The Swan Riders (34 page)

“What if you weren't?”

“Weren't what? Weren't
mutilated
and left to die?”

“Weren't unchanged. The imprinting of ghosts. What if they want it to go both ways?”

“Ewwww.” Michael scrunched his nose. “Why?”

“Because they're human. Michael—I saw the boxes. I saw what the AIs become. There's this simulation running in my head, and the satellites—how can we look down on the whole world, and still be human?”

“You're their test case,” said Elián, who was not as stupid as Talis thought he was. (Not that that was a high bar.) “What if an AI could learn to be human again?”

“I am human.” Michael struck his fist against his skull with a hollow thunk. “I'm stuck as human and it totally sucks.”

“But we need to be better,” I said, “and you're better.”

“I'm not better, I'm just dying. It doesn't automatically make you more noble. Trust me, I've outlived a lot of people, and most of them were mealymouthed self-interested ground weasels.”

I blinked, momentarily losing track of the argument. “. . . ground weasels?”

“Mealymouthed ground weasels. On morphine. I see no reason why I shouldn't be drugged to the eyeballs when the time comes. In fact, let's get started on that.”

“You are better,” said Elián. “If you could see what your other—the other—”

“Two,” I said.

Elián pressed on. “What he's doing to Francis—”

“What?” It wasn't a flicker this time, it was a lightning flash. Rachel sat bolt upright: “What's he doing to Francis?”

“Possessing him,” I said.

“Oh.” Her voice cracked. Dying, Rachel knew that possession was a death sentence.

“Not like that,” said Elián. “In, like, bursts. To hurt him. To get him to report on . . . what it's like.”

If you don't fight,
Rachel had said.

I knelt by her side and took her hand. “Francis Xavier is fighting.”

“
Can the Swan Riders be turned
,” she said, and was suddenly Michael again. “I can turn anybody into anything. Come on. We're going.”

W
e couldn't run, but we ran.

I held Michael up because Elián was too tall. He would go strongly for a half dozen steps, and I would struggle to keep up, and then his knees would fail and I would struggle instead to keep him on his feet. Our boots beat uneven on the boardwalk, and this time no one came out to bow.

No one came out at all.

No voices.

It was as if the nameless city were empty.

Then we turned the last corner and staggered to a stop. The Swan Riders were arrayed before us. At their back was the mountain, and its blast doors were shut.

“Well.” Michael was leaning on me, his voice was low. “Did you want to do the ‘I have a bad feeling about this' line, or shall I?”

We'd come to a halt on the end of the boardwalk, where it stepped down into a rocky meadow of saxifrage and moss, between the city and the mountain. It was as if we were on the thrust of a stage. The Swan Riders were two steps down from us, wearing their wings, like an audience of angels.

It was not all of them—I counted forty-seven, about a third of the number here stationed. Not all of them. But so many.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” said Elián, looking from overwhelming force to the mountain's doors, and back. “And the door thing is not good news. I'm not sure why exactly it's not good news but I can tell it's not good news.”

“Because,” said one of the Swan Riders, “if the blast doors are closed, the city can be wiped out from orbit without touching the AIs inside.” The speaker stepped forward, and it was the boy with the shipwreck-green eyes, last seen being Two and dislocating Elián's shoulder. He was not Two, but it was hard to look at him without shivering.

“You people have got to cut it out with the brain swapping,” said Elián, who
was
shivering. “I am a simple country boy and y'all are making my head hurt.”

“Daji,” I named him, and the green-eyed boy tucked his chin and saluted me. A loyal and unhesitating salute, without a trace of irony. I was AI and he was Swan Rider, which meant he owed me his life, and he looked ready to give it, right this instant. He looked ready to lay it on the stones.

“You were with the party that stabbed Talis.”

“I was,” he said.

“I know your name,” I said. And pitched my voice for the crowd. “Height, stance, skin tone, gait. I could name all of you.”

“We know,” said one of the women—it was Renata, who had held me captive once, who had been afraid. Behind her the mountain glowed sharp and red: a Moroccan lantern in the late afternoon sun.

“This isn't all of you,” said Michael, echoing what Elián had said once, about the Swan Rider conspiracy. “Where are the others?”

An AI would have known—I knew—but Daji answered Michael easily, without mocking him: “Inside.” He tipped his head back at the doors sealed shut behind him. “We faked a quarantine. It won't hold long. But then, we don't have long.”

“You truly don't,” said Michael. “Greta. Are we being targeted?”

And this too, I already knew. The
UNDEAD
had already given me the red sea with the crosshairs at its center, the damage estimates, the list of projected casualties. “The platforms are still coming into place,” I said. “But yes, we're being targeted.”

“Swell,” said Elián. “Would anybody like to join me in a rousing chorus of ‘Oh God Oh God We're All Gonna Die'?”

“Daji is right: the blast doors would protect the AIs inside the mountain,” said Michael. “But not all the AIs are inside.”

Elián couldn't resist the jab: “You don't count.”

“I don't,” he answered, peaceably. “But I wasn't thinking of me.”

He was thinking of two to three medium-sized cities. Two might not know me, but he wouldn't kill me. As the first new AI in more than a century, I was too valuable.

“That's the wild card, then,” said Michael, with whom I would hate to play poker. “If my friends from the little stabby-stabby incident would step forward.”

And they did. The twelve who had stabbed him stepped forward with no hesitation, like the chorus in a Greek play, because whatever else they were they weren't ashamed. And they weren't afraid. They were Swan Riders.

“Look at you,” said Michael fondly—and then he laughed, bitter and sweet. “This has nothing to do with the PanPols, does it? Just this once, it really is all about me.”

Daji stood at the front of them. “My lord Talis. Will you sit?”

“Don't call me that,” said Michael, mild as butter. “But yes, I'll sit.”

With a sweeping bow, Daji indicated the ring of boulders and charcoal that must surely have marked a community fire. Michael came down the wood steps with his hand light on Elián's arm—a bit in escort, a bit keeping his balance. And a bit theater, of course. They looked like king and queen. His legs shook as he lowered himself onto one of the boulders. Daji sat in front of him. They were nearly knee-to-knee.

“Sit with us, Greta,” said Michael, with a little opening of his hand.

So I sat, the three of us close together, and now we were generals in a field campaign, a council of war. The stone was sun-warm but the air was cool. I could smell the dampness of the old ash at my feet, and the syrupy sweetness of the broken sea.

Elián stood at Talis's back. And behind Daji gathered the Swan Riders. Their labels drifted half-visibly above them, as if held there by pins. If Two insisted on a purge, and wanted to keep it to an absolute minimum, I could name and implicate each of them.

Or we could do something different.

“What should I call you?” said Daji.

“Michael will do.”

“The leader of the armies of heaven,” said Daji. “An angel, but not a god.”

“Michael mostly, and Rachel sometimes. Rachel, weeping for her children . . . truly the metaphorical richness is
endless
.” He flipped richness away with the back of his hand. “And we so don't have time for it. Start talking, people. What do you want? We've got a blackbird incoming in . . .” He glanced at me.

I checked on the weapons platform. “Four and a half minutes.”

“Do you not know what we want?” said Daji.

“Think so. Want to hear you say it.”

“We want to save you,” said Daji.

“Funny way of showing it.” Michael pushed aside his coat, and his fingers sank—impossibly, sickeningly—into the hole under his collarbone, pushing in the fabric, vanishing to the knuckle. “I've got like a week to live, and it's not even going to be a nice one.”

A susurration of wings at that. I suspected they hadn't known it would be quite that fast.

But I was sure they'd known it wouldn't be nice.

“So,” said Michael. “You want to save me.”

There was no saving him.

“Me as in Talis.”

“You,” said Daji, “as in the AIs.”

“All of them?” said Michael. With a pronoun that made my heart hurt.

“All of them that we can. You know what's happening to them. What will happen to Greta, when she loses her body?”

“Hands off Greta,” said Michael. “She's
my
wild card. Greta: time?”

“Three minutes, twenty seconds.”

“You want the organic mind to write to the datastore,” said Michael. “A little booster shot of human, every time an AI takes a ride.”

“Yes.”

“It won't solve the palsy. It will still kill you to be ridden.”

“Yes,” said Renata.

“We are the Swan Riders, and our lives are yours,” said Daji. “This is not about saving our own lives. It is about saving the AIs.”

“Even if you have to hurt us to do it,” I said.

Daji glanced at me. “We're Swan Riders. Sometimes we hurt people. But we want—to do that less. We want to change you, Lord Talis.”

Michael shook his head. Denying the change, or just denying the name?

“Consider the difference between you and your other self.”

“It's Greta who made me different,” said Michael. “You people just stabbed me in the chest.”

“Maybe,” said Daji. “But one way or the other, consider the difference. There are three cities annihilated, and your other self did that without blinking. He's drifted—you've drifted too far out from human. Consider what a difference it would make, to have something pull you back.”

Michael glanced round at me. “Two minutes,” I said.

“It would change me.” Michael was looking at his hands, one of them closed tight around the old break in his thigh. “Obviously it would change me, and that matters. I'm just not sure it matters that mu— Oh, God.”

“Michael!” I lunged off my stone and thrust my hands against his face. I reached deep into his implant pathways, and I
pushed.

A sudden, shocking, sparking change.

“What?” gasped Rachel. Her eyes, inches from mine, were round as wells.

“Sorry,” I answered, likewise gasping: it took adrenaline to do that. I dropped my hands. “I thought: if a fibrillation of the heart can be stopped with a shock—”

“Theory later,” said Elián, looking up as if there were a clock across all the sky.

“It won't last,” I warned. I estimated I'd bought Rachel ten minutes at most.

“I know, I can feel—”

Elián interrupted her. “We need Talis.”

Rachel's sweet face shattered. What must it be like, to be pushed out of one's own death?

Balanced on the balls of my feet in front of her, I folded my hands around her hands. “We need both of you,” I said. “That's the whole point. Can you be both of you?”

Her chest was heaving as if she were working hard at something. She blinked and blinked. The cinders made a dry crinkling sound as my boots broke them.

Forty-five seconds left. I did not say it out loud. My datastore began a visible scrolling countdown; a clock over Rachel's face. Michael's face? There was something very fine in the eyes.

“He won't—I won't—he won't kill you. Even if he doesn't love you. You're too important.”

“I know.”

“Lean on that. Lean hard.” There was a shudder in the words, in the breath, like the breathing of a child who has fallen asleep crying.

“I think it does matter, the human booster shot,” I said. “I think it does matter, that much.”

Closed eyes. A fragmented nod. The hands jerked in mine and I let them go.

“Can you do this?” In thirty seconds, we were going to need to persuade Two that people who had betrayed him (though not exactly
him
) had a point. That was not a small thing. And broken or not, Michael had the best shot at it.

“I—” The eyes were closed; one fist came up and pressed into the temple. “Oh, I'm really losing it.”

And then the eyes came open, and they were not fragmented, not flickering. They were whole—more than whole. They were doubled. They were
both.
“And if you don't think I can play losing it for all losing it is worth, then you don't know me at all.”

I felt the smile bloom across my face.

The nameless, doubled person smiled back at me.

Just there, the invisible clock hit zero. I raised my voice to let everyone know: “The weapons platform is now in range.”

The Swan Riders looked up. Not that it would help—none of them could see
space.
But they were human, and when you are human and a shadow crosses you, you look up. I was still looking at the new person. And she was looking at me. Shock wave, beacon. Something more than AI, more than human.