The Swan Riders (38 page)

We walked up into the mountain.

And then we went down.

I had never been in an elevator before. Elevators were one of those things, like sprinklers and lawns, that belonged to the fallen world. Once the last skyscrapers had come down, humanity had discovered that staircases would do just fine.

But the hollow mountain had come from that fallen world. And so did Michael. He operated the elevator without giving it a thought, stabbing the button that fetched it as if with muscle memory. The doors opened.

This particular elevator was an open cage, solid only under our feet. I stepped in gingerly, like a horse into a spaceship. The floor shuddered under me and I yelped and grabbed Michael, who laughed at me, very softly, just a little hitch in his breath. He pushed another button and we went down. Cold walls passed. Bare stone, rough, gleaming wet as the single lightbulb went by.

Down, and down. Slowly.

I knew too much about countdowns. I knew that the shivering figure beside me wouldn't want one. But it looked as if he might get one anyway. His laughter hadn't stopped, but it had become rougher. He was not quite crying.

We were sinking, and sinking, out of the light. Out of all of the kinds of light. I could feel the satellites slipping away behind the stones; the cosmic rays growing sparse as fireflies, and then vanishing.

As if I were an ocean, I could feel the tiny shift of tidal forces. Of gravity.

“At the Institute,” said Michael, caught in something long ago. “Where they used to do this, before the melt. The grey floor, where they used to do this. It was deep, like this. It was so far down.”

They'd thought the stray flux of a cosmic muon might be enough to ruin a neuromap. And who knew, maybe they'd been right. It wasn't as if they'd had time to nail it. And then the world had fallen.

In the four hundred years since, we'd created only forty-nine new AIs. A small number, which meant we hadn't nailed it either.

The light around us changed then—the single bulb at the top of the cage seemed to gain a faint mirror below us. The floor. Water on the floor. We sank into grey gleam as if into rising water.

We hit bottom with a little splash and a huge booming echo. All around us lights snapped on. The elevator door opened.

And we stepped out into the grey room.

It was different, and it was the same.

We were in a cavern, impossibly huge, its walls lost in shadows; its ceiling hidden behind a high grid of lights. They buzzed in the deep, dripping silence.

The grey room itself was not a room, exactly—certainly not something that could be tucked behind a library wall. It sat in the middle of the cavern, with its door open, wrapped copper mesh and studded in wires, ovoid and big as a dragon's egg. Its hatch stood open. I could see the inside of it.

We both could see the inside of it. We could look nowhere else.

The high table of my grey room was in this one a padded chair, thoughtfully ergonomic. But it still had straps.

Different but not different enough. The same.

My wrist—the one I had broken in the grey room, against straps just like that; the one Tolliver Burr had broken in the apple press, which I still could not think about—my wrist flared with sudden phantom pain, enough to make me tuck it to my stomach, gasping. Phantom pain, phantom
everything.
My heart rate shot up and my mouth dried and bittered. A taste of metal.

It was
the grey room
and I was
reliving
and—

“I
can't
,” said Michael, and twisted aside as suddenly as if he needed to throw up.

We smacked into each other—less turning to hold each other than simply colliding, spinning away from the room and everything it was to us, urgent and clumsy and blind to the rest of the world. It was only luck that we ended up wrapped together.

One of my hands was full of pain and caught between us. The other clawed at Michael's back. His fingers dug into my forearms, his forehead hit my collarbone like a mallet as he hid his face against me. “Breathe in,” I said, because his head had struck me like that once before when he'd been panicked and suffocating, and I had lost the ability to tell present from past. “Breathe in.”

For a miracle, he did. Michael took a big shuddery breath, like the gulp of air that went with weeping. His nerves were burning into mine and my fingers were digging into his spine. I could feel him breathe in, ribs moving. “Breathe out,” I said, and tried to breathe out, one two three four five.

“Slower. Come on.” Michael's voice was a mumble, caught between us, but I felt him draw breath and so I drew breath. One, two, three, four, five.

“Out,” I said. And I meant
out of here, out of this room, out of my mind
, but we both breathed out, slowly. I could feel the heat of Michael's exhale, very human, just at my collarbone.

“In,” he said. The pain was fading from my hand and I could feel that it was pushing into Rachel's soft belly. I let the fist of it go. The space between us was warm.

We breathed in, we breathed out, cueing each other with pulses in our fingertips, with the squeezes of our hands.

“All right,” Michael said, at last, and straightened carefully. “You all right, Greta?” He tapped his fingers against my cheek, almost playfully, with a tiny spark-gap zap. “Hate to have to slap you,” he said, drawling.

As if he himself had not also panicked. As if he were not panicking still. I could feel all his sensors fixed upon that hatch, that chair. No AI should ever stand in this place.

I should never have asked it of him.

“Greta?”

I snapped my wrist as if flicking off water, picturing droplets of memory flying everywhere. “I'm all right.”

“Okay,” said Michael, suddenly clapping his hands together, pure theatrical bravado. “Let's get this done.”

Michael. Rachel. Talis. Tanim.

The combined and impossible person.

I waited just outside the mesh wall, my fingers deep in interface gel, and the grey room ripped them apart.

They came out in pieces, in glitches and fragments, in hiccups and gulps.

I could hear my name cried through the mesh walls and feel it in the messy spurts of data under my fingertips.
Greta.

It isn't working.

Oh God it isn't.

And yet it was working because I could feel everything; I could feel Rachel falling from her first horse, a Swan Rider who couldn't ride. Her boot (her first boots: she had always been barefoot) catching in the stirrup, the long bone twisting. A strange boy with soft joy, spattered with mud and trying to help her, the brighter-than-broken-bone spark when she met his eye . . .

I could feel everything. I could feel Talis's reeling shock at finding Davie eating that little cat, tibia exposed but pink paw intact, the first time he'd thought
This isn't working, this is the end of the world
. The day he'd destroyed a city and demanded total surrender and Evie had written everything down.

I could feel Rachel sent to Precepture Four for her first execution, how she had tried to feel
dignity necessity pride
but her wings had bumped into the doorframe and twisted half off and her voice broke before she could even call the hostage child by name.

I could feel everything.

I knew that it hurt. I could not stop it from hurting.

I knew that it was lonely. I could not stop it from being lonely. Talis could not feel me holding his hand. But I held his hand—in every way except the physical, I held his hand. I held it all the way to the end.

It was like holding hands with fireworks.

Beautiful and scorching. Brilliant and horrible. It hurt me and I did not let go.

The dying AIs. Thirty-two times, Talis had held their hands. He'd said
look at me
but it had never worked, there was no one who loved them to look at them, there was no circuit breaker for the mind, there was no grace. How could there be no grace?

I loved him, and I looked at him. The room took him apart and I wove him back together.

And it took—oh, it was taking too long. My upload had been twenty-nine minutes. I was trying to slow and gentle these beams, trying to leash them as they ripped and snarled, but still—it was taking too long.

At thirty-one minutes the data was still coming, though in spurts again, sluggish and slow.

I remembered airplanes.

I remembered New York and Amsterdam and Shanghai and Gary the Unpromising and Little Evie in her grey room with no hair and the teddy bear tucked under her arm.

White wings.

An orange quilt.

A first kiss.

A red sea.

A green world.

It was slowing now. It was almost gone. The walls of the grey room were only mesh and I should be able to hear the breathing, but I could not hear the breathing. The screaming had stopped long ago.

Thirty-four minutes. Thirty-five.

Look at me, said Lu-Lien to Michael. Said Francis Xavier to Rachel. I know it hurts. It will be all right. Just look at me. Look at me. Just look.

In the thirty-sixth minute there was nothing.

Nothing.

How could there be no grace?

At thirty-seven minutes fifteen seconds, the beam collimators switched off with a poof of magnetism. The hatch into the room clicked open. I went in at a run.

The new AI was sitting strapped and fastened into the upload chair with her eyes open. Her face was calm. She wasn't breathing.

“You need to breathe,” I said.

Her head was bolted down by a halo, a half-circle of surgical steel pierced with screws. I fumbled for the master release. “You need to make your heart beat. Come on. One two three four five, remember? Look at me.”

No trace of circulation in the infrared, no heartbeat in the throat, and yet those round, bright eyes were lit like on-buttons, and they swept everything in the room. Everything except me. There was no contact in them. It was like meeting the eyes of a painting.

“Talis,” I said. “Rachel. Michael. Look at me.” The catch on the halo finally gave. I pulled it away, too roughly and too fast: one bolt scraped a welt across the forehead. The others had left round, dented wounds. “Please,” I said. “Please. Look at me.”

And suddenly the AI shuddered as if rebooting, and blinked once. Pulled in air, choked on it, and pulled it in again.

“I'm sorry,” she said—a stranger's voice, passionless. “It slipped my mind.”

Then her eyes closed, and when they opened again, they were—finally—looking right at me. Her voice came softly. “It's very beautiful, isn't it?”

“What?”

“Oh,” she said. “Everything.”

I started unstrapping the buckles that held her into her chair. I could feel her sensors on me, brilliant and unashamed. She was breathing again. And bleeding a little, now that her heartbeat had resumed.

Oh, I remembered this. I remembered being ripped so far from the human that you could forget to make your heart beat. I remembered the rush of wonder that could take your knees out from under you.

I remembered so many things. I remembered Talis saying what angels always say: “Don't be afraid.”

“Don't be frightened,” I told her.

“I'm not,” she answered.

The last buckle, the one holding her right wrist, finally popped loose. She lifted that hand, balletic, and daubed at the compression wound that was letting blood trickle across her forehead at a slant like a curious eyebrow. “Stings.”

“I know.”

She dropped her hand, pushed off the chair, and swung to her feet. I put my hands under her arms to steady her. She looked like a child climbing out of bed, like someone awakened from a dream. Lost and little. And yet her voice: “Nice job, Greta, that's going to be our new procedure if we ever need it. I feel . . .”

But there was no way to end that sentence.

I had walked out of my own grey room like that, awash in wonder and not even sure of my own name. The new AI held my arms, my fingers cupping her elbows, hers tracing mine.