Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  “I will trust you to keep a lookout for tigers,” he said aloud, his voice snatched away by the breeze. “I need to exercise it.”

  This was true. Alpha had said so. “Go left, then, there are people fishing to the north.”

  “Let’s go have a look at them,” Smoke said. He was bored of sitting around, brooding. Silver had been there, as expected. Silver and Gold seemed to be on every world of the Congruency, the Knot in the Tapestry of worlds. Why was that?

  “They are too far for you to walk in the remaining daylight, and you have no flashlight.” Alpha chided him. “Besides, they can tell you nothing, and if they know you’re here they will fear you and we’ll need to leave. We should probably leave soon anyway.”

  “Why?” he asked, walking north anyway. Turn right at the western shore and you would go north, right? He walked, deciding to follow the beach just past the promontory he could see rising in the distance. “I like it here.”

  “Too much takeout food is drawing predators,” Alpha said. “They already know you’re here. A large cat was sniffing around a few hundred meters away last night.”

  “Jesus,” Smoke said, impressed. “You see all that?”

  “I can’t see,” Alpha said, “but I can sense things. Tigers and lions and other, smaller canids. Hyenas, maybe. They don’t prowl the beach much as their food sources are further inland. But they increased after the burgers. Maybe those were a bad idea.”

  “They were good burgers,” Smoke said. He generally didn’t eat much meat, but when in Rome…and the meds she’d brought him made him both thirsty and ravenous. He wished he’d brought one of the blue plastic water bottles from last night’s dinner with him. They had what looked like Chinese script on them, and a grinning baby, cheeks like Chairman Mao on them. Baby water. He shook his head. Lions?

  “Why did we come here?” He asked.

  “I told you,” she said patiently. “This place is isolated and on the fringe of the congruency. You were hurt. That was our protocol. If you get hurt, we come somewhere to rest up. Plus, the time slip here is in our favor. Each hour here is less than a minute on Talus. We can rest and plan and not lose much time.”

  Smoke knew all this. But he chafed at it. The sun was just kissing the horizon now, purpling the distant clouds on the horizon. “Could have picked somewhere without tigers,” he grumbled, just to grumble. He didn’t get to complain much in his life, he mused. Normal people got to be grumpy, but not Smoke. Not as a trainee, apprentice, or Seeker. Definitely not now. He’d been in service to the Center all his life. And he was still dealing with them.

  Except now, they wanted to kill him. He was sure of it. They would not have hesitated to cull him, he knew, back before he’d returned as the rebel Smoke, if they’d sensed he was even considering betrayal on this scale. Or if he’d disappointed them in some other minor way. Seekers disappeared all the time. The work was dangerous, and the Center was not, apparently, that good at caring for its agents. They’d never sent him CARE packages, for instance, not in all the decades he’d been on missions for them. Alpha said they couldn’t, they assumed it wasn’t possible and hadn’t researched it beyond that. Tradition drove them, not innovation.

  So they were after him. He knew it, so they were careful. He sighed. “We’ll move tomorrow, somewhere with a real hospital, maybe?”

  “A hospital can’t tell you anything that I can’t,” Alpha said. “I can sense your body at the cellular level. You just need to rest up and let that silver stuff work. Two more days.”

  He’d reached the jumble of boulders. It wouldn’t be much of a climb to the top. He started forward, testing his knee on the first one. “You can do this, but go slowly, or we’ll be here for two more weeks instead of days.”

  He looked north as he climbed, and saw them. Just visible on the horizon was a sail. It was small and brown, the boat that carried it was a dark line he could barely see.

  “People,” he said, knowing that she knew they were there. He wondered what it was like to live here. “Fishermen.”

  “I told you they were fishing. Four men in that boat, well, three men and a boy. They use nets to bring the fish up.” Alpha said. “They live just up the coast, in a little village by the bay.”

  “I know how fishing works,” Smoke said. “Seems like a good life.” Most people in most places lived like this, small communities. Talk about smothering, though. Everyone would know everything about everybody. He shook his head. No secrets. It could be refreshing.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. Alpha was smothering, he was finding, but it was better than the alternative. He wanted her to stay on his side. They had a common enemy, the Select and their brood of helpers. They wanted Alpha in a box, where they could poke and prod at it. Why? Again, he was no god. The question itched at him though.

  “Why does the Center even want to find other AIs?” he asked Alpha.

  “They may not want to anymore,” Alpha laughed. “Finding me didn’t work out too well for them. But I’ve been wondering this myself, and have some theories.”

  “Share your theories,” Smoke said, adding “Please.” He climbed a little higher, using his hands to steady himself. The rocks were big granite things, well worn by the years of wind and wave. They were warm under his hands. He reached the top of the rise, and settled atop the largest of the boulders, which had a wide flattish patch at its crest.

  “They fear the Congruency. A lot of their investigations were here, or worlds that are near to here. Universes. You know what I mean,” Alpha said. She was a good conversationalist.

  She’d first manifested herself to him as male. A severe-looking man in a suit. What a corporate Silicon Valley executive might have looked like. During their sojourn in the no-time while he had transferred her instance to Talus, they had had a lot of time to talk, if you could call it that, and she had decided she was female. Gender was fluid among humans, she said, so why not with her too? Smoke was glad she hadn’t decided to become something beyond his ability to relate to. Had she become a woman so he could relate to her? For him? If so, he was touched.

  “If they find out you are here, they will either tell you to leave or cause problems,” she said. “You should not be seen. If you can see them, they can see you.”

  “I’ll be still. They won’t see me.” Another sail had joined the first. This one was bigger, with a taller mast and a sail patched with brown cloth. “Where do they get the cloth?”

  “Trade with the interior,” she said. “There are farmers a day’s walk inland, and there are rivers.”

  Rivers. Trade routes. Farms, towns, settlements. Cities. Rulers. Spies. It would be the same here as everywhere.

  “Aaannd, they’ve seen you…”…” she said. “Can we go now?”

  He looked. “They have a lookout atop that mast,” he said. “That’s who saw me?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Hope you enjoyed making that hut.”

  He hadn’t. His knee had been killing him, and he’d gathered the wood in a kind of half-hobble. It had taken all day. “Why?”

  “Because you’ll have to make it again, once we move,” she said. “You need to listen to me.”

  He considered this. “Can’t we go somewhere with furniture?”

  “No,” she said. “We can’t. It’s difficult enough to hide what I am doing from the Select, moving your supplies, moving you. They’re going to figure it out if we do too much.”

  “Really?” He didn’t believe it. “From what? Your computational energy expenditures?” She had explained they could see the ebbs and flows of the power that Alpha used, sort of like an accountant tracking anonymous transactions. They didn’t know what they were for, but they could see the size and frequency of each. “There’s no way.”

  “They are smarter than you are,” she said. Alpha didn’t get angry. She was a machine. She explained. She convinced. She manipulated. “I could probably figure it out, and if I could, we have to assume they could. We don’t want them se
nsing weakness.”

  It was good advice. “So let’s stay here”

  “See the boat? It’s getting closer,” she said, a note of exasperation leaking into her voice. “You’re trespassing. At best they will want to feast you and marry you one of their daughters. Or, you could be dinner. Good chance they’re bored with fish.”

  “You’re good with jokes,” he said. “For a machine.” The boat was closer now, and he could see the waving figure of a man, a boy, seated on a crossbar atop the mast, skinny ankles wrapped around it. The boy was pointing, guiding the boat through the shoals. There were six men he could see on the boat, four on oars and one each fore and stern. The one in the rear manned a steering oar. The one in the front was watching Smoke. He had a long knife in his hands.

  “Okay,” he said. “I suspect marriage is out of the question. What did you have in mind?”

  “You need to start listening to me,” she said. “The whole reason we’re here is because you were being stubborn.”

  “I had to see if it was her,” he protested. “To really know for sure.”

  “We could have come back, in a week, or a month,” she said. “We need to play it safe. If things move too quickly, I can’t protect you. You have got to get over this hero-complex you have.”

  Hero? Me? He laughed inside. He was no hero. He was just lost. The men had guided the boat past the boulders, and once inside the breakwater, were quickly grounding it on his beach. Well, probably their beach, but the one in front of his little hut. The one with the knife jumped into the surf, and stalked towards him.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was being stubborn. I don’t like all this sneaking around.”

  “So you’ll listen to me when I suggest things?” she said. “No more going rogue?”

  The man with the knife had reached the boulders and began to climb. He was brown-skinned, very lean, had a face like old leather. He wore only a skirt-like kilt, the same brown as the patch in their sail. The knife looked very long. He locked eyes with Smoke as he climbed. There was nothing kind in those eyes.

  “No more going rogue,” he agreed. “Speaking of which, can we get going?”

  “Maybe I should let him get a little closer?” she said, teasingly. “Does he look friendly?”

  “Decidedly unfriendly,” he said. “He’s got a knife.”

  The man barked something at him. He was five yards away now, and two boulders below Smoke. He repeated it. Smoke smiled at him, which drew a scowl. Beyond him, he could see the others on the beach, one still on the boat. They were rooting through his hut, scattering his things across the beach. One of them held up his sleeping bag. He felt the pull of recall. His vision swam as it kicked in.

  “Sorry,” he said to the man. “Gotta go.”

  Then, he was back on the beach, where he’d first arrived. It was morning. There was no hut, no boat, no man with a hard face and a knife. Just the sand, and the sea, and the wide-open blue sky.

  “Same beach?” he asked.

  “Same beach,” she answered. “No fishermen here, though. It’s a bit further back in time, I think. Hard to tell. Nobody nearby that I can find.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Maybe I could stay here forever then.”

  “Can’t do that,” she said. “We have to save the world first.”

  “There is that,” he said, and started gathering the wood for the hut. “Can we have burritos tonight?”

  Chapter Seven

  Jessica went to the Library. Smoke had told her it was within her purview. He said he had smoothed the way. She wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but she knew where it was. It was the big, multi-domed building at the center of the main campus, not far from their apartments. She walked, savoring the smell of the green, freshly cut grass, the symmetry of the well-tended shrubbery and little clumps of trees.

  Smoke had told her the groves, as he called them, were another place for Guides to meet in secret, playing at their endless, student-like games and pastimes. In the groves were sometimes hidden small huts, which could be used for clandestine meetings, or sexual assignations. It was expected that the Guides play these games, and strengthen relationships with each other. It was, he said, part of the theater of control the Center exercised over Guides and their lives.

  She didn’t doubt him. As she walked, she noted figures moving through the trees of the grove she passed on her right, indistinct in the dappled green shadows of the late afternoon. A face turned towards her, lighter against the darker shadowy gloom. Did that Guide pause, just for a moment, as he noticed her? Was it even a he? The shadows swallowed the figure, as they receded deeper inside. She couldn’t be sure.

  Was she being watched, she wondered? Of course, she knew she was. Smoke had drilled her into this. The Center mistrusted him, and by extension, her. But they had to tolerate both Smoke and Jessica’s presence here. He held the keys, and those keys, the root level access to their systems from which all of their power flowed, were a direct threat to them. “If they cross me,” he had told her, “I can destroy them. They know this, so you will be safe.” She was under his protection.

  Jessica walked, staying on the paths of crushed, white stones, following the looping arc of path towards the Library. As she approached she studied the building. It was a set of five or six domes, arranged in a lopsided circle around a larger, taller dome. The building was of buff-colored stone. Paris had stones of the same color, she realized. She remembered that Napoleon had used stones from the same quarry for many of his official buildings, when he embarked on his civic rebuilding of Paris. It was lovely stone, she decided, glowing in the mid-afternoon light.

  These buildings were not ornate, though. No Parisian flourish here. The lines of the domes were simple, almost stark. A double lip ran around the edge of the base of the main dome, the largest one. This seemed almost the only nod to architecture or human art in the whole building. Or perhaps it was a funnel for rainwater, she thought, as it followed the curve of the main wall down to the ground. So, function, rather than form. The dome itself had ridges spaced around its perimeter, but those too, could be to lighten the stone roof. She had seen similar ridges on stone domes in Rome, and remembered seeing a show about it.

  This dome, however, was massive. Easily twice the size of the Capitol dome in D.C. The flanking domes that surrounded it might even be as big or bigger than the one in Washington. She wasn’t sure. She had thought it was closer, but its size was deceptive. She looked up at it as she walked. It would take a few minutes to reach, she realized.

  A figure appeared on the path ahead of her, skipping merrily on the stones. The Boy. Smoke had told her about him. He skipped towards her, piping a song in his high-pitched voice. She did not know the words. Smoke had made him seem terrible and daunting, but he seemed, to Jessica, to be just a boy. He was skinny, dark brown from the sun, his head clean-shaven and just gray with a few days growth of presumably black hair. The Boy looked up at her as he approached, and smiled in surprise.

  Fake surprise, she knew. Nothing here was this unplanned. He stopped singing as he skipped up to her, his song ending on a high, lilting note. “You are Jessica! Welcome to Talus!” he said, his voice high and reedy. He smiled up at her, showing even white teeth. “Tarlannan did not tell us you were so pretty.” His eye held hers, and he bowed a low, dramatic bow to her, hands crossed across his chest.

  She smiled. “Tarlannan?” she repeated. “You mean Smoke?”

  “We prefer his given name,” the Boy said. “It is more fitting. This Smoke is,” he paused, as if to think, casting around for the right word, “an affectation. A nom de guerre, if you will.”

  “You speak French?” She asked, surprised.

  “The Tapestry of worlds is wide,” the Boy said. “And we have studied many places.”

  “I know this,” she said. “It’s why I was coming here.” She nodded at the high domes of the Library. “I am a little bored and Smoke spoke highly of your Library.”

  The Boy gl
anced back over his shoulder, in the direction she had indicated, as if he was surprised. “I see! You come to review our archives? To see for yourself?”

  She nodded. “I hope that is all right?” she said quickly. “I was told it would not be a problem.”

  “Oh no problem! None at all,” he said, bowing again, and throwing his arms wide, indicating the Library, perhaps the entire Center. “We are, as you might say, an open book. Nothing to hide here. You may snoop all you like.”

  She blinked at him. Snoop? She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off.

  “A poor choice of words,” he said quickly. “Forgive me, it has been many years since I learned English. You may look all you like, I meant to say.”

  She nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.” A slip of the tongue? Could this Boy really be, as he seemed, just a boy? Or was it a guise? A cloak of skin for something else, something more dire and calculating than this child seemed to her. The floor of reason underneath these thoughts threatened to fall away beneath her.

  She steadied herself. Could she even believe a word this…Boy, as Smoke called him, said? She nodded, and began walking.

  The small boy followed, haltingly, at a slow skip. “Please, a moment,” he called out her, a hand raised. She paused, and as she turned, she saw another figure approaching from behind her. An old woman, tottering slightly. Jessica turned to her, lips parted as if to speak. But the Boy cut her off with a wave of his skinny wrist.

  The Boy spat onto the lawn. He grimaced. “Perhaps we should talk another time,” he said, eying the old woman as she approached. Then he turned and dashed off the path, disappearing into the trees.

  Jessica shook her head. She thought about ignoring the old woman. Smoke had spoken of her as well, she thought. Grandmother, he called her. Another of their Select. But instead some of the manners she’d been taught growing up in Maryland took over, and she waited for the old woman to reach her.

  The old woman smiled. Her eyes were white and cloudy with what looked like terrible cataracts. “You are going to the Library? I can show you their collections. For long was I the chief steward of these records. I know this collection.” No introductions, no preamble or small talk, Jessica thought. Straight to the point.