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.