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.