The Scorpion Rules (25 page)

Time went by, stretched and strange. Talis paced. Xie held my numb hand. The Abbot stroked my hair. We put ice on my hands, then took it off, then put it back on. I had Xie, but I needed Elián, who thought I was strong—I needed Elián. And just as I was thinking so, the door burst open so fast, it thumped into the wall.

“Greta!” Elián rushed toward me, his hands coming up to his face. “Oh, God . . .”

“She's okay,” said Xie. “You're okay, Greta.”

Elián actually looked to his torturer for reassurance.

“Hairline fractures,” the Abbot told him gently. “Bruising and swelling. She genuinely will be fine, Mr. Palnik.”

Elián's hands were coming off his face, reaching for me. A smart-plastic cuff still dangled from one wrist. His face was bruised, as it had been when I'd first seen him. I recognized his expression now as I had not then—swallowed-down fear, carefully tamped fury. “Greta. I swear I had no—”

“Excuse me,” said Talis.

“Go away,” snapped Elián.

“Elián,” said the Abbot. “This is—”

Elián barely glanced at Talis, taking him perhaps for a Cumberlander. “I said
go away
!”

“Talis,” whispered Xie.

“Greta,” said Elián. “I— I'm so—”

“Excuse me,”
said Talis.

“Elián,” said the Abbot. “This is Talis.”

Elián turned. He looked at Talis. He looked some more. His eyes hardened. His lips tightened. The knob of his chin wrinkled up.

“Hi,” said Talis.

“Take one more step toward me,” said Elián. “Take one more step, and I will lay you out. I will put you on the damn ground.”

Talis quirked one corner of his mouth. “Really.”

“Try me.”

“Oh, you are
fantastic
.” Talis looked Elián up and down as if he were a piece in an art museum. “Ambrose, I know you have your heart set on Greta, but I think I like this one. Maybe we should upload them both.”

That erased Elián's fury, and replaced it with a bewilderment that looked a lot like terror. “What?” he said.

“I hardly think he's suitable, Michael. And I'm sure he'd never consent.”

Talis shrugged elaborately. “There's that.”

“What?” said Elián. “No, I don't consent. Consent to what?”

A smile spread over Talis's face. “What a firecracker, Ambrose. I can see why you've had so much trouble. Elián Palnik. It is a pleasure to meet you at last. You're my new favorite.”

“Fuck off,” snarled Elián—and Xie grabbed him by the arm.

“Stop,” she whispered, pulling at him. “Elián, stop. Greta—it's Greta who needs us.”

“Ah, yes,” said Talis. “Your princess. My princess. Greta, who needs us.”

“You leave her alone,” said Elián.

But Talis kept coming forward, slow but unstoppable as the tide. “You're shouting at the wrong person here, Elián. I didn't do this to our Greta. In fact I saved her. You know, mostly. And for now.”

“Lord Talis,” said Xie. “What do you mean?”

“Thank you, Xie,” said Talis. “I do like to be fed my lines. Think about it, kiddies. Really think it through. I stopped dear Wilma by putting a city on the firing line. What do you think will happen if I can't actually fire? What will Grandma do if we wake up in the morning and Pittsburgh is still standing?”

“They wouldn't dare,” whispered Xie.

“No,” said Talis. “
You
wouldn't dare. Which is adorable. But Armenteros— Let's ask Elián. Hey, Elián. Do we think Grandma would dare?”

I saw Xie look at Elián. I saw her whole body freeze.

“I'll spell it out, shall I?” said Talis. “Slowly? For the benefit of the class? Or, let's be honest here, mostly for Elián. Shall I spell it out for you, Elián? If we wake up in the morning and Pittsburgh is still standing, the Cumberlanders will know their snowstorm is working. They'll risk a call out to Halifax. They have to: it's the only card they've got to play. They'll use an oblivious transfer, quantum scramble up a blizzard so thick that it will take hours to hack, even for me.”

He was close to them now—very close. Xie had wedged her body between him and Elián. She was leaning backward as if afraid Talis might scorch her with his presence. Elián was almost holding her up, which left him unable to deck the ruler of the world.

“Let's think about those hours, shall we?” pressed Talis. “The hours when Cumberland has Halifax on the line and not a lot of time. Do we think Grandma will bow out quietly? Or will she go out with a big number?”

“I—” said Elián.

“Or let's ask Greta,” Talis interrupted. In a blink he cut sideways—he had backed Elián and Xie out of the way—and was leaning over the edge of the map table. “What do you think, Princess? Are you up for another turn as the star of the show? Another turn of the screw?” And with that, he closed his hand over mine, and squeezed.

“Michael!” objected the Abbot.

“No,” I heard myself whisper, plead. Talis's grip was slowly breaking through the membranes, through the skins of numbness and pain and into the skin itself. “No, please, Talis—please.”

So abject. And I could not even hate myself for it. I was too far gone.

Elián, though—give him this, he's never been paralyzed. He swung out from behind Xie and seized Talis's arm and yanked him away from me. “Don't you
touch
her.”

Talis just smiled. “But I didn't touch her. I saved her. Whether I can do it again . . . If I were you, Elián, and if I loved her . . . Well. I need you to flip this little situation around for me. I need you to punch me a hole in the snow.”

“I d-don't . . .” Elián stuttered. “I can't— I don't know anything about broadcast jamming.”

“But probably you have friends who do. And you might be able to get them access.” Talis laughed lightly. “If that fails, try murdering Tolliver Burr.”

I could hear Elián's harsh breathing. But he said nothing.

“Grego,” whispered Da-Xia. “Talk to Grego. He knows broadcasting, if anyone here does.”

“Xie, I—” Elián cut himself off and turned to me. “Greta, I can't. It's crazy. And even if— I
can't
.”

But I could only fold up, curling the whole of my body around my broken hands. “Don't let them,” I said, to him, to all of them. “Oh, don't let them. Please.”

Da-Xia covered her mouth with one hand, and put the other on Elián's arm.

“Go,” said the Abbot to both of them. “I'll take care of Greta. Go.”

A long summer evening spread across the misericord. There was birdsong in the twilight, and the sky turned lavender, with high clouds like brushstrokes, first white and then a luminous gold. Cirrus clouds, a shift of the weather. The Cumberlanders had a generator going somewhere. I could hear its growl, and the uncouth voices of the soldiers, who did not belong in this silent, careful place.

It was quiet again. Da-Xia and Elián, slipped away. Even Talis, dismissed. “Use my cell,” the Abbot had said to him. “It's easier to defend than the rest of the Precepture, if the Cumberlanders decide to take action in the middle of the night.”

So it was the Abbot and I.

He took off my tabi and tidied my hair. He wiped the tear streaks from my face with a cool cloth. Then he scooped me up from the table and laid me in the rounded cushion by the Romanist shelves; my nest, and the place where he himself had sent me plunging into terrible dreams.

This seemed like just one more. One more dream. Except that sometimes my hands hurt, and needles were needed to keep me from sobbing.

Darkness fell, and stars opened beyond the shattered roof. The Abbot lit one of the golden lamps. He was silent, crouched at my side.

“You should sleep,” he said, finally.

Obedient—even now, obedient—I closed my eyes for a moment. Terror loomed up from my inner darkness. My eyes flew open. I breathed in through my nose and blew out as if blowing out a candle, two times, three, and four. When I could speak again, I said, “You should shelve the books.”

“Ah. That I could do.” The Abbot unbent his hexapod legs and leaned forward, his hands on the upper joints, wheezing like an old man. He paused there a moment. And then he turned to the books and lifted one delicately.

I watched him work in the lamplight, and he did not seem like a machine. He lifted the tumbled volumes as if they were flowers. He tucked them to sleep on their shelves. Where they were crumpled, or broken-spined, he piled them on his desk. He had glue and binder's tape, a bonefolder.

He had a book press.

I looked away from the little press, its pan and levered top. Felt my heartbeat pounding in my shoulders.

The Abbot left the injured books and came back to me.

“Would that the whole world were so easy to order,” he said. “So easy to repair.”

“But it's not.”

“No. It's not.”

“Dreamlock,” said the Abbot, softly. “Let me help you. Dreamlock, merely to keep dreams at bay.”

“No,” I said. “Not that.”

I wanted to lift my hands, to cover my face, but even the first stir of the movement made my tender shoulders glow with pain. Talis had reseated them—his strange eyes glowing—but it was going to be days or even weeks before the tendon damage healed.

Who was I trying to fool? I didn't have weeks.

The apple press was tomorrow.

“In four hundred years,” said the Abbot, “no army in the world, no nation and no alliance of nations, has stood for long against Talis. The UN will have its Precepture back.”

“And then you'll kill me.” It was a cold fear all through me, but perversely I was comforted. Better the grey room than Tolliver Burr.

But the Abbot made a
tock
noise in his throat. “Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” he said. “What if there were another way?”

A
nother way. A way out of the Precepture other than death.

I remembered Atta's voice, rusted with anger.
They watch us everywhere. It is an illusion.
I was going to die, surely. Surely. And yet—and yet stirring inside me was the kind of fear that comes with hope.

My voice came out very small and cautious: “What do you mean?”

The Abbot was flexing his damaged hand. He'd used the bookbinding equipment to reattach the muscle, but his movements were ratcheting, stiff. He watched the hand open and close a moment before answering. “Greta, dear, do you know what a Class Two Turing Intelligence is?”

“I do— I can't— I know, but I can't think.”

“I'm sorry,” whispered the Abbot, turning his facescreen aside. His voice was as human and soft as I'd ever heard it. He sounded like a child. “Of course you can't.” The golden lamplight caught the edge of the ancient casing of his facescreen. There were fine scratches in the aluminum, and dimples as small as grains of sand.

“Class Two,” he said. “It means a machine intelligence that was once human. It means an AI whose ‘birth' involved the upload of a copied human psyche.” He turned to me, his face icon changing to a smile whose meaning I had trouble reading. “It means me. I am not quite the man I was.”

“You were human.” My voice felt strange. The Abbot sounded more human than I did. “I knew that already. You were human.”

“Talis, also. Though he was part of the first wave. I trust you remember it.”

“Yes.” The Abbot was coaxing me into a classroom. And it was working. I was good at classrooms. “Yes, I remember.” There had been a period just before the War Storms when ending human death had seemed both a good idea and a wise use of resources. When melding humans to machines had seemed one way to become immortal. It had been a brief period—and it had been a bad idea. Most of the AIs had died, and most of the ones who didn't had fragmented, their personalities peeling off layer by layer. I suppose that it was immortality of a kind. The immortal fate of a soul in hell.

The Abbot nodded his scholarly approval at me. “I am younger. In two ways, younger. I was a younger man when I . . . chose this. And it was not so long ago.”

“How long . . .” The question crossed a line—it was like asking a Precepture Child about home. But I had to ask it. “How long ago?”

“One hundred eighty-three years.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. It was a big number. “Oh.”

The Abbot settled beside me. “This place was younger then, too, though already old. And somewhat different, under the . . . old leadership.”

“You . . . you were a Child of Peace?”

“Indeed,” he said. “A hostage child, and before that, someone's son. Some country's young prince. I was sixteen. But I do not suppose it matters. That body is long gone. The country was lost in the war whose beginning sent me to the grey room. But, Greta: the grey room has more than one door.”