The Swan Riders (15 page)

I looked at it.

I saw Talis look at it.

But neither of us guessed.

Talis had a strip of crinkle silk, UN blue, knotted around his throat for warmth. His gaze went back to Sri as he undid the knot, pulled off his glasses, and wiped the dust off the side of his face. Then he stuck the silk in one of his back pockets, folded up his glasses, and tossed them underhand to Sri. She caught them delicately, graciously.

“Next?” he said.

“The vest,” Sri said.

Talis raised his eyebrows. “I realize you didn't ask for advice, but seriously: anything that won't go through a sheepskin won't go through a chest wall, either. You need quite a bit of strength, to stab someone. Someone did mention that to young Mr. Palnik, yes? I wouldn't want to see him bungle it.”

“The vest,” said Sri again.

His eyebrows still arched, Talis undid the buttons one by one. He shrugged the vest off and handed it to me, which made the woman behind me grab on more tightly. The sheepskin vest smelled of horse and lanolin and the woolly inner side was warm to the touch. Talis stood there goose-bumping in a white shirt worn so thin that I could see the structure of his collarbones and the ridges of the binding wrap he wore beneath. (What about Rachel?) There was a long pause.

“Well?” he said. “Or were you planning to have me freeze to death?”

“Hold him,” said Sri.

They clearly had this worked out, who was to do what, when, why—but still there was a pause when they looked at each other. I was concerned in that moment, not for Talis, but for them. What would he do to them when this was over? They had to kill him now; they simply had to. To touch a Swan Rider was punishable by death. To touch Talis himself . . . it didn't bear thinking of. Saskatoon might be the least of it. Following that train of thought, I realized they'd have to kill Francis Xavier, too, to keep him from reporting. And, incidentally, me. But surely Elián wouldn't—

I had no time to pursue the thought. Two of the conspirators—big men, both—came onto the stage and grabbed hold of Talis, one on each side, by armpit and elbow. They held him with his shoulders wrenched back, his body a-tiptoe, locked in place. The flexion made him tremble: a purely physiological reaction. His face was still calm.

Elián was the one who looked like he was waiting for death. “Sri,” he said. “I don't think—”

“Shush,” she told him. I didn't know people actually said that. She stepped close to Talis and smiled. She ran her finger over the thin white shirt, tracing the valley between the collarbone and the faint prominence of the datastore. She slipped past that valley's inner edge, and then she pressed the fingertip down harder, as if making an indent in dough.

I thought of thumbprint cookies.

Talis's eyes flared wide.

“Stab him,” Sri said, “just here.”

Only then, and much too late, did Talis start to fight.

A
Is are no stronger than humans.

The bodies we use
are
human, after all. There are some minor relevant differences: we can access voluntarily the involuntary endocrine tricks that give a panicked person strength. We can treat pain as just another species of data. We can look up a bone's breaking point and push right up against it. But in truth none of this is more than a desperate human can do.

Talis struggled as if desperate.

And it did him no good.

It is easy to forget how small Talis is: between one's knowledge of his history and his habit of striding about as if he had lightning at his fingertips, he seems larger than life. But in this incarnation—in Rachel—he is finely boned, slightly built. Delicate, almost. Easily overpowered.

He flailed with all his strength against the men holding him, making them stagger and spread their stance. He pushed off the ground and arched his back; he kicked out so savagely that someone had to dive in from behind and catch his feet. But in the few seconds when only physicality mattered, he was no match for them. The men held him trapped and trembling. Elián put the tip of his knife where Sri had poked.

“Are you . . . ,” Elián started to ask Sri, and Talis spat: “Don't you
dare—
” and Sri said: “Do it.”

Elián's face was tight as stretched leather, so far from his norm that I was for a moment unsure it was him.

“Elián?” I said. He turned, his face a mask, and he was still looking at me as he put his weight behind the blade and pushed.

Talis jerked and screamed like a hawk. For an instant his face changed, and the coin-wide eyes did not belong to him:
Rachel
, I thought.
Hello, Rachel
. Then Talis was back. I ran his face against the database of all the times I'd seen him, and I was 97 percent sure of it. But I could find no referent in his history for the expression he wore, and had to compare it against generic human norms. I tagged it fear, and pain, both extreme. He was critically hurt, and he was terrified.

Here is the difference between data and knowledge. I had all the data I needed to figure out what Sri and Elián had done to him, and why he had reacted as he did. But I didn't have the lived experience to understand it, nor had I done the thinking to absorb it and put it in a framework so that it came readily to mind. Therefore, I spent at least eight thousand milliseconds—between when Sri had touched Talis and when Elián staggered back, leaving the knife buried in his chest—not sure what was going on.

The men holding Talis let him go, and he fell bonelessly into the grass. Elián stumbled backward, shaking as if the blade had hit a live wire. And in a way, it had.

The affinity bridge. The main connection between the datastore and the brain. It ran along the underside of the clavicle, and then up beside the aorta into the brainstem. The knife had severed it.

Elián squeezed a hand over his own mouth. Sri crouched down. Everyone was silent. We could hear the grass crunch as Talis twisted on his back, his fingers curling talon-like into his own skin on either side of the knife handle. He shouldn't pull it out, I knew that much, but even as I made to say so the need passed: Sri pressed her hand hard over his, hard enough to push him flat on his back, his head tossing.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

“How do you—” Talis took a gasping, furious breath. “—think?”

“Not what I meant.” She pulled her hand from his wound and touched his face. Tight around the dark gloss of the wood knife handle.

“You can't upload,” she said. “You can't download. That makes you human. How does it feel?”

“I—” he said, and something flared across his face: fear? “I am going to gift wrap you, Sri,” he panted. “Before I send you to hell. Something complicated . . . with raffia and—and—” His words were coming harder. His fingers were bloody and white beneath the blood.

“Now, now,” she said, and leaned forward over him.

And then—suddenly, explosively—he yanked the knife from his own chest and slashed at Sri's face.

She jerked back. The knife missed. And Talis—

Talis made a noise.

It was a sucking, bubbling sound, like the last drops of the milk shake. The knife spilled from his hand and his body crumpled. He folded around the puncture as if a sledgehammer had struck him there.

“Shit . . .” Elián skidded to his knees beside Talis, pushing his skittering hands away, looking at the wound as wide-eyed as if he had not made it. “Sri!”

And Sri's face showed—was that alarm? Surprise?

Was this, then, not part of the plan?

I pulled forward against the woman holding me, but she only tightened her grip. My datastore was spinning field medicine at its absolute top speed, and I tried to push it through my brain, to build the organic structures that meant I had really learned it, to change the data into knowledge. It was the only thing I could do, but it wasn't really making a difference. Just then, for instance, I suspected a collapsed lung, but surely that was no more than I would have known as a human.

It was not more than Sri knew.

“Kit,” snapped Sri, reaching a hand behind her, like a surgeon for a scalpel. “And let FX go.”

“I can't—” Talis's voice was a wheezy whistle. “I—”

With whatever imprint of him was left in the brain cut off from the control of the datastore, he had lost everything about him that was AI. I was astonished by the speed of the change. I would have expected five hundred years of chipper insouciance to persist somewhat, if only from habit, but no. The panic he was displaying was purely human.

“Please,” Talis said, or tried to say. There was no sound behind it.

“Sri,” said Elián, “he's dying. . . .”

And that was illogical. There was no reason for Sri and her people to go to the trouble to transform Talis only to have him die at their feet.

“Sri,” I said. “If you'd be so kind . . .”

Sri's head whipped around. “Let her go,” she said. “Let them both go. Where's the damn kit?”

The goatherd woman let me go so fast that I staggered forward, falling to my knees at Talis's side. He was struggling for air. His neck arched sideways, the tendons in it standing out clear as cabling. The puncture—infraclavical, and in the second intercostal space—was an inch, an inch and a half long, and bleeding but not spurting.

I pushed my hand over it as a short-term seal.

Yes, there: I could feel the infrathoracic vacuum nibbling like a goldfish at my palm. It was pneumothorax: air in the chest cavity. It would push against the other organs. If there was enough pressure, the other lung would collapse, and the heart would drown in air like a fish on a dock.

I pushed hard and Talis moaned.

“We need a waterproof bandage,” I said. “Something at least three inches square.”

“Greta,” said Elián. His voice sounded pleading.

“I'm
busy
, Elián.” My voice sounded like nothing at all. “We need the bandage urgently. Cut one from his coat if there's nothing better.”

“Greta, here . . .”

I twisted around.

Francis Xavier was on his knees. Wheezing. Wobbling. He swayed and stretched his single hand out to me. There was a packet in his hand.

My datastore ID'd it: a wrapper containing a military-grade first-aid patch, backed with rubber, infused with antiseptics and coagulants.

Good. Perfect. My estimate of the likelihood of Talis's survival shot up 40 percent. “Are there scissors? Or a knife?”

“Well, I've got one,” said Sri, and handed me Elián's dagger. It was blood-mucked to the hilt, which at least told me the depth of the wound.

“You.” Francis Xavier reached out and yanked Elián backward. “Get away from her. Get away from us. Right now.”

Elián fell onto his tailbone and scooched backward. Francis was kneeling across the body from me. I looked him in the eye and we synced up, a silent countdown, three, two, one.

I pulled my hand off the wound.

Francis tore open the bandage wrapper with his teeth. I sliced away Talis's shirt and the wrap beneath, laying one white breast bare, the nipple wincing up in the cold. Francis tipped a powder of coagulant and forcescar into the wound and slapped the bandage on, pushing against it with all his strength.

Talis's body responded. Remarkably, instantly. Suddenly his trachea was less distended, his face clearer, though human with what I supposed was pain or fear.

“Take the pressure?” said FX.

I moved my hands parallel to his hand, and again we counted it in our eyes, three, two, one. Francis raised his hand, and I slid both mine in.

It had been 71.51 seconds since Talis had been stabbed. He was still conscious. His eyes were wide and locked on my face. His body was shivering, slipping deep into shock. Francis Xavier, meantime, was undoing his head scarf, every clever fold and tuck.

Why?

Of course: a pressure bandage.

I lifted my hands cautiously. The seal held—the patch was meant to be self-adhesive—but continuous pressure was still Talis's best hope. I slid my hands under his narrow shoulders and pulled him a little off the ground. He needed to exhale completely so that we could tie the bandage on, but he was doing nothing of the kind. A whine caught in his throat when I moved him. His breath came in gulps and hiccups.

“Breathe out,” I ordered. Talis took a couple of shallow puffs, then tried to master himself, pushing out a long breath.

Francis Xavier slipped the silk under his back.

“Breathe in,” I told Talis.

He tried, white-faced with pain. I laid him back, and Francis Xavier's arm under his shoulders held him just an inch off the ground.

“Breathe out,” I said, leaning over him, one end of the silk strap in each hand. Talis pushed his ribs small, and I yanked the strap as tight as I could and tied the knot right over the chest seal.

Talis whimpered, shuddered, stilled.

“Ease him up,” I said, and Francis lifted the little body as if it were effortless. Breathing is always easier if you're not lying flat. And it needed to be easier. We might have stabilized the pneumothorax, but we certainly hadn't fixed it. Talis's breathing was ragged; there was lavender around his eyes. I pulled him into my lap, wrapping my arms around him from behind, pushing one hand over the wound.

His head fell back, his skull striking my collarbone. “Thank you,” he whispered. His voice, though already tiny, cracked and dropped: “Oh, God . . .”

Elián, demonstrating his knack for getting through a crisis but not past it, twisted aside and threw up.

Sri, though . . . Sri leaned forward. She unfolded Talis's glasses and set them crookedly on his nose. She tucked the hooks behind his ears and ruffled his sweat-soaked, grass-quilled hair. “There, Michael,” she whispered. “Now, that's human.”