The Scorpion Rules (30 page)

“I—” I said. “No.”

He scrunched up his nose as if I'd offended him by smell.

“I think Elián broke his arm,” I offered.

“Well,” Talis chirped, “that's something! Let's hope my little weapons demonstration is convincing. Cumberland isn't huge. They only have so many cities to spare.”

“Talis—”

“Or!” he interrupted. “I could kill you! Sorry, forgot for a second. If you're dead, they have no leverage against the PanPols at all.” He looked over the top of his glasses at me. “That's quite noble of you, you know.”

“Talis,” I tried again. “They want to leave. They just want to leave.”

“Oh.” Another blink. “Well, that's anticlimactic. And not acceptable. There's a price to pay for attacking my Preceptures. It needs to be high.”

The Abbot's cell was very small, very blank. It had no outlet, no place to rest the eyes. Talis's quick, strong will seemed trapped in it, like a bird. A bird battering itself.

“I will consent,” I said. “I will consent to the upload. I will become AI. But only if you will let them go.”

Talis tipped his head, taking my measure. I was aware, suddenly, that he was very close to me. And—despite Rachel's slight, young body—he was very powerful, very male. “You think I want you that badly?”

It was hard not to pull back. But I did not. “I think you might.”

“And why's that?”

“The AIs,” I said, softly. “There aren't many of them.”

“No.”

“You want there to be more.”

Softly in turn, he said, “Yes.”

“That's why,” I said. And saw it hit home.

Here is something that you learn when you spend a lifetime in rigorous study of the history of war: the weaknesses we perceive in others are often the ones we fear in ourselves. Talis was, famously, someone who knew how to use love—parent-child love—as a lever. How to turn grief into power. Well. Two could play at that game. The AIs were his family, and most of them were dead.

Talis ran his tongue slowly over his teeth, as if counting them. A moment ago I'd glimpsed something human in his face, something that could easily have been taken for heartbreak. It was gone now. He was raven-eyed, bright and frank, and he smiled at me before he spoke again. “So that's what I want. Swell. Glad we understand each other. Though—gotta say, you've got some nerve, pushing at it. The stakes must be high for you.”

It was halfway to a question. To a negotiation.
State your demands,
he was saying. So I did.

“Let the Cumberlanders go. And let them take Elián Palnik with them.”

“Ah, Elián! So it's young love!”

“In point of fact, I think I might be falling in love with Li Da-Xia. But I promised Elián I would save him.”

“Xie.” He flipped the name with the tip of his tongue. “Hot Asian roommate. Kinky.”

It was not worth a retort.

“Sorry,” he said, fitting it around his smile. “Sorry. I'm a prude.”

“I doubt that.”

“Old-fashioned, then. Or just old.” He reached out with both hands and touched my face, tracing the eye sockets with his index fingers, then letting them sweep backward toward my ears.

Talis held my face gently cupped. “I think it's old. I think I'm very old, Greta. And I think you should be more frightened.”

“I am very frightened,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage.

“It isn't easy,” he said, softly. “It hurts—more than you can imagine.”

Prickling, shivering sweat crept up my spine. “The Abbot told me.”

He shook his head. “It doesn't stop there.” His eyes had that quick-winged doubt again—
Rachel dreams
. “You cannot do this at a whim. You gain more than you can imagine. But you give up more than you can guess.”

His thumbs sculpted the corners of my jaws, as if I were clay. I sat a long moment, looking at him. Feeling the touch that should have belonged to Rachel, but did not. The blood between my toes was dry now, and both very different and not so different from dried mud. Through the stone walls I could hear the dawn of birds.

“Don't do this for Elián. Don't do it for Pittsburgh, Louisville, all those abstract cities. It won't be enough. It won't hold you together.” For once he didn't smile. “Do
you
, Greta Stuart, do you consent to this?”

It put pressure behind my eyes just to look at Talis. I was that frightened. But I said, “I— If you will let them go, I will consent.”

“Once there was a boy,” he said, as if to himself, “named Michael.” And then his face did another flip-shift, as if his mind had been wiped blank and another mind installed. He popped to his feet, struck a fencer's wide-leg stance, and stuck out his hand for me. “Join me, Greta, and we shall rule the galaxy as father and son!”

The galaxy? Son? There was too little air in that small room. There was too much heat in my skin. I was losing track of things.

“I cannot take your hand, Talis.”

He folded up the pose, but kept the wild grin. “Right-o.” He bent his knees and grabbed me around the waist like a man lifting a barrel. “Let's go see what exactly those sandbags are for, okay? Because that has to be fun.” It seemed as if he were genuinely seeking permission. Or at least company—someone to play with. “And share the news, of course! Old Ambrose. He's had his eye on you for a while.”

What the Abbot wanted was a successor. He was a teacher who wanted his best student, a master who wanted an apprentice. What Talis wanted was . . . a daughter?

Grinning at me, he waved at the sensor, and the door opened.

We found ourselves looking down gun barrels. The two soldiers out there were kneeling behind the sandbags, weapons ready. I did not particularly want to be shot, but it was hard to fear them. And besides, I had not yet heard Talis agree to my terms. “Talis? You will let them go?”

“Except for Wilma,” he said. “Now, her I want. Tell her it's a deal-breaker. Do people still say that? Tell her to look it up.”

“She—” She'd guessed this. “Armenteros asked me to offer her personal surrender.”

“Wilma Armenteros.” Talis spun the name into a laugh. “You've got to give that gal points, just for the
stones
.” We'd reached the Cumberland fortification. “Hi, boys!” Talis reached out to ruffle the nearest one's hair. “Having fun?”

“So you'll—” I pressed him.

“Wilma's offer is a sop. It's a steak for the guard dog. Well, it worked. This dog is happy.”

Talis dipped down so that he was crouched between the two soldiers, face-to-face. “Already notified them, have you? The monster's loose?”

Both of the soldiers had their gazes locked straight ahead, their faces frozen.

“Scurry off, then,” Talis ordered. “You can fetch some folks for me. I want Armenteros, and the Abbot. Let's get Tolliver Burr out of his sickbed, just for kicks. And arrange a virtual presence terminal for my queen's mum, here.”

“Um,” said the boy, the one who'd turned so green.

“Her Majesty Queen Anne,” I translated for him, “of the Pan Polar Confederacy.” My mother. At any point during the descent of the apple press, she could have said one word and saved me. I understood exactly why she hadn't. I didn't blame her, I told myself. I did not.

It would be good to see her, even. One last time.

“Tell them, on the lawn, at dawn,” Talis said. “Hey, that rhymes!” He popped to his feet and put an arm around me, and we swept past them. Halfway down the hall he twirled round and called back, “Oh, and tell them not to take that cider press down.”

W
ith Talis's hand between my shoulder blades—steadying, friendly, but shiveringly possessive—we went outside.

It was twilight, perhaps three quarters of an hour before dawn. It's a strange word, “twilight.” It makes me think of endings, of things done or left undone, of things over, of evening. But there are two twilights in every day, and one of them does not foretell darkness, but dawn. In this twilight, something new was opening up before me.

The sandbag soldiers must have sent their messages, because the Cumberlanders were bustling about with lanterns, streaking the greyness like fireflies. Or, like fireflies except that they were terrified. Talis ignored them. He guided me around the edge of the Precepture hall. The apple press drew my eye, hulking and black. I shied like a horse—then tried to hide it in a question: “Where are we going?”

“Up to the ship. I want to borrow you a sonic-knitter.”

Even the word “ship” smelled of blood. Flickering images in darkness. I stopped. “Talis, I don't want them to touch me.”

“Oh, don't be ridiculous.” He gave me a little push that sent me staggering. He caught me again almost at once, as if it had been a move in a dance—but his hand grabbing me by the shoulder was a shattering pain. I gasped.

“See?” he said. “It hurts, and it can be fixed, so stop whining.”

I widened my stance, balancing myself against his touch. “I don't,” I said crisply, “want them to touch me.”

“Oh, fine,” he sulked. “They won't touch you. I'll do it.”

“Do you know how?”

“I have a four-digit IQ, Greta. A sonic-knitter is a long way from the most complicated thing I've bent to my steely will, okay?”

“But have you ever used one?”

“Sure.” His smile flashed in the half-light, flaring open like the white on a blue jay's wing. I could not tell if he was lying.

But I decided I did not much care.

Talis walked me up the hill, and into the Cumberlanders' ship. The guards at the door were pushed away from him as if by magnets. The sound of our feet on the deck plating, the smell of the air recycler, the rhythm of the pinpoint lights . . . the muscles in my neck bunched up, and my shoulders grew hot with pain. But I said nothing of it. Grego: he had been so afraid, and so quiet about it. It had been its own kind of strength.

Talis guided me to the medical bay, pushed me onto a tilt table, and started rummaging through locker drawers with such energy that I thought he might start tossing discarded things over his shoulders. But I hypothesized that even Talis's theatricality had limits, for nothing went flying. I lay on the tilt table, squinting against the pinpoint light. I thought about Grego, and about the grey room. I thought about pain, and about what it would be like to have a mind one could switch off.

“Ta-da!” Talis spun around, holding something up. “Sonic knitter!”

Alternate hypothesis: tossing things theatrically had simply not occurred to him.

“Ready?” He didn't give me a chance to consent, but pushed the round head of the device against my shoulder.

Everything I had heard about sonic knitters was true. It vibrated my teeth, it heated my skin, it produced a kind of synesthetic overload, like biting on tinfoil. But all these things were brief. I was left not with pain but with a sort of hollow space where pain used to be.

When he'd done the tendons in both shoulders and the bones in both hands, Talis lifted the knitter away, and I flopped back limply against the padded table, gasping.

The AI grinned at me: “Was it good for you too?”

I continued to hold out the hope that if I did not respond to such taunts, Talis would stop making them. It seemed a somewhat faint hope, but one takes what one can find. Tentatively, I lifted an arm. My shoulder joint rolled through the motion as if it had too much lubrication, and my hand, conversely, was too stiff. But everything moved, and nothing hurt. So I pulled the two slings off over my head, first the left, then the right. I let the fabric drop to the diamond-patterned floor. The buckles went
clink
. I was so tired. I leaned back into the table.

Talis let the mania slide out of his smile and lifted a hand to trace the line of my braid, just above one ear. “We'll probably have to cut it.”

I was dumbstruck. A queen does not cut her hair.

“For when we bolt you down,” he said, still with that fond look. “You want the beams to make a nice, accurate neuromap. Can't do that if you wiggle.”

“So you . . . restrain?”

“Bolt. Literally bolt, right into the skull. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt.” A panicked bird in his eyes again. “That part doesn't. Anyway, can't get a hole through all that hair. Lu-Lien had hair like that, back in the day, as long as a river. She, now—she wiggled, and after the upload she just—” He fluttered his hands. “She melted like an ice-cream cone, that fast. Came to pieces. Seriously, I'm thinking haircut.”

I swallowed. Maybe I nodded.

Talis snapped his fingers. “And another thing.”

“In the whole history of human discourse, Lord Talis, no good announcement has ever started with ‘and another thing.' ”

He grinned at that, but pushed past it. “Elián. This treaty between us—your big brain for his little life? It can't be public. Your countries have declared war, and when wars are declared, my Children die. It's got to be that simple.”

I understood that. In this one thing, perhaps, my understanding was even better than his. But I did not nod. I waited, letting my silence pull more from him.

“If he leaves here alive,” said Talis, “he's got to vanish. Change his name and disappear. My Riders catch a rumor of him and I'll reel him right back in. He may yet regret that you bought his life.”

If he leaves here alive.
“If?”

Talis tilted his head and corrected his grammatical mood. “When.”

“I—” I stopped.

I watched Talis watch me work it through. The AI was as near to all-powerful as any earthly thing could be. No one could hold him to anything. Therefore, he could offer me no assurances, give no hostages to this treaty. I would have to trust him. Or not.