Shadows and Smoke

by Rich X Curtis

  This drew a soft laugh from her. “You probably slay all the girls with that line, don’t you, Hector?” She crossed the room to a low cupboard and removed a glass bottle and two glasses. She glanced at him. “Whiskey?”

  He nodded. “I like whiskey,” he told her. “Yes, please.”

  She shook her head a bit, then poured two measures into their glasses. She examined them, then splashed a bit more of the liquid into each. She brought it to him. He took it. The glass was heavier, thicker than he thought. “Crystal,” she said, “from Jim’s mother. We shouldn’t clink them.”

  “Then we won’t,” he said. Conspire in something, however small, with your target. He smiled at her and raised his glass in salute.

  Her mouth twitched into a smile. She raised her glass to him, took a deep pull from it. She closed her eyes, he saw, savoring it. He sipped at his. The whiskey was warm and smokey, he decided. But it went down smoothly enough. He normally didn’t like strong drink on missions; it clouded his mind. But in Roman towns, do what the Romans do. He had heard that maxim on several worlds.

  “You sit,” she said, indicating the chairs. “I’ll cook us something.” She knelt in front of a small cupboard Tarl noticed had an instrument on its face. She twisted a knob, and sound projected from it, a staticky hiss. A radio, he realized. Wireless. He had seen similar things, of varying levels of sophistication. She twisted another knob, and then music swelled. “There we go.”

  She stood. “Go on,” she said. “Relax. Mi casa es su casa. There are magazines there, some of Jim’s pulps if you’re into that sort of thing. Take a load off.” She looked at him, stepping close. “Hector, please,” she said, reaching out and removing his hat. “Relax,” she said again. She hung the hat on a hook by the door and then disappeared into the other room. He sat in the chair, its cushion springs creaking slightly under his weight.

  Next to the chair was an untidy pile of newspapers. He had seen these before, or things like them. Propaganda usually. But useful for gathering news. He had been to worlds where his task had been to collect things like this. Salvage worlds. He picked one up.

  The type was heavy across the top to catch the eye. There were images printed on the sheet. Older men, shaking hands. The words were meaningless to him. English, he assumed. He would need to learn to read it. He looked around the room. Behind him, on a shelf, a thick stack, no several, stacks of colored books caught his eye.

  He took the first four or five off the top of the nearest stack. Pornography? He wondered, at the lurid image of the woman in a short, hip-hugging skirt, firing a red ray from a bulbous silver gun against a swarthy, threatening man in a helmet. He flipped through pages of small type, also in English.

  The others were similar stuff, men and women in impractical clothing facing monsters. Fantasies, he decided. Entertainment. He was about to replace them when he reached the bottom of the stack and stared at the cover.

  A man, in a white coat, his bald pate fringed with wild white hair, raised his arms in triumph over a red box topped with a glass dome. A human brain floated in the dome, crackling with yellow lightning bolts. Behind the man, a vast room receded in the distance, rank upon rank of similar red boxes, each with its own brain. Above them all, a menacing floating brain, fleshy and pink, loomed up on a stalk of spinal gristle.

  Tarl stared at the image. This was fantasy, surely. Human brains could not be treated like this, he was sure. He studied the book more closely. The printing was slightly mis-registered, he noted, each layer of once-bright color on the cover ever so slightly misaligned with the other. This gave an unworldly look to the image. The paper inside the book was rough under his fingertips, not smooth and polished like the cover.

  Paper, he knew, was expensive and time-consuming to produce well. He had seen it in other places. Newspapers used cheap paper because they needed to reach many readers. These? Books such as these? Gods in boxes? Were there many readers of such tales?

  He supposed there could be. If so, he judged this as a good thing. Promising. Stories guided societies. It was a maxim of the Center, that humans are storytellers. A world interested in stories such as this could be a promising prospect for the Work.

  He looked up. She leaned on the doorframe, watching him. “Jim’s pulps. He loved those,” she said. She took another pull on her whiskey, eyes narrowing at the bite of it. “Always picked up a few when he went into Dallas.”

  “They are interesting. Popular?” he asked. He sipped at his drink, noting that while he had barely touched his, hers was more than halfway gone. She had let her hair down, and her dress was more open at the collar. He ran his eyes over her body, slowly, wanting her to see him seeing her. Women noticed such things, he knew. She was curvy, if a little stout around the middle. He met her eyes.

  She smirked slightly, pursing her lips. “I don’t like them. Mostly for teenagers. People grow up,” she said, “if they get old enough.” She sipped at her drink. “You like them?”

  “The pictures…” he said. “They are controversial?” He wasn’t sure how to say what he meant, whether they were illegal or banned by authority. In his time on the plantations, producing an image of a leggy woman in a short skirt would have been a whipping offense, if not worse. “There are laws?”

  “Oh,” she said, nodding as she took his meaning. “Not for those. There are other magazines like that.” She smiled mischievously. “Jim had some of those. Most men do.” She glanced back into the kitchen. “Almost ready. Hope you’re hungry.”

  She receded into the kitchen again and he heard plates and scraping noises. The smell of frying meat wafted in, mingled with spices. Pepper, he judged, and maybe something like a chili. His stomach growled. He frowned down at it and at the image of the brain in a box. He would report this when he was summoned back.

  They ate in a little dining alcove off the kitchen, a wooden booth, he noted, similar to the ones in the diner. Someone had painted this one pale blue. The food was good, thick pork chops, a white mash with gravy, and tiny cabbages, sliced in half and fried in the same pan. She pushed a plate of sliced bread with a yellow crock of butter towards him. The bread had tiny seeds in its crust.

  She picked at her food while he devoured his. “You were hungry,” she said, as he scraped at the last of the gravy on his plate with a chunk of bread. “Pork isn’t really my cup of tea,” she said. “Not sure why I bought these, really. Jim used to like it.” She sipped her glass of whiskey.

  The music from the other room changed. He cocked his head at it, the swelling strings and brassy, swinging beat. She saw him listening, tapping her finger on the table, her shoulders bobbing with the song. A woman began singing in a childlike voice.

  “You understand the words?” she asked, eyes twinkling.

  He shook his head, smiling shyly. She enjoyed the music, he could tell. “A little. Tell me what she sings.”

  “She asks her new husband to let her stay out late with the boys,” she said, laughing. “‘Kissing the boys goodbye’,” she sang along. “It’s a silly song. From the War. We used to sing it in the factory, when I worked in Amarillo.”

  “You worked in war?” he asked. “Not fighting,” he clarified, “but working?”

  “All the girls did. Somebody had to. I made shell casings, you know, bullets.” She mimed shooting with her fingers. She smoked, remembering. “Did my bit.”

  He nodded. “You are a good cook,” he said, drawing another laugh from her. She laughed easily; he liked it. She leaned back, one arm spread on the back of the booth, glass in hand. She was looking at him.

  “I’m passable,” she said. “Before the War, I wanted to go to cooking school in Dallas, once. But I got married instead.” She drank. Her eyes were a trifle glassy, shining. She raised an eyebrow. “You never married, huh? Nobody special?”

  He shook his head. “I know some girls,” he said, “but nothing serious.”

  She fished a cigarette, slightly bent, from a packet in her apron. She lit it with a s
quare metal lighter that closed with a clack. She regarded him. “Where you headed again? You didn’t say.”

  “Washington,” he said, the first thing that popped into his mind. The madwoman had said that word. A place. “Dee-cee,” he added, remembering she had also included that word. Do not trust them.

  Her eyebrows raised. She pulled on her little cigar, nodding at him thoughtfully. “You are one of those science boys, aren’t you? From New Mexico?”

  He shrugged noncommittally, taking a sip of his drink.

  She eyed him, as if taking him in. “You German?” she asked, and he heard the edge in her voice, clear enunciation now. “I know they hired a bunch of German scientists…that trucker said so.”

  He shook his head, returning her gaze. “From Slavia,” he said, naming the rebellious fiefdom to the south of Bavaria. A nest of criminals and grinding poverty, he remembered. Long-standing enmity with the Kaiserreich.

  “Good,” she said, nodding. “Well, good you’re not German, I mean. Nazis do a number on your country?”

  “It’s not there anymore,” he said sadly, hoping to divert this conversation. “I come here. I help.”

  “Russian bastards,” she nodded, and he could hear the venom in her voice. “You work on the Bomb?” she asked, and he could hear the emphasis of the word in her voice. The Bomb.

  He shrugged again. “I do math, numbers, calculations,” he waved vaguely with one hand. “I help a little, maybe. Do my bit.” He grinned at her.

  She smiled tightly at this. “Huh,” she said. “Well, it ended the damned thing, and we didn’t need to invade Japan.” She stubbed out her cigarette on her plate. “So lots of boys came home that might not have. Good for you.” She stirred herself out of the booth. “You sit, I’ll clear up. Another drink?”

  They settled in the parlor, with the radio, and talked. The dog padded in, made a circle around the table, then settled in a corner of the rug beside her chair, watching him. They listened to songs, and she translated. She talked mostly about herself and her husband dead in the war. Her family had long roots in Texas, from when it had been owned by Spain. She had met her husband at a dance. The house was soon, in a month or two, to be taken from her by the money-bankers, for lack of funds. She would go to Amarillo, where she had family, and had worked in the War. She was sad about it, but what could she do? Living out here alone as a widow was no kind of life.

  She downed her drink, her second, and he finished his first. She stood and fetched a blanket and pillow for him. She took the dog with her outside. “He’s got a bed of his own, in his doghouse,” she said. He remembered she had made a point of telling him, warning him, that the dog slept in her room. She glanced up at him, closing the door behind her.

  “I’m down the hall, at the end. The washroom is halfway, first door on the left,” she said. “I can drive you to the Greyhound station in the morning. The bus station,” she clarified. “You can get the bus to Dallas, then a train up north, I guess.”

  He lay on the chaise that night, under the quilted blanket, knowing he would not sleep. Through the window, he could see the stars, twinkling crisp and bright. A cloud passed by, lit by the moon he couldn’t see. The moon was always the same, in every world he’d visited so far. He liked that about the moon, its steady silver permanence.

  The floorboard creaked in the hall, and he rolled over to look. It was Rosa, framed in the doorway, wearing a thin white shift. The moonlight behind her pierced it, showing him the contours of her hips and thighs. He sat up, rising on one elbow. He was nude under the blanket, his erection rising as he watched her. She didn’t speak.

  He stood then, letting the blanket fall away. He could hear her quick intake of breath, but she still said nothing. He stepped towards her, trying to see her eyes, but they were deep in shadow. He could see tears shining there. Then she turned and fled back to her room. He did not follow.

  Three days later, she drove him to the bus station. He had a ten-dollar bill from her, which she had pressed into his hand and refused to hear his objections. It would get him to Dallas, she said, from there he was on his own. He had a duffel with several changes of clothes, her husband’s things. They mostly fit him, except the shoes. They spoke little on the way. She had asked him to stay; he had refused. As gently as he could, he didn’t need to be cruel to her, didn’t want to be. She hadn’t pressed, but there wasn’t, Tarl thought, much more to say about it.

  At the bus station, he looked at her. Her face was calm behind her dark sunglasses, but he saw tension in the set of her jaw and her grip on the steering wheel. “Thank you for helping me,” he said, lamely.

  “Good luck,” she said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” She lit another cigarette and regarded him. “You know where to find me, if you’re ever back this way.” He had taken her address, on a scrap of paper inside an inner pocket of the duffle. And that was that, he got out of the car, and she drove away. He felt empty. He was, he knew, in reality, not free. This was best, he told himself. It couldn’t be otherwise. The Work demanded it, and he thought of the Boy, his terrible penetrating gaze. His questions. He didn’t want to explain Rosa to them, she had been kind to him. So this was best.

  He spent almost a month working his way to Washington, from bus to bus. Occasionally, strangers gave him rides. Hitching, he learned, was a good way to move from town to town without spending money. Once, a family driving to Chicago bought him breakfast at a café. Another time a serviceman picked him up in an old Ford. The man was in the flying service, talked his ear off for a night about a place called Missouri, and how he used to fish and hunt there growing up. How his family’s poverty meant he ate squirrel sandwiches as a child. He dropped him off in a place called Tennessee.

  He was summoned home to the Center to report once, as he slept in a bus station in a place called Dakota. He woke, feeling ill, thinking it was some reaction to the food here, before realizing it was the sick queasiness of Recall, not actual illness. He waited, then he was no longer in the dingy station, but was, before his eyes could blink, back in the Center.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Center, Debriefings

  Concurrent Present Timeline

  The Boy was there, just him. He looked up from his perch on a window ledge. Tarl knew where he was, in a round room overlooking a courtyard with a fountain of abstract pipes flowing with water. The room had rough, pale blue walls.

  “Report, please,” the Boy said, clapping his hands with childlike delight. His eyes were hard, Tarl thought, like chips of wet, black stone. He looked at Tarl with interest. Tarl told him, haltingly, what he had prepared. The world was promising, but early in their development. They had just fought a large war, and he was in the victorious empire, traveling to the capital city to learn more. They had basic cybernetics and had used atomic weapons in their recent War.

  The Boy clapped his hands. “Tell me about their weapons. How many did they use? We detected two. Days apart.”

  They were atomic, Tarl told him. This is all he knew. He would learn more. And also, yes, about their cybernetics. Rosa had told him of an article she had read about how the British spies had used computers to crack the Nazi codes. There had been no details that she remembered, just that the spies had done it. Tarl related his plan, and the Boy laughed, then nodded sagely. Stay there, he said, and learn more. They would recall him once a month. More than that would be expensive, but this world was closer to the nexus of the tangle in the Tapestry, he said, so it was important to monitor it closely.

  Tarl had agreed, though the predatory smile on the Boy’s face frightened and troubled him. Do not trust them, she had said, face flushed, eyes wide. Any of them.

  Washington was a metropolis of stone under a leaden sky when he arrived. It was humid, but with a hint of fall in the air. He traded Jim’s checked shirt for the suit of clothes he wore on his arrival.

  He slept on a bench in a park the first night, and in the morning, he washed in the bathroom of what he
assumed was a library of some sort. The woman at the counter had barely glanced up at him as he entered. It had many books and seemed free and open to the public. He found the Spanish section and spent some hours reading old newspapers from the war, specifically about the Germans and the Nazis.

  As he left, she glanced up. He risked asking what he hoped wasn’t a dangerous question, though he suspected it might be. Rosa had taught him the words he wanted. Spies. Intelligence. “I need to speak to the department for spies,” he said, in his halting English. He added as much Germanic to his accent as he could.

  She set down the paper she had been reading and looked him over. “Spies?” she said blandly. He could smell her perfume across the counter. “You’re in the wrong place. No spies here.”

  “Intelligence,” he said. “I need to speak with them.”

  “Military intelligence?” she said, and as he nodded, she consulted a thin sheaf of typed papers from a drawer. “It says OSS here, not sure what that stands for, but this is old. Not sure if we have a newer one. E Street, building two hundred. Big place, gray stone, I think.” She looked at him. “You a spy?” she said, in a hushed tone. She smiled, but there was enough interest in her gaze that he decided not to lie.

  “No,” he said. “I look for work. With them. Do my bit,” he added.

  She frowned, but shrugged, nodded, and began ignoring him the way bureaucrats seem trained to do on all worlds. He left and asked a man in a uniform for direction to E Street. It turned out he was close by, only three blocks away. He walked, enjoying the fall air, and rehearsing his approach. He paused in front of a marble statue of a man astride a horse, the horse rearing, the man pointing dramatically. Tarl nodded to himself and approached the building.

  He entered. A small antechamber with two scuffed wooden chairs and a man sitting at a desk, reading a newspaper. The man looked up. “Yeah? What can I do for you, Mac?”