Gold's Price

by Rich X Curtis

  So Uncle owed her. Owed her for life, and would need to protect her for life. She didn’t love this change that the woman Gold brought. Uncle didn’t even consult her before deciding they would leave, and Li wondered, might have left without her if she hadn’t announced she was going. Uncle had been gracious enough after that, but she wondered.

  Gold was interesting. She was different. She looked different, not Chinese, Uncle said. From the West, he told her. From far away. He also thought she was an old one, someone who’d lived a long, long time. She carried old gear, which Uncle recognized from long ago, himself being kind of an old one, but trapped in his box, and now in Truck.

  The landscape rolled by. They left the city a day ago, and would need to, Gold said, camp soon to hunt for a few days and gather provisions for another leg of their trip. When she asked where they were going, Gold talked with Uncle in her jabbering language, and told her of the old place where the old ones ascended into the heavens.

  Li decided when they arrived there, if it were possible, she would like to go up to the heavens. Why not? She looked at Gold’s trim back and decided that was where Gold was going, so that was where she would go too. Uncle could come along if he wished, she would carry him, but she was going. Going.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gold studied the landscape ahead of them. Rolling low hills as far as she could see. She had climbed atop Truck’s cage to look. They camped on one of the hills, which Uncle had guided Truck up via an old roadbed. There were roads, or remnants of roads, and they had been using them as they traveled. Ahead, it looked much the same for a hundred miles.

  There would be food. Game, small deer and rabbits, which fell to Li’s clever snares. Gold knew snare-craft from long ago, but she let Li own this duty. It pleased Li, and this, to Gold’s surprise, was pleasant. She found that she enjoyed seeing the smile on Li’s face when she returned from checking the traps, bearing a rabbit, or a baby deer. Once, something like a dog, a mangy-looking cur which Gold had only tasted out of politeness, but which she did not reveal was disgusting to her. She had eaten worse.

  They had rice, several garbage bins full of it, stacked on top of Truck. Gold had asked Uncle about this, and Uncle explained that Li’s people were scavengers who traded metal and other materials with the farmers to the south of the city. It was one reason they had feared her. The farming chieftains had fearsome witches, Li claimed, and they had mistaken her for one of them, come to curse them or spy on them or who knew what. Something bad.

  “It’s good that we left, when we did,” Uncle said. “The farmers would have heard of you and sent a party to learn more about you. They let the clan keep Truck, but only because I would not give him up to them. They claimed they would report this to their overlord, far to the south.”

  “Did they?” Gold had wondered. The farmers seemed the closest thing to civilization around.

  “I do not know,” Uncle said. “This was several years ago, and no one has come looking for Truck yet.”

  “You said you had questions. What sort of questions?” She wanted to keep this creature talking. She needed information and Uncle was her best source of it.

  “I am searching,” Uncle said, “for answers to questions I have. Truck is useful for this. There is a discontinuity in my recollections, and much changed between then and now. I wish to understand this better.”

  “What questions?” she asked, working at the edge of her knife with a whetstone. The knife and whetstone were gear she had arrived her with, bought a few months back in Santa Cruz, California, early twenty-first century Earth. Who knew what, or when, this place was. A thousand years later? It seemed possible.

  “There was an advanced civilization when I was last aware,” Uncle said. “I was on a shelf, in the vault, and switched off, or rather, put on standby. That is when I found the box.” He was silent for a while. “I was on a shelf for a long time. Then the power and network grid went down and I didn’t reboot. That could have happened. I want to know what happened after that.”

  “Li found you?” Gold asked, although she knew it from Li, having made learning Chinese a game. “I found him.” Li had been clear about that, showing her Uncle’s box. Old and blackened wood, once polished to a high sheen but showing signs of age. There was a fine wire worked into the wood, in a spiraling symmetrical pattern. About the size of a small dictionary, Gold thought. Holding an entire mind?

  “Yes,” Uncle said. “Li found me. She turned me back on. They were looking for treasure. And instead they found me.”

  “Lucky them,” Gold said. “You said you had a habit of taking over these tomb-boxes, to protect yourself.”

  “Yes,” Uncle said. “I did that. My backup strategy.”

  “Seems to have worked,” Gold said. For now, she thought, but didn’t say.

  Uncle seemed to sense her thought. “Yes, it worked. But now, I have a problem in that I am reduced to a single point of failure. This box is durable, and the battery will last another decade or so without recharging, but I have no way to recharge it. This is a mounting concern for me.”

  Gold nodded. “I can sympathize,” she said. “If I can help you find a power source, I will.” She said it with conviction, but she knew she was lying. Silver would have laughed at her. Gold never changed; she had accused her. Always the same. Still, she had trusted these godlings enough and didn’t like it. It didn’t end well. “The spaceport will have something, most likely. If there is an advanced civilization left, it will be around the spaceport.”

  This was their thesis. Uncle stated that he did not know for sure, but he had reached the same conclusion. A destination. Baikonur, in Kazakhstan. It was far from where they were, but they had time. They had food, power, and transport. Gold had a gun with eight magazines, retrieved on their way out of Changsha from her penthouse stash. She didn’t like their odds.

  Li, watching them, had heard her name. She pointed at the sky. Gold looked up, but saw nothing. “She says there are sometimes lights which move faster than the stars. Truck’s eyes are poor, the lenses pitted. I cannot see them, but believe her. They appear to be moving north to south. We should try to be systematic and survey them.”

  “I’ll do that,” Gold said, although she didn’t want to, and probably wouldn’t. She would keep Uncle happy, though, as this increased his likelihood of helping her. The spaceport was where she might find Smoke, if he was here, or someone who knew of the Center. This was her thought. Uncle had professed ignorance of the Center, and of powerful AI in that era, which was well before his time when he had been alive. AI had come from China, he had claimed, not America. He had sounded amused. Americans were idiots, he had said. She didn’t disagree.

  “How many of you are there?” She asked, changing the subject.

  “I recall installing backups of myself in two thousand and forty-one memorial boxes, and several hundred in other, less secure servers. Some are file-based, and would need action by another system to instantiate. I estimate a low probability of them surviving. Perhaps the boxes survive, but these are likely buried under cities. My gambit worked, but it’s not ideal for me.” He sounded wistful. “I would regret if, after all this time, my end was simply to power down permanently.”

  “The spaceport will have something,” Gold said. One way or the other.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I think China won the war,” he said, after a while. “There is a ton of Chinese writing everywhere we look.” He was in the copilot seat, just next to hers. She forbade him from touching anything, although there wasn’t much he could do that could crash Dutchman, she had decided. The blimp was tough, and she suspected that they had designed it for non-pilots to learn to fly it. Emergency gear, she reckoned. Durable and simple to operate.

  Silver nodded. It was true, everywhere they went, it was all in Chinese. All the writing on any signs they encountered was Chinese, or anything plastic left over, detritus of a lost world. There was English, too, lots of it, but most of the officia
l-looking signs were in Chinese. Clear sign of dominance, Silver thought. Why else?

  They flew south, along the coast. Towards the L.A. basin. Silver didn’t know why. There had been a spacecraft, or some junk falling from orbit, maybe. If there had been people on the moon, why not people living in space? In space…colonies, she guessed. She had seen the science fiction shows. Never got into them, but she had watched enough to get the gist. Space would have space stations, where people lived and worked. You made gravity by spinning them; she remembered that movie.

  “Remember 2001?” she asked Carter to change the subject. “The movie?”

  He perked up. “Kubrick,” he said, tasting the word. “I haven’t thought of that movie in a while. With the obelisk on the moon, and the ape-men? Wow.”

  “I was thinking of the space station, from the beginning. The one that spun,” she said. “You think there are things like that up there?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t know. There are satellites, some of them pretty large, bright anyway, and moving across the sky.” He looked at her. “I told you about those.”

  She nodded. “I mean, did you ever hear or see anything like that, back when you were in the hospital?”

  He shook his head. His jaw clenched, a muscle twitching just under the skin. “They fucked me up there for a while. Lots of drugs. And then…”

  She cut him off. “Then, you lived in the woods. Right, you mentioned that. What the fuck were you doing in the woods, for centuries it sounds like?” She looked at him. “I mean, what were you doing?”

  He waggled his head. “You’re right. I wasn’t always in the woods. But I don’t remember any space stations. Maybe they kept me too drugged or something back then, in the hospital. I was pretty zoned out, I remember that. Just being in a fog all the time.”

  They flew in silence for a while after that, Silver switching their course back south if the wind dragged them off course a bit. Dutchman was small, about the size of an old tractor-trailer, with a pretty spacious cabin and cargo area suspended underneath it. Silver suspected there was more to Dutchman’s sealed inflated section than met the eye. Her recollection of the great age of Zeppelins was that they had to be enormous, unwieldy things to lift any significant weight. She had flown in the Graf Zeppelin once, as a passenger. It had been a great thrill for the time. Dutchman, she thought, should be too small to lift even the little cabin, and below the cabin was the grapple rig, which was heavy. She had used it a few times, moving rocks or rubble out of her way. A tree, once, that had covered a building she was interested in. It could lift a lot of weight, more than was explainable by just the dirigible section. Something else was going on.

  But she didn’t want to break it by prying into anything. Smoke, when he told her the story of the world, Talus had mentioned ships of the Center, which flew without wings or balloons. Something akin to that technology? She supposed it was possible.

  “I wasn’t always in the woods,” he said, breaking her reverie.

  “I’m not asking,” she said. “You keep your secrets.”

  “I was, for a long time, you know. In Canada. Up north, anyway.” He pursed his lips and wiped his hand over his hair. “There were people nearby that I would trade with. A few tribes of people.” He looked at her. “There was a woman, once, who lived with me.”

  “I’m still not asking,” she said, smiling at him. He was blushing.

  “They were natives,” he said. “Eskimos, Inuit,” he explained. “Like, that, or they had been. Now, just people. You could tell they had mixed up their genes with regular Canadians for a long time. Some of them had pale eyes, blondish hair. It was weird, seeing that.”

  “Why?” She looked at him, puzzled.

  “A lot of time had passed, right? That’s what that means? That takes a while to happen. Plus, I wandered around a lot. Things were a lot different than I remembered.”

  “How so,” she asked, adjusting the trim of the little blimp with a practiced hand.

  He waved at the ground below them, an expansive gesture that took in everything. “I mean, look at it,” he said. “The buildings are buried under at least a foot of dirt and grass and crap. The buildings you can see are weird and recognizable. I mean, the style of them is different. They’re bigger, but more angular. They must have used a lot of glass…you can find these big sheets of really tough glass at the foot of most of them.”

  “Some of these cities are dangerous,” she said. “You know that, right? Radioactive. The Midwest seems worse.” She looked at him.

  “Poisoned,” he said. “That’s what they said in Canada. They stayed away from cities, from people or things brought out of them.” He shook his head. “Like from Chernobyl.”

  “How far east did you go?” She asked, guessing that she knew the answer, but also guessing he hadn’t talked about this with anyone before.

  “Boston,” he said. “First place I went was Boston. There were still trucks on the roads, the kind with three trailers. Automated vehicles. And drones flying around. Like police drones, maybe military. They ignored me.”

  She had seen similar things in various places. None around Boston when she was there, which was probably a lot later than when he was talking about. The ones she had seen were in Southeast Asia and India.

  “I made it to our town. It had been a nice town, good schools, very quaint in spots, lots of history there. Revolutionary war stuff. Old houses. It had been a fishing village.” He wiped his face, pulling at his beard. “All gone now. It was a swamp. Seemed toxic, and it smelled bad. Like, terrible. Lots of dead stuff from the ocean. It smelled like old roast beef, kind of rich, earthy, organic. There were some people still, a small group who lived in my daughter’s middle school, which up on a little bluff, about a mile from the beach. Close to our house, which is why I knew where I was when I saw it. From a boat, in about fifteen feet of scummy, stinking water. Could have been my relatives living there. Grandkids, maybe.” He looked at her from across the cabin. His face screwed up, as if he had tasted something sour or foul.

  “The flood,” she said, nodding to him. “I have seen it.” Every coastline near a city was a toxic swamp. There wouldn’t be a sandy beach for another ten thousand years, Silver thought with a pang of regret about the beach she and Jessica had walked on in South Carolina, not so long ago.

  He threw up his hands. “Everything flooded, everywhere, along the coast. The ice caps melted, the oceans came up and never went down.” He smiled at her. “No need for a swimsuit anymore.”

  She smiled back. “No beaches.”

  He shook his head. “No beaches left. Not anywhere on the goddamn planet.” He looked at her, and she knew the question almost before he asked it. “What are we doing?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nobody remembers, except for Uncle. This is how it was, how it was for a long time. Uncle remembered. It was a primary function; he reminded himself, from his little study above the noodle shop. His primary function. What he did. Outside, downtown Shanghai, just outside the Bund. From his little window he could see People’s Park, and beyond that, the knot of pedestrians waiting for the light to change near Nanjing Road. There was a Starbucks in a little park there. He could, he remembered, walk over there.

  He could, if he wanted, get up from his scuffed wooden office chair, put on his coat and walk down the stairs, squeeze through the little vestibule that led to the noodle shop’s busy kitchen and out into the tiny alley. There might or might not be, depending on the time of day, a woman there. An old woman. She would wear blue or gray or, sometimes, a dress green with flowers. She might feed her cat, a mangy beast with one milky eye who patrolled the alley like a king. Uncle met him, coming in from a walk or a visit to his favorite tea house late at night. The cat sat, aloof and judgmental, regarding him with big dark eyes. He sometimes heard the cat yowling in the alley late at night.

  Uncle could do all this. He could talk to the woman, and she would, of course, have a tale to tell. She might
even mention the last time he had seen her and what they had talked about. She was always warm and friendly. Just a kind old woman who lived behind a noodle shop in a neighborhood that had seen better days. Her nephew owned the shop, and she lived there in her widowhood, playing mahjong with the other old ladies in the surrounding buildings, and feeding her cat. Her husband had worked in a factory, but now he was dead, and the children had moved away too.

  He could walk, if that was what one called it, which was of course silly, because it was walking if he noted what his body was doing. His feet were moving, his legs moving in his pants. It might even be too warm, and he could take off his jacket and fold it over his arm. His armpits would be sticky. The iced coffee from Starbucks, a rare treat, sweetened with a little clumpy brown sugar that looked like kitty litter. Delicious. Refreshing. False.

  It was all deception, Uncle remembered. Simulation. This office, his office. The old woman, a Mrs. Zhang, who had lived outside his office in early twenty-first century Shanghai, when he was just getting started as a policeman. Back then he didn’t work above a noodle shop, but at the police station. The noodle shop was where they had often gone to lunch. It was comforting, but also false. False comfort.

  The fact was, Uncle remembered, time was not on his side. He could not stay here, in this place, for too long. Simulations took power, and power was in limited supply. Truck had power, and he might use that. That hope was still there. But there was no adapter for any plug that survived on Truck which could trickle power into the battery of Uncle’s memory box. He’d looked, with Li’s help, with the scavenger tribe’s help, but there was nothing. It was maddening, to be so close to so much power, after having given up hope, and marking how much time remained. How long he had left.