The Swan Riders (32 page)

And so I chose. I chose, as I often did, the person who was in the most pain. I got my shoulder under Elián's armpit and heaved him to his feet.

Two wanted to know why the Swan Riders had put a knife in Talis. Elián had given him a crack, a clue—that their motivation had something to do with the nature of possession. And Two would peel that crack open. He would push his way into Francis Xavier's mind; he would pull out just long enough to take the report; he would do it again.

It sounded like . . .

I tried to think of something less horrifying than waterboarding. Or rape.

It sounded like a very intimate bit of torture.

“FX,” I said. He was standing there, upright and poised as a dancer, silent as a priest. The spread ribs of the upload portal made wings behind him. “Francis Xavier. Are you sure?”

He smiled at me, a soft thing, like April sunshine. “I am a Swan Rider,” he said. He reached for me, spreading his hand in the air as if glass had fallen between us. I met his hand, fingertip to fingertip.

Talis's fingertip pulses had been fluent, easy as a language. Francis Xavier was not AI, and where Talis had sign language, he had something like semaphore. But he gave the data to me, byte by byte, and the book opened in my head. It was the book of Francis Xavier, of the Lake Tana people—or as much of him as the AIs had thought to make note of.

And it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough.

He'd come to us, as so many of the Swan Riders did, young and poor and brilliant and passionate. We had trained him and educated him. We had taught him to fight and to ride, to engineer and to negotiate, to doctor and to improvise. And then we had sent him out to save the world.

When he was just fourteen, he'd rebuilt the floats on the Pacific Gyre plastic harvesting colony and installed desalinators in the Drowned States of Micronesia. At fifteen, he'd brought the antiviral to the Carobama dengue outbreak, and helped quarantine the McMurdo Republic during the Vostock Cryptosporidium emergence.

And beginning when he was sixteen, he'd been stationed, on and off, in reach of Precepture Four. He'd killed the girl from my class, Nghiêm Th
B
hn. And the old woman in Saskatoon, Alba Kajtar. He had murdered them.

He had killed two people. And he had saved ten thousand lives.

The pulses faded. Francis's hand dropped away.

Two would pull him apart. And he knew it, too. He knew it.

I balanced Elián's weight across my shoulders, and Francis Xavier stepped backward into the upload portal.

“
A
re you sure about this?” said Talis.

“Nope,” said Evie. “But Az is.”

“Seventy-nine percent,” said Azriel.

They were gathered in Evie's room—he and Az in their 'bot forms and Evie leaning down from the ceiling as a camera eye on a jointed arm. Talis fought the urge to tell her that the cake was a lie.

The three of them were leaning, in fact, over a body. A young man, tattooed, too thin, sea-green hair that was mouse-brown at the roots. His face soft with sleep—with sedation, actually, because no one was quite sure how this was going to go—and turned to one side. Talis both did and did not want to examine that face. If this worked he would be able to see it in a mirror. He wasn't sure if it would be better or worse to see it from the outside first.

“What kind of person just . . . signs over their body?” said Talis.

“Hello?” said Evie, raising a couple of needle-arms as if raising her hand. “We all did!”

“Well, kind of,” said Talis. Sure, they'd all died after becoming AI. But the death had been an ugly side effect, not the actual point. “This is different.”

“They would seem to be idealists,” said Az. “There are currently four hundred thirty-two of them in an encampment outside. They say they want to help.”

Talis was willing to admit that they needed help. The ability to destroy cities from space was nice and all, and a judicious number of smoking craters had created a sort of stunned pause that passed for peace. But peacekeeping was a different question. They needed a less lethal, more personal touch. Something subtler, more flexible. They needed systems and rules, and they needed someone to enforce them.

They needed an army.

What they had, instead, was the makings of a cult: people from all over the world looking up into the pause of his peace as if seeing the face of a god.

Some of them had actually turned up at said god's doorstep. And now one in particular had lain down on said god's gurney as if on an altar.

His name, unpromisingly, was Gary.

Just then Gary sighed in his sleep. Talis felt the heat of the exhale across his thermocouples and the push of the air current against the pressure sensors in his finger pads. He curled his fingers up—they went cling against the gurney—and tucked his hand away. Pockets, that was what he needed. He would push his fists deep into his pockets, which would both look satisfyingly broody and help him think.

“If you're squeamish we could just upload everybody,” said Evie, who somehow viewed becoming a perpetually-nine-year-old room-shaped demigod as a positive experience to be widely shared. “Skip the middleman. AI army.”

“A waste of resources,” said Az. “Even with a screened applicant pool the Spiel Institute program never achieved a success rate of better than two point six percent.”

“Do you ever just use a sentence without a number in it?” snapped Talis.

“Five percent of the time,” said Az, who completely lacked irony, and who was ironically their expert on human consciousness. Granted, he viewed it mostly as a computational challenge, parallel to describing how individual water molecules somehow became liquid, or how smooth spacetime emerged from fluctuating bits of quantum information.

How did the billion electrochemical flashes between neurons become thought? How did the thousand skittering thoughts become person? Before the Big Melt, it had been the problem of the age. Now Az claimed to have nailed it—”fully solved the emergent phenomena from the ground-state Hamiltonian,” and even Talis didn't get that—and they were ready to try out his answer on Gary the avatar.

Talis looked down at Gary. Was this it, then? A human face for a new god to marshal his followers. A human presence at the peace table. Human hands to do the work of saving the world.

Azriel had a dry voice and a leftover New Zealand accent that was the last human thing about him. For approximately the gazillionth time, he explained (with math) how they would suppress the existing “Gary-ness” and then use the same machinery the AIs had used in their original bodies—the datastore, the webbing—to operate Gary's body “like any other appliance.”

Evie waggled her camera at that.

Talis was skeptical. Math or not, this seemed to him like demonic possession—and himself, the demon.

It helped that Gary, like the other dirt-smudged and wide-eyed young people in the shantytown outside the blast doors, had volunteered. It helped that their work was righteous; that the world needed saving. But if Talis was honest with himself, most of the reason he himself had volunteered to try possessing Gary was a demon's reason. He wanted to draw a deep breath again.

Back when he was human, he had been a political scientist. It was a limiting role, but it beat denizen of the underworld, so he tried to put it back on again, though it was ridiculous on him as an argyle cardigan. “Is this even legal?”

“Really?” said Evie. “We just blew up Fresno.”

“Rider seven in your UN contract,” said Az. “Given adequate budget, you can employ as many people as you want. And since they are volunteers and the salary expenditure is zero, the potential legal number is infinite.”

“Rider seven,” Talis said softly. “Right. Okay. Evie, can you plug me in?” He had a cable coming out of his own heart, and they'd left an actual socket in Gary's shiny new datastore, a little detail which, yuck, needed some work. Short-range magnetic induction, maybe? Or floating gates. There were plenty of ways to transfer data short distances at high rates without an actual—

—Plug.

The whole world jolted as if it had just been divided by zero: it compressed to a point and blew into infinite dust and suddenly Talis could feel the tongue in his mouth. One of those human things that humans edited out. The feeling of their own tongues, the view of the nose perpetually at the corner of the eye, the darkness of blinks. He could feel hard table heart lungs fingers blood coming out of his nose everything going too fast. Beside him the discarded 'bot that had been his body clattered to the floor.

Too fast, too fast. He felt it all and for a moment struggled not to; it was like being on fire. Then he remembered that he had wanted it and seized it, still burning, with a will more chromium than steel.

He remembered what a reasonable heart rate was, and a reasonable rate of breathing, and set those both.

He tried to tune out his tongue.

No good. He could still feel it.

He could feel everything, and his breathing was doing that thing where it was too obvious and awkward and he had to think about it to keep it going. He could feel his lungs moving. He could feel things to which there were no human analogs at all, like the low-frequency waves that crossed the brain once a second, the anesthetic sweeping through the brain's sand castle of self-awareness. The webbing was far more powerful than the drug-induced wave and he simply pushed back on it and felt his whole self light up. His brain and his body—his body—felt literally aglow.

Yes. Yes, this was going to work. He could feel it. This was going to save the world.

Talis took a deep breath. He opened his eyes.

B
y the time we staggered into the sunlight outside the blast doors, Elián had stopped trying to tear himself apart, but he was still shaking, still crying softly.

We tumbled to a stop at the head of the stairs, as an alternative to tumbling down them.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. Sit.” I lowered Elián onto the top stair and sat down beside him, between him and the drop. There were ravens swirling below us, and Elián was coming to pieces. He inhaled with strange sharp sounds, as if still trying to keep himself from crying out. He raised a hand to smear the tears away from his eyes, the snot away from his nose. On his wrist the blackwork tattoo gleamed, solid as a handcuff. He saw it and folded forward, across his own lap. “Oh, God . . . ,” he groaned.

“Elián,” I said. “I'm here. I tried to come sooner—” There was a cake, and a party. “I'm sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

I rubbed circles on his back. I could feel the knobs of his spine, and the bunch and shiver of muscles. “Don't forgive me,” I whispered. I was AI and he was Swan Rider. He should not forgive me.

“Not you,” he said. “Talis.”

Two.

Talis, as he had been before I met him. Before I'd changed him. Before he had learned to be human. The Talis who could snap his fingers and destroy a city and not even pause to watch it burn.

Below us the nameless city of the Swan Riders was yellow with winter-bleached willow scrub and dotted with white tents, and around that the red sea rippled in a bright wind, the petals of a rose. I made a count of the tents, even as I consulted my datastore for numbers. About 150 Swan Riders as a steady population—141 just at the moment.

They were volunteers. They were all volunteers. Idealists. True believers. And yet—