Zoe's Tale

by John Scalzi

  And it was. The sun was up, the day was bright, particularly after a couple of hours in the light-swallowing information center, and Roanoke was deep into spring—which was really pretty, even if it turned out that all the native blooms smelled like rotten meat dipped in sewer sauce (that description courtesy of Magdy, who could string together a phrase now and then). But after a couple of months, you stop noticing the smell, or at least accept there’s nothing you can do about it. When the whole planet smells, you just have to deal with it.

  But what really made it a good day for a walk was how much our world has changed in just a couple of months. John and Jane let us all out of Croatoan not too long after Enzo, Gretchen, Magdy and I had our midnight jog, and the colonists had begun to move into the countryside, building homes and farms, helping and learning from the Mennonites who were in charge of our first crops, which were already now growing in the fields. They were genetically engineered to be fast-growing; we’d be having our first harvest in the not too far future. It looked like we were going to survive after all. I walked past these new houses and fields, waving to folks as I went.

  Eventually I walked past the last homestead and over a small rise. On the other side of it, nothing but grass and scrub and the forest in a line to the side. This rise was destined to be part of another farm, and more farms and pastures would cut up this little valley even further. It’s funny how even just a couple thousand humans could start to change a landscape. But at the moment there was no other person in it but me; it was my private spot, for as long as it lasted. Mine and mine alone. Well, and on a couple of occasions, mine and Enzo’s.

  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 imm
obilize 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.”

  They still said nothing.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m heading back.” I brushed past Hickory.

  And found myself on the ground.

  I rolled and looked up at Hickory, confused. “What the hell?” I said, and made to stand up.

  Dickory, who had moved behind me, roughly pushed me back into the grass and dirt.

  I scrambled backward from the two of them. “Stop it,” I said.

  They drew their combat knives, and came toward me.

  I grunted out a scream and bolted upright, running at full speed toward the top of the hill, toward the Hentosz farm. But Obin can run faster than humans. Dickory flanked me, got in front of me, and drew back its knife. I backpedaled, falling backward as I did. Dickory lunged. I screamed and rolled again and sprinted back down the side of the hill I came up.

  Hickory was waiting for me and moving to intercept me. I tried to fake going left but it was having none of it, and grabbed for me, getting a grip on my left forearm. I hit at it with my right fist. Hickory deflected it easily, and then in a quick reversal slapped me sharply on the temple, releasing me as it did so. I staggered back, stunned. Hickory looped a leg around one of mine and jerked upward, lifting me completely off the ground. I fell backward and landed on my head. A white blast of pain flooded my skull, and all I could do was lie there, dazed.

  There was heavy pressure on my chest. Hickory was kneeling on me, immobilizing me. I clawed desperately at it, but it held its head away from me on its long neck and ignored everything else. I shouted for help as loudly as I could, knowing no one could hear me, and yelling anyway.

  I looked over and saw Dickory, standing to the side. “Please,” I said. Dickory said nothing. And could feel nothing. Now I knew why the two of them came to see me without their consciousness.

  I grabbed at Hickory’s leg, on my chest, and tried to push it off. It pushed it in harder, offered another disorienting slap with one hand, and with the other raised it and then plunged it toward my head in one terrible and fluid move. I screamed.

  “You are unharmed,” Hickory said, at some point. “You may get up.”

  I stayed on the ground, not moving, eyes turned toward Hickory’s knife, buried in the ground so close to my head that I couldn’t actually focus on it. Then I propped myself up on my elbows, turned away from the knife, and threw up.

  Hickory waited until I was done. “We offer no apology for this,” it said. “And will accept whatever consequences for it that you may choose. Know only this: You were not physically harmed. You are unlikely even to bruise. We made sure of this. For all of that you were at our mercy in seconds. Others who will come for you will not show you such consideration. They will not hold back. They will not stop. They will have no concern for you. They will not show you mercy. They will seek to kill you. And they will succeed. We knew you would not believe us if we only told you this. We had to show you.”

  I rose to my feet, barely able to stay upright, and staggered back from the two of them as best I could. “God damn you,” I said. “God damn you both. You stay away from me from now on.” I headed back to Croatoan. As soon as my legs could do it, I started running.

  “Hey,” Gretchen said, coming into the information center and sealing the inside door behind her. “Mr. Bennett said I could find you here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I asked him if I could be his printer monkey a little more today.”

  “Couldn’t keep away from the music?” Gretchen said, trying to make a little joke.

  I shook my head and showed her what I was looking at.

  “These are classified files, Zoë,” she said. “CDF intelligence reports. You’re going to get in trouble if anyone ever finds out. And Bennett definitely won’t let you back in here.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, and my voice cracked enough that Gretchen looked at me in alarm. “I have to know how bad it is. I have to know who’s out there and what they want from us. From me. Look.” I took the PDA and pulled a file on General Gau, the leader of the Conclave, the one who ordered the destruction of the colony on the video file. “This general is going to kill us all if he finds us, and we know next to nothing about him. What makes someone do this? Killing innocent people? What happened in his life that gets him to a place where wiping out entire planets seems like a good idea? Don’t you think we should know? And we don’t. We’ve got statistics on his military service and that’s it.” I tossed the PDA back on the table, carelessly, alarming Gretchen. “I want to know why this general wants me to die. Why he wants us all to die. Don’t you?” I put my hand on my forehead and slumped a little against the worktable.

  “Okay,” Gretchen said, after a minute. “I think you need to tell me what happened to you today. Because this is not how you were when I left you this afternoon.”

  I glanced over at Gretchen, stifled a laugh, and then broke down and started crying. Gretchen came over to give me a hug, and after a good long while, I told her everything. And I do mean everything.

  She was quiet after I had unloaded. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “If I tell you, you’re going to hate me,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m not going to hate you.”

  “I think they’re right,” she said. “Hickory and Dickory.”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  She pushed me lightly. “Stop that,” she said. “I don’t mean they were right to attack you. That was just over the line. But, and don’t take this the wrong way, you’re not an ordinary girl.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Do you see me acting any different than anyone else? Ever? Do I hold myself out as someone special? Have you ever once heard me talk about any of this to people?”

  “They know anyway,” Gretchen said.

  “I know that,” I said. “But it doesn’t come from me. I work at being normal.”

  “Okay, you’re a perfectly normal girl,” Gretchen said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “A perfectly normal girl who’s had six attempted assassinations,” Gretchen said.

  “But that’s not me,” I said, poking myself in the chest. “It�
��s about me. About someone else’s idea of who I am. And that doesn’t matter to me.”

  “It would matter to you if you were dead,” Gretchen said, and then held her hand up before I could respond. “And it would matter to your parents. It would matter to me. I’m pretty sure it would matter to Enzo. And it seems like it would matter a whole lot to a couple billion aliens. Think about that. Someone even thinks about coming after you, they bomb a planet.”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

  “I know,” Gretchen said. “But I don’t think you have a choice anymore. No matter what you do, you’re still who you are, whether you want to be or not. You can’t change it. You’ve got to work with it.”

  “Thanks for that uplifting message,” I said.

  “I’m trying to help,” Gretchen said.

  I sighed. “I know, Gretchen. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bite your head off. I’m just getting tired of having my life be about other people’s choices for me.”

  “This makes you different than any of the rest of us how, exactly?” Gretchen asked.

  “My point,” I said. “I’m a perfectly normal girl. Thank you for finally noticing.”

  “Perfectly normal,” Gretchen agreed. “Except for being Queen of the Obin.”

  “Hate you,” I said.

  Gretchen grinned.

  “Miss Trujillo said that you wanted to see us,” Hickory said. Dickory and Gretchen, who had gotten the two Obin for me, stood to its side. We were standing on the hill where my bodyguards had attacked me a few days earlier.

  “Before I say anything else, you should know I am still incredibly angry at you,” I said. “I don’t know that I will ever forgive you for attacking me, even if I understand why you did it, and why you thought you had to. I want to make sure you know that. And I want to make sure you feel it.” I pointed to Hickory’s consciousness collar, secure around its neck.

  “We feel it,” Hickory said, its voice quivering. “We feel it enough that we debated whether we could turn our consciousness back on. The memory is almost too painful to bear.”

  I nodded. I wanted to say good, but I knew it was the wrong thing to say, and that I would regret saying it. Didn’t mean I couldn’t think it, though, for the moment, anyway.