The Scorpion Rules (32 page)

Elián jerked his arm away.

“Ah, Elián, Elián,” said Talis, shaking his head sadly. “The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. You've got to let her go, son. If you don't, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for—” But then, at Elián's startled recognition, he dropped whatever character he was playing and grinned hugely. “Ha! Look, you got that one!
Casablanca
! A movie fan! That Spartacus thing, you know—totally wasted on this lot. Isn't it awful, what we've lost? Greta, when we get to the Red Mountains, I'm going to make you watch a lot of movies.”

For a split second there, Elián had been grinning goofily at Talis. Now he looked as if he might throw up. For my part I pulled the one significant piece of information out of Talis's little sidebar, as I was beginning to suspect would be an essential skill. “We're going to the Red Mountains?”

“What, you thought I'd stick your brain in a box, plug it into a 'bot, and send you on your way? You're going to need some fairly intensive support, if you're going to keep sane.”

I glanced at the Abbot, who said, “Quite true. And I do trust that Michael has warned you, Greta. There is a fair chance that what's left of you won't be recognizable. That you won't, in any meaningful way, survive.”

“I know my history,” I said.

“History,” intoned the Abbot. Like me, he loved history, but he said it as if it were the smallest word he'd ever heard. “I'd meant to give you more training, Greta, more time, more—” He dropped the end of whatever he'd been about to say, and turned on Talis slowly, like a gun platform swinging round. “Warn her, Michael. Do it now.”

And Talis— Oddly enough, the strategic mind of the epoch seemed at a loss for words. His face was baffled as a little child's. He looked . . . vulnerable. When I spoke, it was half out of pity. “I do know. Most of the AIs died.”

“Yeah,” he began, and then stopped. He raked his hand up the back of his neck, raising his porcupine spikes again. “Okay, so the thing is, the human mind is a miracle of integration. You're so good at fooling yourselves into thinking you're just one thing, one central little
me
that makes all the calls. It's a total delusion, a fiction, but it
works
. AIs aren't like that. We have layers.” He made a little tick, tongue against teeth. “We have layers—and we lose them. The techs used to call it skinning. They meant like onion skin, but that doesn't cover it. The clients called it skinning too, and we meant . . . something different.”

To be
skinned
. Goose bumps prickled over me. I thought of the smartplex tablet in Tolliver Burr's hands. I would be like that. Blown into pieces, and each piece still playing, still remembering . . .

“Know that,” said the Abbot. “Know that, before you choose.”

I looked at the Abbot, the well-known abstraction that was his face. I looked at Talis, who was suddenly smiling again. It was a smile like the sun: so brilliant that it was painful to look at.

Dig deep within yourself,
wrote Aurelius.
Within is the wellspring of Good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.

Elián was staring at me. I felt Xie's hand slip into mine. I laced my fingers through hers. I dug deep and answered: “I choose.”

T
hree days.

Talis had popped off, glittering and spouting nonsense, and had returned later with the news. His repair of the grey room would take three days. He was speckled with grease, holding a multipencil, and looking pleased.

“It will take an all-nighter or two, mind. Does the Precepture have coffee?” We were all looking at him, but he spoke only to me. “I've got you pegged as more of a tea gal, Greta, which frankly you're just plain wrong about, but anything caffeinated would do.”

“Riiiight, coffee,” Elián drawled. “'Cause what you need is to be
more
intense.”

I stepped in to save Elián from himself. (Again.) “I'm afraid that if it doesn't grow in Saskatchewan, we don't have it, Lord Talis. Which eliminates both coffee and tea. But thank you for letting me know how long I have to live.”

He gave me a weirdly compressed little smile. And then, for a miracle, he went away.

“Did you just dismiss Talis?” said Elián. “You've gotta show me how to do that.”

“I think you hurt his feelings,” said Xie, wonderingly, looking after the AI.

“What makes you think he
has
feelings?” said Elián.

“If he doesn't,” I said, “then where will that leave me?”

We were sitting on the bench where we'd put out the pumpkins as a symbol of defiance and hope. Below us the Cumberlanders were scuttling like mice beneath a hawk, trying to meet Talis's deadline.

“They released Atta?” said Elián.

Xie nodded. “The Cumberlanders checked him over. The concussion was minor. He's fine. Han, on the other hand . . .”

“Yeah.” Elián looked down, peeling a long splinter of cedar bark away from the pumpkin bench. “I know.”

Han and Grego. I had missed so much. Lost so much. But I had saved a few things. The pumpkins, for instance, had already grown more orange. They were ripening. Going to make it.

Elián
was going to make it.

He did not seem happy about it. “I don't get it. From the day they dragged me here, I was going to die—we were both going to die—and you were okay with that.”

“I was wrong.”

I said it that simply. As if saying it didn't make my heart twist. As if learning it hadn't kicked the scaffold away from the entire structure of my life, leaving me tottering. “I was wrong. My whole life, I— My friends have died here, Elián. The boy before you—you didn't know him, but he was my friend, could have been my friend. And he died. I wanted that to mean something. I wanted it to be okay.”

“It does mean something,” murmured Xie.

“But it's not okay,” I said. “It's never been okay.”

“No,” she said. “It's never been okay.”

Elián was still looking at me as if I'd turned into a chicken. “So, what, you're just going to join forces with that . . . thing?” Elián snapped his strand of bark into matchsticks, and threw them in the direction Talis had gone.

“I'm going to save us,” I said. “All my life I've been trying, and I never have. Now I finally get to. I'm going to save us.” I stopped, took a deep breath. “But I'm frightened.”

It hurts more than you can imagine,
Talis had said. Talis, who knew exactly what I could imagine. Who had seen them break my hands.

The Cumberlanders kept packing, but no one moved the apple press. Or its cameras.

Xie wrapped her arm around me. I leaned into her and closed my eyes.

The morning stretched and warmed. The shock ship seemed to be nearly loaded.

One thing was loading—a coffin. Of course they had come with coffins. Into it, they put Grego's body, to be repatriated back to the Baltic Alliance. He would be the first dead hostage in four hundred years to get a decent funeral. To the Cumberlanders it was the first step in what would probably be a long, prickly process of negotiating reparations. To us it was our friend, who was dead, and who was leaving. We looked at them carrying the plain box up the gangplank, and we held each other's hands.

Someone—a young female Cumberlander—turned up with Talis's horse, which (despite having been ridden brutally, who knew how far) was not in fact dead. The soldier was leading the horse with a . . . leading thing (horses are not my strong point), and the horse was apparently looking for sugar cubes in the soldier's ears. Both of them were smiling.

Elián was pacing, restless, unable—without the benefits of a Precepture education—to stay still, to contain his own physicality. He looked at the horse, and then back at Da-Xia and me, who were still sitting side by side. One of the younger hostages had brought us a UN-blue blanket and some food—hot flat bread and salty goat cheese.

“We should—” Elián said wildly. “We should hide you on board—stow you away.”

I looked at the ship, remembering Grego's enthusiasm for it, his talk of deceleration forces and gravity harnesses; remembering the close spaces and the blood coagulating on the deck plates.

“I don't think that's practical, Elián,” said Xie.

It wasn't.

“Or the horse. We could steal the horse.”

“I don't know how to use a horse,” I said. “Do you know how to use a horse?”

Xie tipped her chin up and pointed with her thumb toward the sky. The Panopticon might have been gone, but Talis's net of satellites certainly was not. Elián followed her gaze, his face falling.

“We'd probably end by eating it,” I said.

The horse looked over at me, reproachful and, I would swear, alarmed.

Elián was alarmed too—nearly panicking. I thought it was not really about me. The cameras stood waiting by the apple press. We were increasingly sure what they were for: the death of Wilma Armenteros.

Elián stopped pacing to look at the cameras, but couldn't keep looking at them. He whirled away. “She— Grandma, she promised my mother, she said. She promised my mother she wouldn't come home without me. And I—”

Elián had betrayed his grandmother—his whole nation, but his grandmother, specifically. To save me, he'd chosen to sabotage the snowstorm that had been keeping Talis at bay. And now that Talis was no longer at bay, he would tear out Wilma's throat.

“I can't go home,” he whispered.

His exile was already struck into the treaty. His broken heart would seal it.

Down the slope, Talis was explaining that part of the deal to Armenteros. The general glanced toward us, and there was joy shining out of her whole body.

“She's just heard that you're going to live.” Da-Xia's voice was soft, steady, sure. “Look at her, Elián, so that you will remember. She does not for a second regret what she's doing, because it means you are going to live.”

Elián stared. I did too, realizing something that it was probably best not to say aloud: Elián's survival was to be a secret. If Talis was telling Armenteros, then he was sure—very sure—that she would not be passing the word around. She did not have long. And so he was telling her out of . . . could it be kindness?

“Ooo, I know!” Talis's chiming voice drifted over the grass. “He can go to Moose Jaw and help mine the dump. That would be fun for him.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Armenteros.

“Fine.” The AI splayed his fingers. “I don't care. I'll get him a horse. He can go anywhere. But tell him he's got to
vanish
, Wilma, or he will regret it.”

“Understood.”

“No, I'm not going,” said Elián, to us. “They're not sending me anywhere.” He reached for my hand. “I'll see it through—see Grandma through, and you, Greta. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He set off down the slope like Spartacus himself: the slave made hero. When he reached Armenteros she grabbed him like a rearing bear and pulled his lanky body into her soft, fierce one. It wasn't three minutes before they were fighting again, though. Only this time—just for once—I thought Elián would probably win.

The ship left. The bulk of it looked ridiculous, lifting from the ground, as if a man had taken flight by flapping his hands. But lift it did. It slung itself up the induction spire, gathering speed. It cleared the top and then fired rockets—chemical ones, a blast of heat and stink. The convention limiting rockets to compressed air was apparently a nicety the military felt it could ignore, environmental damage be damned. I made a note to discuss that with Talis later. The policy might need to be changed.

Oh.