The Swan Riders (2 page)

He shut off his eyes.

He shut off his eyes, but he couldn't shut off his mind, even though sometimes he longed for a fuse, a circuit breaker, or just something as simple as sleep. The mainframe didn't and couldn't sleep; didn't and couldn't stop. It poured information through him like current and in the darkness without his visual sensors he watched as Shanghai fell. It had become what they called a bowl city: lower than the new sea level, ringed in a great wall. The explosion had breached it. With his orbital eyes, with ten thousand cameras, Talis watched the struggle: five minutes with the secondary baffles, the pumps, the emergency workers swarming like ants. It was right inside his head and it was eight thousand kilometers away and it was already too late.

“Talis?” His name, a tone of panic. A familiar enough combination. But it sounded wrong, dubbed over the drowning city like a radio broadcast, flat as if someone had shut off half the speakers, disconnected. “Talis!”

And someone—not Evie—someone
human
touched him.

He woke up with a gasp that turned into a snarl, woke up and rolled to his feet like an acrobat with an AK-47, woke up and shoved the human who had dared to touch him away—into the wall, as it turned out.

“Whoa,” said the human. “Hey.”

It was Elián Palnik.

Right. Elián Palnik. Greta Stuart. Li Da-Xia. 2563 AD. Precepture Four; Ambrose's Precepture. Ambrose was dead. And there was a new AI.

Talis blinked three times and reset his internal now, trying to line up with the present moment. It wasn't quite as easy as he made it look. There was always an instant when he woke when he was Michael, when the dream clung and the disorientation of waking in a different body, a different country, a different century was as complete as if he'd awakened lying on the ceiling.

Elián waking him was not a good sign. Not that he cared about Elián, per se. The boy was a smart-mouthed kid with his heart on his sleeve and Talis supposed vaguely that he had rather liked him, even though Elián had done his little human darnedest to be a problem—but no, he didn't care, one way or the other. It was only that Elián had been sitting with Greta.

And right now Elián was caught against the wall and doing his best to look angry instead of afraid. There was really no point in lying to AIs with infrared vision and half a millennium of experience, but few people seemed to grasp that. And perhaps the person Elián was really trying to deceive was himself.

“Talis—” the boy began, and choked on the name: the name of a monster, a murderer; the name of the thing that had killed his grandmother, not five days earlier, and with a certain dramatic flair. But Elián had come anyway; he'd said the name anyway, like an atheist pleading with God. “Talis, it's Greta.”

By the sound of his own name, Talis knew something had gone wrong.

He'd found Greta tipping into a category three dissociative crisis.

Her monkish little cell was grey with fear; she was tangled in quilts of UN blue as if she were dissolving into the sky. Greta's roommate and (he thought, probably) lover, Li Da-Xia, was backed up against the opposite bed. That was presumably the problem. Or at least the problem's most immediate source. New AIs had a great deal of trouble with emotionally charged memories, and having your (probably) lover in your bedroom had to count.

“What's happening?” Elián asked.

He had absolutely no inclination to explain.

Greta was coming apart at the mere sight of Xie, but she had no history with him; it should be safe for him to touch her. He knelt beside her and took her hands. He rubbed his thumbs over the ridges of her knuckles as if she were prayer beads. Her fingertip sensors meshed with his; he could feel the currents slamming around her body. He let his active sensors sweep out, delicate as butterflies. The bounceback fluttered in: a story of rising potentials, of catastrophe, of pain.

“What's happening?” said Elián again.

He spoke aloud, not to answer Elián, but merely in an effort to be honest with himself. “She's skinning. Oh, I didn't think she would . . .”

Greta Stuart had had the best mind he'd met in an age. He had not known it at first (in fairness, the first time he'd met her she was in the middle of being tortured, which does not display the best side of anyone's mind) but he'd slowly come to see it. She was smart. She was stubborn. She was logical. She was incredibly brave. It should have been enough.

Tears were leaking from her eyes.

Elián, who on reflection he didn't like after all, snapped uselessly: “Well, help her!”

How many times had he done this? Two dozen? More? (The number was thirty-two, and he was only pretending to be unsure of it.) There was very little he could do to help. A smaller event, a category one or category two crisis, sure. He could intercept it with ultrasound, cut the memories free of their emotional content.

But this was category three. This was skinning.

He'd seen it over and over: how a single memory rose from the organic mind, and then from the datastore, and then (reinforced, and stronger) from the organics, and then (reinforced, and stronger) . . . it was two mirrors reflecting each other. It was feedback squealing through a microphone. A single moment building to an intensity beyond what any psyche could endure.

How could there be no circuit breaker? How could there be no grace?

“Greta,” he whispered, his voice sounding rough in his own ears. “Greta, listen to me. The two memories are the same, yes? It's only the thinker that's different—but what does that matter, if the thoughts are the same?”

“What does it matter!” Her voice was shrill, but she still had words: good. Words were good. Words were data. AIs could work with data. “It's only the whole construction of self, Talis!” And then: “They died, Michael: they all died!”

She didn't say who, but he knew. Thirty-two times, he'd held their hands.

And before that—he'd fallen retching to the floor of the grey room at his first glimpse of Lu-Lien's face. His best friend and lover, standing (as Xie was standing) right there. Opening for him her slow-blooming smile. He'd seen it, and remembered it, and remembered it, and—what is pain but overload? What is overload but pain?

Lu had taken his hands and it had been like taking hold of a live wire. His mind convulsed. The memory bounced between the mirrors until she had whispered to him, “Michael,” and he (in the greatest act of grace in his ungraceful, frenetic life) had opened his eyes.

Greta's hand was shut like a vise on his, making his borrowed bones ache. “What did you remember?” he coaxed her. “What's the last clear thing?”

“Xie,” she gasped. Her eyes were so tight-shut that they made cracks across her face. “Xie, cutting my hair.”

“Well, then,” he said. “Look at her.”

Greta opened her eyes. She looked at Xie.

And then, a miracle.

Very slowly, Greta reached out and took Xie's hand. He saw them move together like two halves of a broken whole. Saw the present moment break the short circuit that was devouring Greta's mind. What had worked for him, and never worked again, not once in thirty-two times . . . it worked.

A miracle.

A somewhat provisional miracle. What Talis knew very well, and Greta did not, was that the dissociative crisis they all called skinning was not a single chasm to be leapt. It was a long, steep slope of scree. At any moment, one wrong step could send you sliding. Avalanches of memory could be triggered by the slightest thing. Getting down that slope, finding stable ground on which to build a new construction of the self—that was going to take more than one sweet little touch. Five hundred years in, and there were still moments when he shook uselessly and could not remember who he was.

He missed Lu.

One sweet little touch.

He watched them, Greta and Xie and Elián, over the next few hours, until the Swan Riders came. Watched the tenderness with which they treated each other, and tried to remember tenderness. Watched the way they believed that love would save them.

As if it could.

As if it could be nearly enough.

S
o.

It is perhaps not everyone who asks to be murdered, gets their wish, and then, three days later, finds that their most immediate problem is that they cannot ride a horse. I was trying at least to be wryly amused by the novelty of the situation.

The horse, on the other hand, seemed rather put out. It kept slowing to a stop, or wandering off at some strange angle. “Please don't go that way,” I said to it. “Go with the other horses.”

It didn't. It was peeling off to the left. My datastore provided me with the procedure here, and I pushed it up into my brain so that it would come to me more easily, as if I had really learned it. (Only I hadn't, of course. I had never been on a horse in my life.) The procedure went

1. Get horse's attention.

2. Pull rein to right.

3. Hope for best.

I touched the horse's neck, and made a chirrup noise like a lovesick squirrel. The horse swiveled an ear toward me, a good sign for step one.

I pulled the right rein, gripping with my knees in case the horse obeyed me suddenly.

The horse turned its head right—hurrah! But before I could get too excited, it slowed. It stopped. It looked at me over its shoulder as if to say:
Are you serious?

Ahead of me Talis reined his horse around and called back: “Greta: All right?”

From a distance, you could have taken Talis for a human, and not a remarkable one: a slightly built, strong-jawed young white woman with a haphazard haircut and positively startling eyebrows. You could have taken him for Rachel.

He was not Rachel, for all that he had borrowed her body like a cup of sugar. The way he stood up in his stirrups made him look mad and compelling as Joan of Arc. “Need help?” he called.

“I'm all right!” I shouted back, then dropped my voice. “You're a herd animal,” I told the horse, which was still just standing there looking over its shoulder at me, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger expression on its face. “You're supposed to want to stick with the other horses. Look: they went that way.”

I made the squirrel noise again, did some preemptive knee-clinging, and tapped the horse with reins and heels. The horse tried to work its nose between my knee and its own ribs. I pushed its head away and did the reins-heels-knees thing again. The horse (I swear it) said
If you say so
, then bolted. Before I knew it, we were heading for the horizon at a flat-out run.

There are some things only bodies can know, and one of them is how to stay on top of a running horse. My datastore saw fit to provide me with a list of people killed falling from horses. Genghis Khan, for example. Geronimo, of all people. The list was long and filled with people who were better riders than me. Of course there were brain-blanked five-year-olds who were better riders than me. The ground was streaking and pounding by, the horse surged and bounced under me, I'd lost track of the reins, the saddle was hitting my more delicate parts with a hammer's force, and this was a stupid way to die.

Just as I thought so, something swooped like a raven into view: Talis's black horse. He was running it, hard, fast. It pulled in alongside me.

Talis leaned clear out to one side—impossibly far, as if gravity were one of the things that obeyed him—and scooped up the reins I'd dropped. For a moment we were running side by side, blurred with speed, pounded with noise. He slowed his horse and mine slowed too, until we moved at a tolerable bounce.

I panted and gasped. I might be an AI now, but I still had a body, and it had still put all its effort, just then, into the physical work of not dying. I was short of breath—I could feel the upper lobe of the right lung pushing awkwardly against the datastore—and my heart rate was significantly elevated. Talis, on the other hand, was merely flushed a bit, and grinning. “And you call yourself a Stuart,” he said. “Bonnie Prince Charlie is spinning in his grave.”

“I also cannot wield a claymore,” I said. “In case you were wondering.”

The AI laughed like a bell ringing. The horses had slowed to an amble now, and one of the Swan Riders maneuvered his horse along my other flank. Now my animal had nowhere to go but straight ahead. It calmed somewhat.