Nobody does things for me. They resent me. With Wes Dawson it went far beyond resentment. He gave orders. He lectured. He taught the language of the horrors — an expected the women to use it. He was persuasive and smooth and condescending, like that first psychiatrist they had given her, the one who thought using Q-tips was a form of masturbation. She’d gotten along all right with the second one. Mrs. Carmichael had looked a little like Jeri Wilson. A little plumper, and not as scared, Alice thought.
The horrors were worse than Dawson. Anything short of instant obedience puzzled them. They solved the problem by prodding with their trunks or the butts of the twisted-looking guns. They wouldn’t listen to anything she had to say. They treated her like a thing. If Alice McLennon slashed her wrists, it would be one less damn thing for the horrors to worry about.
This cleaning of air pipes: it was make-work, a way of keeping the prisoners busy, like picking tomatoes at Menninger’s. Alice wasn’t fooled. I’m here for being crazy, not stupid. The horrors were too big to fit in the pipes. What had they done before people turned up? Maybe they had Roto-Rooters, or maybe the pipes just never needed cleaning, or — she’d glimpsed something like a steel doughnut just the size of the pipe, with a glittering eye that watched her, from a distance. Robots?
And like the make-work at Menninger’s, it served its purpose. They’d pushed her into the ducts when she balked. Those rubbery split trunks were irresistibly strong. She floundered in there, disoriented and nauseated, and took the great wad of cloth and the plastic bag that were shoved in after her. Then she hadn’t done anything for a while. Then … she started to clean the pipes.
Well, there was dust and rust, and it came off. There were wads of goop and soil and feathers in the filters. And, moving around in the pipes, she began to learn a kind of skill. There were no handholds; of course not, the horrors had never expected that living things would need them in here. She learned to move in a zigzag jumping style, swiping at the sides with the cloth. It worked.
It worked, and she was getting better at it, but it was makework, and she couldn’t wait to get back to the garden, with its open spaces.
Some of the plants were sprouting. Alice was afraid to touch them. Mrs. Woodward chuckled. “Rice. I might have known it would be rice. Rice likes it wet.”
“What do we do now?”
“Nothing. There ain’t any bugs here. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe we want to block off the water pipes that feeds some of the other stuff.”
Alice nodded. She pushed herself back to look at the vegetable plot. Was that another tuft of green, where they’d planted corn and runner beans together? Alice belatedly realized that she was too far from a handhold.
It didn’t bother her much. She was used to free-fall. She floated, waiting for Thuktun Flishithy’s minuscule thrust to pull her someplace useful.
Something wrapped around her ankle. She jumped as if she’d been electrocuted, and looked down at a cluster of tentacles, a broad brown head, wrinkled with age, and recessed eyes. “Raztupisp-minz?”
“You have learned to recognize me? Good. How is your health, Alice?”
“I’m fine.”
“Your plants are sprouting. I am pleased. I think our plants will grow in your world.”
Alice held her face expressionless. Dawson had suggested if the plants grew well, Earth would become more desirable to the horrors — and she hadn’t believed him. Should the plants die … easy enough, but she’d have to go on eating what they fed now.
“I want to explain something,” the teacher said. “You may have noticed that some of the fithp are acting strangely. The mating season has started for one class of us, the sleepers, and it affects their behavior. They are not turning rogue, but do not irritate them.”
“You’re not a sleeper, are you? And Takpusseh is.”
“Mating season goes with the females, the sleeper females are spaceborn, and so is Tashayamp. For most of the year, many days to come, you may see me as neuter.”
She studied him, but there was nothing to be read in his alien face. Yet this was a teacher and a manipulator. “Can you hear thought?”
“Hear thought?” He snorted. “No! But I can see. You talk of mating with females. You shy from males when you can. You are thin in the hips, your breasts are flat. Sometimes there are fithp who are shaped like females but never come into season.”
Alice leapt away, back to the seed plot, back to the company of the other prisoners. Nobody had ever suggested such a thing to her! They thought she was strange, yes, but a neuter? A freemartin? If she didn’t like men, it was because men were … were …
She feared the teacher would follow, but in fact he was was speaking to another fi’ — to the other teacher, Takpusseh.
She remembered, now, that men had tried to tell her that she was strange, to put her on the defensive. Fuck me to prove you’re a woman.
