The Swan Riders (30 page)

S
o I went out into the City of the Swan Riders, went running headlong into that strangeness, my boot toes pushing off the boardwalk paths with a sound like a drum being struck. I needed to know everything, and I needed to know now, and so everything came. As if the air itself could be painted, Talis's map—17C—hung in front of me. Compasses, charts, annotations. Information lay in glosses and depths across the visible world. I knew where I was going, and I knew how to get there.

It was midafternoon. The high sun curved off the sides of the white yurts as I ran. The willow scrub flashed by under me, yellow as fire. And all around me, people in doorways stopped what they were doing and saluted.

I ran through the Swan Riders like a shock wave, and they bowed before me, and some fell to their knees.

Who were they? What did they want from me?

I was born to a crown, and thus have never once simply walked down a street. Always there have been eyes on me, and ways cleared before me. The strange thing was not the bowing but the running—the feeling not of procession but of chase, that what was happening was not about me, and would not wait for my arrival. Francis. Elián.

Halifax.

Half the world.

The Swan Riders rose as I passed. They turned. They watched me go. I could have asked any of them for anything, and they would have given it. But instead I was building a catalog of them: their heights and skin tones, their gaits and stances. Unlike Talis, I could replay the moment he had been stabbed. It would be fairly easy to assemble a list of those who had posed as trommellers.

The man Alejandro, for instance. Alejandro, into whom Francis Xavier had crumpled because the ride had been hard, was the same man who had wrapped his arm around Francis's throat in a gesture that even at the time had seemed brotherly.

Betrayal.

Two's hand on Michael's arm.

There were, in my datastore, no records—no records at all, of any kind—about what Elián was experiencing. About what happened to the Riders when the AIs possessed them. The AIs, apparently, had never cared—but suddenly the gap was as startling as a mountain scooped out of the landscape.

Talis
, I thought.
How could you have missed this?

The yurts were at my back now, and the hollow mountain was right in front of me. There was a bare spot at the end of the boardwalk—benches and bolders and the ashes of bonfires. And past that, switchbacked stone stairs climbed to the big metal doors that marked UN Strategic Data Processing Center Number Seven. Blast doors. Supercomputers. EMP shields. Talis had not built it—he'd merely been stationed here. One of the UN's assets. Once upon a time, at the end of the world.

I came off the boardwalk and did not even slow down. And then, just past the bonfires, in the scree and rubble at the foot of the stairs, I saw—

Something. Something else my datastore knew little or nothing about. Nestled in the stones were little . . . dolls? Carvings? Little figurines of horsemen, made of wood. They were set so carefully among the stones, as if they were as fragile and important as eggs. Some were powerfully primitive, like cave paintings; some so realistic that the horses looked as if they might stamp and rear. Some were dressed in scraps of leather, some painted, some feathered, some plain. Some faded and cracked by time—by decades, by centuries of time.

This was what Sri had been carving for as long as I'd known her. This was what Rachel had almost finished on the table beside her bed.

The datastore told me that the Swan Riders made them, from the wooden skeletons of worn-out saddles. It said this neutrally, as if it were describing a hobby on par with the whittling of whistles.

These were not whistles.

They made the human hair stand up on the back of my neck. There was no time to wonder over them, but their eyeless forms seemed to follow me as I ran up the stairs, past the thick and towering doors, and into the mountain.

It was dark inside the mountain, so dark that it was like a wall of blackness in front of me. I could run in blackness—I could taste the distances like a bat if I had to—but it was off-putting.

“Lights,” I said, like a spell, and like a spell, lights answered. Concrete floors with painted lines and place codes. Rough blasted walls swagged with cables. But I did not wonder at it. I ran past the first door. Letters as tall as I was said 1
A
.

My footfalls rang back off the walls. I could hear my own breathing, and the thrum of a huge air-circulation system. I knew—because I knew everything—that this place could have supported a human population in the thousands, for years, without outside support. It was a massive undertaking, a shelter, a silo, a storehouse. Now a half dozen AIs lived here, and most of them didn't move around much. It was just Talis, stalking lonely as a lion after every other animal had left the ark.

4A, 5A, 6, 7, 8, 9. Checkpoint, blast doors, downward stairs, water pumps, B cross corridor. 11A, 12A. The mess hall. The infirmary. The white-sheeted beds were ghostlike and empty: if Elián was having surgery, he was not having it here. 13A, 14A. The
UNDEAD
was listening to me. There were barriers to leap between the rooms now, places where compartment doors could drop and seal, like the chambers in a flooding ship. Seven more doors to the C cross corridor.

The compartment seal between 16 and 17A dropped shut in front of me.

“Door,” I said. But nothing answered. The bulkhead in front of me was steel, and huge, like the side of a warship. Grey paint curled off the walls. Rivets leaked raised scars of rust.

I turned around—and the bulkhead there slammed too. There was no overhead light in this section; darkness crashed in. The air went
whump
with overpressure, and then deeply silent.

“Door,” I said, into the
UNDEAD
, into the darkness.

Nothing. My ultrasound told me I was caught in a box of stone and steel, fifteen feet on a side. My datastore tried out labels—
portcullis/submarine/elevator shaft/oubliette/
dungeon—
but the box was entirely outside my lived experience, which mostly had to do with goat farms. “Open,” I said. “Door!” It didn't budge, so I reached with my electronic attention for the
UNDEAD
control systems.

They reached back.

It was like groping for a light switch in the darkness and instead having the darkness take your hand.

“Hello?” I said to the control systems.

“Hello!” they answered. A child's voice. Jump-rope bright.

“Who's there?” When I spoke I did it aloud, of course, but hearing my own voice made me realize the other had not been audible. It was in my head. I was linked into the
UNDEAD
, but now the
UNDEAD
—or something in the
UNDEAD
—had linked back into me.

“It's Greta, everybody,” said the voice in my head. “She's here!”

“UNDEAD,”
I said. “Lights. Now.”

A little light, like a porch light, came on at my elbow. It was centered over door 16A. The door's number had been crossed out with a spray-paint X, and someone had sprayed on a new word. In big dripping letters, it said:
EVIE
. The smoothness of the paint felt shiny under my fingers.

“In here,” said the voice, and door 16A went
chunk
. It swung open, a line of brightness widening into a rectangle.

Evie. Evangeline. Nine and also 520. Nine and immortal. Not the straightest stripe on the zebra, Talis had said. And when
Talis
warned you someone was a bit off . . .

There is, so often, no way out but through. So through the door I went.

“Hello?” I said to the echoey little room. The walls were covered with equipment mounted on articulated arms; there was a table at the back with boxes on it, and a cake. “I'm sorry, but I'm in a hurry. I need Talis.”

“We all need Talis,” said another voice—monotone, androgynous. “You will have to be more specific.”

“Shhh . . .” Evie hushed it. Audibly, this time. “You'll ruin the surprise.”

I could tell by the resonance that the monotone voice was human, or at least using a human voice box, though there was no one in sight. Evie's whisper, in contrast, was carried by surround sound. The lights dimmed slowly, as if to cue a curtain rising. A shiver ran across my scalp.

That optimized whisper began a countdown: “Three, two, one.”

The lights flipped to bright, and the room shouted: “Surprise!” A single figure rose from behind the table and blew a birthday-favor horn with a sad hoot.

“Were you surprised?” said the room gleefully. “Were you? We made you cake!”

“Uh,” I said, because with my upgrades I had an IQ pushing past 500. “Thank you?”

“Evie,” the room said. “I'm Evie.”

“I know.”

The single human figure—AI figure—stood behind the cake and stared at me with eyes like binoculars.

Evie nudged him with a needle. “Az . . .”

“Surprise,” he said, with perfect flatness.

“That's Azriel,” said Evie.

Talks in numbers.

“Happy AI debutante surprise party,” said Evie.

“I didn't realize AIs had debutante parties.”

“That's why it's
surprising
,” said Evie.

One of the boxes on the table rattled as if a raccoon were in it.

“What's in the box?” I hated to ask, but the things one hates to ask are usually things one is better off knowing.

“That's Peter. Peter's doing so much better! He has a filtered live feed into his box and actuators for when he gets really excited.”

And I realized: the boxes on the table—they weren't gifts for the AI debutante party. They were partygoers.

Matrix Boxes.

“You shouldn't look at Peter, but you can say hi to everyone else,” said Evie.

“That's okay,” I said, taking a step backward.

Something wrapped my arm, stopping me. My head whipped around and I found that the room was full of mechanical arms—some tentacle-like, some jointed, some tipped with needles. They were everywhere, but the ones that were behind me were all extended and awake, waving like a kelp forest. One of them, one of the tentacular ones, slithered round and round my upper arm, cold and smooth and powerful. It tightened. “Come on,” said Evie.

A needle between my shoulders nudged me forward. I stumbled toward the table.

“Is there a song?” said Evie, and then paused, as if listening and relaying the answer. “Nobody knows any AI debutante surprise party songs.”

Evie had been listening, so I listened—and suddenly could feel all of them, the AIs inside the boxes. The pressure of their eyes and sensors and attention turned on me. Their voices were in my head, and they all sounded like my own voice, but some of them were screaming.

I jerked as if to get away from it, but there is no getting away from voices in your own head. “Whoa,” said Evie, and the snake around my arm jerked upward. I tilted and started to topple and—

Found myself in Azriel's arms.

“You were leaning forward six degrees.” He was radiating data in the pulses of his fingertips, in the rhythm of his blinks. “Most humans cannot maintain a static lean of greater than four point five.”

“I'm not sure it was a static lean. I think it was more a
bolt for the door
lean.”

The blank-faced AI set me on my feet. His gaze seemed to swirl over me, as if he had pinwheels for eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Tracking the Brownian motion of your dust motes to use as random number input for my Monte Carlo simulation. You're very dusty.”

“I just crossed a continent. What simulation?” But the next second I was sorry I had asked. The fragments of code swirling out of Azriel had hooked into me, and and I could see exactly what he was simulating. I found my hand coming up, as if to protect my eyes from light, my mouth saying, “Don't . . .”

Pure distress. But the simulation didn't stop running.

“Are you upset that there's no song?” Azriel said. “We have a combined processing power of approximately three hundred exaflops. We could probably write a song.”

“It's not the song.”

It was everything except the song. It was the little girl with a hundred needles and the screaming boxes and the fact that the simulation was a global war game, in which Halifax was being obliterated every time Azriel twitched his stiff little fingers.

“I need to go,” I said. “Talis is—”

I couldn't tell them. I had thought they might be allies, but they weren't. To ally with them would be like leading crocodiles into battle.

I was shivering. Azriel's war game was so deep in my head that it felt as if it were using me for processing power. I needed a fuse; I needed a switch. I said, “Talis needs me.”