“Strength in numbers,” said Talis. “Just in case.”
Elián, the son of a great line of strategists, turned sharply at that. “In case of what?”
“In case of anything. Discretion is my favorite part of valor.”
“I’ll bet,” said Elián.
“As for you, Elián Palnik . . .” Talis grinned and I tagged it as a predatory grin, meant to disturb. “They’re bringing you a horse and a map.”
The word was ambiguous. “A smartmap?” I asked. A smartmap could find locations from positioning satellites, detect water and catalog plants, provide current information on settlements and cities, more.
“If it’s not a smartmap,” said Elián, “then you might as well shoot me in the head.”
“Ooo, tempting!” Talis tilted an eyebrow twenty-three degrees. “Greta, dear. Does anyone in the Precepture have a gun?”
“I don’t think so.” I turned to Elián. “Do you know how to use a horse?”
That made him laugh roughly: a laugh with tears behind it. I was not sure why.
Two days, three.
In the day it was glorious. My body sat in its little cell, but inside me the data seemed infinite. I could close my eyes and picture a library like a forest, its columnar shelves going back and back, and no glimpse of an end to them. Whatever I needed, came—leaping, eager, easy. Someone left a pitcher of asters and coneflower outside the door, and I sat for three hours staring at them. Through my new eyes the homely flowers—the whole world—shone as if new.
The organic memories rose too, more often, now that the brain was not so acutely injured. I had lived eleven-sixteenths of my life within the walls of the Fourth Precepture: there were memories soaked into the stone. The organic mind pushed at the inductive webbing; the webbing shoved the organics into correct positions, and both were me.
I dreamt and dreamt.
I was becoming something—twofold. When I leaned on the wall, I remembered that the stones were cooler at night, and remembered that the specific heat of granite was only 790 joules per kilogram. They were two different kinds of memory, and having both was not always easy. My skin was both my skin and a mesh of sensors. Sometimes I was sure it would not hold me, that I would come apart like sugar in water. Sometimes I simply knew I was larger than my own skin, and the thought did not bother me.
On the third night I dreamt that I went up among the graves. I walked in grass and tangled plants up to my waist. They brushed my arms. The sky was so open that if you made a sound there, it was tiny, swept away. I came to a crater and I climbed down into it, and stood in the open, blasted space. Scratching through the plants had left my bare arms and legs blistered. My limbs were thick with blisters the way a stem gets thick with frogs’ eggs, my body encased in translucent, gelatinous polyps. I sat down and waited for them to hatch.
Not once in the dream was I afraid.
But I woke sharply and felt swollen and—
I leapt up. I ran my fingers down my arms, my legs, turning my sensors up as high as they would go.
“What’s wrong?” said Elián, rolling over in Xie’s bed.
“Perhaps it is nothing,” I said. “It is nothing. A dream.”
I let my arms fall to my sides. There was nothing, nothing.
No, there was too much. Too much in me. Surely it would break me open.
I felt my body shivering—no, shaking.
Elián had staggered out of bed to stand in front of me. In the darkness he touched my hair, softly. “It’s not nothing.”
“The AIs—” I said. The other AIs. It would be factual to include myself in the grouping, but the phrasing did not come naturally. “There is a statistical cluster of anomalous neurological events on the third day after the upload. What was once called ‘skinning.’?”
“Yeah, I remember. The Abbot made Talis warn you.” The cell was starlight-dim, and Elián was only a shape. I turned up my infrared vision to try to see him, but it made him look ghostly. I could see his eye sockets, as if he were a skull. He squinted and pushed his fists into those hollows. I looked away.
“So, skinning—what happens?” asked Elián. “What happened to the AIs?”
They had died. Mostly they had died. They’d gotten caught in a feedback loop, overloaded, died. I said nothing.
I felt Elián’s hands settle on both my shoulders. “Greta? What did you dream about?”
“Hatching,” I said. “I was . . . hatching.”
“You’re obviously not going to hatch.”
No, I thought. I was not going to hatch. I had two skins, but there was nothing inside me, nothing to come out, because there was nothing in my heart.
Unless. Unless there was.
“I think . . . ,” I said, slowly. “I think you should keep me away from Xie.”
“But you—” Elián cut himself off, not quite able to say it. “Greta, don’t you remember how you feel about Xie?”