The Swan Riders (42 page)

Night.

It was strange to lie in the bed where Talis had died. To lie inside Elián's arms as she had lain in Francis Xavier's. To curve my hip into the hollow her body had made.

To lie inside that fate.

Elián was breathing softly on the back of my neck, snoring a little. But I could not sleep. There was something wrong with me, something that made the minutes seem longer, the noises seem louder. Something aching. Something—

I was afraid.

Lying awake, but almost dreaming. Once, in such a state, I had seen the whole world spinning. Once, I had seen the figure of a small and great young god, draped in beads and silk. Outside, in the darkness, little beads of ice that are called graupel fell from the sky and rattled at the door.

Li Da-Xia. She was less than fifty miles away. I could see her now, if I wanted to, under her glass ceiling.

But when I looked—I could not help it, I could see the whole world, I looked—I deployed a keyhole satellite; in another moment I was looking through the glass roof of Precepture Four. And I saw her there, asleep on her bed.

Her hair loose, her body unguarded. Sighing in her sleep, she rolled over.

I threw myself out of the bed and tried to shut off my satellite eyes. You could not be human, if you were using those eyes. Elián whuffled like a horse at the sudden disturbance, then rolled onto his stomach with a sleepy grunt.

The wall said: “Greta?”

And my whole heart said what Francis had said.
Not yet.

“Can't sleep?” said Talis, from the wall, in her new and softer voice. There was something feline in it, a roundness. A purr.
Lioness.
“I can't either,” she said. “Well. You know. Not in a body right now. Literally can't sleep.”

“I'm not ready to talk to you. I just helped you die.”

“I was there.”

“Yes,” I said. “But also, no.” The distinction was important. “Talis, we just buried you.”

“I know.”

I crossed closer to the terminal. I wanted Elián to stay asleep. Talis dropped his voice.

“I watched Francis, too,” she said. She would have felt my deployment of the keyhole. Knew what I did, what I looked at. Why it got me out of bed. “Used the old global surveyor sat. For a while. But—”

“But it turns out you can't love someone and also monitor them from space?”

Talis laughed—her new sparrow's laugh. “Turns out.”

I put my hand into the interface gel and felt it sparkle back at me. A hand in mine.

“I know we can't talk yet,” said Talis. A pause. “I know that. I just wanted to say—thank you for helping me.”

And I answered so suddenly that my voice cracked. “Will you help me?”

Talis knew what I meant. Always did. The palsy that had killed Rachel would kill me, too. A year. Maybe less. I'd be talking out of a wall, not dead, but first I had to die. I had to die
like that
.

I felt the sensors surge around me. “I will,” said Talis. “I promise.”

“Greta?” said Elián groggily. “What's wrong?”

Everything. Nothing.

“Go back to bed, Greta . . . ,” said Talis.

“Jesus!” Elián jerked upright as if he'd found a tarantula on his face. “That's so creepy! Go away.”

“How about if I just stay here, but be quiet.”

“Like you could,” said Elián.

“Yeah,” sighed the terminal. “How about if I just stay here.”

And then, miraculously, Talis fell quiet. Present, still: even once back under the blankets I could feel her tapped into the room's sensors, a thing as faint as the breath of someone else in a room.

None of us know what to do in the face of grief, but of this one thing I am sure: the hard work of being there, being quietly there—that is never wrong.

The sensors moved over me like a sigh. I breathed as if matching my breath to Elián's, to the sensors, to the breath of Talis, who was no longer breathing. And thus I was lowered into sleep.

I slept all day, groggily, fitfully, slipping in and out of dreams. I dreamt of Agnes Little, lifting her chin, masked in freckles. I dreamt of Rachel dying, of the little horse carving come alive and squirming its way free of the sandy grave. I dreamt of Francis taking flight. I dreamt of Xie, the princess sleeping in her glass coffin, and the weapons satellite reaching down as if to kiss.

In the dream, I knew what I had to do.

I knew what I had to do.

Two things woke me: the smell of dinner, and a voice from the wall.

“Hi there!” it said.

The voice was male, human, and unfamiliar. The intonation was none of those things.

“Evie?” I said.

“Who's Evie?” said Elián. He was standing at the table, frying something amazing-smelling in an iron skillet.

“One of the other AIs.” And not the straightest stripe on the zebra. I made a tell-you-later gesture, and Elián shrugged. He was forming grated potatoes into patties with his hands.

“Is that Evie?” I asked the wall.

“Yes!” said Evie, in the incongruous borrowed voice. I sat up in bed, rubbing my face. It was—my datastore told me—actually late afternoon, winter sunset. But even so, waking to Evie was a little much.

“Talis told me I had to try this.”

“This?” I asked.

“This human thing. It's so
weird
.”

“I'm sure it is.”

Her deep voice dropped to a slumber-party whisper. “
I have a penis
.”

Elián choked so hard that bits of latke came out his nose.

“Do you really?” I ventured.

But there was no answer.

“And she's off,” said another voice. Talis. “She is in fact skipping down the hallway; I need you to picture that so that I don't have to live with the image alone.”

“Oh, God,” said Elián. “Please get that child some help.”

“That's the idea,” said Talis.

“Was that . . .” Elián flipped a latke into the pan. “What's his name, the big Brazilian guy—Alejandro?”

“Alejandro is Argentine,” said Talis. “And he volunteered.”

How was the ride,
Alejandro had asked Francis.

And Francis had answered:
The ride was hard.

“Are you two all right out there?” said Talis. A carefully not-loaded question.

“We have horses,” I said. “And all the supplies one might want.”

“And a spaceship,” said Talis.

“Yes,” I said. “But for now—we might ride.”

Talis was silent, and yet I could trace the path of his thoughts from the lengths of his pauses, the shifts of his attention as it fed through the room sensors.

I answered his unspoken comment. “It's only fifty miles.”

Fifty miles to Precepture Four. To my former world. To the girl who knew me better than anyone in the world. Look at me, I would say. I am alive. I am the same but I have changed. Can you see me?

“Nothing like a road trip,” Talis said.

Nothing like a full circle.

“And after that,” said Talis. “You're coming back?”

“I will.”

“Good,” said Talis. “Because now that I'm in charge again, I'm going to put you in charge too.”

“I don't think authority works like that,” said Elián.

“It works like I say it works,” said Talis.

“Yeah,” said Elián. “That's
why
it doesn't work.”

Elián had a reasonable point. “Talis,” I said. “Are you saying we're equals?”

“Well,” said Talis. “I aspire to that.”

“In that case, I would like to propose that peace achieved through terror can never truly be peace.”

Talis paused. “Fair point. But I would like to remind you that stories that start with the words ‘power vacuum' don't always turn out very well.”

Elián had flipped the last of his latkes onto the tea towel. He was watching me. Holding his breath. Knowing the gravity of the moment, if not the content.

“It turns out . . .” I edged out to the idea carefully. “It turns out you can't love someone and hold them in the crosshairs. It turns out you can't love the world, that way. It's not . . .”

“Human,” said Talis.

“Just so.”

“Grace,” said Talis. The name struck inside me as if I were a bell. “Will you help me? I'd like to save the world.”

My new name rang through my body. I felt the intricate dance of data and sensing and human soul. All of them were me. I closed my eyes and said: “Let's start.”

“Put your coat on, Elián,” said Talis. “This, you're going to want to see.”

Elián and I wrapped a couple of latkes in waxed cloth and took Roberta and Gordon out into the gathering night. We climbed the hill above the draw to overlook our refuge, and the grave. And there we stopped.

Among the grey-gold grasses, Gordon's coat was the color of the moon. Roberta's dark chestnut almost made her vanish. The two horses breathed out puffs of steam. Elián's hand was warm in mine. Steady. I could feel his newly implanted sensors mesh with my sensors, pulling us closer together. Around us was winter quiet: neither insects nor birds, but the quick sharp wind in the grass. “Look up,” I said.

It was almost full dark. The stars were so bright that they came together in clots.

“The ones that are moving are the satellites.” I pointed, my hand pale in the darkness. “That one there, the bright one,” I said, tracking it with my finger as it swept toward us from the horizon. “That's one of the orbital super-platforms. A city killer. It can fire both projectiles and beams.”

“I know,” said Elián, and shivered inside his Swan Rider's coat. “Can you—do you already talk to them?”

All the time.

“More than that,” I said, and opened my lifted hand.

The star-on-a-string that was the weapons platform suddenly brightened. And then Elián gasped as it turned lightning-bright and blazing, streaking downward and breaking into cinders—a falling star.

“Look up,” I said, not to Elián, but to the world. I let Azriel translate it into the three thousand remaining languages. I let it pour from every speaker, every terminal. From each of my ten fingertips. Talis had a point, about power vacuums: this might not be the beginning of a happy story. But one way or another, it
was
a new beginning.

“My name is Grace,” I said, to Elián, to Talis, to Queen Agnes Little, to the listening world. Then I drew with my hand a circle across the whole of the sky, and it filled with streaking, breaking platforms.

Grace, the gift unexpected, unearned.

Grace in a grid of falling stars.

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