The Swan Riders (22 page)

How strange this was, how strange. The rounded little space, with its framing of bare tree branches, its whitewashed plaster walls. Such a small place, balanced against the turning, glittering world that spun in my head. Against the view of Halifax from above. And yet it drew my attention in, and slowly I let the satellites go.

This place. A warm place, like a nest. A good smell. Elián, whom once I had loved. Talis, whom once I had—I tried to remember. Hated? Feared? And (he kept refusing to be “incidentally”) Francis Xavier, standing with Elián's dagger ready in his hand.

“Elián,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” he said. “There aren't many places to go from that hilltop. The others—Sri thought you'd come here.”

“Did she?” said Talis. “And where is my old friend Sri?”

“Like I'd tell you.”

“Oh, you might,” drawled Talis. He stretched a hand toward Francis Xavier, who put the dagger into the upturned palm. Talis closed his grip around the handle one finger at a time. “It would be
so
interesting to find out.”

“Talis, don't.” My tone was a bit off: it sounded as if I'd said: “Sit, boy.”

Talis raised an eyebrow at me. “Sorry, dear. Do go on.”

“Can I have my spoon back?” said Elián. There were purple indents on either side of his Adam's apple. “The soup will burn.”

I considered. The risks seemed minimal. The soup smelled good. “Give him his spoon,” I said to Francis.

Francis held out the spoon without lowering the knife. Elián took it gingerly. I pulled a chair out and sat down across the table.

There were carrots sliced into coins on the cutting board, and they seemed like the brightest thing I'd seen in months. Elián stirred the soup. He bent over the pot, his chin tucked, his dark curls spilling onto his forehead. Once I'd kissed him in the part of that hair. AIs did not remember. They relived. The warmth and roughness of the kiss, the smell of it, the body helpless in my arms.

“Elián,” I said, watching him put the carrot slices in the soup, one at a time, like coins into a well. “Elián. Why are you here?”

“Remember when you saved me?” he said softly. “Thought I'd try and return the favor.”

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” said Talis, bowing his head and digging his fingers into his hair in mock despair. “Elián Palnik made a
plan.
”

“A plan?” I asked Elián. “Did you?”

But instead of answering, he asked again, in a roughened whisper: “Greta: Do you remember?”

Did I? I did, and I did not. I had lost none of the data. I remembered—Elián had come to the Precepture in chains, he'd stayed defiant. In return they'd hurt him. Just a little, but over and over, until he fell apart. I remembered watching him walk down the slope to the potato patch like a machine with a software fault.

Like a machine.

Just a little, they'd hurt him—that was what I'd thought at the time. It occurred to me now that I did not actually know. What had been done to Elián was part of the Precepture records. If I wanted to know, I could just know.

I felt an unfamiliar hesitation on the point: did I, in fact, want to know?

“Careful,” said Talis softly. He'd stopped watching Elián and was watching me.

And once he would have been right. Once, even remembering Elián, let alone dwelling on the memory, would have been dangerous. The skinning, the feedback loop of memory building to a fatal overload. In my first days as an AI, remembering things had been like walking out on a fabric stretched above a void. There had been a give to my memory—fragility, danger, fear.

But since then. Since then.

I remembered Talis using ultrasound cascades to arrest the feedback loops. One little, one big, one catastrophic. I'd refused him, I'd fought him, but he—

Don't be human
, he'd said, and he turned me into light. And since then . . .

“I remember,” I said. But did not quite know what I meant.

“Okay,” said Talis brightly. “I've got a question.” I hadn't seen him so cheerful since—well, since Elián had stabbed him. Having a knife in his grip and someone handy to murder had done wonders for his mood. “The blood,” he said. “Was it hot? Did it get into those little wrinkles between your fingers? How many times did you have to scrub them, to get it all out?”

Elián stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The moment you stabbed me.” Talis was broadcasting false surprise. “Pivotal for you, I should think. Me too, obviously, but, hey, I'm feeling generous, so let's focus on you. I'm talking about that bit when the blade pops through the muscle into the squishy parts. I'm talking about
sitting
there and watching someone
suffocate
from the inside out. Not your usual thing, surely? So what does it take, hmmm, to make an idealistic young sheep farmer go that far?”

“Seriously? You're fuzzy on why I hate you?” said Elián.

“Nah, course not,” said Talis, waving a hand. “I had you tortured. I mean, not me personally, but if they'd asked me I would absolutely have signed off. I squeezed Grandma Wilma in that apple press until she popped like a zit. And I turned your girlfriend here into a right little psychopath—no offense, Greta.”

“None taken.”

“On the other hand,” chimed Talis, “I'm an AI whose emotional responses and ethical instincts may or may not be an elaborate self-delusion. I'm a monster. And also, just incidentally,
I'm trying to save the world
. What's your excuse, human? What exactly made you decide to get your hands all messy?”

“It's an experiment,” said Elián, stirring the soup.

“Oh, that's fine, then,” said Talis. “As long as I got vivisected for
science
 . . .”

“I want to see if an AI can learn to be human again.”

“O . . . kay,” said Talis. “Greta, perhaps you could explain to Elián the flaw in his brilliant plan to mutilate you for the good of your immortal soul. I've got a feather bed with my name on it.” He tried to get up then, and the voice that broke from him was not quite his. “Francis—help me?”

Francis Xavier came and helped him. And Talis came fully back. “Greta, do wake me if you decide to kill him; I don't want to miss it. And you, my little monster,” he added, pointing at Elián. “Remember what they say: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and I'll kill you and everyone you love.”

Elián was looking at me as he answered. “Too late, Michael. You already did.”

Shortly after that, Francis Xavier tied Elián to the table.

The Swan Rider was protective, always, but he also was staggering and snarling with exhaustion, and there was so much to do. First and most urgently, I found the tissue knitter and managed the medically challenging process of running it on a half-healed wound, tearing Talis apart so I could put him back together. Talis attempted to keep quiet and still and succeeded at neither. Fortunately, it wasn't long before he fainted, sinking limp into the feather ticking, lost in it like a corpse in the snow.

Meanwhile Francis brought the horses into the stable, rubbing them down, making them drink a little, giving them some of the oats from the refuge's cache. He took off his prosthesis and its liner, put ointment on his blisters. He choked down a piece of jerky and a bit of water. And then he lay down on the cold stone floor, at Talis's side, turning his face to the sleeping form and his back to the room.

I took two steps away and watched the pair of them.

Francis's outflung hand was curled into a fist. He was awake. Breathing. Guarding us. But even as I watched, the hand softened and the breathing smoothed out. Four days breaking path in deep snow: the Swan Rider had walked clean off the outer edge of his endurance. I'd been spared that but still felt a heaviness in my bones, a chill in my torso. I was fatigued. But FX and Talis—they were exhausted.

I glanced at Elián, who was tied standing up. The thin strip fastening his wrist to the table looked fragile but was in fact smartplast with coded magnetic adhesion. He had no hope of breaking it. And only fingertip pulses—mine, Francis's—could undo it.

Even if Elián's plan was to stab me, even if I couldn't wake FX in time, I was safe enough.

“Your hair's growing out,” Elián said.

It had been sixteen days since Xie had clipped my hair back to the scalp so that I could be bolted to a table to die. If it had grown out, it was only enough to make me look like a mange victim. But Elián was smiling at me.

“I like it. I remember it being all carrots but it's almost like honey.”

I wondered how long he had been at the refuge. If he had been lying in wait for us. If he was also shivering with fatigue, and if so how he might rest, tied like that.

“Greta?” he said. He reached toward me, and with the movement the scent of him hit me. “Please talk to me.”

I could smell him, and I remembered something: the metal table Elián was standing beside was also a kitchen. There were knives in the drawer. I took a step back. Elián tried to follow but the tie on his wrist brought him up short.

“Greta,” he said again.

“Would you really stab me?” I said. “What you did to Talis. Is that what you want to do to me?”

Elián tried to reach me. His fettered hand was stretched out taut behind him. He was pulling too hard on it: his wrist was dented and swelling against the edge of the strap.

My hands had once been strapped down, just so . . . I flinched at the memory, jerked as if shocked.

“You've got to know I wouldn't hurt you,” said Elián, softly as if afraid of spooking me. “Never, Greta. Do you remember that?”

“I remember everything. I have lost none of the data.”

“Yeah?” Elián drawled, as he did when angry. I turned and watched the horses in the shadows past the half-wall, shifting and chewing and nosing each other. “What have you lost, then?” His words stung the side of my face. “Because I've gotta tell you, Princess. You've lost something.”

“I didn't
lose
it,” I snapped. “Talis
took
it.”

Out of nowhere, I was furious. Charges built in my hands. Bolts of uncollimated ultrasound shot everywhere, my fingertips crackling like sparklers. Gordon Lightfoot picked up his head and stamped.

“He took it, Elián: Talis took it. And I fought, I tried—” Words fell out of me. “I fought. I fought like you used to fight, Elián. I fought even though it hurt me. Even though I couldn't win. Don't tell me I've lost something.”

“Oh, Greta,” breathed Elián. His free hand came to his mouth. “Oh . . .”

“He took it,” I whispered, “and I didn't say he could.”

Furious, yes. And not with Elián. I wanted to throw myself into his arms.

But I could not bear to be near him.

This was what Talis had taken from me. My human self. Love. He'd taken it because it was burning through me. It was burning through me. If I touched Elián, I thought, I would burst into flames.

“Why did you come here?” I rattled, desperate. “Why did you come, Elián? Talis will kill you.” What he'd done to Wilma Armenteros in the apple press. That bad. Worse.

Talis would take one more thing.

Elián twisted his face into an imitation of his usual grin: “I was sorta counting on you to stop him.”

The grin was a lie; the microexpression was terror. He was terrified. I was terrified. “I can't,” I said. “I can't stop him—”

“You can. Look, I know I don't know anything about AIs, but I'll bet you're way better at being one than he is.” I wrapped my arms around myself. Elián dragged on the table, straining to reach me. His free hand was a millimeter shy of my face. I could feel it in a shiver of fine hairs and electrical fields, a shiver that went all over me. “Greta, please,” he begged. “Let me go.”

“Why did you come here?” I said. “After what you did to Talis . . . Elián. Truly. Are you here to stab me?”

Elián stiffened. I remembered that when I'd met him he'd been boyish, strapping but soft. There was little soft about him now. He was bones and muscle; he was shaking.

“Elián?” I said.

His voice came out as a whisper. “Do you want me to?”

“I—”

I'd seen what it had done to Talis—I had seen his terror, his confusion, his pain. But it still seemed, for an instant, like quite a reasonable idea. I stepped forward, into Elián's enfolding arm. My fingers sparkled. I undid the tie on his wrist.

E
lián staggered at his freedom, gasped as if I'd shocked him.

He wrapped both arms around me.

And I caught fire.

It was so much; it was too much. He'd held me like this too many times. Held me desperate and terrified, his lips on my ear, his cheek in my hair.