The Swan Riders (16 page)

They left us sitting there.

There were a few minutes when the conspirators stood about like a school group on tour, staring at us: the pietà of me and Talis, Francis Xavier kneeling alongside, the blood drying to darkness in the pale grass.

My organic mind, which had an annoying habit of providing me with thumbprint cookies and milk shakes and nonsense images generally, provided this one: my family and I—me very small—going to see a living crèche. The royal family standing quiet and still, looking at other people standing quiet and still. For a few moments I felt again as I had then: peaceful. Talis's breath hitched and staggered inside the ring of my arms.

And then the stillness broke up.

Of course it was Elián who broke it. From the first moment I saw him he'd been bad with stillness. Our time at the Precepture together seemed in retrospect a blur of torture, food fights, and kissing. When I had been going to my death he'd made a joke about football.

And I felt nothing about that at all.

“Where'd you learn to do that?” He stood looking down at us. “That medical stuff.”

“I know everything I need to know. It's what I am now.”

“Yeah?” he said. “What's that like?”

“It's not like anything human.”

“Yeah,” he said again. “That's kind of what I figured.”

Some of the other conspirators were clustered a little distance off, where they appeared to be having a spirited argument, albeit one conducted in whispers. I had a feeling this had not quite gone according to plan.

“Hey,” said Elián, crouching down, trying to catch Talis's fluttering attention. “I don't—I mean, I didn't mean to hurt you quite this bad.”

Talis's exhale shuddered. It might have been a laugh. “Go away.”

From someone who never passed up the chance to hear the master plan, this was not the wisest strategic move.

And yet I sympathized with Talis's dismissal. My hands were literally full. Under my hands Talis's heart was beating fast and arrhythmically; his skin temperature was critically low. In the stark light his lips were as blue as if he'd bitten a pen. The wound had taken in too much air; his circulation was failing. If we couldn't get that air out, he was going to die.

“Elián!” one of the strangers shouted to him. “Let's go.”

The trommellers had drawn up horses from the hidden side of the hill. They were mounting up now, slinging goats over saddle horns. The horses towered over us, breathing steam. Sri was among them. She seemed calm, but her horse Roberta, mirroring some hidden mood, stamped and skittered sideways.

Elián looked at her, back at me, back to her again. There was tension around his eyes; he pushed his lips together. But he took the horse's bridle without a word. He started to mount and paused with one foot in a stirrup, suspended between options. “Greta: come with us.”

And I thought about it. I trusted Elián. He had just knifed someone I was close to, for reasons I did not understand, but I trusted him. It would not be too much to say that I had once loved him, though the state was difficult to call back to memory.

“She can't,” said Sri.

And I couldn't.

Talis had made me an AI, a process very few people survived. I had not survived it yet. For a blink of a moment, I hated Talis and everything he stood for. But then the strange intensity of feeling switched off, and I tightened my arms around him and shook my head.

Elián swung his leg over the horse, holding the reins so tight that the animal stepped backward, snorting. “You know, Greta: back when you were human, you wouldn't have let that happen. Somebody getting stabbed right in front of you? No way.”

“There were fourteen of you,” I said, at pains not to point out that, as the person who had done the stabbing, he was hardly in a position to criticize.

“You would have tried.” His voice was fierce with certainty. “Maybe you should think about that.” He wheeled the horse after the others.

“Good luck, Greta,” Sri said, swinging her horse close. “Good-bye, Michael.”

“Talis,” he whispered, his head hanging. “My name is Talis. . . .”

“Sri,” said Francis Xavier. He wrapped his hand around her rein: for a moment I thought he meant to stop her going, though I knew neither how nor why.

Then Sri laid her hand over his—her hand, palsied and bony, over his, so large and steady—and I realized it was a good-bye. Their wrists were pressed wing to wing: the tattoos suggested that a small bird rested invisibly between them. “She wouldn't have been back,” Sri said. “Not for long, anyway. Not whole. You know that, right?”

A pause, a slow nod. “I know that.”

“Have you started your carving yet?”

“You know I haven't.”

“Francis Xavier.” She pulled her hand away from his. “Get out while you can.”

“If I see you again,” said Francis Xavier, “I will put a bolt through your heart.” Then he lifted his hand from the reins.

“Greta, don't forget.” Sri saluted me formally. “There's a chest tube in the kit.” Then she whistled, and all the horses wheeled.

Our attackers went. We watched them go. The hoofbeats drummed, then tapped, and then there was the huge silence of the open prairie.

Francis Xavier, who had been standing with his head bowed, lifted it slowly. “All right,” he said. “Let's get this done.” He knelt to the first-aid kit, rummaged, and came up with a chest tube, and with a scalpel.

And so, as Sri apparently wanted, we saved Talis's life, pulling the air from his chest cavity before he could drown in it. It was an ugly thing. I thought he would pass out—to call what we did to him invasive was to give it its mildest name—but he didn't. Not until after we were finished and I picked him back up did he let himself go limp.

The fight melted out of him slowly. His breathing smoothed. His eyes softened, then closed. His hands, which had been clutching at me, grew more still, heavier somehow. One of them was tucked up in the cradle of my arms, curled loosely. The other fell away, into his lap. After another moment I could see the change in his delta wave patterns, and then the flicker of his bruised-looking eyelids. He was asleep.

It was getting toward evening, and the wind was picking up. The temperature was 1.2 degrees above freezing. Francis Xavier took off his duster and laid it over us, kneeling to tuck it in round Talis's shoulders, under his chin. “Rachel,” he said, with more soft feeling than I had imagined him capable of.

No one answered him.

T
alis—or what was left of Talis—was honestly not sure if he'd ever been murdered.

How would he know, really?

He liked riding out, and he'd done it a lot, especially after the first couple of centuries. Sometimes one really did need the personal touch: he'd strong-armed many a treaty in person, forged many a peace. Away from the Red Mountains, the people he met had rarely encountered an AI in Rider form. They found him uncanny, if not flat-out terrifying. Thus he kept the name of Talis whispering around the world. And with the name, the peace he'd given up so much to achieve.

It worked like this. There was a small global network of fortified data silos that his AI self could easily reach through shielded hard cables, the real him being much too big to flit about wirelessly. There was one such silo in the Red Mountains, of course, and others in strategic places around the world: one near Lhasa, one in the Urals at Yamantaw, one deep in the ancient cave-city of Derinkuyu, one under Kilimanjaro, and so forth. In each, the UN had a base of operations, and the Swan Riders had associated encampments. His usual practice was to ride out, take care of business, and ride back. Usually he returned without fuss, then reuploaded and reintegrated the returning copy. It rarely took longer than months, which meant he wasn't in a body long enough to start being inconvenienced by the white-light pain of the lesions an AI left in the host brain. That pain had killed him once, back when he was Michael, and once was more than enough.

Plus, if he kept it short, then after he reuploaded, the Swan Rider was often in pretty good shape. He certainly didn't want to destroy more of them than he had to.

But—and here was the wrinkle—every once in a while, there was a self who rode out and never came back. A piece of experience earned but never reincorporated. A book written but never put on its shelf.

He supposed some of those missing versions of him might have been murdered. More probably they'd met with accidents, but—well. He had enemies, certainly. He had more people who hated him than most people had
people.
Why shouldn't some of them be murderers? Mind you, it was hard to see what they would get out of it, beyond the splatter, and it was a terrible risk. There had been a handful of unsuccessful attempts, and what he had done to those people, even he did not care to think about.

But then, sometimes bloodlust went deep. Too deep to be subject to cost-benefit analysis.

And what could he do but keep riding? It was good for the world he'd once saved and then, frustratingly, had to keep saving, as if the world were a leaky boat and he was the only one with a bucket. And if he was honest with himself, it was good for him, too. It kept him—not sane, really. Sane was a human yardstick; he didn't hold himself to it. It kept him entertained. Which was important. Boredom crawled over him like rust. It was a slow death, boredom, the way rust is slow fire.

So, on balance, he was quite willing to risk being murdered. He'd pictured himself shot through the head on some dusty byway, or bleeding out on the floor of a conference room somewhere, the conspirators standing around, shocked. He let himself imagine that it had been quick, without really caring one way or the other.

But
this.
Murder, yes. Possibly he could even be eaten by lions, something colorful, something new. He'd risk that. But he'd never dreamt he was risking this.

He hadn't seen it coming until the moment Sri had touched him, the shivery tickle of her finger as she found just the right place to force a blade. And then, having seen it, he hadn't been able to stop it. He'd struggled, of course, could think of nothing better to do than struggle, though it was so human: they always fought; it rarely helped. He'd struggled and while he struggled he had time to anticipate, time to play out the whole scenario in his head. He knew a bit about recreational torture (because, hey, he'd lived a long time, and there'd been the aforementioned boredom): he knew that you should scratch with a toothpick before you strike with a whip. Sri's fingertip on him, the shiver and the tickle—

And then, the blade.

He really did picture it as a whip, which was the problem with thinking too fast, with thinking about whips: the knife was a whip coiling around the roots of his very self and yanking them screaming from the earth like mandrakes. For just an instant he was still whole, and could feel the datastore reacting to the massive short and the body reacting to the wound and the organic mind going into the oh-shit brace position one called shock, and then—

And then, very little. Sure, pain: he'd just been stabbed in the chest. His knees didn't even try to hold him. His hand flew to the injury as if it had its own software. But what was dazzling was how the world looked flat, colorless, as if he'd fallen into a picture of the world instead of the world itself. Half his senses were simply gone. Infrared, ultraviolet, ultrasonic—the friendly jostle and burble of the electronic world, the beautiful depths and overlays of the informational world—gone. His memory cut up like a paper snowflake—if he hadn't spent so much time, since Greta, pushing his own history around in his mind, there'd be nothing left of him at all.

As it was . . . there was enough. The loss was cruel—it would have been less cruel to blind him—but there was enough of him left. Or so he thought, for just a moment. He'd snarled a little at Sri; she'd smiled a little at him: the accepted parts in the drama. He thought it was a drama. He thought he could play it. But then he had pulled the knife free.

And suddenly. He needed air and couldn't get it. He was reasonably accomplished at ignoring pain, but this—this was a brand of distress that was a step sideways from pain, and it was imperative.

The body—the body needed air. And suddenly, the body was his—no, was him. He was his body. He was human.

With one flick of a knife, they'd made him human.

T
alis slept like a child—a deep, limp sleep that would have made anyone think he was an innocent.