The Swan Riders (39 page)

“Do you have your balance?”

“I could dance.”

I breathed out the name: “Talis? Is it Talis?”

“No.”

I could feel the fine tremblor running through the underside of her arms, the sudden wince in the corner of her eye.

“I'm going to be Talis,” she said. “But there is something I need to do first.”

“What's that?”

“Find Francis Xavier,” she said. “And rescue Sri's horse.”

“The orange quilt,” I said, and she nodded. Of course she knew it. It had been on her marriage bed. If Sri had been found with that quilt, then she had been found at Refuge 792, Francis and Rachel's station. The horse would be there.

And there, it seemed, this new AI would face the end of the world.

I still had not let go of her arms, and her upturned, amazed, aglow face was close to mine.

“It's a marvelous world,” she said, “but I do hate basements. Let's go.”

T
alis was standing on a kitchen stool with a wrench in his hand and a multipencil tucked behind his ear, wishing he'd picked a taller Rider for this trip. The other one at the refuge had been big, but this one (her name was Rachel) had had the faster horse, and he really hadn't considered that he might need to reach things.

But—it had turned out to be an odd mission. Not at first. Some idiots from an idiot state called the Cumberland Alliance had taken one of his Preceptures, tried to forestall his actions by using his hostages as hostages.

Yeah, no.

Interfering with his Preceptures was infuriating, obviously—and he was making some quite colorful plans about teaching that Cumberland general a lesson—but handling it had been straightforward enough. Show up, blow up a city, demand a surrender, tickety-boo.

And then—

Her name was Greta Stuart, and she was the first person to consent to the upload in a hundred years, despite his system of Preceptures which was meant (among other things: other very important, world-savey sorts of things) to find candidates. After a hundred years, there was going to be a new AI.

Which meant he needed the grey room back online. Right away.

Hence the kitchen stool. The grey room had magnetic collimators embedded all over its walls. They were superconducting, and they'd quenched, then failed entirely—which tended to happen to delicate electronic things when you pointed whopping great illegal EMP weapons at them.

Speaking of. From the doorway came a polite cough.

“Really?” he said, without turning around. “Ambrose, if you're going to insist on going around looking like a pile of Tinkertoys, you don't get to cough.”

“I didn't want to startle you,” said Ambrose. Ambrose—the Abbot—was the AI in charge of this Precepture, and he had Luddite ideas about not possessing Riders or even pulling information from his datastore. He “cherished his limitations.” Talis did not cherish limitations; it was a fight they had been having for 180-odd years.

Ambrose shuffled into the room on his cane and six legs. Talis spun round and hopped down, one smooth motion.

“Forgive me the affectation,” said Ambrose. “But you did look precarious.”

“Nah. I'm good. Could use a ladder, have you got a ladder? But otherwise good.”

“Of course there are ladders. I will have one brought from the orchard.” The battered monitor that was the Abbot's head swung from side to side. “How do you bear to work in here, Michael? The grey room . . .”

Talis ran a hand through his hair. This Rider might be short, but she had excellent mess-up-able hair. The grey room—it was not his favorite place to be, sure, but he had the flashbacks under control. “It helps that my room was different than this.”

“Mine was this.” Ambrose, though in 'bot form, actually shivered.

He was malfunctioning.

Talis could see the cascade failure that was beginning to eat away at his friend's neuronets. It looked bad, maybe even fatal. But fixable. The timing might be tricky, though—he might have to wait until Ambrose was too weak to resist getting fixed.

Because he was not going to lose Ambrose. Not Ambrose. He was the best of them. Saner than Evie or Gambit or Lewy or even Az. Way saner than the ones he kept locked in Matrix Boxes, taking in reality (if they did at all) one carefully screened dribble at a time.

Talis would save him whether he wanted to be saved or not.

“What we are pushing Greta to do,” said Ambrose. “It is a terrible thing. And yet I would have her do it. I would have her do it, because I would not lose her. And I would have her do it because I think you need her.”

“I don't need anyone.” Talis rubbed a thumb between his eyebrows (this Rider was subject to small flashes of pain), accidentally smearing himself with graphite. “Did you come in here just to make gnostic pronouncements, or what?”

“I came to see if you were all right. The grey room being . . . what it is.”

“I'm fine, Ambrose. Really. I'm peachy.”

The Abbot looked around. “All this.” He had hands with ceramic phalanges, steel actuator cables, rubber muscling. He gestured grandly with one of them, seeming to take in Talis in his Rider's body, the grey room, the Precepture full of hostages, even the satellites circling overhead. “All this,” he said. “Michael—have you ever considered your endgame?”

“This isn't a game.”

“No,” Ambrose whirred. “But everything ends.”

R
efuge 792, in the heart of lost Saskatchewan. In reach of the ruins of Saskatoon; in reach of Precepture Four. I stood on the gangplank of the spaceship and looked at it. Behind me Elián and Francis Xavier were unbuckling the horses from their gravity harnesses.

Talis had wanted to come, for the horse—and because it was home. The last station of the two Swan Riders known simply as Francis Xavier and Rachel. They had no last names, and no histories but the one they made together. A universal longing, this—anyone would do it. A dog would do it. Slip away to someplace small and familiar. Slip away to die.

It was snowing, because of course it was: the kind of snow that seems to condense from nothing, under a clear, still sky. It built fragile edges of sparkle on the bending blades of the grass, onto the black stems of rush-shaped wind generators, onto the raised grains of the old grey door set in the side of the hill.

“It's your birthday, isn't it?” said Talis, coming out of the hatch to stand beside me.

I blinked. It was: November second. The Feast of All Souls. I was seventeen. And I was as old as the world.

“We'll make a cake,” Talis said.

We'd do no such thing. We would walk across that sparkling grass. We would pull open that door, and after that . . . Four of us would walk in, but only three of us would walk out, and we all knew that. We had drugs and bedpans to ease the journey down, but it was still a hard descent, and we knew that, too.

“There's not going to be a cake,” said Talis. “But happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” I said. “When's yours?”

“Fourth of July. There used to be fireworks.”

“And . . . ?”

“And. April. The twenty-seventh. Apple blossoms.” A pause. “Have you ever seen fireworks?”

“No.”

“They're . . .” Talis couldn't find an adjective for fireworks, but in my hand, his hand was sparkling. It put fireworks behind my eyes, of course. “It wasn't all bad, the fallen world.”

“No,” I said. “It was lovely.”

The prettiest thing about fireworks come after the explosion. The cinders falling.

And falling. This version of Talis, who was also Rachel, was going to die. Most of the Swan Riders took Sri's door, the ravens' door, but Talis was not going to do that. We would monitor the whole process. We would record it, and learn from it. There must be a way to crack the Rider's Palsy, and we were going to find it.

In time, I hoped, to save Francis. And Elián.

Though probably not me.

“Grab the horses, would you,” said Talis. She was looking out onto the gathering hoarfrost, the blue sparkle of winter light, the impossibly delicate beauty of the world. I turned to take the horses out of Francis Xavier's capable hands, and he and Talis walked down the ramp together.

“Jesus . . .” Elián stopped at the refuge door.

The last thing that had happened here had obviously been violent.

The feather tick was dragged half onto the floor and a string of onions was torn down and tattered. Three crossbow quarrels were stuck in the wall. There were prints on the rush floor of something—or several somethings—that walked on blades, and scuff marks where someone more human had been dragged.

But there was also, as we had dearly hoped there would be, the horse. Roberta. Talis and Francis went right to her, delighted to have someone, something, that they could actually save. They fussed over her while she whinnied: with pats and cups of water, with handfuls of hay.

But in truth Roberta was fine. Sri had unsaddled her, made sure she was rubbed down and warmly blanketed. Put her near the water barrel, spread out a dense layer of hay. Had she even reported in, called the Red Mountains so that someone would come for the horse? The control screen beside the upload portal was active. It twittered and blinked. I could have reached for the interface gel. I didn't. I liked the ambiguity. The human ability to rest in wonder.

It had not been long, this strange passage, Talis's journey from AI to human and back; my journey from human to AI and back. You could plot it on a tiny strip of calendar.

And yet.

Sri's saddle was turtled on the floor—she had known she would not use it again. The two beds were as we had left them, pushed apart, each into its own alcove.

I beckoned to Elián, and we pushed the two beds into one. The bed legs scraped against the flagstones that were under the rushes. Talis and Francis Xavier, who had been sweetly fussing over the rescued horse, both looked up.

They both had very open eyes.

Talis's first attack, in that place, was both startling and totally expected. Both shocking and the thing we were waiting for. Talis went to the floor. And Francis Xavier picked her up as if it were effortless, and put her on one half of the bed.

She was fighting herself, fighting the air around her—urgently, dangerously, hopelessly. So Francis Xavier wrapped her in his body and in the indigo quilt we'd brought from their other bed. Wrapped her as if she were Rachel. She made a huge, shuddering effort to still her thrashing hands, and let herself be wrapped. Be held.

It went on until it was over. Francis Xavier lifted his arm gingerly. Rolled away.

“First ground rule,” said Talis, flopping onto his back. “No kissing. It would just be fundamentally weird.”

“I—” said Francis Xavier. Then stopped and stroked the pad of his thumb against the corner of Talis's mouth. “Whatever you need.”

Talis looked away, and somehow ended up catching Elián's eye.

“Don't look at
me
,” said Elián.

“You're not tempted?” said Talis. “I'm crushed.”

He turned his face and rested his cheek against the smooth skin of Francis's bare stump.