Jessica looked at me and said, over whine of the engines, “Where are we going?”
I looked at Gold and at Smoke, who was returning from the cockpit. Gold shrugged and looked out the window. Smoke flicked his eyes over me, then to Jessica. He took off his glasses and collapsed into the seat opposite Jessica. He stretched, catlike and graceful. He looked tired, I realized. He hadn’t slept last night either, instead telling us his long, strange tale. Neither had I, I realized, and it had been a long time since I got a good rest. He folded his glasses into his pocket and looked out the window as the desert started to roll by. The hills in the distance passed by, ageless. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
“California,” he said. “The Golden West.” And then he said a word in a language I didn’t know, fluid and sibilant, polysyllabic. “Goin’ back to Cali.”
Gold laughed to herself as the plane threw itself into the sky. I felt a chill, as I always did before a fight or something big finally resolving. A knot of tension relaxed in me, something I hadn’t realized I had carried, had been carrying for a long, long time. I looked at Gold, who watched me back, her eyes flat. Snakelike. Reptile, I thought, and smiled at her. Slowly, she smiled back, and I remembered, suddenly, looking at her, what this feeling was.
I was happy.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Smoke watched the country slide by beneath the plane. Gold and Silver slept, or rested. The Jessica woman slept behind him. It had exhausted her, being up all night in her cell back on the base. That, and the stress of being captured and incarcerated, not told anything, hooded and cuffed. He put them out of his mind and looked out the window, craning his neck to see more of the wing. Planes were amazing things, he thought. Flying in them. Incredible. He had been to three Worlds that had planes. They all were astonishingly similar.
There was the First, which had been much like this World. The same general stage, anyway. Not a phase of development, he corrected himself, although maybe that was a valid theory. The Center was not sure, there being various theories of cultural development being constantly debated. But a stage, as in where actors held a play. A place where things had forked from the relatively recent past. Their planes had been loud, bulbous, slow affairs. Water landers. Their aesthetic had been markedly different, more ornately European. The same hard-eyed military types who spoke a fierce, martial imperialist German. At war, or nearly, with the Americans, as usual.
The Americans, he mused, were hard to miss; they had taught him. They were always fighting somebody. An empire spanning many Worlds. The Center’s theories of multi-verses (his native word being something like “many similar places”), posited but could not prove that the American Empire, bracketing as it does the pivotal events which led to the Center’s rise, and recent ones of a different sort, were a sign. A sign they were on the right track. The signals he had learned, had drilled in incessantly, were here. They had to be. He was sure, and had bet his life on it.
The second world’s planes had been very different. A Filtered World, they had decided at the Center. The first probes showed a viable civilization of the right technological stage, somewhat related to the other culturally. It was a good sign. This World had, they thought, been the source of the signal, or it was a World close to it. So, they sent him, and later maybe others. He never knew. There had been a war, a bad one. In the south, there were cities that had largely escaped it. But it rained all the time, and the sky was rarely clear. He had been in Brasilia, and it was full of the same grim police and military types. Large and in charge, he smiled at himself. He liked the local rap culture. It was cool, and reminded him of Talus, the games the young toughs had played had been similar. Taunts and mock fights, sometimes real fights too. It had not been easy, childhood.
Their planes had been sleek, matte affairs. Numbers in large, plain type on their tails. Salutes, esprit de corps. The whole bit. Much like the military here, although the formality of this current World’s military was lax compared to that Earth. It had been sixty years since the War, and life was just beginning to move on from it. It had been desperate the first few decades for the survivors. The ashy rains had killed many people, and people still got sick and died at alarming rates. But most of the fallout had settled, thanks to the incessant rains. They had barely survived at all.
But some had, he found out. It was depressing and amazing all at once. These people were surviving, the few hundred million who had survived around the planet. Nobody knew how many, or would ever know, Smoke realized. It would be a hundred years, he thought, before they got an accurate count of the total loss. Smoke recalled a boy he had dated there, in their little cabin near a lake outside of São Paulo, and how he talked about it, the stories from his grandmother about it. “Poof” he would make this gesture, with his fingers, and blow through them. Gone, like that. Like dust. Like smoke. Their planes didn’t fly often, fuel was scarce.
He had hated to leave. He had wanted to stay, to learn what had really happened. It might be valuable, he had argued, to know what had sparked this. Nobody seemed to know. They had had an advanced technological base, that much he knew. Some of the computer systems he saw had been remarkable. But they were mostly junk nobody had electricity for. Something like what they were looking for may have happened there.
It hadn’t mattered. His arguments were valid, but time was pressing. Mark it, and move on, they said. Learn as much as you can in six months and get out. The time differentials were in the Center’s favor, this only being roughly a week on Talus. So he stayed for six months, and then they pushed Recall. Yanked was a good word for it. Recalled to them as he sat on their little lake, on a still night under lowering clouds, sitting warm under a blanket with Jorge, and then, instantly, back. One moment he had been there, then not there but home.
That World had been a failure, they said. Center had a consensus on this. Their projected recovery score was less than five. Abysmally low. They were not a candidate to birth a Mind. Filtered. The gods there, if they had gods, would realize it soon. Their debates would end, and the World would be…recycled? Put to another use. Ended. That was what had brought him, what the Center was, what it did. It searched. A Mind had been born here, maybe, but it was dead, along with most of the people.
But it was in the right range, or area, or cluster of Worlds the Center had sampled. Was sampling. Looking. Somewhere, among one of these Worlds, they would find it, one of the few Worlds that could exist, the exact strand of which stretched off uniquely like the Center’s did, into the future, down a perhaps similar path to the Center’s. This was the goal. Find another Mind. Find something like the Center.
Spies, Smoke thought. Agents. Sneaks like him. Tough people who could survive such places. Show them what to look for and bring them back to report. There had been other probes before his, he knew. But he had been the first person they had sent there. He sighed and swallowed his frustration about that, how unfair it had been. He could have stayed for years, and it would have changed nothing.
But the Center was in a hurry. Always in a hurry. Frantic, he realized as an adult. Outwardly calm and placid, the Center wasted no time. You moved through your lessons, jogged together everywhere you went. You slept a solid eight hours and were busy the rest of the time, with only a few weeknights off. If you weren’t studying, you were sparring or working out or practicing with simulations. He had raged at them, wept openly and shamed in front of the elders. Unfair. They had sneered at him, hectoring him to grow up and get serious. They discouraged such sentiments. Attachments, love affairs. Wasteful and dangerous.
This place, though, they wouldn’t Recall him from. This place had the real deal. The cat’s meow, the mainline motherfucking, straight fucking shit. He loved their profanity, their easy men and women, their optimism in the face of the knife’s edge they walked. Unwittingly. Children, they were. Most of them did not understand their danger. They just went on living, having kids, watching sports. Fucking, eating, drinking. Loving each other, hating
each other. Being human. He wondered, and not for the first time, if this World was just some years prior to the Brasilia he had known. Was it the same World, but earlier? It was similar, but he didn’t think so.
There were obvious differences. The US had owned Mexico before the War, which this one didn’t. He didn’t doubt the similarities were real. It was close, whatever that meant. He had hit after almost a hundred Worlds, mostly dead or mired in the dreamtime, pre-industrial and fine with it. Or wrecked by some calamity. Here, he had hit pay dirt. Finally. Those Worlds had been his punishment, penance he felt, for Brasilia. For caring. This one was promising.
But, beyond his initial weeping, he didn’t complain, there being no point. It wasn’t in his nature. He did his work, believing in it. There was a reason to do it. It was important. He had told Gold, and later Silver, what he thought of the Center, and of Talus. It was a zoo, was the word. The Center protected his family, his people. Fed, tended to, culled when necessary by the Guides. He knew this now and had never questioned it before. He remembered seeing some Guides returning from the Tribes with strange tubes they carried, like long, thin, black garbage cans. They had looked somber.
He learned later they had culled a tribe that had grown too large to manage. They had gone with the tubes full of bees and returned without any bees. The bees were death, death for the Tribe they were released on. The bees could be released by a drone easily enough, he knew. But the Guides did the job and came to view it, in fact, as one of the most important parts of their role. To tend the human herd in all ways. It was a farce. A con. Manipulation. He could see it, and he thought others felt it too. He could see it in their eyes. There was sometimes a look one saw, an appeal. It was subtle, but he felt he could interpret it. I don’t like this, but there’s nothing I can do about it, and I think you feel the same way I do.
Sometimes, people who spoke up disappeared, or you heard they had, in whispered gossip in the halls or over dinner. So-and-so is gone, just vanished one night. It was all rumor. Nobody he knew had ever disappeared, and he smiled to himself of the weight of that statement. It was entirely possible his friends had disappeared and he didn’t know it yet. It was always a friend of a friend kind of situation. He stayed out of trouble. Kept his head down. It became a reflex.
And now, this place. Similar, very similar, to the World of his Brasilia, which was lost to him. The Center gave, and it took. It was, he gathered but did not fully grasp, difficult to find and reach these Worlds. It involved the harnessing of both titanic energy and cognition. The Center did it. Somehow. They would scan a World with their remote probes, and they would send someone, if it were promising, to learn what the probes couldn’t learn. To find the new Mind and foster it. He was not confident it was possible, but it was the mission, and there was an urgency to the Work.
The gods, the Center had learned, or inferred, or suspected, were not patient. Their evaluation of a World’s progress would end eventually, their debates would resolve. Either a World would develop a new Mind or it would not. If not, the gods had uses for a Failed World, and that use did not include the people who lived there. They were ephemeral. Unimportant, ultimately. He recalled Jorge’s gesture, learned from his grandmother, who had seen it. Like smoke, poof. Gone.
The Center was racing the clock. Talus had a Mind; it was a Mind. The Center thought and acted. Time is against us, they taught. No hesitation or wasted effort. Forward with the Great Work. The Center knew what the gods knew. There were many Worlds connected by a shared fabric of energies. It was true. But a mystery. He had been to many Worlds. But the how of it? The underlying mechanism? The Center taught that humans couldn’t grasp it except for by analogy. It just was. Accept it. The Center, being much more than merely human, could control it. This was also part of the Work. Waste no time. Find another Mind, like the Center, before the gods’ patience ran out.
It was, he reasoned, a cult, religious in its strictures. Racing the clock against the gods, who were bent on either finding a new Mind or trying again. Wiping the slate clean. Starting over. Like on Talus, this place was rushing towards something. In this place though, at least he was free. For a while. Free to do the Work. Free to think what he liked. After that, well, he thought, looking out the window at the patchwork fields sliding by below him, after that he would see. There was potential here, potential for the Work. Potential for, maybe, he thought carefully, more than that. Maybe for starting over. Starting everything over.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We landed at a military airfield in northern California, slipping into the traffic pattern on a high-level government override, according to Smoke. He seemed to hold significant authority in the government to do this. How old was he? He seemed young, but then again, so did I and so did Gold. But he claimed he wasn’t like us. He served a different god, an artificial Mind. This was shocking. He seemed so small, but looked wiry and strong. He could be dangerous in a fight, I thought, and looked at Gold. Was this why she had aligned herself with him?
“How did you two meet?” I asked, as we made our approach. Gold looked at me, then at him. She shrugged.
“In DC,” she said. “Early CIA. In the fifties. He was infiltrating them, just as I was.”
“I was better at it,” Smoke said. “She was obviously a mole, and I noticed.”
“He caught you?” I asked. Gold was good at that thing. It was surprising. Her eyes stayed flat. She shrugged again, minutely. Irritation.
“Not really,” he said. “I gave her a clean bill of health. I cleaned up some paperwork from poor record keeping during the War.” He smiled. “Then I turned her.”
I looked at her, then asked her in Nahuatl, “Did he? You climb in his lap? He looks small.” She cocked her head at me and smiled. She beamed. We had not spoken the Aztec language in many decades, if not centuries. It comes back, though. I felt like there was dust in the back of my throat.
“Careful,” she said softly, in this same language. “He is clever. Later, we should talk.”
“What language is that?” Smoke asked. “I don’t know it.”
“An Indian language,” I said. “Old and mostly gone now. You speak many languages?”
“A few. German, Spanish, Portuguese. This one, English,” he said. “But please, no secrets.”
I smiled. Gold smiled. I inclined my head a fraction. “So, no secrets then.” I looked at Gold. “It had just been many years since we had spoken it.”
He watched me, evaluating. Wondering at my motives and trustworthiness. We were going into action. Could he trust me?
“Won’t happen again,” I said, soothingly. “English only from now on.” I smiled. People like smiles. “Can we go over the plan again, before we get moving?”
He nodded. We talked. The plan was simple. Knock on a door, have a talk with a man. Get him to tell us what he knew. Done it a million times. Well, many times. We needed information, and Smoke’s agents had identified him as the weakest link in the group he was part of.
We had landed at Travis, a base somewhat inland and north. Smoke’s theory was that this was less visible to people outside the government who might be watching. There was a convoy of three black SUVs waiting on the tarmac as we taxied up. Smoke’s crew filed out ahead of us. I smiled at Jessica.
“Going for a drive,” I said. “Like old times.”
She smirked at me. “Let’s hope it doesn’t end in kidnapping like the last time.” She was looking at Smoke.
“I’m not kidnapping you,” he said. “If you want to stay here, you can. We can drop you off once we leave the base.”
She shook her head. “Nope. I’m staying. Maybe I can salvage something out of this story.”
“Nobody will believe you if you tell the truth,” Gold said. “Nobody ever really believed me when I told them.”
“Who did you tell?” Jessica asked her, warily.
“People. Various people, different times.” Gold waved it away, an imperious gesture. “People pretend, but they
don’t really believe that there can be people like us.”
“Can’t say I blame them,” Smoke said. “You two are unique. More than you know.”
Gold looked at him. Smiled sweetly. “Can we get off the airplane now?” She leaned forward, expectantly.
He nodded. “Middle car. Let’s go.”
We deplaned down the little ramp. There was nobody around to greet us. Someone had left cars for us, apparently. We were alone in the bright sunshine. Beyond the runway was a line of low brown hills, and in the distance, what looked like the tower and terminal of a small airport. We were far from where casual observers could see us. The airstrip smelled of dirt and jet fuel.
I got in the car, in the back seat. Smoke took the front passenger seat. Jessica got in the third row and Gold next to me, wearing her gold-tinged aviator glasses. She smiled at me blankly. Just along for the ride, I thought. I didn’t buy it for a second. Below her calm was a well-stoked fury, murderous and frightful, barely restrained. I feared Gold, and that mood, which meant, having known her for so long, I feared her all the time. But we live with atomic weapons too, and they are just as dangerous. I think.
We rolled. Smoke directed the driver. “South gate,” he said, and the driver, one of his crew, a blond giant, nodded. He had a hands-free headset on and spoke into it occasionally. We sped down the flight line, past a lonely tanker plane idling on the airstrip, apparently waiting for us to cross ahead of it. We roared past, not slowing.
As we left the gate, Smoke spoke to the driver again. “Too fast, blend in with local traffic please.”
“These cars are too obvious,” I said. “Anybody watching the gate will know something is up.”
Smoke looked back at me. “It’s okay. By the time they know we’re nearby it will be too late,” he said. “Element of surprise.”
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