Shadows and Smoke Read online

“Size does not concern us,” Neera said. “Wits concern us. Intelligence. Cleverness. Spark.” She smiled at him. “These are what we seek to find among the Trainees.”

  “Stubbornness,” Grandmother said. “We look for a drive, boy. Ones who want to be the best, to do great things. To do the greatest of great things.”

  He looked at their faces. Neera smiled at him, and the man, Arwal, regarded him cooly. The others looked serious and grim, studying him, he thought. He scanned each, then looked back to Grandmother.

  “What things?” he said carefully, trying to parse her meaning. “You think I…” he trailed off. “Me?”

  Grandmother looked at him and pursed her lips. “That is what we’re here to decide. You are not,” she said, mouth pursing as if she’d eaten something sour, “fitting in with the others. Singled out, isolated. Would you agree?”

  “I have friends,” he said, thinking of Jin and Mak and Murn. He felt his face growing hot again. He looked up at the man, Arwal, who was frowning at him.

  “Yet you do your work alone and seem to prefer it.” Grandmother raised her hand as he opened his mouth to speak. “We monitor such things. Nothing really goes unnoticed.” She smiled at him. “So, these worthies,” she gestured at the assembled Elders, “thought it was time to meet you for themselves. They have some questions.” She waved at Neera.

  “Let’s begin,” the woman named Neera said. From beside her on the bench, she raised a wooden tray with some small items on it. One was a string. She lifted it between two fingers. Her white nails caught the lamplight in flickers. “This string,” she said, “how long is it?”

  “A hand,” he said, guessing this was a test. It was about that length, and that was how he thought of things.

  “Whose hand?” she asked. “Surely you have been here long enough to learn the standard weights and measures,” she said, glancing at Grandmother.

  “He has,” Grandmother said. “None of your backwoods guesswork boy, use what we have taught what you.”

  He nodded, risking a smile at Grandmother. “Yes, I have. This is ten Al, or close enough.”

  Neera nodded. “Imagine now, that you had ten beads on this string, each with a number on them, one to ten. You follow?”

  He nodded. “A number line,” he said quickly. “We use these in mathematics.”

  “Just so,” she said. “Do you like numbers and calculations?”

  He shrugged. “I like them well enough. You can be sure of your answers if you check things properly.”

  She nodded. “Now, suppose I asked you to pick a bead on this string. What are the chances you would pick bead number 4?”

  He hesitated, reviewing her question. “One in ten,” he said, nodding with certainty.

  “Good. And if you were to consider all possible numbers between one and ten, how many are there?”

  “You mean fractional values?” He looked at her and Grandmother. “They are endless.”

  “Infinite,” Neera corrected. “Yes, they are infinite.” She held his eyes. “Now, suppose I asked about the number five, followed by a decimal marker, and five zeroes? What is the probability that you select this number?”

  “It is this number divided by the infinite, which is zero.” He felt this was correct, as they had studied fractional values just recently. This was basic maths, things he felt solid with so far.

  Neera nodded again. “Close enough to zero to not matter.” She regarded him and nodded. She wadded the string in her fist. “There is a number, in between three and four, which has special properties. Do you know it?”

  He nodded. “This is Na,” he said. “It is the ratio of a circle and its radius.”

  “Diameter," she said, smiling. "Could you select this number? Could you cut this number line precisely at Na?”

  He thought about it. Na was special, he remembered, because it did not repeat. There were numbers that did this. “No,” he answered, digging his nails into his palms. They felt damp.

  “Why not?” Neera asked, probing. “It’s just a number, correct? You can probably even say it up to a certain number of places after the marker, correct?”

  “But I can’t pick Na,” he said, “and have it hold still long enough to cut the line. It is infinitely non-repeating.” He was proud of himself that he had remembered this exact term.

  “But we use Na in many calculations and applications. How can we do this?” Neera asked, her face betraying nothing. Her eyebrows were very dark, almost black, though her eyes were a pale grayish-blue, pupils wide and dark in the lamplit room.

  “What do you mean?” He asked, but he knew some of what she meant. Builders needed to know about Na to do much of their work.

  “This room,” she said, “is a circle, correct? The builders who fashioned it would have used Na in their calculations, would you agree?”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly. “Or they could have used a stick with a roll of string.” He shrugged.

  This drew chuckles from the Elders and a smile from Neera. “Yes, we sense ways to accomplish approximations. How precise of a circle could one draw this way?”

  “With enough practice,” Tarl said, “you could get pretty good at it.” He raised his eyebrows at Neera. He meant it as defiance, but she smiled at him.

  She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow at him. “Just so,” she said. “And yet, this is only an approximation. Tell me, do you think the builders who use Na in their calculations rely on approximations?”

  He looked at her, but her face was impassive behind her smile, giving away nothing. He licked his lips. “They must, since they cannot know the complete value of Na.”

  “Yes,” Neera said, nodding in satisfaction. She lay it down on the tray. “This is fundamental to our understanding of the universe. Some things we cannot measure exactly. Especially tiny things. Consider this pebble.” She lifted it between two fingers and held it out to him. “Tell me about it.”

  He extended his hand and she dropped it in his palm. He regarded it. “It is smooth. I could measure this.”

  She smiled. “Smooth, yes,” she said. “But measuring is tricky. If you looked closely, you would see that it is far from smooth. You hold a world of mountains and canyons that seem deeper than any on the surface of the world.”

  He had seen such images in the Library. There were devices that could create them. There were creatures, fantastic looking creatures that lived all around them. Even on their bodies. The thought made him itch. “The world is infinite in all directions, then?”

  “Were you strong,” Neera said, “you could crush this pebble into dust, correct? If you had a mallet or such a tool, you could smash it?”

  He nodded. “Maybe not to dust, but yes, I could. With enough time I could make it into an infinity of smaller pebbles.” He looked at the stone. It was smooth as glass to his fingers. He tried to imagine it as a large as this world, with mountains and canyons and sharp-edged valleys.

  “And each of those pebbles,” Neera asked. “How many could you make from one of them?”

  “An infinite number?” Tarl asked. He had no idea. He glanced at Grandmother, wondering at the purpose of this questioning.

  “You would think so,” Neera said, holding out her hand for the pebble. “But it turns out that is not true. At tiny sizes, the building blocks of the universe, that make up this pebble, this bench, the entire world…they behave very strangely. At a fundamental level, they are not even particles anymore but energy fields of various kinds. And they behave strangely when we look.”

  “This pebble is an energy field?” he asked, feeling stupid. It was just a pebble.

  Neera nodded. “Everything is. Including you and every cell of your body. Even those of your mind, that are having this thought right now. It is confusing,” she said, laughing. “But also exciting! How could this be?”

  “You are asking me?” He laughed. “I am just a Trainee.” He looked up at her. “They call me Stupid Tarl.”

  Again, the Elders laughed
. Neera nodded at him. “Children can be cruel. We both know this is not true. But yes, I am asking you.” She waited.

  “I don’t know,” he said, after pondering it for a moment. It was too much to think about, particles and energy fields. He knew none of this. “I don’t know about these things.”

  “We will let you in on a secret,” Grandmother said, leaning forward to catch his eye. “We don’t know either.” This drew a chuckle from the adults. “At least, those of us in this room don’t know, though Neera knows more than most of us, and more than she lets on.”

  Neera smiled at him, shrugging slightly. “You did well, Tarl. These are the questions that our group studies.”

  “Her group studies the universe,” Grandmother said. “How it came to be the way it is, how it really is.” She looked at him. “There are other groups who study other aspects of the universe, and they don’t use string and pebbles to do it.”

  “He is ready,” Neera said. “For the Seekers. He will have no trouble with this.”

  “Seekers?” Tarl asked. He had not heard this term before. “Is that in the Library?” He asked. He had spent many boring hours in the Library already. The thought of working there, among the books and scrolls and teaching machines…he would rather go back home.

  “No,” Grandmother said, nodding to Neera. “Seekers are a special group. Hunters is perhaps a better word. You understand infinities, or the concept of infinity at least, yes?”

  He nodded, looking as she leaned forward and picked up the string. She held it up to the light, peering at it with her cloudy white eyes. “This is not a single thread, is it? Yes or no?” She looked at him, expecting him to answer.

  “No,” he said. “Strings are like ropes, we braid them. Twisted fibers of wool or plants.” He had helped make plenty of rope from the long grass in the marshlands.

  “Do these fibers touch?” She looked at him. “In the string, do the individual threads touch each other?”

  “They are a braid, so yes. They have to touch.” It seemed obvious, so he suspected he was wrong. The obvious, he suspected, might not be the true state of affairs.

  “Together, they form the string, but, at the tiny scale, something separates them from each other by what might as well be an infinite gulf of space.” She sighed. “Now, imagine our world, our universe, everything we can see and feel and touch, and sense with our most powerful machines, is but one fiber of this string. Can you picture this?”

  He nodded. “And the other fibers?” he asked, gathering speed. “They are other places?”

  “Just so,” Grandmother said. “And there are perhaps twenty in this string, but reality is much larger. Infinitely so, in all directions.”

  “What,” he said, “does this have to do with me, and these Seekers.” He was forming a picture in his mind of an endless braided rope, or string, of a cloth, extending in all directions. He shook his head.

  “We know this is how the world is. That there are many worlds, many universes. What we see and sense is but one shadow of an endless braid or tangle of worlds. Worlds without end. Worlds we cannot see or touch, but can detect and model paths for. Do you understand?”

  He blinked and nodded. “I think so. Maybe not everything. But I don’t understand what you want with me?”

  “We want you,” Grandmother said, “to help us find something among these worlds. This is what the Seekers do. Arwal leads this effort.” She nodded at him.

  “What are you looking for?” He asked her, swiveling his gaze between Arwal, who looked grim, frowning slightly, and Grandmother. “And you want me to help?”

  “We do want you to help. You are bright with numbers,” she said. “And you have the spark. We take the most promising trainees as Seekers for this great project. It is the purpose of the Center, at its core.”

  “What are you looking for?” he asked again. His mouth felt dry.

  “Proof of something. Something precious,” she said, smiling at him in the half-light. “Something infinitely precious.”

  Chapter Four

  The Center, Simulation Room

  3 Years Later

  “This is simulation,” Arwal said to the four trainees. “It will seem real. It will look real to your eyes. You can touch things in the sim. It will even smell and taste real. But it is not real. It is a construct.” He looked them over. Tarl met his gaze and nodded.

  They were in a circular white room, with one door that folded neatly into the arc of the walls. The ceiling was a shallow dome that glowed with a pale yellow light. The floor was also gently sloped and covered in a thick, springy mat that felt soft underfoot. There were no windows, but Tarl could see vents discretely tucked into the rim of the dome.

  Next to him, Jin rotated his neck to loosen it. The other two Trainees were older than he and Jin. They trained in the sims and would be there to guide Jin and Tarl through the test. Jorna was small, a thin, wiry girl maybe five years older than Tarl, he reckoned. Sool was perhaps the same age as Jorna, maybe a year older. He was from the eastern ocean region, Tarl thought. Big and brown with curly, wiry hair and wide expressive eyes.

  “This test is drawn from the Archives,” Arwal was saying. “Every successful mission is recorded and archived for later study. This is a relevant portion of the mission selected to illustrate some widely applicable concepts.” He paused and looked them over. “Questions?”

  Jin raised a hand. “What sort of world was it?” he asked. The Archives held many thousands of missions, it was said. Each world was different, and while some were similar to each other, none were alike. This was why they trained and studied them. The Archivists catalogued and classified everything known about a mission, recording anything they could learn. It was like, Grandmother had said dismissively, cataloguing the grains of sand on the beach. But they did it anyway, and she pored over, it was said, every report the Seekers made.

  Tarl had learned. The Seekers, the group he was training to join, were the ones who traveled between the threads of the worlds, and returned to bring their knowledge back. The Center’s work was exploring these worlds to learn everything they could. The Center sent agents, Seekers, for this. It was dangerous work, Arwal had stressed. So they needed to learn what they might encounter.

  In class, Tarl had asked questions. What sorts of knowledge were they looking for? This varied, he was told, based on what the Center knew of the world before sending their explorers. Sometimes, it seemed, it was to look for evidence of certain types of mathematical concepts being used by people in these threads in specific ways. Others because they met some esoteric criteria known only to the Center. They instructed the Seekers on a case-by-case basis, he was told. Each world was different.

  “This world,” Arwal said, “the one you will visit in the sim today, is an example of a Filtered World.” He glanced at them to check their understanding. “You are familiar with this classification, correct?”

  Tarl nodded, and the others did. Filtered Worlds, or Failed Worlds were places that had developed to some level of technological sophistication and then reverted to a previous stage of development. Failed Worlds were, according to the Archivists, the most common.

  Jorna raised her hand. “What sort of Filtered World is it?” she asked.

  Arwal nodded to her. “Good question,” he said, cocking his head at her. “This is your third simulation?”

  She nodded. “It helps to know going in, what you might deal with,” she said.

  “And so it does,” Arwal said. “This is standard procedure. This world is a Nomadic Dreamtime, as best as we can classify it. The natives here have no history beyond myth. Anything they say is unreliable. It is probably a thousand years post-Collapse, according to the Archivists. Your sensoria will follow the Seeker’s track into a set of ruins, and you will observe the interactions with the natives. Your assignment is to return with a piece of information you think is important.” He glanced up at them. “Ready?”

  They nodded, and he nodded back. “I
will return in…” he glanced up, as if listening to something only he could hear, “… several hours.” He grinned at Tarl and Jin. “Enjoy yourselves. You will spend a lot of time in these.” He left, closing the curved door behind him.

  The room was a bare circle now, the outline of the door barely visible against the curved wall. “Steady yourselves,” Sool said, his voice high and clipped for such a large boy. “This feels weird.”

  Tarl looked at Jin and then blinked as the world lurched underneath him. Jin was there, but now they were no longer inside the circular simulation chamber, they were on a wide plain covered in tall dry grass. The sky was a blue dome overhead, and the wind was sharp and clear in his nose. It was cold, even, Tarl noticed. He looked over his shoulder and saw a distant ridgeline stepping up to a range of purple and gray peaks, their shoulders blanketed with snow.

  “Whoa,” Jin said, eyes wide. “That was abrupt.” He too was spinning, taking it all in.

  They were, Tarl reckoned, in a wide dish-shaped valley, in the foothills of this mountain range. He saw a stream nearby that flowed straight down the valley floor towards what looked like a cluster of structures. Ruins, he realized quickly, and then said it out loud. “Ruins,” he said excitedly, pointing.

  “This way,” Jorna called, walking towards the bank of the stream. “The sensoria follows the path of the original Seeker. We can dally here but we’ll miss their encounter as it unfolds. Follow the avatar.”

  She pointed, and Tarl saw there was another figure with them. It was a human form, but silvered and hard to focus on. It was also, he noticed, translucent. He stared hard and saw that it was a woman, tall, with a mane of pale hair tied behind her. She scanned the horizon and then began picking her way down the embankment.

  Tarl watched her. She was tall, dressed in trousers tucked into high boots, well-suited for hiking. She wore a short jacket with a fur-lined collar. Her outline blurred and wavered, and while Tarl could see through her, if he focused, he could pick out details. She had long fingers, he saw, as she knelt down and dipped her hand in the stream. Sool scampered up to her and mimicked her action, splashing his hand in the water. He ran through the avatar, passing through as if she was vapor.