The Swan Riders (4 page)

So clearly, clear as glass, I remembered that. I could actually feel the shape of the memory, the crystalline structure of it deep in the ravaged ruin of my organic brain. A broken crystal: it cut at me as my datastore provided the equivalent memory, and a dossier about the war whose beginning had made her life forfeit. B
hn. A laughing little slip of a girl, she'd liked to braid my hair, and when the Swan Rider said her name she'd started screaming. The central issue of the war was—

“Greta?” said Francis Xavier, which didn't help.

I could feel the two versions of the memory well up, amplifying each other, slowly, slowly, but looping nevertheless, rising, feeding back—Francis Xavier ducking in the doorway, then looking up, his eyes utterly blank.

I closed my eyes.

Reducing stimuli will always help. Remember that.
Talis's advice on being overwhelmed by an AI's too-sharp memories. Even he—sometimes I saw him close his eyes.

Except that the heat of the fire and the smell of the rabbit cooking made me think vividly of cremating a body. Another trapdoor, and a deeper one.

“Talis,” I whispered to the darkness in front of my eyes.

He hadn't been near, but when I said his name he was there. A hand on my hand. Capable, rein-callused, Rachel's stolen hand: Talis. “Greta.” His voice was soft. I could feel the brush of his sensors, like a moth's antennae. “What is it?”

“Him,” I said. “Him, he killed B
hn.”

“Francis Xavier,” said Talis. “Go draw us a couple of buckets of water, would you?”

I heard the Rider get up. I let my ultrasound ping at him—he could probably sense it, and such tracking must surely be rude—but I let my ultrasound ping him and I tracked him with my eyes closed until he was hidden by the curve of the hollow.

“Open up,” said Talis softly.

I opened my eyes.

Talis was crouched in front of me, balanced on the balls of his feet, his hands curled over my fists. The fire's reflection danced in his pale eyes. “Open up,” he said, softer still, a lover's murmur, a request. He raised his hands to my face.

His sensors, which had been feathering me, were suddenly sharper: palpating, breaking through even the rising overload of the doubled memory.

“What are you doing?” I heard my voice crack.

His eyes were crinkled with concentration. “Exorcism. Just—hold still.”

Stronger still, the sensors. It was like having a finger poking me right in the brain. “Michael,” I gasped. “Stop.”

He didn't. Nausea made my skin prickle into sweat as he reached into me. More like an iron nail than a finger now. A nail going deep.

And then, all at once, I remembered B
hn. Every image of B
hn that my mind had ever struck into a coin of memory, and how strange that we cannot choose what is struck in memory, every image of her I had ever had, everything—it came rushing into my head all at once.

And like a circuit breaker tripping, I stopped remembering.

My images of B
hn fluttered to the ground inside me, like dropped cards.

Tarot cast. Pages coming out of a book.
Alice in Wonderland
: only a pack of . . . slowly the metaphors too stopped coming.

My mind fell quiet.

Talis lifted his hands away. “Sorry,” he said. “But it does work. If the memory is small enough.”

B
hn. Small enough.

“Thank you,” I said. For lack of anything better.

Sri, across the fire, was watching me like a cat. Francis Xavier was stopped at the top of the rise with leather buckets dripping onto his boots.

Talis rocked back on his heels and gathered in his riders with a whirl of his hand. “So,” he said. “Greta here is three days past her upload. Our mission is to get her to the Red Mountains before her brain utterly destroys itself and she winds up seizing in the grass until her heart gives out.”

He turned and spoke aside to me, so neat I could almost hear the parentheses, though in truth I was somewhat preoccupied by the image of
seizing in the grass.
“I have friends there,” he said. “And, you know, what's left of friends. We can teach you some tricks and tips.”

He turned back to his riders. “Let me be clear: she is worth more to me, and to the future of the planet, than either one of you, or, for that matter, any one medium-to-large city. Possibly two or three cities, though obviously we all hope it doesn't come to that.” He smiled at them. “The takeaway is that I
do
want this to work. Hmmmm?”

“Hmmmm,” affirmed Sri. Francis Xavier said nothing. He poured the water into the fold-up troughs we used for the horses, and then stood there, with his back to us. He had short hair, sectioned and arranged in little knots that lay close to his scalp, like certain images of the Buddha. He was standing still enough to be such a statue.

“FX,” Talis prompted.

Francis Xavier turned around and locked on to my eyes. “I will protect her.”

I was stunned by the slow certainty. It sounded as if he were saying wedding vows.

And then.

A flash. A blow to the eyes. Solid black shadows rushed out from everything, from Talis, from Francis Xavier, from the horses and the hillside, from every blade of grass. For an instant the sky was white and the world was flat and blackened.

Francis Xavier was moving. Before I even got a hand up to shield my eyes he was running forward, spreading his arms. He slammed into us, wrapping one arm around Talis and one around me, pushing us to the ground, sheltering us with his body.

For a moment I just huddled under Francis Xavier, stunned by the flash, by the blow. My eyes watered. The dry grass scratched my face. Like a chick under a wing, I was glad enough to be covered.

Not Talis, though. “Get
off
 . . .” He pushed his way free. “It's miles away, honestly . . .”

Francis Xavier stood up.

There were spots in front of my eyes, and the night sky glowed a strange, sulfurous yellow.

“Plasma in the ionosphere,” said Talis. “An orbital weapon.”

He squinted toward what seemed to be the source of it—behind the horizon to the south and west. It looked as if the sun had mutated and was swelling back where it had set.

“I've never seen one,” said Sri.

“I have,” I said. Talis had once stopped Elián from escaping with a bolt from the blue, scooped a small crater out almost at his feet. “But—”

“But not like that,” said Talis. “That was a city killer.”

“Where . . . ?” breathed Sri.

Francis Xavier was counting under his breath. For a moment I thought he was trying to keep his temper, but then there was a distant crackle, not quite thunder. The sky made a sound like glass creaking. From the delay between light and sound, one could calculate—”Four hundred miles,” said Francis Xavier. “Calgary?”

“We don't have to guess,” said Sri.

Right. At least one of us could talk to the orbital weapons platforms.

“Calgary,” said Talis, like a one-word eulogy. He stood a moment, looking at the sick, false sunset. Then he clapped his hands together and twirled round to face us. “Well, kiddos. Something is obviously up, but no worries. I'm sure I'm on it.”

There was still, in the Red Mountains, a master copy of Talis. Someone—something?—who could access every networked sensor in the world, examine any database, command any satellite. Someone who was, apparently, “on it.” Our Talis might be able to talk to the weapons platform and confirm its firing strength and its target, but without the real-time access to information, he couldn't know the why of it.

“So,” said Sri. “You were saying, about the medium-sized cities?”

“It might have nothing to do with Greta,” said Francis Xavier.

“Yeah,” said Talis. “But how likely is that, really?”

“We should go,” said Francis Xavier. “If there is a threat to you. Or to her. We should go. Our refuge is less than fifty miles.”

“No,” said Talis.

“We could use it as an extraction point. Or at least update the sitrep.”

“No,” said Talis. “Greta is a novice. She can't ride fifty miles at a stretch. Not to mention I just pushed an ultrasound pulse through her prefrontal cortex. And it's dark.”