The Scorpion Rules (34 page)

I took a breath. My mother and I both breathed. Fingertip to fingertip, we steadied ourselves, then let our hands fall away.

“We did not know, in my time . . .” I saw her eyes glance behind me, to the curve of the wall that hid the grey room. “Do you? Do you know—what Talis will do?”

Even now she could not drop the Precepture's coded speech.
Do you know what will happen in the grey room? Do you know how you will die?

How could I even begin to explain?

She was desperate with her good-byes. “I only wanted to say—to say—”

“Mother—” I interrupted her, and she fell completely silent. Her eyes were bright blue and almost glazed, as mine had been in that fateful portrait. They held a resignation that seemed more terrible than grief. It occurred to me that she had been waiting to talk to me for a whole day, and might well have thought me dead. A war had been declared. A Rider—and what a Rider!—had arrived. I
should
be dead. And yet she had held herself ready for the call, waiting. I wondered how long she would have waited.

“Mother,” I said again.

She had waited through every inch of the apple press.

She had been waiting for eleven years.

There were tears welling behind her only-for-family glasses.

I thought if I closed my eyes, I would be able to feel her fingers fiercely tight on my five-year-old arms.

And for the first time since choosing my own fate, I too began to cry. “Mother. It's not death. He's not going to kill me. I'm not going to die.”

The second day was also the day that Talis cut me open.

I did not particularly want to talk to Talis after talking to my mother, but I was in no position to disobey him, and I was afraid to leave him alone in my room, lest he get bored and paint it pink or sacrifice a goat in it or something. So I scrubbed up my blotchy face, tidied my hair, and went.

I found him lying on my bunk with his nose in my copy of the
Meditations
of Aurelius.

“What is this about surgery?” I said, to the book.

He lowered the book far enough to peer at me over it. “I thought you knew your history.”

“I'm a classicist.”

“Really? Wow, that's useless.” He lifted the book. “Explains this, though. ‘You have power over your mind, not outside events,' ” he read. “ ‘Keep to your own mind, and stand tall. Your life is what your thoughts make it.' ” He crossed his ankles and raised both eyebrows at me.

“You object to that?”

“I'd like to think I had something to do with your life.” He waved his hand around the little room—the two narrow bunks and one creaky table, the laundry and the white linens on hooks, the paper birds making the sky more soft and beautiful.

“Something,” I said. “But not everything. Which is rather the point.”

He sat up, letting my book slide to the floor. I rescued it as it fell.

Talis's duster was tossed across Xie's cot. I nudged it aside and sat facing him, the book in my hands. We were nearly knee to knee. I did not like to see him in this familiar place. He was like a knife in the spoon drawer. Like a torch in the barn.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For . . .”

“For giving me the out.” He put one thumb on top of the other and let his fingers steeple and unsteeple, rapid as shuffling cards. “I don't actually want to blow up cities, you know. That's what the Preceptures are for, so that I don't have to. Obviously, therefore, I have to exact some kind of cost for touching the Preceptures. But I don't want too much red on the books. I would just as soon . . . have the out.”

It was two parts explanation, one part threat. Just a little reminder of why I was doing this, and what might happen if I changed my mind.

I set my book on the table and patted it closed. Talis had cracked the spine. There was a little box on that table too. His? “Explain the surgery, Talis. I agreed to upload, and there was no mention of surgery.”

“Yeah, but it's a package deal.” He ran his hands through his hair. There was blood, Wilma's blood, in little dots on his shirt cuffs. “Okay. Remember, in my day, in Michael's day, the upload was part of a general quest for immortality, which was dumb, but never mind that. The point was to get immortal, so obviously the upload's not supposed to kill you, and yet your brain can't survive the spooling. I mean, never mind riding a bicycle—your brain won't remember breathing when the grey room is done with it. So.”

There was a faint pause there. Talis rubbed at a spot under his right collarbone the way a man might rub at a bruise.

“So. Your self. The essential data that the spooling records. It's got to go somewhere. It goes here.” He curled his fingers and tapped the spot he'd been rubbing. Through the thin fabric of his shirt I could just see the structure of his collarbone and the soft curve of Rachel's bound breasts. There was a shadowy shape between the clavicle and the binding wrap, a distension of the skin that was too rectangular to be anything natural.

“The datastore—the AI's heart and soul. The surgery implants it. There's some odds and ends, too—full-spectrum retinas, fingertip sensors and transmitters, the little things no self-respecting superior being would be without.” He spread his hands and tilted them to catch the light. There was something there, a faint silveriness to his palms and fingertips. You'd never see it without the just-so tilt, but it was startling in its slightly-off-ness, like Grego's eyes. “Becoming AI is all about the brain, obviously, but you need a bit of body work, so to speak—a first step.”

“But—” I said. Xie's newest folded birds were shimmering above me, and I swore I could still smell chocolate. “But, if you can't breathe . . .”

“The surgery also threads inductive webbing in the brain. The datastore uses that to operate the brain, and the brain operates the body. Bit convoluted, but it generally works. You'll be breathing, I promise.”

That thing under his shirt—that thing was going in me. Stuff in my fingers, stuff in my eyes, stuff in my brain. And he, he had it too? The woman he was being, borrowing, what about her? I tried to form the question. “The Riders—”

“Are universally brilliant at breathing. It's part of my recruitment screening.”

Not what I meant. That shadowy structure under his shirt—it was his shirt, and yet under it were the slightly crooked ridges of the binding wrap, and Rachel's breasts. “The Riders—you use them, operate them?”

“Yeah, and you can too, someday—but it's better to operate your own body at first. Less disorienting. I mean, marginally. Take what you can get on that point, trust me. You can transfer later when your body wears out. Which it will, fast, by the way—something about the induced voltages, and microscarring. Dunno; there weren't huge numbers of volunteers, after what happened to us in that first batch, and then Antarctica melted and all that, so the research kind of hit a dead end. Anyway, my point is you won't get more than a year or two out of it.”

“But—” I had many objections. I picked one. “What about Rachel?”

“She volunteered,” he said. “My Riders serve a higher purpose.”

“But she's—” Was he killing her, just by making her breathe? Was that what he was saying? “This voltage scarring—”

“Higher purpose,” he chirruped. “I'm the good guy, remember?”

I looked down. The little stains on the cuffs of his shirt were more brown than red. His fingernails were scrubbed and tidy. He had his little box in his hands, and was fiddling with it.

“I—I don't—” I stuttered. A clean sacrifice was one thing. Becoming an abstraction, like the Abbot. This was different. It was so biological, such a mishmash, a horror. “Talis, I don't want—” The box in his hands opened.

“Oh, don't be squeamish,” he said, and he injected something into my arm. It was cool, like chilled oil. It spread fast. My legs went liquid, my vision swam.

Talis caught me, smiling softly as he gathered me in his arms. “There,” he said. “I've got you. Don't be afraid.”

I woke surrounded by blue, my head pounding. Blue: UN blue, more silver than the sky. A sheet beneath me, another over me, more tented round. I was stretched out on something as hard as an autopsy slab, but the sheets meant some care had been taken with sterility, which— Well. I should have been comforted, I suppose. Talis had just told me I was keeping my body for a year or two, and I suppose postoperative septicemia would have put a dent in that. But it was hard to be relieved. What had happened to me? I had not been uploaded, but I felt already changed. Irrevocably changed.

I was alone. The surface I was lying on was marble—the pastry counter in our kitchen. The sterile sheets had been hung from the pot racks. The symbolism was bad: I'd always been hopeless in the kitchen.

I reached up and touched my chest beneath my right collarbone. A numb tenderness met my fingers—that third skin again. I traced the rectangle of the implant, the new sensors in my fingerpads shunting information into my mind. There was a line of forcescar above the implant, slick as plastic. Faint electromagnetic radiation bloomed upward through my skin. That was strange, and then I realized I could feel it—even stranger. I blinked, wild color flaring around me, ultraviolets, infrareds. I could feel the route the blood vessels took in my head.

Strange beyond strange beyond strange.

But not painful. I sat up slowly, and the room did not spin, though I was aware of the whisper of Coriolis force from the rotation of the world.

“Well, this is interesting.” Talis's chiming voice came through the curtains. “I don't know that I've ever been murdered.”

I staggered through the draping, and found Talis backed against the butchery counter. Elián was holding a knife point to the hollow of the AI's throat.

It was not—it was
not
what it looked like. Elián was tall and muscled, a farm lad who evoked the adjective “strapping,” and he was holding a butchering knife. Talis was unarmed, unprepossessing, and cornered.

But Elián was just a boy. And Talis was . . . Talis. I had an urge to reach behind me for the gamma scalpel, and it was not Talis I thought I might need to defend.

“Her blood's all over,” Elián snarled. “It's all over you!”

Talis was wearing hostage white as surgical scrubs, and there was indeed blood on them—my blood.
But I consented,
I thought.
Sort of.

“Give me some credit.” The AI was leaning backward onto the counter, partly away from the knife, and partly just lounging. “I washed.”

Elián pushed with the knife. The point dimpled Talis's skin, making a ring of white pressure.

“But you mean metaphorical blood, and fair enough.” Talis's brightness was glinting up the blade. “You're right. I laid her face up in that press and let her watch it drop. I did it slow. I filmed her face. And it will be
centuries
before anyone touches a hostage Child again.”

They had not been talking about me at all.

“How can you—” Elián was shaking. “You're a monster.”

“Yes,” said Talis. “Are you?” He straightened up. Elián had to step back so that Talis's own movement wouldn't drive the knifepoint in.

“Elián—” I said, and Elián looked wildly round at me.

“The world needs its monsters,” said Talis. “It needs its gods. And it needs a certain number of passionate sheep farmers who are neither. Don't do this, Elián Palnik. It will destroy you.” He cocked his head, Rachel's glasses glinting, his eyes a pale and thoughtful blue. “In all sincerity, child: I'm not worth it.”

“Greta.” Elián threw a fast glance over his shoulder. “I didn't know you were—” The knife was away from Talis's throat now, though only an inch or two. “Are you all right?”

Well, I was wearing a bedsheet and watching a murder. “Oddly enough, I can feel the magnetic field of the Earth.”