The Swan Riders (8 page)

“But . . .” But surely Talis could afford whatever was needed for his people.

“The Swan Riders don't get corrective therapies of any kind.” Sri turned her carving over, shaving her way closer to the horse's heart. “It changes our mind/body map too much. Makes it harder for the AIs to use us.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Francis Xavier said: “Rachel wears glasses.”

Something in the way he said the name of the woman Talis was inhabiting made me wonder . . . Sri had said this wasn't her station. Was it then Francis Xavier's? And Rachel's?

I got up, trailing the blanket like a cape. It was poppy orange. There was a tiny red silk heart stitched to the hem of the backing. I fixated on it—poppy and saffron, and the little red heart, every thread. I was fixating on it as I had on the apple. I was falling into fugue, shutting down. What had happened? I hugged the quilt close. I was shivering, not from cold but from . . . exhaustion? As if I'd run miles and miles. I found one hand squeezing the base of the other thumb, like a vise, making pain shoot up my arm.

“Are you angry?” said Francis Xavier.

“What?” I said.

Francis Xavier lifted his dark eyes and said: “You should be.”

Just then the refuge door opened, and in came Talis, trailing night chill and wildness. “Oh, good, you're up.” He spoke to me without a glance at the other two. “Feeling better?”

“Feeling—” What was I feeling? “What happened?”

“We made soup,” said Talis. “Did anyone give Greta some soup?”

Francis Xavier had bent his head back to his work on the bridle, and he stayed bent. Sri tucked her carving away and got up to ladle soup. She slid a bowlful over the table toward me. Talis swatted Francis Xavier on the shoulder and the Swan Rider stood up so that the AI could claim his seat.

Talis sat. Francis Xavier crossed silently to the bed. He tugged on one side. The bed separated into two narrower beds—not much more than benches, though topped with feather ticks. The legs scraped and screeched across the stone floor as Francis Xavier pushed one bed into the empty alcove.

“Try the soup,” said Talis.

I tried the soup. It was potato leek. Warmth spread through me—heat and carbohydrates mimicking emotional comfort. “What happened before the soup?”

“We were talking about the political situation,” said Talis. “Calgary, former city of. And all that.”

Calgary. Yes. I remembered the charged and roiling sky spreading out behind Talis on my first day away from the Precepture. The ruined city hiding behind the horizon. I remembered that. But I had lost something, too. “The why of it,” I said.

“Pretty simple. The PanPols refused to give up a hostage. I—by which I mean the master version of me, not
me
me—used Calgary as a pressure point.”

“Did it work?”

Talis raked his hand through his hair, raising it into wild spikes. “I'm sure it
will.
”

“So, no?” said Sri.

“The government is dragging their feet. And the public is . . . I don't think we're looking at a popular uprising. But just shy.”

“We're riding through a popular uprising?” That seemed alarming to me.

“Hardly. This is Saskatchewan—who's going to rise up, the gophers? We're riding through
sand.
And the Pan Polar Confederacy is huge. There are seven duchies on three continents. It's not like I'm going to run out of pressure points.”

No, but—

We should stop
, I thought.

Or maybe:
Help me.

I
n the end, Michael Talis reflected, it was easy. Taking over the world.

The satellites were in his head all the time now. At first communicating with them had been clunky and wobbly, like using a pole to get something down from a high shelf. But they had slowly . . . come into focus? Something like that. Seven years after Evie had first given him the codes, seeing the world from the orbiting spy satellites was as easy and as natural as using his eyes.

Reaching down the weapons platforms was like putting one finger down on top of an ant. When he did it for the first time, he could almost feel the tiny crunch. Sensory feedback in the finger he didn't have. From the exoskeleton that Manila didn't have.

Actually—he looked again—Manila didn't have much anymore. He'd wiped it out. Entirely. Gone.

He tilted back his artificial head and looked at the ceiling of the room that was Evie. The needle-arms waved back at him cheerfully. “Rebroadcast the demands again. Tell them there's more where that came from. Tell them total global cease-fire.”

“Already done,” said Azriel. Despite his somewhat appalling nom de guerre (Azriel, angel of death), Talis rather liked Az. He had a cute New Zealand accent and a way of getting things done before you even asked for them. On this project—the take-over-the-world project—Talis had put him in charge of translating total global cease-fire into all 3,528 of the world's known languages, and hijacking all the world's known broadcast systems to get it out there. They'd given a radio frequency for people to get back to them. Radio, because it couldn't be shut down. He suspected the governments of the world would have the Internet down by tomorrow, but his lines to the weapons satellites were secure. And no one could block every ham radio in the world.

Manila smoked gently. Into their radio came an echoing silence.

“We lost Davie today,” he said, by way of distraction. “I put him in a box.”

The boxes—Matrix Boxes, he called them—were new. They were a kind of simplified, simulated reality into which he could plug the more damaged and dangerous of his AIs. Manage their input to keep them from going crazier. Lock down their output so they couldn't hurt people. Inventing the boxes made him feel a bit supervillain, but he hoped it would be a stopgap thing, a rest cure, a kind of therapy. Spend some simulated time on a simulated beach swimming with simulated dolphins or some such, and recover your sanity.

But the truth was there was no end in sight. He didn't know how to help the other AIs be themselves. Azriel might like numbers a little too much and Evie might be flipping terrifying, but they still had something that passed for personality. The others—they had drifted too far out from their human selves. He did not know how to bring them back.

But it was better, he told himself, than all the others. The ones who had brushed too close to human. Who had overloaded.

Who had died in his arms.

“Matrix Box, huh?” said Evie. “How many is that now?”

“Seventeen,” said Azriel. “What decided you?” Az was building some kind of critical-moment decision model, which was going to be handy at this moment of critical decision. The radio crackled with silence.

Talis shrugged. “He ate his cat.”

“Oh, no,” said Evie. “Not Mittens-Kittens!”

“Davie can eat?” asked Az.

“You wouldn't think so . . . ,” said Talis, trying to blink the image of a 'bot attempting to eat away from his mind. It didn't work, because he couldn't blink. And he couldn't forget. Anything. Ever. “I mean, you definitely wouldn't think so, and yet . . .”

Manila, he'd picked because it was doomed. The Big Melt had really done a number on the Philippines. Most of Luzon was swamped, and Manila had been hanging in there only with seawalls and pumps. Water would have taken it eventually. Of course, water would have left time for evacuation, but—

Talis found he was counting, a clock visible across the world. No one had surrendered yet, but maybe four minutes and twenty-two seconds was a little quick.

“Anything?” he asked Az, who could monitor everything.

“Nothing.”

Manila flooded and steamed. Fans of nipa palm floated on the churning water, their shapes like severed hands.

“History will be kind to me,” said Talis softly. “I intend to write it.”

“Oooo,” chimed Evie. “It's quoting time! Winston Churchill.”

“Or a common paraphrase thereof,” said Azriel.

Talis attempted a sour sideways look, which was hard because he had no eye sockets. “Who but an AI would look that up?”

“Everybody, if you use your quotey voice,” said Evie.

“I don't have a quotey voice.”

“You do,” said Evie. “You definitely have a quotey voice.”

“I just blew up Manila, Evangeline. Could we—I don't know—have a minute of silence or something?”

“Sure!” said Evie.

Exactly 60.00 seconds passed.

“Your quotey voice kind of turns down at the end. Like the opposite of questions.”

“Leave it, Evie.”

Another minute passed.

“Come on, people,” murmured Talis to himself. “Get out of the pool.”

“Sort of like that,” said Evangeline. “Like how the vocal frequency goes down between seven and nine percent on the accented syllables? Sort of doubty-sneery.”

“Why don't you just start writing down everything I say,” he snapped.

“ . . . If you want.”

Another minute passed.

“Think they'll listen?” he asked. He was certainly not going to admit to being desperate to be listened to.

“Oh sure,” said Evie.

And Az said: “I estimate five to ten more cities.”

Inside Talis's head the satellites spun. He let himself drift out to join them.

T
he next morning we rode for Saskatoon. On the first day nothing particular happened. On the second, we struck the remains of a rail line that cut across the flat skin of the prairie like a scar. There was not much left of the actual line—the rails had long since been pulled out for salvage, and the wood ties and telephone poles rotted away—but the banks of it remained, and it was a smooth, quick ride.

“Good news,” said Talis, surveying the distance behind us as we struck camp that evening. “We might just reach the Red Mountains before Francis Xavier exhausts his meager supply of verbs.”

But what he really meant was, we might make it before I died.

Something had happened at the refuge. Talis had been talking about the destruction of Calgary, he'd been poring through the maps and updates and . . .

I knew what he'd learned. I'd lost none of the data. But something had happened, and Talis had sent a wicked pulse of ultrasound through my mind. It was the second time. If there was a third . . . I was walking along the cliff edge in the dark, careful with every breath, aware of the hollow spaces under my feet.

If Talis took one more thing—and how could he not, in seven hundred miles—if he pushed like that again—

“Stop worrying,” he said. “You're going to be all right.”

“Stop reading my mind,” I returned. “It's uncanny.”

“It's
AI
,” he corrected. “And you're going to be fine.”

“Fine like Evangeline is fine?” offered Sri.

“Who . . . ?”

“Another AI,” said Talis, crinkling his nose. “And not the straightest stripe on the zebra, I'm afraid. Turns out you shouldn't make nine-year-olds immortal and give them vast inhuman powers.”

“Nine-year-olds,” I said faintly.

“Yeah,” said Talis. “First wave, so way too early to be my fault. She had some kind of leukemia, her parents didn't want her to die . . .” He was making big circles in the air with his hands. “That old story.”

“Oh,” I said. “
That
story.”

“So Evangeline's a little Twilight Zone-y,” he said. “Doesn't mean you will be.”

“She thinks if Swan Riders are going to be silent, then we might just as well have our larynxes removed,” called Sri.

“And I stopped her,” said Talis. “Very nearly before she even got started.”

“And then there's Azriel.” Sri was rubbing down the horses. Perhaps it was that that made her sound singsong, vastly amused.

“Azriel?” I looked at Talis inquiringly.

“Doesn't talk,” he muttered. “Well. He does. But mostly in numbers.”

“And Gambit,” said Sri.

Talis looked sidelong at me. I could feel his active sensors, sense him in my fingertips and at the backs of my eyes. “Wants to move us to the moon.”

“All of us?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Talis. “A new world for a new creature. And also something about superconductivity.”

All of us, I realized, as in all of us AIs.

“And Lewy?”

“You're not helping, Sri,” he snapped at her, brilliant as lightning. Her horse, Roberta, squealed and Gordon's ears swiveled round. It was suddenly very quiet. “Keep at it,” Talis said softly, “and I'll put the larynx thing back on the table.”

We'd struck camp above a little lake, a slough that had built up where culverts had fallen and the rail line had become a dam. There were snow geese there—hundreds of them, white and crisp against the dark and shining water, and more coming in, sounding like trumpets as the sky drew downward. The season was turning.

Overshadowed by all those white wings, I tried to conjure a sense of wonder. But it would not come.

Higher than the geese, the satellites. As twilight thickened I could see the larger platforms, streaking the sky like slow meteors. They seemed to murmur to me—I could not talk to them, could not yet command the death of thousands in a blink. But that was coming. They murmured
power, peace . . .