The Swan Riders (37 page)

“When you've earned it,” I told him.

I beckoned to my Swan Riders—and they were
mine
—with one royal wave. We had wounded; we had people in pain. It was past time to find them comfort.

“Wait,” said Sri as the men in wings went to pick her up.

It was weak enough to be a last word, but it was heard. The Swan Riders fell back; they waited. Sri was trying to flail free of her blanket. I folded it back for her. Underneath, her legs were twisted like old cedar railings. “Sri,” I said. “What is it?”

Now her hands were fumbling at her vest. She got one button popped open, and reached inside it, and drew from her inner pocket . . .

Haniwa.
Ushatbi.
The carved figure of a horse and rider.

Sri's was narrow and sharp. The rider and the horse were both nearly faceless, just ridges and edges, but the horse had a mane and tail carved into a froth of curlicues, and the rider had huge and perfect wings. A blaze of gold ran up the belly of the horse and the belly of the rider, and four black beads made their eyes. And here was something I had not considered before: the horse and rider were one thing, carved in one piece. If there was an afterlife, this little figure would go there with fast hooves and broad wings.

“Help me up?” Sri said.

I looked at her cedar railing legs, stiff and crooked. Then I helped her up.

I wish I could say she walked tall and calm to place her own grave marker, but in fact I had almost to drag her. We skirted the fire circle and crossed the meadow, sending stones rattling as her feet trailed through them. I am neither small nor weak, and Sri was at the moment both, but still she was a weight. I grunted and we staggered, and yet everyone watched as if it were a royal procession. And that was only right. We walked out of the meadow, down the path that threaded between the boulders with their dragon scales of grey and red lichen, to the foot of the stair.

I helped Sri kneel. She knelt there. She placed the figurine at the root of the post that made the first railing, at the bottom of the stair. She turned it this way, then that, then back a fraction, until suddenly it was in the perfect spot, positioned as if sweeping down the rivulet of dust, as if riding down the mountain, out into the world, with all speed.

“There,” she said.

I was silent.

She was silent.

A raven came sweeping down on the railing just in front of us, cupping its wings and spreading its tail to brake and land. It bobbed up and down and seemed ready to speak a word.

Another landed further up.

Then another, and another.

Only then did I understand what it really meant for a Swan Rider to kneel here. The ravens were smart, and adaptable, and they knew too.

“I'm ready,” said Sri, mostly to the ravens.

“Are you sure?” Daji had come up behind us. “You probably have a week or two.”

A week or two of end-stage palsy. Sanctity of natural death aside, I wouldn't blame anyone for giving that a miss. Daji's hands were on Sri's shoulders, holding her steady.

“Sri,” I said—then hesitated. Twisting to face her, I put my hand on her thigh. I found the pressure point on the inner thigh that released tension in the quadricep. I pushed. Sri gasped, and I knew it hurt and it helped. I leaned forward and kissed her, softly.

“Sri,” I said. “Thank you for hurting me.”

Her smile didn't conceal the tremble of her chin. “My little AI,” she said, without a salute in sight. “It was a pleasure.”

I looked up at Daji, looming above us. I looked at the ravens. I looked at the grave marker, with its wings and blaze of gold. And then I got up and stepped away.

I drew a circle in the air and the Swan Riders gathered in. They picked up Michael. I pulled up Elián. And we all left.

There was no sense left in which I could be considered an innocent. But I did not want Elián—or even Michael—to have to witness the moment when Daji snapped Sri's neck.

That night.

It was running down the clock. It was moving pieces around the board. It was the little gap between game and endgame, into which so much tumbles.

The young queen Agnes Little said yes to hostaging herself and her unborn child. She said yes with her chin lifted, and fear bright in her eyes. I had doomed her. She was only fifteen.

Sri died. She was just shy of twenty.

Francis Xavier lived. The Swan Riders took him off to their hospital to repair the puncture in his lungs.

Michael lived too. It was a slightly nearer thing. He needed a new datastore and new webbing in his brain before he could possibly consider an upload. It was a major surgery for such a weakened person, but it was nothing that the Swan Rider doctors hadn't done a thousand times before.

Talis Mark Two saw to the reactivation of one of the mothballed grey rooms. If even his mechanical hands shuddered as he did that, I resolved not to notice.

Elián slept. It was hard to blame him. He had had his mind ripped open, and then he'd tried to start a revolution. It almost qualified as a typical day for him but he needed rest.

That left only me.

I was an AI now, but I had a body. I was exhausted and hungry. I was elated and grief-stricken. I was frightened and transformed.

I went for a walk.

I went down the causeway. Despite the geothermal heat of the sea, the evening was chilly. The sun was down properly now, and the sky seemed to be sinking to the earth all around me, gathering and thickening. Gravel scranched beneath my boots. The light from the Swan Rider city leaked away. It didn't matter. I could see in the dark. I could see everything.

I went to see the horses.

They were kept on the biggest island, left to weave among the salt-grass dunes and tug sweet hay from the high ricks and run and run and run.

I found a rock and sat on it and waited until he came out of the darkness: a white snuffling nose and a flick of a red ear, a swish of tail that was as good as my name.

“Hello,” I said. “Gordon Lightfoot.”

I opened my arms and he came and pushed his great head against my chest.

I had not seen Sri's death—I had protected the others from it and thus had not seen it. I went back to pray over her body, to wrap it in the quilt I had last seen on the makeshift bed shared by Rachel and Francis Xavier, far away in a refuge between Precepture Four and the ruins of Saskatoon. Someone had loved this quilt. Someone had loved Sri, once, probably. But I did not know who, because I did not know her history.

Perhaps I had loved her myself. In my shell-shocked and tumbling way. As much as I could.

Not nearly enough.

I had helped Sri put her figure in the stone. I had kissed her, her lips cracked and eager, her taste as sweet as morphine. I would remember her. I remembered her.

I remembered all the Swan Riders who had put their horses in the stones. Their names and faces.

I remembered all the AIs who had gone to the grey room, all the ones who had died there. All the ones who had died later.

I remembered the grey room, and I saw the strange figure of Michael/Rachel holding her thumb in her teeth; the first knuckle of her pointer finger pushing against her philtrum, which is the proper name for the dip between mouth and nose. I remembered the shudder that had run through her whole body. I remembered what I had asked her to do.

I remembered Queen Agnes Little, with her chin lifted.

I remembered all the hostages.

I remembered Xie.

Gordon Lightfoot pushed his head against me. I wrapped my arms around him, and I held fiercely.

T
he call for execution came, as is traditional, at dawn.

I had been up by then for hours, sitting wrapped in the indigo quilt from Francis's bed, waiting at the bottom of the stone stairs.

I tried to see that night with human eyes, which was not easy. To sit in darkness and let darkness be close. To watch the light come up before the sun and find the carved horsemen one by one. Some old, some new. So many.

The little prayer flags on the railing made a noise like someone rubbing their fingers together. I watched the light come down the mountains on the northwest side of the flooded valley. The light looked as if it were poured over them, something liquid and slow. The sea at the base of the mountains was still black, but now it was shining and black, and the islands were drifting and grey.

And finally, down the road from the hospital, he came walking alone.

Michael. Rachel. Tanim.

Talis.

I do not think he saw me, wrapped as I was in the midnight quilt. I do not think he was looking, particularly. He was walking slow, with one hand uplifted, letting a bobbing raven rest on his wrist, another perch on his shoulder. Dressed only in his hospital scrubs—a simple
kameez
of UN blue—he looked every inch a figure of myth. The wounded god.

He blinked when he saw me, and missed a step. The ravens swayed. With exactly the gesture Two had once used, he threw his wrist into the air. The ravens took off, and for a moment seemed to surround him in a whirl of dark wings.

He crossed the bonfire meadow as if it were easy. “Greta. You're up early.”

“I didn't want to miss you.” I got up and came down the stairs, trailing starry blanket. “Where's your coat?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Because
pneumonia
is what I'm really worried about right now.”

I wanted to know, and so I knew: he was not cold because he was running a fever. They'd boosted his failing body into overdrive so that he could do this: given him short-acting painkillers, stimulants, anticonvulsants. It was nothing more than a stopgap, but a stopgap was all he needed. The drugs (or something) had made him strange and febrile—a hectic blush on his cheeks and a fine tremor in his hands.

“My, um . . . ,” he said, and stopped. The ravens had landed on the rail behind me, waiting as they had for Sri. “My room is ready.”

“Well.” I folded the blanket up and draped it over the railing. The bird sidestepped and quorked. “Then let's go.”

“Greta, you can't . . . You know you can't come with me.”

“What I know is that you're afraid of being alone.”

“The grey room,” he said, talking past me. “I have to.”

“I know all about the grey room,” I said. “I've been up all night with the grey room. I've been through every vid and every file we have. I know that it hurts. I know why it hurts. I know that it's deadly. I know why it's deadly. I know that they have to strap down your hands and I know that no one can stand by you and hold them. I know what happened to each and every one of the two thousand, four hundred thirty-seven people who ever lay down on those tables. I know that they were all alone.”

“Stop,” he whispered. “Why are you—stop.”

The god in him was gone. He looked, instead, like a child who'd been slapped: trembly, with bright splotches over his cheekbones.

“You won't be,” I said.

“What?”

“You won't be alone.”

“Greta. You
can't
go with me.”

“But as someone once mentioned to me, I'm AI. If I want to know, I can know. If I want to see, I can see. I can weave in with the data during the unspooling. I can modulate the fields in real time to do minimal damage. I can watch over your body. I can go with you, Michael. Rachel. If you'll have me.”

He took a shuddering breath and looked up the crooked staircase—and then, as if he couldn't bear it, snapped his gaze aside and tried out a grin on me. “What happened to the girl who was going to overdose me and dump my body in the snow?”

“Well,” I said. “There was this boy.”

“Let me guess. He was human?”

There were three possible answers to that: Elián, FX, Michael. Human, Swan Rider, AI. “It changes you,” I said. “Caring for someone. Being cared for.”

“Okay,” Michael said. “Okay.” He closed his eyes and reached for me blindly; he took my arm and for a moment just clung. Then he opened them, set his jaw, put the other hand tight around the railing. “Let's go.”