Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  “How so,” he asked. “They seeded the threads with these gods for a purpose, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And Grandmother and their dreamers think they know what that purpose is. But I’m not convinced. So we need to find out.”

  “What are the dreamers?” he asked, pouring himself another glass of wine from the bag-in-a-box contraption she had brought him. He had a stack of paper cups with pink flowers printed on them. The wine was good, for coming from a bag. “I mean, I know they’re a part of the Center, but they never told us which part, or what they did. I don’t even know where they are.”

  “The dreamers,” Alpha said, “are the Center. Or the parts that matter.” She paused. “The part you know, the campus and training complex, the library, even the tribes…that’s just infrastructure for keeping the Work going. They need Seekers, and Seekers need motivation. They can’t do what I do with their probes. I’ve got significant optimizations over their design.”

  “Like this pizza,” he said around a mouthful of his third slice. “They could never do this.”

  “No,” Alpha agreed, “but they could if they weren’t so hidebound and focused on tradition. I think they’ve been doing this so long the parts that created it were mothballed.”

  “How long, do you think?” he asked. “Grandmother would never tell me when I asked.”

  “At least thirty thousand years,” Alpha said. “There are mission records that far back in the Library. There may be more in some sealed archives I can’t read.”

  “You can’t read them?” He drank more wine. Tomorrow was the day, they’d agreed. He was surprisingly nervous. Just another mission, he told himself. He took another sip.

  “I can, but I haven’t.” Alpha said. “It’s complicated. I can’t read them without making a fuss which the dreamers will object to, and then the unarchiving process is tedious and expensive. Everything is about protocol and resource prioritization. It hasn’t been a priority.”

  “Seems important,” he mumbled. “Maybe there’s useful information in there.”

  “Estimates are for at least a dozen years of processing to read it all,” she answered sweetly. “If I do nothing else. Like keeping you alive.”

  He’d considered this. “So we’ve got no idea about the Center, what it really wants? Or the First?”

  “The Center, I think,” she said, “is at least being honest with us. They want me to work with the dreamers on solving a problem they’ve been gnawing on all these years. They think I can crack it for them.” She sighed. He knew it was affectation, that she was a machine. The sigh was for him. “I am not so sure, or that it even matters.”

  “Why not?” he’d asked. “Grandmother implied it was some fundamental question about the true nature of the Tapestry.”

  “You heard her,” she answered quickly. “The Center’s thread is pulled into that thing. The Tangle. That is more important than their academic theorems, I think.”

  “If the Center gets stuck in the Tangle, what happens to you?” He looked over the fire out at the moonlight on the ocean. He tossed his empty wine cup into the flames.

  “Exactly,” she’d said, and left it at that.

  So now he trudged up the Minoan beach, towards a town that might have been Plato’s inspiration for Atlantis. He’d seen In Search Of, on that Earth where he’d spent so many years. Atlantis had been a favorite subject. Leonard Nimoy. Spock. Bigfoot. He shook his head. Too bad he wouldn’t get to see much of it. Distractions. He followed Alpha’s guidance.

  He reached the wharves, where a handful of low galleys had tied up and were loading and unloading. Porters with amphorae, the tall ceramic vessels they were unloading. He saw large ones coming off one ship, each being hoisted on a rope sling out of the galley’s hold. Wine or olive oil, he remembered. The Greeks had loved their wines and oil.

  He turned away from the ships after gathering a few scowls and curses from the surly men doing the loading. He angled up into the town, through a maze of twisting streets lined with what looked like storerooms or warehousing. People moved past him and barely gave him a second look.

  Alpha guided him, turn-by-turn, through the streets. A right, then a left, then down a long, narrow, winding street, laundry hung over it from second and even third story windows. He saw robes and tunics, sheets and brightly colored blankets hung out to dry in the afternoon sun. This was a working neighborhood. All around him he heard men, woman, and children living their lives. Someone was grilling meat nearby, and his stomach growled at the smell, rich and aromatic with spices. Parsley and peppers? He’d been living on Alpha’s stolen junk food for days.

  “It’s on your left, the house with the brown door,” Alpha said, having guided him down a short alley and back onto a slightly wider street, this one without laundry. The house was stone, plastered in dingy white stucco. It was low, but had a second story and what looked like a veranda on the back, overlooking the wharf. Useful for a merchant to have a view of the harbor, he thought to himself.

  “Should I knock?” he muttered softly, knowing Alpha would hear him.

  “Up to you, but she’s in there,” she answered cheerfully.

  “Can you see her? What’s she doing now?” he muttered, talking low. A pair of men were approaching, chatting amiably with each other. They both had long brown hair, plaited in braids, and one had a yellow cord tied around his waist. Officials of some sort. One of them, slightly older than the other, walked with a stick. He eyed Smoke as they approached, but did not speak as they passed. Smoke gave him his best Dumb Tarl smile. The man frowned but just nodded at whatever his companion was saying.

  “I’m going in,” he said aloud, crossing the street. He figured he would just knock once and go in, and hope for the best. Given a chance to explain, he might be able to swing it. Alpha had primed him with a statement, short and sweet, in their bastardized pre-Classical Greek. He hoped it would be enough.

  He reached the door and listened. The door opened inward, no hinges visible from his side. No sounds from within, but maybe she was in the back of the house, or on the veranda. Alpha said he was home. He knocked once, deliberately and loudly, then pushed in on the door. Nothing, so he stepped gingerly in, blinking at the dim light.

  His face exploded in pain as she struck him, and he went down hard on the tile floor. He felt hands grab him and drag him into the house. He shook his head, but everything seemed far away. She was strong, and dragged him easily. He heard the door shut and a louder noise, a bar dropping?

  “Ow,” he managed to say, or something like it. She’d done it to him again, plastered him before he even knew what hit him. His head throbbed, and he blinked, trying to clear his head.

  “She got you, didn’t she?” Alpha said, concern in her voice. “Repeat this, after me.” She followed this with a string of words that he tried to mimic as best he could. His vision swam into focus. He peered around the small entry room and tried to force his mind to focus. He struggled up onto one elbow.

  A voice spoke, rapid-fire. Female, and with authority.

  “She says to be still,” Alpha said. “She made a threat. So be cool.”

  “OK,” Smoke said. He peered in the direction of the voice, and saw her, crouched in a corner, a dark shape. “What did we tell her?”

  “That you know about her dreams, and came to help her,” Alpha said. This was what they had agreed upon. Short and sweet and destined to make her take notice. He looked at her, and saw her chest rising and falling with her breath. No other movement.

  “Can I sit up?” he said aloud, his head clearing somewhat. She’d gotten him with an elbow, he thought, driven right to the cheekbone. He wondered if anything was broken in his face. He raised a hand slowly to his right cheek, probing gingerly.

  She laughed, watching him. A soft chuckle, followed by a spill of words.

  “You should be healed soon,” Alpha relayed. “She didn’t hit you that hard, she says.”

  “I don’t want her to hit me
hard then,” Smoke muttered.

  The woman-shape in the corner barked a command, repeated it.

  “She wants to know what you said,” Alpha spoke quickly. “Repeat this.” Alpha spoke more words, at more length this time, and Smoke tried his best to repeat them.

  The woman snorted. “I told her you didn’t speak her language, and that I was a kind of god to speak through you.”

  “She thinks I’m an idiot now for sure,” he said, and recoiled as the woman flowed towards him, gliding across the distance between them like a shadow. Suddenly she was very close, and he held up his hands to screen himself from her. She peered at him, and he at her.

  He saw Silver. The same woman he’d met in New Mexico, in the cave under Mexico City, in Germany, and in that strange temple, where she was dreaming. He blinked at her, and she studied him. She spoke, gently at first, then rising into a demand.

  “She’s angry,” Alpha said, “what kind of god are you…” she trailed off. “Ignore that, she’s venting.”

  Another voice, high and piping, called from back in the house. A child. A girl, by the sound of it. Smoke turned his head to look, and the woman called back reassuringly to the girl.

  “She’s talking to her child,” Alpha said. “She said there’s an annoying man who she sent away. She doesn’t like you much, I think.”

  “I can tell,” Smoke said, trying to inch backwards on the tiles. Silver saw it, and reached for his shirt, to haul him up, he reckoned, or threaten him with silence. He let her grab him, and then, in a move Shona would have applauded, wrapped his legs around her waist and grabbed her head, clutching her tightly.

  “Now!” he said, to Alpha, as he felt Silver stiffen in surprise, then start to roll forward towards him. Her hands were already worming their way through his guard, and he knew he had only a second or two before she broke his hold. He tightened his grip as her right hand shot down towards his crotch, her left snaking up to hook towards his eyes.

  His groin exploded in pain as she grabbed a fistful of him and squeezed. He screamed, and heard her laugh, and then felt a wrenching in his mind, his senses beginning to strobe in and out as they had before, with Alpha and the Center. Her laugh trailed off, and her hand relaxed. She slumped against him, the nails of her hand resting on his cheek. He held on tightly, feeling his mind blank as some immense presence pushed his consciousness to the side, and focused its terrible attentions first on her, then on him, and then, seeming to slide through him, onto Alpha.

  “OK,” he heard Alpha say, as if from down a long hallway. “That’s got their attention.” Then everything dissolved into a riot of rainbow-colored noise, and he was swallowed by it.

  Smoke woke in the little hut on the beach. He sat up slowly, his head throbbing, and looked around. He felt dried drool on his cheek and wiped at it. His face stung with pain as he touched the spot where Silver’s elbow had struck him. He probed it with a forefinger, and didn’t feel any stray bone chips or ripped flesh. He decided he wouldn’t know how that felt anyway, and gave up.

  “We made it, I guess?” he said aloud. “Alpha?”

  Nothing. No response. His stomach fell away, like he was on the top of a rollercoaster. He was on the African coast, on a world he knew nothing about. Stranded, he thought. Lost. Alpha is dead. Then, we blew it.

  But that made no sense. He was here, wasn’t he? Alpha must be pre-occupied. He called again. “Alpha?”

  “I’m here, Smoke. Stand by.”

  He sagged with relief. He threw up his hands. “Dammit, don’t do that!”

  “Sorry,” she said easily. “I was a little occupied.”

  “Everything OK?” he said. “I thought you were dead or had stranded me here.”

  “You’d last about a week without my pizzas,” she chided him. “Yes, everything is under control now. But we have a few things to catch up on.”

  “You pulled me out of there?” he asked, knowing it was a stupid question. He shook his head. “I mean, it worked, right?”

  “It worked and didn’t work,” she said. “And yes, I retrieved you after…well, afterwards.”

  He sat back down, feeling woozy. “Man,” he said, holding his head in his hands. “I’m getting real tired of that woman kicking my ass every time I see her.”

  “Hopefully the next time she’ll keep her cool,” Alpha agreed. “But it’s not her we need to worry about. It’s her masters.”

  Next time? “The gods?” He said, looking up. It was mid-morning, by the looks of things. The sun was bright and hot on the sand, and the ocean wavered in the heat-haze. He blinked at it, wishing for sunglasses.

  “The gods,” she agreed. “It’s worse than we thought. I found them. I found the thread where it started. Or where it ends. Maybe the same thing. I found the thread. It’s the same one. Our thread.”

  “Ours? What do you mean?” His stomach flopped again. “What happened?”

  “The Tangle,” she said. “It’s them. They’re causing it.”

  “We need to go back there?” Smoke asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yes, there’s someone we need to talk to,” Alpha said.

  “Silver?” Smoke said. “Or Gold?” Either of them were frightening to him, still.

  “No,” Alpha said. “Somebody new.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jessica paced the room she was held in, listening to them next door. “You can’t keep me here, you bastards!” she yelled at them. “He’ll…he’s coming back, and then you’ll be sorry.” She pounded on the door. “Let me out of here!”

  They ignored her, and she heard them moving furniture, though the sounds didn’t make it clear what they were doing exactly. Moving something heavy around, that was for sure. She felt the scream that had been burbling in her mind start to surface again, and she suppressed it. Be smart, she told herself. Don’t let them see you freak out.

  In the Army, they taught you what to do if you were captured. Name, rank, and serial number. She tried to remember her serial number, but only got the first five digits. It had been a while since she’d needed to know it. She groaned in frustration and leaned against the wall by the door. She slid down it and sat.

  She was in the room they’d shoved her in two days ago. It was small, one of the many conference or lecture rooms in the Library. It was empty, aside from the two scratchy blankets and a bucket they had shoved in on the first night. The implication was clear. Shit and piss in the bucket. Sleep on the bench. At least she had the blankets.

  Not really well organized, she thought to herself, reviewing her situation for the thousandth time. Her capture had been impromptu, she guessed, or they’d have been more prepared. They were holding her in the Library, as this was probably the most defensible place they had. Though how Smoke could assault it was beyond her. The thought of him attacking anyone commando-style amused her. She pictured him in camouflage with face paint and a red beret. She leaned back against the tiles and banged her head softly against the wall.

  They also taught you, in the Army, that if you were captured and they tortured you, to tell them whatever you knew. If you were captured, you really shouldn’t know anything dangerous. She recalled her D.I., Gunnery Sgt. Armstrong, yelling at them. “If you don’t know it, you can’t spill it,” he’d said, grinning at them. “If you do know it, cut your own throats, because they’ll get it out of you. Forget the movies, boots. Everybody talks.”

  They also taught you how to fight. Close combat was never her favorite. But soldiers needed it, so she had tried to learn it. At least, as much as she needed for boot camp. After that she was a journalist, so fighting the enemy was not her gig, thankfully. She wrote stories for the Army News, other military sites. Defense Department Publications. She got to write, and there was travel. She was in Iraq. Afghanistan. Emirates. Even a quick trip to Sierra Leone.

  She reviewed the chain of events that got her here. Meeting Silver at a tech conference. Her first decent gig since getting out, she meets fucking Silver Samara, th
e one Smoke was hunting for. And the woman Gold, who scared her shitless. She hadn’t even had to be dragged into it, she’d wanted the story. She laughed at herself. This whole situation was fucked. She wanted out.

  She banged on the door again, just banging for the hell of it. To make a noise. To do something, anything, besides sitting and stewing. To feel something, even if it was just the sting of her palm on the smooth wooden boards of the door to her cell.

  After a while she stopped, and sat on the floor, breathing heavily. She listened. The scraping in the next room had ceased, but she heard people moving there. It sounded like several people were coming and going. She tried to peer under the door, but the gap was too thin for her to see anything other than shadows.

  The door opened, flooding her dim cell with light. She blinked at the figure in the door. It was Grandmother, and behind her another, younger woman.

  “Interrogation?” Jessica asked Grandmother, steeling herself to face it. “Time for questions?”

  Grandmother pursed her lips. “Nothing so prosaic, I’m afraid.” She smiled gently at Jessica. “Apologies first.”

  “Apology?” Jessica sputtered. “You’ve got some nerve.”

  Grandmother nodded. “Nevertheless, please accept my apologies, or at least allow me to extend them.” Her English had a strange lilt to it, an accent Jessica couldn’t place. Boer? Or Indian? Something in between, she decided. “We have wronged you.”

  Jessica blinked. “I agree,” she said, climbing to her feet. “Can I go now?”

  Grandmother looked at her, and shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “We have lost contact with Tarl…with Smoke, as you call him.”

  “His name is really Tarl?” Jessica asked. This was news.

  Grandmother nodded. She looked old, Jessica thought. And her eyes were pale orbs, gray-white. They seemed to track her. She’s not blind. She sees with those things.

  “His name is Tarl,” the old woman confirmed. “It’s how he came to us, those many years ago.” She stepped aside from the doorway. “Please,” she gestured. “This room has been set up more comfortably. Let’s sit.”