The Scorpion Rules (12 page)

“We didn't help him!” screamed Hannah.

“I—” began the Abbot, and then stopped, as if something had tapped him on the shoulder. There was, in fact, nothing in sight. “Stand up, Children,” he said. “There's something Talis wants you to see.”

Xie's wide eyes reflected mine.

Don't let him be dead.
I could feel my stomach climbing up my throat.

Don't make us watch you kill him.

“Come now,” said the Abbot. “You'll miss it.”

And what else could we do? We got up.

At the Abbot's direction, we stood in a line, as if for a firing squad. We faced the open prairie, south and west.

Nothing happened, and nothing. And then—the sound of nightmares. A flash and crash bigger than lightning. A sizzle as if the air itself were on fire. Orbital weapons fire.

I had never heard it in life. None of us had. But of course we knew it, from a thousand vids. It was iconic. It was history. It was
here
.

Thandi jerked backward, crashing into me, and Gregori actually hit the ground, putting his hands over his head. A second strike came: light, then a split second later the crack-boom. The light was the eerie Cherenkov blue radiated by the accelerated particles. It flashed, brief and blinding, and when our eyes cleared, we could see the column of cloud rising, arrow-straight, all the way to the edge of space.

First a light and then a cloud—a pillar of cloud by day.

The next thing we knew, the gantry spiders from the induction spire could be seen swarming downward, striking out for the impact point.

Elián. Of course it was Elián. We all knew it. Knew it even before they brought him back over the ridge, dressed like a trommeller and walking tall in Hannah's shoes.

“There we are,” said the Abbot. “Thank you, Hannah. Let your parents know we'll be in touch.” The proctor stepped backward, and the trommeller child bolted.

The Abbot watched her go out of sight, and then turned to us, one degree at a time, like a ratchet. He smiled. “Well, then, my children. Isn't this an interesting glimpse of history? Shall we go have a look?”

None of us wanted to have a look. None of us dared say so. Our little execution-neat line had bunched up—the great noise of the orbital weapon had us all clutching at each other. Han was helping Grego off the ground.

“Come then,” said the Abbot, and lifted a hand. Proctors seemed to melt out of the walls and swarm all around us. “It should be instructive.”

So we went—six children in white, following an old, creaking robot who was finding the path with a stick. It probably looked idyllic from a distance. If you couldn't see the machines that swarmed in the deep grass around us, scaring up the grasshoppers on all sides.

We followed the way the trommellers had come, a faint road through the waist-high prairie. The grasses were sere and stiff with end-of-summer heat, and the buffalo berry and sagebrush branches were thorn-sharp. They scratched our wrists, the backs of our hands. The rough ground pressed through the thin soles of our tabi.

A hundred meters, two hundred—as far from the Precepture as any of us had ever been. Three hundred meters, and then the track ended.

In front of us a crater opened, a shallow bowl of bare earth, a thousand feet wide. Heat still rose from it: it smelled like a kiln.

Spilled down into it, as if dropped from the edge, were three apples.

We stood at the crater edge. Thandi was closest to me, and she was shivering—waves of trembling were coming off her skin, like the ripples in the air above the impact site.

What Elián had done, so publicly—our cohort would be punished for it. When? Where? How? This crater, so strange, so hot, so full of possibilities. It could be
instructive
.

And it was different. Different from anything we were used to. Different from anything we had practiced. Different from anything we knew we could endure. Thandi was not alone in shivering with terror.

But the Abbot did nothing.

The Abbot. My teacher and protector, as dear to me as—as— I could think of no comparison. He would never hurt me. Had never hurt me.

Though presumably he had ordered me hurt.

He had spoken to Hannah as if he were fond of her.

And he had spoken to Talis, in the silence of his elaborate mind.

Said the Utterances,
These Children are
mine.

We stood beside the crater in silence, trembling in the heat. Then we went back to the Precepture. Elián was nowhere to be found.

In the dispatches, later, I read that Talis had demanded blood from the trommellers for interfering, and that the family had elected to surrender not Hannah but the old woman.

It is only royalty who turn over their children.

T
he punishment we'd been expecting came the next day, before Elián was even returned to us. It was, as such things usually were, very simple. The windows wouldn't open. Atta tried them once, twice, then turned to us with an eloquent shrug. The classroom door slid closed of its own accord.

Heat it was to be, then. Not the blistering heat and strange fumes of the crater—not what we'd feared—but heat nonetheless. Well. We'd survived that before. The temperature was already creeping up when Brother Delta shambled in. Without comment he launched into a discussion of the use of ritual in limiting wars.

There is a sense in which war is nothing but ritual: the magical change of blood into gold or oil or water. There have been whole cultures whose notion of war was not much different from their notion of religion, or of sport. The Aztec Flower Wars, for example, were century-long rituals whose intent was to produce prisoners for religious sacrifice. When the Spanish came, they thought the Aztecs were savages because the Flower Wars had not resulted in wholesale death.

An odd notion of savagery.

Talis had pushed us back toward the Aztecs, insisting, for instance, on limiting the effective range of weapons to a hundred yards.
I'm talking handguns, crossbows,
said the Utterances.
Hell, bring back broadswords—those were cool. If you want blood, then I want it all over your hands.

While the room heated slowly, we discussed the emotional differences between hand-to-hand combat and what was once called “the morality of altitude”—the ability of pilots and drone operators to kill tens of thousands of people without looking any one of them in the eye. Which was more savage?

Talis's first rule of war:
make it personal.

My hands were damp with the heat. I wiped them down my thighs.

The ritualization of war is an inexhaustible topic. The lecture went on for hours—all morning. The heat lapped around us like an incoming tide. Da-Xia pulled her feet up and tucked herself into a half lotus. That didn't look as if it was going to help.

The bells rang, but Brother Delta did not even pause. We watched the younger children file out into the gardens as he pushed the discussion toward hostages specifically. Tokugawa Ieyasu, first Tokugawa shogun of Japan, had spent his childhood as a hostage. As young princes, Vlad the Impaler and his brother had been held hostage by the Ottoman sultan to guarantee the cooperation of their father.

“Oh, yes,” said Grego. “And this worked out so well. History remembers him as ‘the Impaler' only because he invented the shish kebab.”

“Really?” said Han.

Atta—from Vlad's part of the world—very nearly made a noise.

“Stop it,” barked Thandi. “Stop it, it's not funny.” She was sheened with sweat, and she kept looking at Elián's empty desk as if to set it on fire with her eyes. A proctor climbed up and perched there, and Thandi turned away. There was another proctor on the ceiling, and a pair by the door.

The jokes flagged.

The heat rose.

Brother Delta called on me for a précis of the Roman tradition of hostages, which was extensive. The Romans took hostages by the herd—the thousand noble children of the Achaeans, for instance, during the war against Perseus of Macedonia. These had included the historian Polybius, whose father—

But I found myself breathing through my mouth, trying to keep cool. Polybius, who—

I could not remember.

Atta swiped his sleeve across the fogged-up window and sucked at the moisture in his cuff. The sun had swung westward and was now pouring onto his desk, and Gregori's. Grego was pink, the capillaries in his skin standing out cruelly. His eyes were snapping light-dark-light as he fluttered on the edge of consciousness.

Out the cleared swath of the window, I watched the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds pile the more overgrown of the zucchini into heaps to feed to the goats. On the day goats refuse to eat zucchini, we humans will have to give up all pretense of domination over the agricultural world. The squashes will have won.

For just a moment I could vividly imagine World War Squash.

Heat. I was slipping.

“Hostages,” said Brother Delta, and then Gregori fainted. Atta—he was silent, but he wasn't stupid, and he could size things up as quickly as any of us, and react faster than anyone else except quick, graceful Xie. Atta slid out of his own chair and caught Grego on his way to the ground. He laid the body on the floor in front of the desks. Gregori's samue top was so wet with sweat that it left a dark mark on the grey stone floor. He looked so . . .

“Sit down, Atta,” said Brother Delta.

Atta didn't. He crouched there, holding Grego's limp hand, his thumb fitted into the pulse point. How long would this last? Until we were all on the floor? Could Grego last that long? Han, too, was halfway out of his chair, his fist at his teeth, his face nakedly horrified, as if Grego were dying in front of us.

Dying. But surely they wouldn't—

I stood up.

I felt every eye turn to me.

“Brother Delta,” I said.

Our teacher swiveled toward me. Aligned himself precisely. He did not widen his eye icons, as the Abbot would have done. He was focused on me and not a whisker of him was human. “Greta,” the thing said.

“This has to stop,” I answered.

Delta ticked. “Sit down, please, Greta.” At my elbow, the proctor on Elián's desk raised itself slowly.

“This has to stop.” I was too hot, too stunned, too sick to say anything else. But I didn't sit down, either. I stood firm even as the proctor stepped—click, click, click—toward me.

And then, suddenly, there was sound around me. Chairs scraping stone, cloth stirring.

Da-Xia, Thandi, Han. Atta pulling himself off the floor. Everyone—everyone had stood. All at once, everyone had stood.

“Children,” said Brother Delta. Again there was no narrowing of the lips, no widening of the eyes. It had been terrifying a moment ago. Now it was like being scolded by a coatrack. “Children.”

“Enough,” snapped Thandi—and she turned and stalked out of the room. The door slid open for her, and stayed open.

The silence was stunning.

“Da-Xia,” said Brother Delta after a moment. “Would you please go and see if Thandi is well?”

Da-Xia nodded, and then ran from the room with her loosened sleeve points flapping. She moved like a figure out of myth—like something with wings.

Heat—my head was whirling. But the door stood open. Cool air eddied around our feet. The steamy windows cleared.

“Sit down, Children,” said Delta.

No one did.

“I think that will do, Delta.” The voice in the doorway made us turn. It was the Abbot, his facescreen dim, his eyes soft and thoughtful. “Children, if you'd help Mr. Kalvelis? It's your bell for gardening.”

Atta scooped up Grego. And we didn't bow. We just left.

Han and I led the way to the gardens, and Atta carried Grego in his arms.

There was a hand pump by the toolshed: an ancient iron thing flecked with blood-red paint. We pumped up the earth-cool and rusty water; we drank and drank. We used our hands to rub the water over Grego, and slowly coaxed him back to life. We leaned him against the terrace, in its meager shade. And then—for what else could we do?—we planted garlic.

We were planting where we had harvested the potatoes. Where Elián had stood, and said: “I'm Spartacus.” Where he had fallen, screaming.

But all day long, we did not see Elián.

Or Thandi. Or Xie.

Elián they had taken to punish, obviously. And Thandi, who had gone out of the room like water bursting a levee. Of course they had taken Thandi. But Xie had done nothing. She was—not innocent, because we weren't, but innocent in this. They had taken Da-Xia because . . .

I knew in my heart that they had taken her in my place. I had stood up when I should not have, and I needed to be slapped down. They'd taken Xie to hurt me, and hurt me they had.

And God knew what they were doing to her.

As soon as the bell rang to let us inside, I began to search. Da-Xia was not in the kitchens. The miseri was empty.