The Swan Riders (18 page)

“You remember that?” said Francis Xavier.

“I remember that,” said Talis.

But he shouldn't. AIs could not access their Riders' memories.

“Who are you?” said Francis Xavier. “If you remember that, who are you?”

The moment in which he didn't answer was so long that I thought he had no answer.
Talis
, I thought.
Talis, as much as anyone—but how much of Talis?

But what he finally said, softly, into the darkness, was nothing of the kind. “Francis,” he said, and for once the shortened name was not a joke, not one of Talis's can't-be-bothered flippancies. The blood-smudged hand fumbled out, pale as a moth. “I'm so sorry, Francis. I know you loved me. But I think I'm gone.”

Francis Xavier dropped Talis's hand as if it were something living and poisonous. He stood up tall, swallowed hard, and walked into the darkness.

Of course, to my eyes, the darkness gave him little cover. I could see his heartbeat quickening, his shoulders coming up as he drew deep for air. Blood moved from his less-essential organs and into his heart and lungs and brain. For all the world it looked as if he'd taken a blow and was deciding whether to run or fight. That was curious, and I was on the point of deploying more sensor power to try to understand why when Talis's hand bumped, cold and clumsy, against mine. “Leave him,” said the AI.

Ex-AI. From his fingertip sensors, I felt nothing at all.

But I obeyed him anyway, letting Francis Xavier slip off behind the horses. Talis began a sigh, but it turned into a stiff little gasp. “Did I mention the stabbing pain?”

“You did.”

“And so you're going to . . .”

“Monitor it.” Then I realized what he was asking. “Your respiration is poor. Narcotics could suppress it further.”

“Oh, swell. That's just
swell
.”

“I think you're hypovolemic. You should drink something.” His hand lay curled and still on the scratchy horse blanket. I lifted it. Held it for a moment, because he seemed to want me to: his fingers closed, childlike, around mine. Then I shifted to my true intention and felt for the radial pulse. It was faint: a crude measure of lowered blood pressure.

“Drinking sounds good,” said Talis as I counted heartbeats. “What's on tap? No, let me guess: we've got water, and water.”

“Francis Xavier rode down to the river.” I fetched a canteen and had to help him hold it, as if he were a baby. Even with my help he got a bit wet. The last swallow went down wrong and he started to cough.

And then he couldn't stop. The cough became a ragged, tearing jag that made his whole body shake. It went on. It went on and on, until I thought it would kill him. Though it almost could be a joke. Talis himself: dead of swallowing funny.

Francis Xavier came running back. He flashed a look at me—unreadable—and pulled Talis up until the AI was leaning forward onto his broad, strong shoulders. Talis was shaking, blood on his lips, his fingers digging into Francis Xavier's arms. The Swan Rider stayed silent, rubbed circles between Talis's shoulder blades, hugged him close. When the jag finally released them, Talis sagged, resting his cheek on Francis Xavier's shoulder. He was both exhausted and tense, both sweating and shivering.

They stayed like that for a moment, leaning together. I could not see Francis Xavier's face. Talis was worryingly pale. The pain (or something) had actually pulled tears to his eyes—a thing I'd never dreamt I'd see. Maybe they were merely watering. Coughing made the eyes water, did it not? “Michael?” I said.

He didn't answer.

They didn't move.

No, this wasn't good. That jag could have torn open the forcescar—it could be a symptom of internal bleeding—it could be any number of things, and I needed to check all of them. “Put him down,” I ordered Francis Xavier. It took him a long moment to obey, lowering Talis carefully onto the pile of saddlebags.

His eyes were open, responsive: he seemed to be conscious. Good.

I pushed back his ruined shirt. It was knifed, cut, brown with blood: surely at least half a liter—no wonder he was shocky. But no new blood was seeping from under the chest seal. I peeled it carefully free. The skin beneath was pink with its newness, slick as plastic. We had perhaps overdone things with the forcescar powder, in our haste: it looked as if someone had poured a cup of wax across the top of Rachel's breast.

But the forcescar had not split open. And it was not growing out of control in lumps and branches, which can happen sometimes. The various punctures we'd made later were not bleeding. There was no heat of infection. The chest tube was draining clear.

And that left internal bleeding to worry about. I spread my fingers under Talis's collarbone and swept them downward, trying to build a picture of the whole thoracic cavity. I did not see any dark blooms of blood, or bright ones of air.

As I moved my fingers lightly over the goose-bumped skin, though, I could feel one more thing: the secondary magnetic fields spiraling out from the datastore, spending themselves uselessly in soft tissue and bone. I knew that they weren't directed at me—they weren't directed at all—and yet they wove tendrils around my fingers and wrists like tiny curls of wild morning glory.

Talis
, I thought.
There you are.

For a moment I wanted to dig my fingers through the skin and the forcescar, through the frozen foam of bones and the moving goop of lungs, and rescue him.

“Ouch.” Talis's voice squeaked. He mastered it, pulling it down half an octave, but even so it wavered: “Okay. That was ouch.”

I tried to reassure him: “There's no significant bleed, as far as I can tell. The pain is probably the intercostal muscle: it's torn across three rib spaces. The datastore asserts that that's very painful, but that doesn't mean there's new damage. You can safely ignore it.”

“Thank you, Greta. I'll keep that in mind.” His tone was dry enough to displace populations, but tears were running down his face.

Francis Xavier chose a different tack: “You're going to be fine,” he murmured. “You're going to be fine.”

“No, I'm not,” said Talis. “That's the bloody
point
, isn't it? I'm not going to be fine. I'm going to be human. I'm going to be human, and I'm going to die.”

And then he closed his eyes.

“Talis?” I said. No answer, though it was obvious from his brain waves that he was conscious. “Michael, what do you mean?”

Francis Xavier put his hand on my arm. I fell silent, and FX slipped in front of me and sat down on the horse blankets at Talis's side.

“Rachel,” he said. “Have you had episodes?”

Talis—Rachel—which?—drew a deep hiccuppy breath. “No.” Just a whisper.

“But—” said Francis Xavier.

“I had a scan-and-map before I left the Red Mountains,” said Talis. His voice sounded different: higher, lighter. “The microscarring . . .”

“Stage two?” said Francis Xavier.

“. . . Three.”

I'd caught up with them by then. They were discussing the Rider's Palsy: the scarring that crept across the Swan Riders' brains like frost over a window, the thing that was killing Sri. Stage three scarring meant less than a year to live—and considering the hard use Talis had put Rachel's brain to since that last scan . . .

“Why'd they let you ride out?” said Francis Xavier.

“I didn't tell them,” said Rachel's voice, a light, laughing voice. If a sparrow could have spoken, it would have been that voice: commonplace, companionable, lovely. It swung then and became Talis's voice, sharper and stronger: “I can feel it,” said Talis. His tone was as laughing as Rachel's, but the laughter held more knives, more hurt. “Now that I stop—I can feel it coming.”

“Now that you have reason to care,” said Francis Xavier.

Talis's eyes snapped open. If I had been Francis Xavier I'd have sought cover. But Francis Xavier didn't even blink. “Now you care,” he said.

“Did you help her?” demanded Talis. “Sri—did you know she was planning something?”

Francis Xavier was silent, but his face was tight and his stillness was no longer fooling me. I was ready to declare him the patron saint of “more going on than meets the eye.” He made the Rider's salute, touching his shoulder and extending his hand toward Talis. “My life is yours. If I could have died to stop Sri, I would have. But that does not mean I disagree with her.”

He leaned forward and turned his palm against Talis's cheek, resting it softly, shockingly intimate. “How many of your Riders have you destroyed? And only now, you care.”

Talis's eyes closed. And they stayed like that, frozen. Five seconds. Ten.

“Rachel?” I said.

“Don't talk to her,” said Talis.

“But can she hear me?”

“I said,” snapped Talis, “don't talk to her.”

So I was silent again. Considering. What happened to them, the Riders, when they were possessed by the AIs? And suddenly I saw the pun hidden in their title. The Riders, who could be ridden. My own mind had been ravaged past the point of failure before being overwritten with a copy of itself. So I did not know: what was it like to have one's intact mind shoved aside and manipulated by an AI? The AIs could not access the Riders' memories, but could the Riders—could they still see? Could Rachel, inside Talis—could Rachel still see me?

The datastore made no record of it.

As if the AIs had never thought it important.

Or as if the Riders had kept it carefully secret.

I watched Talis soften again toward sleep, with Francis Xavier keeping his steady hand cupped around the face that might or might not belong to the woman he loved.

I got out the painkillers. There was some possibility that they'd kill him, but he was dying anyway.

Francis Xavier watched me fill a syringe, lift it, squirt a few drops of liquid out to clear the bubbles and hit the dosage exactly. I thought he might stop me, say something—but he didn't.

I was AI. He wasn't.

And neither was Talis. Not anymore.

That left me in charge.

Talis's eyes opened when the needle touched the back of his hand. He looked at me, his eyes wide. But he said nothing.

The drug acted fast. Eased him downward. Soon enough he was breathing slow as a machine, deeply asleep, his body temperature dropping even as the sun came up over the ruin and the graves.

D
awn. The light spread out, low and wintry, and the ruined walls of the church cast long shadows. Talis slept. Francis Xavier watched him sleep. I watched FX watching, and reevaluated my entire understanding of him. I didn't get far before he stood up, sudden and decisive, and began shrugging out of his coat.

“Francis?”

He folded the coat onto the grass beside the pellet stove and started undoing the buttons of his vest.

“Francis, what are you doing?”

Always the most private of us. Always the first to feel cold. But he was stripping to the skin as the winter sun rose into a thin lid of cloud and the light turned to watered milk.

“My kit bag, there,” he said. He nudged one of the saddlebags with his foot. “At the bottom—just dump it.”

My eyebrows drew together—a strange feeling, as if my eyebrows were puzzled independent of my brain—and I unbuckled the bag. Dumping it seemed a bit much so I unpacked it and laid the contents in a neat line. An extra sheet, a packet of salt, a metal cup, and a carving knife folded closed. It got more personal as I got deeper: toothbrush. Hair oil. Socks. At the bottom, beneath even the underwear, was a stuff sack containing the lowest-tech prosthesis I'd ever seen. A harness of leather straps and brass buckles. A matte-black arm that ended in a metal pincer. Curious, I lifted it in both hands.

Francis Xavier took it from me and shoved his shortened forearm into the hollow socket of the prothesis. There was a leather cuff around his bicep, a saddle across that shoulder, a strap that ran across his bare chest and under his other armpit. It was all as beautifully useful as a horse's tack, and as intricate. Brass buckles and points of adjustment. FX fumbled with the buckle over his sternum, pointing his chin at the sky, his throat bared, his fingers blind.

“Let me help you with that.”

“I don't need help.”

“It will be faster.”

I had stepped close to him, close enough to put my hands on his chest. His hand still covered the buckle.

“Come on,” I said. “You must be cold.” I could feel the heat radiating from his skin.

“Yes,” he said. And slowly he dropped his hand. He was all muscles and goose bumps. “It needs to be tighter. No slack, but it shouldn't press into the skin.”

“Okay.” The buckle and the leather looped through it were both cold to my fingers. Under them, Francis Xavier's skin was darker than the leather, smooth and gleaming.