Against Impassable Barriers

by Kate MacLeod

  “Thanks,” Emilie said, putting the box back in her pocket.

  Scout touched her own pocket, feeling the two crystal eggs contained within. She supposed the evolving AI was really the more useful and important gift, but the memories were more to be cherished.

  “We agree her responses are adequate,” the Months’ head lawyer said as she rejoined her team. “But Ms. Shannon, please wait for Ms. Tajaki to read the entire question out before responding. A court of law does call for a bit more formality than you are perhaps used to.”

  Scout nodded.

  The young tribunal enforcer was still gazing at her. The naked place where their eyebrows should be was drawn far up their forehead. They were trying very urgently to say something, and yet Scout didn’t know what it could possibly be.

  Unless . . . was the tribunal enforcer trying to tell her to vote a different way than the others? Each vote to stay with the Months’ had seemed to alarm them further.

  Clearly, the tribunal enforcers knew lots of things Scout and the others didn’t.

  It could be vital that they weren’t all on the same ship for the journey to galactic central.

  And yet why weren’t any of them trying to communicate with Emilie or Geeta? Why only Scout? It couldn’t be because they thought she’d be more likely to understand, or at least Scout hoped that wasn’t the reason. Because she was more confused than ever.

  “Scout Shannon,” Mai said, leaning forward in her chair. “Do you feel like you’ve been threatened or unduly influenced in any way to make your decision in one side’s favor or the other?”

  “No,” Scout said, then looked to the young tribunal enforcer. Had that been all right?

  She couldn’t tell.

  “Scout Shannon,” Mai said. “Are you satisfied that all of your questions have been answered fully?”

  “Yes,” Scout said. She felt like her voice had wavered there a bit, but no one else seemed to have noticed.

  The expression on the young enforcer’s face was more urgent than ever. And just as inscrutable.

  “Scout Shannon,” Mai said, and there was no mistaking the triumph in her voice or in her eyes as she glanced over at her sister beside her. “What is your choice?”

  Scout swallowed hard. Her hand slipped into her pocket, clutching the two egg-shaped memories within as if asking the ghosts of her parents for strength. She looked back at the young tribunal enforcer, trying to put all the intense confusion she was feeling into her own eyes and facial expression, trying to think at them everything she couldn’t say out loud just in case they really could hear her thoughts, but mainly just the question—what?

  “Scout Shannon,” Mai said. Her confidence wasn’t wavering. She seemed amused that Scout was making the moment of their victory over their cousin as dramatic as possible.

  “I’m sorry,” Scout said to Geeta and Emilie, not the Months. “I choose to go with Bo Tajaki.”

  This time it wasn’t the lawyers in a loud uproar. It was Jun Tajaki herself, bellowing like an animal that had just been viciously attacked. Scout fell several steps back as Jun launched herself to her feet, knocking the heavy chair behind her onto its back on the dais with a loud thoom that echoed painfully through the room.

  Then she leaped into the air directly at Scout, hands outstretched before her, fingers curling into talons, and Scout felt like her legs were melting beneath her.

  But Jun’s bellow cut off before it quite built to full intensity, ending in a squawk of surprise. The six tribunal enforcers at the base of the dais had all reached up and snatched her out of the air, wrestling her to the ground and pinning her all in the space of a second.

  Scout tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry.

  To think Liam had said calling them “enforcers” had been a misnomer. She understood it now.

  Bo’s own ménage of tribunal enforcers closed around Scout, making sure no one else could get at her. The dogs were barking like mad, pulling at their leashes as they tried to join the pile on top of Jun. And somewhere in that pile was the tribunal enforcer who had been trying to communicate with Scout. She wanted to see them again, to see if she had just done what they had been trying to steer her to do.

  But someone had a hand on her arm to pull her towards the double doors. The dogs’ barks changed from anger to alarm as they too were quickly hustled towards the double doors.

  “Wait!” Scout cried, pulling her arm free. “Geeta! Emilie!”

  “It’s not safe here,” Bo said, appearing at her elbow. “We have to get you to my ship at once.”

  “But I have to talk to them,” Scout said. “I have to explain. Can’t I at least say goodbye?”

  “I’m very sorry, Scout,” Bo said, and once more she believed him.

  Was she wrong to keep believing him?

  They reached the white hallway that was the airlock, and as soon as they were out of the metallic hallway, a clear pane closed down behind them. With every step they took along the white hallway it retracted behind them, barely more than a step behind the last enforcer’s bare heel.

  Then they were in the wood-paneled room, and the white hallway had disappeared from sight. All that remained was a large window.

  The ménage of tribunal enforcers melted away, seeming to disappear into the shadows. The lawyers argued their way out of the room and down one of the hallways.

  Scout stood against that window, hands pressed to the cold pane, and looked out at the ship that still contained her friends. It was already moving away from them, and they were moving away from it, and the gap between was growing and growing and growing.

  Scout blinked back tears. She desperately hoped she hadn’t just made a huge, irrevocable mistake.

  22

  Scout stayed at that window long after the Months’ ship had disappeared into the black. She didn’t turn away even when her dogs gathered around her, nuzzling at her knees and trying to get her attention.

  “I am sorry, Scout,” Bo said. “I didn’t expect everything to end that way. But my cousin Jun can be frighteningly unpredictable. I don’t think she’s quite stable, actually. One hears stories.”

  Scout said nothing. Her hands pressed to the glass were going numb with cold, as was her forehead. Without realizing it, she had slumped against the pane, no longer looking at anything. Just tuning the whole universe out.

  “Rona has a room prepared for you,” Bo went on. “You should settle in, get cleaned up and a bite to eat. I have some business to attend to, but I hope you’ll join me for dinner tomorrow night?”

  His question hung in the air, and Scout squeezed her eyes tightly shut. No matter what business he had pressing down on him, he was clearly going nowhere until he felt like she was okay.

  She pushed away from the window, turning to face Bo. Rona was standing behind him, hands folded anxiously together, but a warm smile spread across her face when her eyes met Scout’s.

  “Okay,” Scout said. She wasn’t agreeing just to dinner, or even to his plan for her afternoon. She was agreeing with everything, acknowledging what had happened.

  She couldn’t change any of that now. She could only find a way to move forward. Just like she’d been doing every day since she had met Gertrude Bauer, who had told Scout to call her Warrior and then kept her safe as everyone trapped underground with them killed each other off one by one.

  Scout had walked out alone, just her and her two dogs. That was a pattern that kept repeating.

  “You will see your friends again,” Bo promised her. “When we reach galactic central we can arrange a meeting. You are testifying on different sides of a court case, but only to give the court a feel for life out here. It’s not a criminal investigation; there is no legal reason to keep you apart. And we’ll be there soon.”

  “How soon?” Scout asked.

  Bo looked to Rona.

  “Should be about five days,” she said.

  Five days. It didn’t sound like much, but in Scout’s experience, a lot could go
fatally wrong in five days.

  “Well, I leave you in Rona’s capable hands,” Bo said. “I’m afraid here the walls don’t listen for requests, but if you need anything, just find someone in a uniform like Rona’s. Or ask your AI, they can assist you.”

  “My AI,” Scout said, checking her belt pouches. She had nearly forgotten she had it.

  “I’ll see you at dinner, then,” Bo said, and disappeared down one of the hallways.

  “Shall we?” Rona said, and at Scout’s nod she started down a different hallway. Not that it mattered to Scout; all the corridors took her away from that window.

  Rona slowed her steps until Scout and the dogs fell into step beside her. “I would request that if you should bring your dogs out of your rooms, you keep them on their leashes. They might add an element of chaos to my tight ship.”

  “Of course,” Scout said, but something else had caught her attention. “Rooms?”

  “Well, there are three of you,” Rona said with a smile. “You need a bit more space. It’s down here.”

  They went down a flight of stairs, and Scout realized they were moving away from the more regimented part of the ship, where Rona had her own quarters, as did the other active members of ship’s crew, and down to the level of the central garden.

  Rona smiled again as she opened a door with a touch, then stepped aside to let Scout and the dogs go in first.

  She was standing in a living space that was long and narrow, about the size of the rover she had briefly called home back on the surface of Amatheon. But there were no bunks in the room. Just to the left of the door was a little kitchenette, and behind the clear cabinet doors, she could see a wide array of food.

  And the refrigerator, also glass-fronted, contained an entire shelf of jolo.

  To the right of the door was a table with a pair of chairs pulled up to it. Someone had arranged fresh flowers in a bowl at the center of the table; Scout could smell their spicy-sweet scent even from the doorway.

  Beyond the kitchen and dining area was a sitting space, two couches at right angles around a low table. On the floor against the wall were two large, flat pillows, or so Scout thought at first glance. Then she noticed the soft raised edge that wrapped around three sides of each pillow and the smaller pillows nestled inside and realized they must be little daybeds for the dogs.

  But the most amazing thing of all was the far wall, which was nothing but four glass doors. The center two were standing open, and Scout could feel a fresh breeze blowing in. There was another, smaller seating area beyond the doors under the light from the artificial sun, and beyond that a little walled-in garden dominated by a single tree, although other small plants grew close to the walls, some extending tendrils into the walls themselves to wind their way up and over it.

  “All of this is for us?” Scout asked.

  “We thought your dogs would enjoy their own little garden to romp in,” Rona said. “That door there leads to your bedroom. That also looks out on the garden with its own door. And through this door is your bathroom.”

  Scout walked with the dogs to the glass doors and unhooked their leashes. They dashed out into the walled garden to explore, tails wagging like mad as they separated to follow different scent trails. Shadow gave a little bark, and Gert barreled over to see what he had found.

  “I hope you’ll be comfortable here?” Rona said. She sounded so anxious, as if she were really afraid that Scout would refuse to stay, that Scout felt tears pricking at her eyes again.

  “It’s lovely,” Scout said. “More than I’ve ever had.”

  Rona smiled in palpable relief. “Excellent. I shall be back to fetch you for dinner tomorrow night at six, but until then, just relax. Enjoy your space. Make yourself a snack. Stroll through the park. Anything you need, just ask your AI.”

  “Thank you,” Scout said, walking with Rona back to the door and closing it behind her.

  She could hear birds chirping somewhere out beyond the garden walls and the dogs snuffling as they made slow, nose-down perusals of the grass. Distantly, she could hear people laughing and talking together beyond her walled garden.

  But mostly it was quiet, a pleasant sort of quiet.

  She wished she had convinced Geeta and Emilie to come with her. They could all be here now, sharing snacks from the kitchenette, sitting outside together enjoying the warmth of the fake sun.

  Scout gave herself a little shake and told herself not to be so maudlin. Five days. That wasn’t so long.

  She headed into the bathroom and peeled out of the clothes she had been wearing for far too many days. She supposed she could have asked the Months for access to a shower and clean clothes. She suspected Geeta and Emilie had. Life on her own out on the prairie had made her perhaps too accustomed to living without such things.

  The shower was warm, the water falling over her softly, the soap smelling heavenly. She stayed under the spray for what felt like an eternity but finally stepped out of the shower and opened all the cabinet doors in search of a towel.

  As she dried off, she saw stacks of clothing also waiting for her there. Her own clothes smelled rank, and the idea of putting them back on was repulsive. She could wash them herself in the sink or find someone to ask about proper laundry facilities.

  Or she could try on the creepy Tajaki clothes.

  Then she noticed the stacks in the closet weren’t red. They were, if anything, clear. Which was a very strange thing for clothes to be.

  She wasn’t up to the challenge of figuring out how clear clothes worked. She emptied her pockets and piled her clothes in the corner of the shower, then, wrapped in the largest towel she had ever seen, she went to the open doors and whistled for the dogs.

  She had them both trapped inside the shower with her before they figured out what was going on. Gert loved it. She loved getting wet almost as much as she loved getting muddy. Shadow was less of a fan. He retreated to the corner where Scout’s clothes were piled up and shivered half with cold and half with fear as Scout scrubbed Gert clean. Then Scout coaxed him into the soft cascade of water and soaped him up as well.

  She toweled them off and let them go, and they immediately headed back out to the yard to roll in the grass, but they smelled cleaner now.

  Scout washed all her clothes and draped them over the chairs in the kitchenette to dry. Still wrapped in a towel, she poked through the cabinets. Most of the food was unfamiliar to her. The names were confusing, and the pictures on the front weren’t terribly illuminating either. At last, she found a package of already popped popcorn, liberally dusted with salt and what the package called “cheese flavor.”

  Scout had only had popcorn fresh out of the popper over a cooking fire back on Amatheon, but she didn’t think what was in the bag could be too different. She poured some into a bowl and brought it to the couch. Both of the dogs came charging in to sit on either side of her, Shadow curling up tight against her side while Gert turned around and around several times before flopping down with her head on Scout’s knee.

  Scout crunched the popcorn, which was all right but not like the fresh stuff back home, and listened to the birds twittering in the garden outside her door.

  She wondered, if this was what they gave her to travel in for five days, what awaited her at galactic central? And would it still feel this lonely? Then the warmth and the soft comfort of the couch and the birds’ lullaby and the slow heartbeats of the dogs cuddling up to her combined to lure her off to sleep.

  23

  Scout woke to the sound of the dogs crunching something. She sat up to find herself alone on the couch, the dogs nowhere in sight. She followed the sound of their chewing until she found them behind the cabinet that separated the kitchenette from the little dining area. There was a little nook inside that cabinet, and inside the nook was a small bowl of water standing under its own little spigot and another trough-like bowl filled with kibble. The dogs looked up at her, clearly delighted by the kibble, both tails wagging madly as they ate.

/>   Scout found bread and a toaster, and while the smell of browning bread filled the air, she gathered up her now-dry clothes and carried them back into the bathroom.

  The sun outside looked the same as it had when she had shut her eyes, and yet she suspected she had slept the night through to the next morning. She felt that rested, and the clothes felt that dry.

  The clothes were not things she had picked out herself and were not really to her taste. She liked the pockets on the shoes and the scarf was pretty to look at, but Scout wasn’t really into bright colors. And the jumpsuit was just awkward to wear; she had to get most of the way out of it every time she used the bathroom.

  She looked again at the stacks of clear clothes, pants, and shirts, as well as smaller things that she took for underwear and even the outline of transparent shoes on the bottom of the closet. Clearly, this was technology she didn’t understand.

  But she could figure it out with a bit of help, couldn’t she?

  She looked back down at the marshal belt.

  Well, she had a question. Scout took the lens out of its pouch and put it over her eye. “Hello, Teacher,” she said.

  “Hello, Scout,” the gray form said. “Have you chosen a name for me yet?”

  “Not just yet,” Scout said. “Can you explain these clothes to me?”

  “They are smart clothes,” the form explained. “They will adjust to your size, and the tailoring can also be adjusted to your preferences. You lack the necessary implants to command the nanites yourself, but I can do it for you. What would you like to wear?”

  “Does it have to be red?” Scout asked.