The Swan Riders (6 page)

What fresh hell indeed.

It was cruel to make a novice horseback rider go on for a second day at a stretch, let alone to go at a steady lope, but with Calgary at our (metaphorical) backs, not to mention the charming image of
seizing in the grass
, Talis and the Swan Riders did exactly that.

Apparently the “refuge” was about forty miles away—a reasonable day's journey for the others. But not for me. The muscles in my thighs trembled and twitched as we rode through the morning, and when it
finally
came time to eat lunch, I could not get down. Francis Xavier—by far the biggest of us—had to help me, fitting his hands around my waist and guiding me toward the ground. One hand was warm and the other was air-temperature, but they were both strong and careful. The day before, the mere touch of Francis Xavier's shadow had made my skin shudder. Now I felt very little for him. I remembered that he had killed my friend, certainly—I had lost none of the data about the death of Nghiêm Th
B
hn. I remembered the exact sound of her fingernails breaking. But it was as if Talis's exorcism had dipped my memory as a finger is dipped into candle wax, briefly sensitizing it, then sealing it off.

So I did not shiver in horror as Francis Xavier touched me. But the numbness that Talis had left me in the place of that horror was . . . When my mind paused on it, it was as if the floor had fallen out from under my heart. As if I'd walked off a threshold, expecting there to be a step. A stagger in the very core of my human self.

Francis Xavier backed off with a silent bow and I lurched a few steps and practically fell into the grass. With royal dignity, of course.

The day had grown warm. The two Swan Riders set to work tending the horses, loosening cinches and pulling off saddles, rubbing them down where the sweat of their effort had gathered on their necks and backs and legs. Talis, though, plopped to sit in the grass beside me, disdaining anything so mundane as work.

Or, possibly, monitoring me closely. I could feel his sensors. “Doing okay?” he asked.

I was curled forward, stretching my back. I suppose it looked as if I were folded up in grief, but it was only pain. (It was mostly pain.)

“Well,” I answered. “I'll never walk again. And I hope you weren't looking for an heir.”

Talis snorted. “Nah, I'm good.”

Francis Xavier lifted the ceremonial wings from the back of his horse, where they were folded—one might wish for
like the wings of Pegasus
, but really it was more
like awkward covers for his saddlebags
.

The horseback pageantry of the Swan Riders made sense to me as part of the ritualization of war. As a system of transport it left something to be desired. I put the soles of my feet together and tried to open my knees. Unsuccessfully. The muscles inside my thighs roared with stiffness. I made a little noise and Gordon Lightfoot and Sri (who was rubbing down his back) both looked over. I was fairly sure they were snickering at me.

“Shut up,” I told them crossly.

“Newton's equal and opposite law of horses, Greta,” said Talis. “He's as miserable as you are.”

“Oh, I doubt it.” The horse might be sore—I felt bad, suddenly—but I doubted he was struggling to reframe his entire identity.

“Lunch?” Talis handed me a piece of fry bread wrapped in a waxed cloth. Francis Xavier had cooked them that morning, balancing a skillet expertly on our tiny pellet stove. I unwrapped it and ate it folded. It was cold and the best kind of chewy, slathered with the fermented butter we made at the Precepture. Tangy and salty, it tasted of pure homesickness.

And yet it was the smallest of the things I longed for.

“Tell me about the refuge,” I said. “What is it? Where is it?”

“Long answer: it's a Swan Rider station, and it's nowhere particular. Meant to be in reach of the Precepture, and of the salvage teams in Saskatoon. The world is dotted with them, but we don't advertise.”

“Short answer?”

“It's a secret base.”

But . . . “This is Pan Polar territory, Talis. It's sovereign. I'm fairly sure no one told us about a secret base.”

“Yeah, that's the
secret
part.” He sighed and flopped onto his back in the dry grass. “What, you think you can rule the world out of a saddlebag? Obviously there's a base. A small one, but—there's a food cache. A weapons store. Emergency equipment. And, the important bit, a communications terminal, linking back to the Red Mountains.”

“So we can call for an evacuation.”

Talis wrinkled his nose. “Maybe. I'd rather not.”

And Sri put in, singsong: “Shuttles can be shot down.”

She was quoting from the Utterances. The full verse was:
Shuttles can be shot down, and you won't always know who to blow up afterwards.

“Exactly. Air transport is too exposed,” said Talis.

I turned from him to look around. We were on top of a swell in the prairie, the rattling dry grassland spreading out in all directions. I could see to the end of the world, and there was not so much as a cloud shadow to hide in.

“With respect, Talis, we could not be much more exposed if we were the illustration next to a dictionary entry of the word ‘exposed.'”

“Ditch the ‘respect' thing,” said Talis. “You're AI; I'm AI. We're equals.”

“Oh,” I said. “In that case, I would like to propose that peace achieved through terror can never truly be peace. We should release all the Precepture hostages and shut down the orbital weapons platforms.”

“Okay,” said Talis. “We're equals, but you're a dewy-eyed moron.”

“We would not have come this far if that were even remotely true.”

“Fair point. Let me put it this way instead: no.”

Francis Xavier had set his wings up as a windbreak and had settled himself inside them, resting quietly as a saint in a grotto. Sri had nosebagged the horses and was passing apples.

These too were from the Precepture. The one she gave me was dappled and lumpen and neat in the hand. A sweet smell on the edge of fermenting—a cidery smell. I felt my fingers tighten against the apple as if my gears were jammed. The apple's skin was harder than human skin, and slicker. My nails broke through it, and there was more of that smell.

I did not like apples. It would not take a genius to know why.

Talis was, among other things, a genius. He came up on one elbow and made a little catcher's mitt of his hands. I lobbed the apple to him. He caught it neatly.

But it was too late: the smell clung to me. That apple press smell. I wrapped my arms around myself, as if to hold the memory, to control it. It was not enough. I pinched the root of my right thumb with a vise made of my left hand and I squeezed. It was a trick I'd learned as a small child, to distract myself from uncontrollable fear with controllable pain. The bolt shot across my palm and up my arm. And though I knew why I was inflicting pain on myself—though my pulse shuddered like a closing apple press, dropping one ticktock at a time—I did not think about it. I did not think about being tortured. I thought about nerve paths. I deepened the bend and pain roared through my thighs and back. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and blew the moment away.

“Right,” said Talis. “Done with that? Because I could get one of the horses over here to step on your foot.”

“Don't be crass.” Caught between my knees, my voice wavered.

“Hey, inappropriate jokes are pretty much what I do. You know, inappropriate jokes and smoking craters. It's the combination that gets to people.”

I straightened up gingerly. My lower back seized regardless. “I understand the risks of shuttles, but if the alternative is riding horseback for eight hundred miles, I am feeling willing to chance the odd surface-to-air missile.”

Talis paused. “Well, we have to see what's happening. We can do that when we get to the refuge. But it's not a joke, you know. Shuttles really can be shot down. And there's no backup of you, Greta. Not yet. The loss would be immeasurable, and I won't risk it.”

“But—”

“Look,” he said, and reached for my hand. I began to wave off him and his arguments, but he met my lifted hand midair. Suddenly we were fingertip to fingertip. And his were . . . twinkling. Not with visible light, not with enough electricity for a human to sense, but with micropulses of current that went straight into the sensors embedded in my fingers.

The pulses made a pattern—no, a code. It was something equivalent to a call number, which my datastore took and turned into . . . it was like a book, or like the memory of having read a book, or like always having known something but only suddenly being able to call it to mind.

It was like nothing human at all.

At Talis's touch I had become an expert on the early history of the Swan Riders. I remembered how they had been attacked or kidnapped, ignored or despised, as they tried to bring Talis's order to the world. In those days they had moved mostly by air—why wouldn't they?—and Talis had discovered that sometimes an attack on an airborne vessel couldn't easily be traced back to insurgents on the ground. He hadn't always known who to punish. He'd come very close to losing control of his fragile peace.

Once he'd even been on one of the shuttles, as one of his Rider selves. It had gone down in flames, emergency thrusters making the ground impact survivable, barely, but then the fire—

Talis jerked his hand out of mine. “Michael!” I cried, expecting to see him burning. But he flicked his hand in the air as if flicking off dishwater. He blinked three times.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said, unconvincingly. Because here it was, in a nutshell: AIs do not remember. We relive. Our memories are too perfect. We cannot tell the memory of pain from pain; cannot tell the memory of fear from fear. Talis was looking at me with wide blank eyes and inside them was the time he'd been on fire. But instead of screaming, he smiled.

Sri was openly staring at him. And I did too, stared at the only person I had ever met who could grin while he was burned alive. How did he do that? I was thinking about what he'd said, about
seizing in the grass
. An apple had just come close to killing me. And this morning, a dream. A dream where I could not tell the memory of love from love. And apparently I did not know how to stand in that kind of fire. “Would my heart really give out?”

“It conceivably could. But I won't let it.” Talis laced his fingers together and pushed them out, cracking the knuckles. “Look, it's a balancing act, and I admit it's tricky. But I'm better at it than anyone in the world.”

I could sense the energy he was building in his hands—energy to power his ultrasound in case he needed to move fast to strip more from my memory.

That was what he meant by not letting my heart stop. He would do what he had done with B
hn. He would do that again. To the queen my mother. To the Abbot, my teacher. To Elián, my foil and friend. And to Xie, my everything . . .