was for Sanford, the hero, the bringer of the cavalry. Now she realized with a hot flare that they were also cheering for her.

Her legs buckled. Sanford’s arm slipped around her waist, holding her up in an unobtrusive way. T’aki still kept his grip on her hand, waving and buzzing cheerfully back at the crowd, oblivious.

“Do you see the doors?” Sanford asked. “We will go through the doors. We will sit down. We will eat. We will hear a few stories. You are not expected to speak. We will go back to our room. We will put T’aki to bed. We will copulate many times—”

She laughed.

“—and we will sleep. It is the only time, do you understand?” He clicked in her ear, then added, “Until we are home on yang’Tak. Then, one more, my family only.”

“Okay.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She started walking. The buzzing got louder. They were on every side of her, some of them slapping rhythmically at their chest plates or shouting as she passed by. If there were words in what they were chanting, she couldn’t make them out. All she heard was noise; all she saw were armored bodies and vibrating palps. That dream-like sense of unreality began to well up, trying to tell her this wasn’t really happening, that she would close her eyes and open them back in the cell, smelling the stink of old urine and rotten meat, hearing nothing but the stuttering of her stubborn heart and the rasp of her shallow breaths echoing off the empty walls. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t over; it was just a matter of time until she woke up.

And just then, like an iron spike through her rising panic, came a voice she knew, a voice she never thought she’d hear again: “Sure, just walk on by, caseworker. Don’t even say hello.”

Sanford tried to keep her walking (his antennae snapped flat, annoyed), but Sarah dug in her feet and made him stop. She turned around, searching the mash of yang’ti faces and there he was, just behind one of the guards, his arms folded human-style, looking at her.

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.