The Swan Riders (17 page)

I held him for an hour, while Francis Xavier gathered our scattered horses and retrieved our gear. By the time that was done my back had started to spasm. Francis Xavier scooped Talis out of my arms as if he were a toddler, and like a toddler he still did not wake. Darkness was gathering by then, and the temperature was dropping fast.

I found a gap in the ruined foundation of the church and led the horses through it. In the meager windbreak of the northwest corner, I piled the saddlebags and microfoam pads and one of the horse blankets into a kind of inclined bed. We laid Talis out and tucked all three crinkle sheets around him. Shivering came over him like waves, like aftershocks.

I stood looking at him, not liking what I saw. His skin temperature was too low; his heartbeat was too fast. Francis Xavier didn't have an AI's brain structure, but he had the same sensors I did. He looked at Talis. He looked at me. We looked at each other.

“It would be ideal if he didn't die,” I said.

FX paused. Said: “Yes. That would be ideal.”

I was not sure what to do first. “The blood loss is problematic, but we can't address it here: there's nothing to transfuse. The cyanosis is lifting, which is a good sign, but—”

“He's cold,” said Francis, very softly.

“It's the shock,” I said, but that did not stop Francis Xavier from spinning to rummage in the heap he'd made of our gear. I watched, noting the slashing spill of the bag from which he'd yanked the first-aid kit. Noting the ripped and battered prosthetic arm. FX was having no trouble without it: he'd even lifted Talis with no visible struggle, balancing the slight body with the stump of his forearm, curling his muscles up as if lifting a beam. As I watched he found the pellet stove, flipped it over, and wedged it between stump and rib cage to hold it upside down and unfold the legs.

And yet—without his coat, without his head scarf, without his prosthesis, he looked so . . . bare.

I blinked, dizzy again, feeling that space in which I should feel something. That step onto the missing stair. Before, the hollowness had been in a place here, a place there. Now—Talis had sent such a pulse through my organic mind that it hardly existed, and the hollowness was everywhere, as if I were floating above myself. As if I were falling.

The pellet stove was ready. Francis Xavier set it beside Talis as if putting a candle on an altar, then sank forward over it. He was balanced in a crouch on the balls of his feet, his elbows on his thighs, his fist in his face. The myoelectric arm was lying beside him, elbow-end blunt in the grass, fingers curled oddly, as if trying to hold something.

“Is it broken?” I said.

“No. It's heating up.”

“Your prosthesis, I mean. Your hand.”

“Ruined. A horse stepped on it.”

Overhead the sky was turning more transparent, beginning to let in the darkness of outer space. One by one they came on, the stars. Handfuls and then dozens of stars, to my eyes overlaid with their names and distances and places in the Hertzsprung-Russell stellar sequence.

The satellites looked down on us.

I looked down on us.

Francis Xavier was shivering.

The pellet stove was pouring out heat, but the big man was shaking as if with silent sobs.

“There's not enough light,” I said.

FX looked up at me. His face looked like aftermath, all stillness and ruin.

“There's not enough light for any kind of treatment,” I said. “Or travel. It would be wise to get some sleep.”

“We were just attacked,” he said.

“And if it happens again, we won't be able to save ourselves. There's no point in keeping watch.” Francis did not seem to be processing this. “They want him alive.”

The
why
of that was a puzzle, and one in urgent need of solving. But I couldn't get Francis Xavier on track. “What did he do to you?” he said.

“Nothing. I'm fine.”

“Not the trommeller boy. Talis. Did he—” He spread his own fingers in the air over his own face, pantomiming an AI's ultrasonic reach. “Did he—”

“He had to.”

“Did you consent?”

“There wasn't time.”

He shook his head, sharply, but just two degrees, as if he had not meant to do it. Then he was silent again. I could not read his intent. I needed to learn, and so I started researching methods for understanding human emotions.

“We will need water,” Francis Xavier stood up. “I will go to the river. And when I get back we can keep watch in turns.”

But he didn't go, because despite his tone it wasn't up to him. I considered the matter. Riding in the darkness was risky. There were prairie dog holes, and a country in political turmoil, and somewhere, a party of people who had actually attacked us.

On the other hand, Francis Xavier had been riding a long time (at least since he had killed B
hn, three years ago) and he was the best tool I had. So I let him go, and he went. And then I was alone.

I took my own advice and lay down next to Talis, pressing close to share heat. I could feel his ribs moving against my back, the small stirs of his body. Francis had taken back his coat. Under the crinkle sheets it was warm enough but my face was very cold—so cold it felt tight and blushing.

The stars came on, layer after layer of them. The sky was 13.7 billion years deep, and so, so, empty.

Gordon Lightfoot came over and nosed at my hair, his breath steaming. The night was turning bitter: the steam was welcome. “Hey, horse,” I said, lifting my hand to feel the softness of his muzzle, his wrinkly, whiskery lips. He fluttered his nostrils at me. “Hey, Gordon Lightfoot, named for the Canadian singer/songwriter of the late twentieth century. How are you?”

Without being bidden the horse went to his knees beside me, and then with a sigh he lay down on his stomach, his legs tucked up like a foal's. His big, strong body made a third wall, turning the open corner into something nearly cozy.

“I'm sorry I didn't brush you,” I said. Francis Xavier had taken off NORAD's and Gordon's saddles and bits while I sat holding Talis, and toweled them roughly so they wouldn't chill, but he hadn't had time to groom them. I could see the dried foam and dirt along Gordon's girth and barrel, where the cinch went, and on his back where the saddle rubbed. I put my back to Talis and reached out and scratched the horse's hide, loosening the dirt in the small patch I could reach. The blotches of red on his egg-white coat were like maps of an unknown country.

So, so empty, my heart. But stretched tight. It echoed like a drum.

Suddenly, I wished Elián had stayed.

Francis Xavier did not get killed when I sent him away.

NORAD spotted his return first and gave a squeal and a stamp. Gordon Lightfoot sighed and climbed to his feet. I sat up and considered what I would do if the moth-colored approaching horseman presented by my night vision (pale horse, pale rider) was not Francis Xavier. But it was.

He recounted: he'd found a switchback deer path down to the riverbed, scouted for a pool, filled what water skins a single horse could haul. Once daylight came we could ride there in an hour or so and water the horses more thoroughly.

Not that Talis was going anywhere.

Francis Xavier cranked up the stove to glow red-hot, and we roasted a rabbit. It was our last rabbit. He'd shot it earlier, before he'd lost his crossbow, before the world had changed. I did not, just then, feel sick of eating rabbits. I was starving. Should being soaked to the elbows in human blood have put me off the idea of meat? Would it have, if I had still been human? I wondered with part of my mind, while at the same time wondering how Talis could possibly sleep through this. Roasting meat on a wintry night seemed to me the sort of smell that could rouse the dead, and Talis was merely critically wounded.

But he didn't rouse. Francis Xavier and I ate. Francis Xavier took a short shift at sleeping. Then I did.

I was beginning to wonder if Talis would ever wake when his voice came with no warning from the darkness.

“I remember airplanes,” he said.

Francis Xavier and I looked at each other. Talis was still lying propped up. I could see the gleam off his open eyes but I couldn't tell what he was looking at. He'd complained to me once that Rachel was night-blind: was it possible he couldn't see anything at all? His focus seemed that far away, though his tone was positively chatty.

“The last airplanes,” he said. “They ran on fossil fuels, can you imagine—smooshed-up dinosaurs, metal cans in the air. I remember airplanes. I took drugs in Amsterdam before it drowned. New York, Dhaka—with my own feet I have stood in cities since lost beneath the waves for ten human generations.
I remember airplanes and I have killed millions of people and
my name is Talis
.”

The last sentence came tumbling out of him, fast and strange. Neither Francis Xavier nor I answered him.

“
Talis
,” he said more softly. “I have bloody earned it.”

“Are you awake?” I asked him.

“Of course I'm awake,” he snapped. “What do you think?”

I did not know what to think.

Talis tried to sit up, then stopped, going rigid. “What happened?”

“You were stabbed,” intoned Francis Xavier.

“Yes, Francis,” he said with clipped precision. “In fact, I had noticed that. The sucking chest wound was my first clue.”

Francis Xavier paused, waiting to see what Talis would say next. The AI made a little face. “How am I now?”

When Francis Xavier didn't speak I decided I probably should. “A transfusion would be ideal, but I would characterize your condition as stable.”

Talis tipped his chin back, looking up at the great round of the stars. “Terrific,” he said.

I looked up too, where a bright weapons platform was passing like a star hung on a string. It was beautiful, but there was little enough to hold one's interest, especially if one could not see the information overlays. But Talis seemed interested—even transfixed.

“Talis?” I asked. Then: “. . . Michael? Are you all right?”

He made a little noise. “A list of the various ways in which I am not all right, Greta, would top the
Oxford English Dictionary
. The unabridged one. With the little magnifying glass.”

“You may have internal bleeding,” offered Francis Xavier, presumably as a helpful example.

“Couldn't tell you,” said Talis.

I realized he'd lost the ability to scan his own body. That was unsettling by itself, but if he was bleeding into his lungs he could easily drown. I checked as best I could, but even with maximum ultrasound it was difficult to get a read on what was happening inside him. I started pushing what I needed to become an expert in medical ultrasound and in the meantime evaluated external symptoms. His breathing was rough, but that could simply be pain. Well, I could only try to find out, and the accepted method of investigation (unsophisticated though it was) was to ask. “Do you have pain?”

He gave me a
look.
“Um, knife to the chest? Obviously there's pain.”

“Is it burning? Aching? Stabbing?”

“Yeah, gonna go with stabbing, there.”

“Pleuritic?”

He hesitated, then in a voice somehow smaller than his own said, “What does that mean?”

He could not look it up.

“‘Related to the lining of the lungs.' Is the pain sharper when you breathe in?”

“You know, oddly enough, it feels
exactly
as if someone I trusted had me held down and cut open with a
dagger
. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Talis.” I was attempting to be diagnostic: surely he must see that.

“Sorry,” he sighed. “Yes, sharper—it hurts to breathe. Of course, it hurts not to breathe, too, so what can you do?”

“Are you short of breath?”

“Always . . . Rachel's always . . .” His eyes crinkled softly: I wondered if he'd already forgotten that I could see him in the darkness. It was a remarkably unguarded look. “To implant the datastore they resect part of the upper lobe of the right lung. Rachel had some scarring. She's always felt just a little short of breath.”