Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  “She thinks we’re green,” Silver said. “In fighting.”

  Gold rolled her eyes. “She knows about that place in the mountains, though, doesn’t she?”

  Silver shrugged. “She knows,” she said. “More like we can’t command troops, she knows best. The usual stuff.”

  Gold barked a laugh. “She’s got what, a thousand men?” She leaned closer. “You tell her about your army in India?”

  “It was Assyria, not India,” Silver said absently. “And no, I didn’t measure dicks with her.”

  “Right, it ended in India. What about that jungle place? Where you fought her kind?” Gold snapped her fingers. “Vietnam?”

  Silver just looked at her. She shook her head.

  Gold pursed her lips, exhaling. “I had big armies too, you know. Lots of times.”

  “Not measuring dicks with you, either,” Silver said, but she smiled at the other woman. “What she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. That’s in our favor, right?” She thought back to her campaigns in Asia, closing her eyes briefly to see the endless procession of her troops, spears flashing in the sun, the elephants lowing in the heat. She could almost smell them.

  She opened her eyes, meeting Gold’s. “I’m going up to the railhead,” she repeated. “Make sure Truck gets there.”

  “They’re watching Truck,” Gold said, matter-of-factly. “The big trooper, and the one with the ugly scar on her head.”

  Silver glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re always watching that thing. They think I don’t see them,” she smirked. “At first I thought they were watching me, or our friend Smokey.” She shook her head. “But they’re watching Truck.”

  Silver pondered this. “Why? Chen?” She wondered if there was something about Chen that could interest Warren and her crew. The thing was crippled, it wasn’t a threat to anyone, was it?

  “Maybe, maybe not.” She smiled at Li, who was having trouble following their conversation. “I will keep an eye on them. On it.” She made a face, nodded to Silver. “See you up there.”

  Silver nodded back and turned to get her duffle. Carter, she could see, was yelling at a wrangler trying to get a horse up the Dutchman’s ramp. Warren had been ready. There was a line of troopers, waiting patiently. As she walked to her tent, she calculated horseflesh and eight men with their gear. And weapons. She frowned. One trip would be nice. Dutchman could lift a lot, but it did have a weight limit.

  She’d lifted part of the collapsed roof of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with it. She shook herself, minutely. She’d been rooting around in the past when she should have thought to look up. Stupid. There were satellites she could have mapped. She could have hunted for systems in the US that might have been of some use. Instead she’d found a sword. Well, even a fifteen-hundred-year-old sword might be useful. She’d bring it upwell if she could.

  She reached her tent and broke it down quickly, stuffing the multi-colored fabric into its sack. The sticks were willow wands she had picked carefully in California in some overgrown park. There had been a children’s merry-go-round, choked with bracken. Without the thin willow sticks, she had no tent, so she made sure to wrap them carefully in their fabric sheath she’d fashioned. The original aluminum rods had held rubber bands, long-since rotted to dust. The fabric of the tent itself looked like it was going to last forever.

  “Going somewhere?” a voice said softly. Smoke.

  She looked up and over her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him. Getting slow, Silver. “You shouldn’t do that,” she said to him. “I don’t like being surprised.”

  He nodded, smiling. He spread his hands. “Apologies,” he said. “You going to the train station?”

  “Warren calls it the railhead,” she said. “Some kind of tunnel system. She’d got her people up there.”

  Smoke nodded to himself, then shrugged. “I heard about these tunnels. When I was a spy for the Americans,” he said with a smile. “The Chinese had a lot of them. The US found them when an earthquake collapsed one section of them. With their satellites,” he said, making pretend binoculars with his hands. “They saw.”

  She stood, stuffing the tent into the duffel. “These came later,” she said. “After our time. Nobody had hyperloops built when we were…” she pointed with the sheathed wands behind her, “…back there. Then, whatever.”

  “A hyperloop then?” He frowned. “For cargo? Would be large.”

  She nodded, shrugging. “She seems confident it’s functional. Had people there all along.” She walked towards the Dutchman.

  “They would need machines,” Smoke said. “Like Chen. Smart things.” He followed her, matching her stride.

  Silver looked at him. He was looking a little disheveled, more than she’d seen before. His clothes, a silvery pajama set embroidered with gray thread, was stained and dingy. He had boots that he’d gotten from somewhere, she noted. But he looked tired, rings around his eyes.

  “You OK, Smoke?” she asked. “You look wiped.”

  “I’m OK.” He grimaced. “Physically, I mean.” He licked his lips. “I need to ask you something.”

  She glanced at him. “Ask away,” she said. “We’re on the same side, remember?”

  She saw him parse that, a momentary pause. “Chen. He unleashed the Bloom.”

  She stopped. “Unleashed?”

  A sharp nod. “He thinks I can read his mind so he’s candid with me. To a point.” He looked at her. “But I believe him.”

  “It, Smoke. It,” she said. “You believe it. It’s not a person. Not alive.”

  He grimaced. “No, I think you’re wrong. He’s alive, as much as you and I are. We just have systems that are adapted to carry consciousness. Evolved for it.” He jerked his head back towards Truck, Chen’s black ceramic head a dark dot against the yellow. “He is running on hardware that is comparable to ours, but he’s alive.” He shook his head. “But that’s not the point. He did it.”

  “Does Warren know?” she asked, looking back towards the Dutchman. Carter had gotten a system down and the later horses seemed to be more tractable than the first had been. They were almost loaded.

  “No. This is his big secret,” Smoke said. “I think he was tasked with it. By the people we’re chasing. If they’re still up there.” He raised his eyes to indicate the heavens. Upwell.

  “Maybe so,” Silver said. “I get it, a monstrous crime. Want me to have Truck pop his head off?” She tapped Smoke in the chest with the sheathed wands. “It happened. I can’t change it, you can’t change it. Nobody can change it. It was a long time ago.”

  “I’m aware,” he said. “But it’s important. The Center…I think, well, Alpha thinks, mostly, that what the Center detects in other threads is…people. Like, their thoughts.”

  She blinked at him. “Thoughts?”

  He nodded. “I can’t explain it and Alpha isn’t here.” He tapped his head. “I just know that’s the gist of it. They sense thoughts. Like, of a lot of humans.”

  She paused, considering. “Continue,” she said. It was clear he had more to say.

  “It would explain a lot. We always went to worlds that had held large populations at some point in their past, or were like yours were. Civilized.” He gave her a lopsided grin. “More or less.”

  “So they can detect large groups of humans?” She shrugged. “What does that have to do with the Bloom…” she trailed off. “They all died.”

  “Yes!” he said, pointing at her with clasped hands. “Yes.” He bounced up and down. “They all died. They also did in the Earth I went to, where they lived on floating oil rig platforms. And in Brasilia. And Mexico. And a number of other places. The Center can find these threads because they all had apocalypses of some sort.” He met her eyes. “Those worlds had been Filtered.”

  She heard the emphasis in his voice. “So what’s different here? How’d you sense us?”

  “World War II?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

  She thought of
the camps. Cities burning. Following a line of tanks that stretched for miles. Poland. “That must happen all the time.” She frowned at him.

  “Nukes. Lots of people dying at once,” he said. “They said they could detect weapons. Like in Japan.” He nodded to himself. “I thought they meant high-energy physics, but I don’t think so anymore. Alpha doesn’t. They can detect dips in observable…thought. Human thought. Cognition. Consciousness.”

  She blinked at him. “Human thought is a physical process,” she admitted. “Maybe they can detect it.”

  “Something here caused a big problem for the Center. They call it the Tangle, this region of…space. Time, whatever.” He waved his hands. “Something here. It had to be the Bloom.”

  “OK,” she said, glancing back up at the Dutchman. Carter was inside. There were only two horses left to load. “So everybody dying here caused a thought-quake or something like that?” She smiled at him. “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “They didn’t die, Silver.” He cut her off. “That’s what Alpha wanted to tell you. She thinks they’re alive. They didn’t die. They went up there.” He pointed up. “The Bloom uploaded them. All of them.”

  Later, as she watched the countryside slide by below her, she pondered Smoke’s news. Chen. She could, she knew, have Truck crush him in his massive claws. Truck would do it for her, maybe. Certainly for Li, if the girl asked. She would, too, with a little nudging. But she could envision a use for Chen, if there were machines they needed to deal with. He was their only extant AI, unless you counted Truck, which she did not. Alpha couldn’t help them here.

  She eased the control yoke to the left, yawing the airship slightly. They were low, with the weight of eight horses, men, and their gear. The little airship was only two hundred feet above the ground, and chugging along slowly. It was amazing to her that the Dutchman had survived a thousand years in storage, and was still functional. The engineers at Boeing AG would be proud, she thought.

  Eight billion souls, uploaded to an off world data center? It made a perverse kind of sense. The surface of the planet was a terrible place to store data. Rocks hit planets every day. The Earth, she remembered from her studies of planetary science in the seventies, was hit with an estimated twenty tons of debris every day. There were huge scars in the crust of the planet from even larger rocks. The sky was full of rocks, and the Earth’s gravity was pulling at all of them, all the time. It was only a matter of time before a big one.

  The gods, she knew, her gods, had chosen a different route. They needed liquid water, and protection from falling rocks. They delved deep into the mantle, Smoke had said. Lots of water there, lots of heat, and miles of protective crust overhead. There must be untold numbers of them down there, under the Earth. Trillions and trillions. Had she really served those? For so long? She wrinkled her nose at the thought.

  “That ridge. It’s over that ridge,” Carter said. “Kind of a big flat bowl-shaped valley. Hills to the east.” He pointed to the blue line on the horizon. They had crammed themselves into the tiny cockpit with the dog. They had eight horsemen, horses, and all their gear in the back, and had been traveling north all day. It already stank back there.

  She nodded. She may have been a servant once. But those days were over. She peered at the line of blue hills marking the end of this part of their journey. But where were they going, really? She sighed, twitching the control yoke again, lining the little airship on the riverbed that marked the old road. Going. But where? And for what?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The runner reached Jessica as she was crossing the courtyard near the Tree. A skinny-legged girl, skin black as charcoal, and barefoot as all children were in the Center. She came pounding up and raised her hand, which held a rolled scrap of paper. She puffed with exertion.

  “Get your breath, girl.” Jessica smiled, taking the rolled note. Runners were rare, but not unheard of. There really wasn’t any other way to reach someone in the Center, which she had long ago accepted. Cellphones? Not here. Pay phones? Never. No telephones at all, that she had ever seen. The Center was traditional that way. They had never had these things, so they didn’t have them now.

  She found that she’d rather grown to like it. It was quieter, at least. Fewer distractions. The Select, like Grandmother and Neera and the others, just seemed to know what each other were thinking. No cellphones for them; something else, something much more intimate. Jessica had asked once, but Grandmother had just waved her question away and changed the subject.

  The runner recovered her ability to speak. “From Murnaballa, Lady,” she said. “She requested that I hurry.” The little girl smiled broadly at her. Jessica wondered if she was one of the Boy’s creatures, then decided she was being uncharitable. Not everyone was a spy in this place.

  Jessica frowned, unrolling the paper. Murn’s precise script was laid out in neat lines. It was a shopping list, a few things she’d need for her trip to the market. Rice, bean curd, fish sauce, and vinegar. The last item was underlined. Apples.

  “Thank you, child,” Jessica said to the girl. “This is helpful.” The girl nodded and departed, walking back the way she had run. Jessica read the list again, then folded it into her pocket. Apples.

  It was a code, of course. A word-code that she and Murn had devised long ago. Which had gone mostly unused, she reflected. She barely remembered most of it, but apples meant one thing: return home immediately. Well, she was headed that way anyway, so she bent her path towards their apartments.

  Eight decades had passed since they had last had word from Smoke or Alpha. A few tentative, low-confidence signals, a half-dozen times, which Grandmother had classified as something akin to a carrier-wave, but no data. It was a promising sign, but the time-slip was diverging rapidly. The last had been decades ago. Every day here was mere seconds there, or even less. Her hope had faded long ago. Grandmother seemed unperturbed. Smoke was alive.

  She’d effectively become an Archivist. She had the run of the Library, and had for many years. She was still piecing together the story of the Center, mostly by reviewing the oldest records, the oldest mission reports. There were no other records, as such. For anything. It was astonishing. She had looked, and looked long, trying to take the measure of the Library, to get her head around it. Surely there must be something, hidden somewhere in the cavernous domed building, but there was nothing.

  As an undergrad, she’d taken Archeology 101, a survey course. It had consisted mostly of lecture, with a short visit to a Native American site being excavated in front of a freeway construction site. Archeology had, she remembered, given great emphasis on the garbage dumps of the sites they had studied. The little Indian village they had been digging up was gridded off. The field archeologist, a stout woman in a wide, floppy hat, said the midden heap had yielded mostly bones and some broken stone tools. Useful information, but nothing major.

  As far as she had learned, the Center didn’t even have a trash heap. They dumped their waste, what little there was, into the sea. Neera had smiled indulgently at her surprise on learning this. The Center wasn’t a global civilization, she had explained. They were one small campus with several thousand souls. Not a threat to the fish, she’d said. Not like where she’d come from with an exaggerated shudder. She had laughed. Not like that.

  Her studies, as she viewed them, consisted of her reviewing mission sims. Mission sims and the metadata associated with them. The mission simulation data was stored with the dreamers, but the information about the record, the metadata, was stored on thin slates, kept in wooden boxes, many thousands of them per box. There were many thousands of boxes. Nobody had an accurate count, though it seemed that there had been several attempts at this by ambitious Archivists. She had identified three different cataloging systems, each with several sub-variants. The Library was a mess. Neera had dismissed this, claiming confidently that the dreamers knew where everything was.

  Still, the picture had slowly come together. The Center ha
d sprung into existence, seemingly fully formed, at some point sixty to one hundred thousand years earlier. The earliest missions had been haphazard, she’d realized. And all to worlds that had suffered some catastrophe: war, climate shift, or plague. That seemed consistent. They called these worlds Filtered. Failed. These worlds seemed everywhere in the Tapestry.

  But there were no other records. None of any kind. The Market seemed to just know what it was low on, and needed more of from the farms. The mess halls didn’t order food, the Market knew how much to deliver, and where. The same seemed to hold true for clothes. The Market had a department store of sorts. If you needed or wanted a new pair of pants, you just wandered over and took what you needed. They never seemed to be out of anything for long.

  The lack of records had stumped her at first, but she was stubborn. And doubly so, now. She wasn’t aging. She looked the same as she had when she first came here. Not a day older. Murn was an old woman now, and so as time passed Jessica had taken to doing the shopping, cooking, and other small chores. Murn’s mind had begun to wander as well. Grandmother had commented on it. Jessica knew it was only a matter of time, like so many other things in her life. Murn would die, and she would enter another chapter. She pushed the thought away.

  The Center didn’t keep records. It didn’t have history. The people who lived here, and those who lived in the tribes, as they called the scarce remote human colonies spread around the planet, were deeply ignorant. They didn’t know anything beyond what their Guides, the Center’s missionaries, told them, which wasn’t much. Don’t inbreed, the Center’s message seemed to be. Stay out of certain areas. Oh, and occasionally we’re going to snatch your kids and bring them to Florida. She shook her head at this, not for the first time. As near as she could tell, the Center was more or less where Orlando, Florida had been on Earth. On her Earth. Disney World.

  Early on, she’d tried to figure out the why of it. She’d asked Grandmother, during one of their occasional teas they shared, why the Center had lost its records. They had been sitting in the kitchen of their little apartment. Murn was napping in the sitting room, so she kept her voice down. “Why doesn’t the Center record history?”