John Scalzi - Zoe`s Tale

I laid back, looked up at the clouds in the sky, and smiled to myself. Maybe we were in hiding at the farthest reaches of the galaxy, but right now, at this moment, things were pretty good. You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view. And the ability to ignore the smell of an entire planet.

"Zoë," said a voice behind me.

I jerked up and then saw Hickory and Dickory. They had just come over the rise.

"Don't do that," I said, and got up.

"We wish to speak to you," Hickory said.

"You could do that at home," I said.

"Here is better," Hickory said. "We have concerns."

"Concerns about what?" I said, and rose to look at them. Something wasn't quite right about either of them, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was. "Why aren't you wearing your consciousness modules?" I asked.

"We are concerned about the increasing risks you are taking with your safety," Hickory said, answering the first but not the second of my questions. "And with your safety in a general sense."

"You mean, being here?" I said. "Relax, Hickory. It's broad daylight, and the Hentosz farm is just over the hill. Nothing bad is going to happen to me."

"There are predators here," Hickory said.

"There are yotes," I said, naming the dog-sized carnivores that we'd found lurking around Croatoan. "I can handle a yote."

"They move in packs," Hickory said.

"Not during the day," I said.

"You do not only come here in the day," Hickory said. "Nor do you always come alone."

I reddened a bit at that, and thought about getting angry with Hickory. But it wasn't wearing its consciousness. Getting angry with it wouldn't do anything. "I thought I told the two of you not to follow me when I want to have some private time," I said, as evenly as I could.

"We do not follow you," Hickory said. "But neither are we stupid. We know where you go and with whom. Your lack of care is putting you at risk, and you do not always allow us to accompany you anymore. We cannot protect you as we would prefer to, and are expected to."

"We have been here for months, guys." I said. "There hasn't been a single attack on anyone by anything."

"You would have been attacked that night in the woods had Dickory and I not come to find you," Hickory said. "Those were not yotes in the trees that night. Yotes cannot climb or move through trees."

"And you'll notice I'm nowhere near the forest," I said, and waved in the direction of the tree line. "And whatever was in there doesn't seem to come out here, because we'd have seen them by now if they did. We've been over this before, Hickory."

"It is not only the predators here that concern us," Hickory said.

"I'm not following you," I said.

"This colony is being searched for," Hickory said.

"If you saw the video, you'll remember that this Conclave group blasted that colony from the sky," I said. "If the Conclave finds us, I don't think even you are going to be able to do much to protect me."

"It is not the Conclave we are concerned about," Hickory said.

"You're the only ones, then," I said.

"The Conclave is not the only one who will seek this colony," Hickory said. "Others will search for it, to win favor from the Conclave, or to thwart it, or to take the colony for its own. They will not blast this colony from the sky. They will take it in the standard fashion. Invasion and slaughter."

"What is with the two of you today?" I said. I was trying to lighten the mood.

I failed. "And then there is the matter of who you are," Hickory said.

"What does that mean?" I said.

"You should know well," Hickory said. "You are not merely the daughter of the colony leaders. You are also important to us. To the Obin. That fact is not unknown, Zoë. You have been used as a bargaining chip your entire life. We Obin used you to bargain with your father to build us consciousness. You are a treaty condition between the Obin and the Colonial Union. We have no doubt that any who would attack this colony would try to take you in order to bargain with the Obin. Even the Conclave could be tempted to do this. Or they would kill you to wound us. To kill a symbol of ourselves."

"That's crazy," I said.

"It has happened before," Hickory said.

"What?" I said.

"When you lived on Huckleberry, there were no fewer than six attempts to capture or kill you," Hickory said. "The last just a few days before you left Huckleberry."

"And you never told me this?" I asked.

"It was decided by both your government and ours that neither you nor your parents needed to know," Hickory said. "You were a child, and your parents wished to give you as unremarkable a life as possible. The Obin wished to be able to provide them that. None of these attempts came close to success. We stopped each long before you would have been in danger. And in each case the Obin government expressed its displeasure with the races who made such attempts on your well-being."

I shuddered at that. The Obin were not people to make enemies of.

"We would not have told you at all—and we have violated our standing orders not to do so—were we not in our current situation," Hickory said. "We are cut off from the systems we had in place to keep you safe. And you are becoming increasingly independent in your actions and resentful of our presence in your life."

Those last words hit me like a slap. "I'm not resentful," I said. "I just want my own time. I'm sorry if that hurts you."

"We are not hurt," Hickory said. "We have responsibilities. How we fulfill those responsibilities must adapt to circumstance. We are making an adaptation now."

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

"It is time for you to learn how to defend yourself," Hickory said. "You want to be more independent from us, and we do not have all the resources we once had to keep you safe. We have always intended to teach you to fight. Now, for both of those reasons, it is necessary to begin that training."

"What do you mean, teach me to fight?" I asked.

"We will teach you to defend yourself physically," Hickory said. "To disarm an opponent. To use weapons. To immobilize your enemy. To kill your enemy if necessary."

"You want to teach me how to kill other people," I said.

"It is necessary," Hickory said.

"I'm not sure John and Jane would approve of that," I said.

"Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan both know how to kill," Hickory said. "Both, in their military service, have killed others when it was necessary for their survival."

"But it doesn't mean that they want me to know," I said. "And also, I don't know that I want to know. You say you need to adapt how you fulfill your responsibilities. Fine. Figure out how to adapt them. But I'm not going to learn how to kill something else so you can feel like you're doing a better job doing something I'm not even sure I want you to do anymore."

"You do not wish us to defend you," Hickory said. "Or learn to defend yourself."

"I don't know!" I said. I yelled it in exasperation. "Okay? I hate having my face pushed into all of this. That I'm some special thing that needs to be defended. Well, you know what? Everyone here needs to be defended, Hickory. We're all in danger. Any minute hundreds of ships could show up over our heads and kill us all. I'm sick of it. I try to forget about it a little every now and then. That's what I was doing out here before the two of you showed up to crap over it all. So thank you very much for that."

Hickory and Dickory said nothing to that. If they had been wearing their consciousness, they'd probably be all twitchy and overloaded at that last outburst. But they were just standing there, impassive.

I counted to five and tried to get myself back under control. "Look," I said, in what I hoped was a more reasonable tone of voice. "Give me a couple of days to think about this, all right? You've dropped a lot on me all at once. Let me work it through in my head."