The Scorpion Rules (3 page)

The moment didn't—couldn't—last. The boys were already coming down the row with the ladder. Xie was unfolding from the ground; Thandi was pulling Han to his feet, and then, suddenly—

A sonic boom.

It crashed into us like a slap to the ear. The stuck goat shouted. From the trees all around, loose apples pattered down. Grego bolted for the edge of the grove, leaving Atta alone with the ladder.

We all wanted to go with him, of course, but—

“Wait! The goat!” I called.

My classmates stopped and turned and looked at me. On their faces, varying degrees of annoyance, resignation, and respect sorted themselves into agreement, obedience. This is what it is like, in my experience, to speak as royalty. Even to other royalty.

“Our duty is with the goat,” I said.

It was not that I didn't want to see whatever was coming—I very much did—but duty must come first. Atta, his face still more annoyed than agreeing, swung the ladder up against the tree with a thud.

And then Bat Brain, with the sense of dramatic irony and comic timing shared by all goatish kind, chose that moment to prove herself free after all. She came leaping lightly down the tree, lightly off the ladder, then lightly off my shoulder. I crashed to my knees, not lightly, and bent there panting. Bat Brain lifted her head and bleated into my face, breath smelling of new apples and old fermenting grass.
Goat,
she said.

Xie picked me up off the ground. “ ‘Our duty is with the goat'?” she quoted, snagging said goat by one horn.

“Well, it was.” I took the other horn, and with my free hand evaluated the sore spot in my shoulder. Bat Brain had lightly left some welts, but the skin was not broken.

Xie shook her head. “Only you, Greta. . . .”

Grego's voice came from the edge of the grove: “Come! It is a ship!”

Xie looked at me and I looked at her. We went toward Grego with as much haste as was appropriate, dragging the goat between us. When we cleared the trees we found a perfectly round cloud overhead. We could already see the fleck of light at its center.

A ship.

“What kind is it?” Da-Xia asked Grego. He likes ships—indeed likes anything with blinking lights.

“A suborbital shuttle, I think.” Grego glanced over his shoulder, lenses and microcabling flexing inside his eyes. Grego needs the cybernetics in his eyes because his albinism means that his natural irises do not block light effectively, and bright light therefore dazzles and blinds him. The implanted apertures are designed to compensate for this, but through his tinkering he has pushed them to do more: magnify up close, far-see, the like. It is not quite the full-spectrum retinas the Swan Riders are said to have, but it does serve him as built-in binoculars.

We stood around him and hung on his words—literally, in Han's case. He was holding Grego's elbow like an excited child.

“It's little,” Grego said, his accent thickening with his excitement.
Lee-til.
“Two person? Four at most.”

“New hostages?” said Xie.

“New hostages,” I agreed. “At least one.”

At least one, and no more than four. The children of the leaders and generals of the new American state on the PanPol border.

“I thought they might send them all to one of the other Preceptures,” said Xie. “I wonder why—”

She was cut off by the bong of the great bell. It was not quite time for the trice bell, which summoned us inside to lunch, but clearly our teachers wanted us safely away and were ringing it early. The chance to see the new hostages was to be lost, then.

“There's still the goat,” said Thandi.

“I have not in fact forgotten about the goat.” I hardly could. She was clamped between my knees.

“I'm just saying,” said Thandi, “our duty is with the goat.”

She was mocking me, but it was more than that. Goats are the task of the oldest of our Precepture's age-based cohorts—our cohort. We genuinely could not go in while a goat was loose. What Thandi was saying (carefully, because we were in full view of the Panopticon, and one assumes its vast intelligence can read lips) was that we might be able to see the ship land after all.

“It doesn't take all of us,” said Han, guilelessly.

Thandi pressed her lips together, but nodded. When it came to judging what limit we could push and what push would get us punished, there was no one better than Thandi. The rest of us took her assessment for the expert advice it was. We could not all stay out. The bells had stopped now, and the ship was close. We needed to move.

“Take her, Greta,” Xie said.

Thandi clapped her hand to her breast with great drama. “You're the one who takes our goat duty so much to heart.”

I looked around and saw accord on every face. And in spite of Thandi's mockery—and I do know I am easy to mock—this was kindness. This was simple kindness. They all knew that the incoming shuttle would be carrying the hostage or hostages from the new American state. I might someday be called upon to die in their company. Of course I wanted to see them.

And, silently, my colleagues were offering me a chance to do so.

I took it, of course. They went to obey the bell. I went to put the goat away, and to see what I could see.

I did not hurry as I grabbed Bat Brain by horn and collar and pulled her over to the fenced pasture, where—despite a quarter acre of clover grazing—the goats were all crammed together on top of the feed shack like refugees on a sinking ship. Bat Brain didn't fight. She's not a bad creature, despite having been named by thirteen-year-old boys. Her ears are black with speckles and soft as sueded silk. All around the gardens the other cohorts were filing in—ragged lines of children dressed in the coarse white linens of the Children of Peace, painterly against the terraced gardens. Overhead the cloud was very close, filling half the sky. The birds had fallen silent under it.

Now that Bat Brain was in sight of her sister goats she wanted back in the pen—as if getting out hadn't been her doing in the first place.
Lonely,
she bleated.
Now I'm looone-ly.

She stood at my knee as I undid the ropes binding the gate, then bounded past me as the gate opened. In a moment she was up atop the hay rick, pausing only to butt poor Bug Breath smartly in the ribs.

Goat,
Bat Brain said reflectively. All the goats were watching the cloud, their heads tilted up, their long ears flopping.

I double-tied the gate and went with measured speed toward the Precepture hall. The stone building and its great wood doors were shadowless in the noon light. On its left the Panopticon shimmered and watched me. On its right the induction spire, where the ship would land, was almost too bright to look at. Shining as aluminum and slender as a birch tree, the spire shoots up a thousand feet into the air. Some days I think it is a pin, a straight pin that holds the Precepture down like a butterfly on a board. Sometimes I feel like a specimen.

I had the timing about right: the shuttle was landing. It slipped its eddy coils neatly over the spire tip as it descended, shedding energy magnetically and gliding to a stop amid the scrub grass tuffets and hysterical chickens.

The ship was indeed small, not much bigger than a single one of our cells. Its skin of low-friction polymer swirled like quicksilver. Gantry spiders came from nowhere and swarmed over the hatch. They were perhaps a hundred yards away, but I could hear them, the mechanical click of metal on ceramicized polymer, a sound like ancient clocks. The day had fallen that quiet.

I sat down on the log bench outside the main doors. A hatch opened in the Precepture wall and a small spider-shaped proctor came scuttling out to take my shoes. Or rather, my tabi—thick-soled toe socks, calf-high, and clipped tight against ticks. I bent over and undid the clips, one by one. The proctor unfolded extra arms, ready to be more efficient. Its pincers clicked on the ancient flagstone of the Precepture step as if it were tapping its fingers.

I thought I had timed it, but I was running out of time. What could be keeping the passengers? The proctor danced. I peeled off my tabi and stood up—and then, finally and probably too late, came the clunk of explosive bolts firing. The gantry spiders opened the shuttle hatch.

A single child came out.

The new hostage was a boy, and about my age. From that distance I could get only an impression of him: tall, well-built but soft-looking, racially indeterminate as many Americans are. His face was tipped down, loose dark curls spilling into his eyes. The ship's steward—a spindly thing like a praying mantis—had one pincer clamped around his bicep. The boy leaned away from the grip. He was hunched, tense, his hands clenched together in front of him, almost as if he were tied up.

No, not
almost
. His hands were lashed together at the wrists.

I froze.

I have seen hard things at the Precepture. But I had never seen anyone in chains. We children were trained to walk out under our own power, and we did. Even with the Swan Riders, we almost always did.

But this boy—his hands were bound. He stumbled.

My head whirled, as if I'd taken too much sun. At my feet the door proctor was clicking, its optical beam sweeping me. I saw a burst of red as the beam hit my eyes. Proctors have no facescreens, and their moods are hard to read . . . but I should not make excuses. I was not watching the proctor, nor attending to my duty to go inside. I was watching the bound and staggering boy. The word “slavery” flashed through my mind as I stood there—

The proctor shocked me.

It was a hard shock—I cried out and fell, landing hard on knees and hands and elbows. Across the field the boy shouted something. I looked up at him, and he threw out his bound hands toward me, rescuing or wanting rescue, desperate, drowning . . .

And then he vanished behind a close-up view of the proctor. The little machine loomed in front of my nose and put one claw, needle-delicate, on my hand. My tabi were still clenched there, trapped by the electrical spasm. My fingers would not unbend.

The needle-claw pushed into me.

“Easy, there,” said a warm voice, behind me. The Abbot. One of his spare legs swung forward and shooed the proctor away, the way a man with a cane might shoo a cat. The proctor rolled up as it tumbled backward, then with a flip unfolded onto its feet again. It clicked. I shrank from it. “Greta? My dear?” The Abbot stooped beside me and lifted me up, his ceramic fingers cool as he brushed the hair out of my face. “Are you all right?”

“G-good Father,” I stuttered. My back was to the boy now, and my fingers opened at last. The tabi fell. The little proctor dragged them away. “I apologize, I—”

The proctor had shocked me. It had been years since a proctor had had to shock me. It was little children who got shocked, and fools. But the proctor had shocked me.

“I—”

I could think of nothing to excuse myself. The Abbot. There was no one in the world whose regard I valued more. No one whom I would have less liked to see me in disgrace.

But the Abbot only smiled softly at me. “Think nothing of it, Greta. We are not so jaded, I hope, that an incoming spaceship does not qualify as a distraction.”

Distantly I could hear the boy shouting.
Slavery,
I thought again.
Slavery is no part—

“You wish to quote something?”

I blinked.

“I can see it in your face,” said the Abbot. “Well. In your face, and in your neural activity, as reflected by the blood flow visible in infrared and trace electrical activity visible via EM sensors. How is it that Talis puts it?”

The Utterances, 2:25:
Never lie to an AI
.

Particularly one who has raised you as if he were a father, from the age of five.

Behind my back, the boy was all but screaming.

Slavery.
The Abbot was quite right—it was part of a quotation. He raised the icon of one eyebrow at me, and I quoted: “Slavery is no part of natural law.”

“Ah.” The Abbot would have been within his rights to punish me for such a radical thought, but he seemed merely ruminative. “Roman, of course, coming from you. Let me see. ‘Slavery is no part of natural law, but an invention of man. And it is that other invention of man, war, which produces so many slaves.' Gaius the Jurist.” He smoothed a stray curl behind my ear with his ivory fingers. “Don't worry, dear one. This young fellow may be a challenge, but I'll have him settled down soon.” He lifted the hand away from my hair, signaling. The shouting stopped.

I turned around to see the boy sagging in the steward's pincered arms.

“He is no slave,” said the Abbot. “And neither are you, Greta. Never forget that. Neither are you.”

I
am not a slave. The Abbot, in this one thing, was wrong: I have never thought myself a slave.