Smoke's Fire Read online

  “Why not? Without this, what use is the damn thing?” the Boy sputtered, his high voice rising. “The dreamers need it. Surely you can see that. This thread is heading into that thing, that Tangle or knot or whatever she calls it. The dreamers need to complete the Work. They need it.”

  “I need her more,” Smoke said. “And she isn’t a slave. It’s up to her, and we have more pressing issues currently.”

  “What issues?” Grandmother said, peering at him with her white eyes, glowing in the dawn light. “These women? The ones in the Tangle?”

  Smoke stayed silent. Don’t talk too long with them, Alpha warned him in his ear. They are scheming and fishing for data.

  “We have a truce,” he said instead of responding to her. “I will not linger here, and you will keep Jessica safe until I return. Then perhaps, if Alpha is willing, she can visit the dreamers.”

  “How long will your…business take?” Grandmother asked. The Boy threw up his arms in disgust.

  “As long as it takes,” Smoke said. “We’re going deep in the Tangle.”

  “To what end?” she said. “There’s only chaos in there. Nothing gets out.”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. Hopefully, some answers.” He snapped his fingers, hoping Alpha would take him elsewhere on cue. But nothing…

  He sighed. The Boy shook his head, and he saw Grandmother roll her white eyes. “Sorry,” Alpha said in his ear. “I was distracted.”

  And then he was gone from there, and felt the sand of the beach under his toes.

  “That was awkward,” he said to her. The breeze carried salt on it. The same beach, then. The African continent, somewhen.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Next time let’s agree on a signal or something.”

  “Or something,” he said. “Now, what’s the plan.”

  “I was hoping you would tell me,” she said. “I’m kind of stumped.”

  “You find anything?” He looked up the beach, no hut. He’d have to rebuild it again. He started up the strand.

  “I found them,” she said. “High certainty. But there’s a problem.”

  “Which is?” he paused, squinting out at the ocean.

  “They’re not alone,” Alpha said. “Not alone at all.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “The Tangle is growing,” Alpha said. “Threads go in but they don’t come out.”

  “How is that even possible?” Smoke asked. He sat on his “couch” he’d fashioned from two big driftwood logs dragged up from the beach. No fishermen with long black knives in this thread, no sails on the horizon. The jungle loomed up behind him. Alpha said it went for hundreds of miles inland. Maybe it was Africa. He was alone here.

  “I can’t really say. I can just measure it,” Alpha said. “It’s verifiable.”

  “You sure you’re not wrong about this?” He scratched idly in the dirt with a stick. His face was still tight and sore where the Boy had smacked him with his little fist. Had that blow knocked him out? He worked his jaw, feeling the taut skin stretch. Maybe it was from when I blocked that flying kick?

  “It’s verifiable,” Alpha repeated patiently. He sometimes wondered what might happen if Alpha decided to part ways with him. “That means I’ve verified it.”

  Smoke smiled tightly to himself. “Got it,” he said, standing up. His side was still a trifle sore from when he’d crashed through the table under the Boy’s furious assault. He started walking down the beach, back to the boulders he’d climbed before. Maybe he’d see another boat. “I need to go for a walk,” he said. “I’m still sore.”

  They’d been here two days, licking their wounds. He was beat up. Jessica was taken. A hostage. It made sense. They could hold her, and the only way he could free her was by an assault that would mean death or damage to people he didn’t want to hurt. With Alpha’s help he could certainly do it, but it would be chaos if he did. People would die. People he knew. He thought back to the red-haired support worker whose windpipe he’d smashed. He didn’t want to see that again, he didn’t want to do that again. He could see her dead eyes, judging him. They’d been so blue.

  Jessica was safe where she was. There was nothing she could tell Grandmother or that bastard Boy that they didn’t know already. She was a guarantee of his good behavior. He couldn’t move against the Center with her held there, he knew. He waded through the surf, and scanned the horizon. Nothing, just clouds to the north promising a wet night. He’d have to start looking for firewood before the afternoon got too far along.

  “What,” he said, picking up their conversation from where they’d left it, “does it mean if the Tangle grows? Why do we care?”

  “It’s an anomaly,” Alpha said smoothly. “Something has happened in there that is drawing world-threads together. It’s like a rip in fabric, it’s spreading slowly but with every snapped fiber it gets bigger.”

  “And pretty soon you need new pants,” Smoke said. He tossed a rock into the waves, trying to skip it. It dropped out of sight. Plunk. He frowned. Alpha had never worn pants, he knew. He also knew she would know what he was talking about. “So, what happens if we do nothing?”

  “The Tangle will eventually knot the entire multiverse. No threads are post-Tangle, as far as I can tell. Once they go in, they don’t come out. They end,” Alpha said.

  Smoke sighed, trying another rock. This one skipped once, then hit the face of a small wave and disappeared. Plop. They’d been over this. He knew how long they had. Alpha could not tell with certainty. Something about how braids of closely congruent threads were near the Tangle, but not in it yet, and if they went, they dragged whole chunks of the universe with them.

  A thought occurred to him. “What’s happening in those threads?” he asked. “The ones in the Tangle?”

  “The interface between threads would abrade,” Alpha said. “I think there would be bleed through. Fundamental physical properties would change suddenly. Stars would go out, gravity could change, radically fluctuate. Chemistry would alter. It’s unpredictable. Grandmother spoke the truth. Nothing that gets too deep in there gets out.”

  They’d discussed this too. Gravity multiplying by a factor of a billion in an instant. The universe would light up with a trillion-trillion new suns. Laws governing atomic interactions altering even slightly would mean everything living in such a thread would die instantly. He thought back to people he had seen in these worlds, as a Seeker. The little girls in an amphitheater, held up on their fathers’ shoulders. Gone. He pushed the image away and tossed another stone into the sea.

  “And you’re sure Silver and Gold are the cause of this?” he asked. They were the only recurring elements in the congruent threads on the fringe of the Tangle. He knew what Alpha thought.

  “Maybe not the cause, but they’re involved. It’s almost certain.” She sounded exasperated. “You’re stalling,” Alpha said. She’d accused him of that too. “Your face is healed. Your side is sore, but there’s no lasting damage.”

  No lasting damage, Smoke thought sourly. He felt like a hammer had smashed his side in. “So we should go in there again?”

  “Yes,” Alpha said. “The sooner the better. Worlds are dying, Smoke, as we speak.”

  He knew this too. “Any chance you can figure out something like what the Center uses to fix people when they come back from missions?” He spied a rock, a flat black disk, and stooped to pick it up, feeling for the twinge in his bruised side as he bent over. “Getting my ass kicked is getting a little old.”

  “No time for that,” Alpha said. “Living organisms are complex. I can’t make a template system that would be foolproof without a lot of testing. Unless you want me using the Center’s system?”

  The Center had perfected a system where they took a Seeker’s snapshot of their physical self that they could restore without breaking mental continuity. Alpha said it was a good chunk of what the Center spent its cognition on, and estimated they must have tested it many thousands of times before they were satisfied. I
t also meant they could make alterations to the physiology of a person who they used it on. Physical changes. Also mental ones. He shuddered.

  He thought of Murn, his Murn, and what the Boy had done to her mind. His fault. He had asked. He scowled, feeling the edge of the flat black stone bite into his palm. He threw it angrily, leaning down so it flew, spinning, into the water. It skipped one, two, three…and four times before it sank. His lip twitched.

  “No thanks,” he said, at last. “I’ll heal the old-fashioned way.” He hoped he wasn’t in for another beating from Silver, but he suspected trying to coerce the woman was risking that.

  These past few days they’d reviewed the fight with the Boy. He was slight, massing about thirty kilograms, Alpha estimated. His strength-to-mass ratio was low compared to Smoke’s. So how, Smoke wondered bitterly, had he been such an effective fighter? He’d kicked Smoke’s ass handily, he thought. And he did it with a smile on his little face. He shuddered at the thought of the Boy’s teeth clacking and snapping together as he’d tried to bite his face off.

  “The Boy was an Augment,” Alpha explained. “It is an avatar of the Center itself. All of the Select are. It might have been a human boy once, but no longer.

  “He fights so well,” Alpha explained, “because he makes absolute maximum effectiveness of every blow. Human fighters don’t know how much efficiency they waste with each blow.

  “The Boy wastes no effort, so every punch is precise, on-target, and optimized for maximum impact. There’s a bandwidth constraint at work, which is probably why he wasn’t lethal for you within a few seconds of contact,” Alpha explained, rather dispassionately to Smoke’s mind. “He couldn’t be completely maximal due to the lack of available data on your responses.”

  This had made him feel worse, and he’d stopped griping about it.

  “OK,” he said aloud to the wind and waves. “Let’s go over this plan again.”

  Alpha had located a Silver instance, as she called it, well within the outer shell of the Tangle. Not a thread in imminent danger of being snipped by the Tangle, but deep enough to be within its influence. It’s congruence was high. The plan was simple. Smoke would be inserted, he would overpower Silver, and then they would try a new approach.

  “Silver and Gold both said they serve their gods,” Alpha told him. “But we’ve only got their word for it.” Alpha had explained this at length. “We need to talk to their gods.”

  Smoke had relayed everything he could remember of his discussions with Smoke and Gold about their gods, and how they interfaced with them. The mechanism seemed highly organic to Alpha, more grown than designed. The gods spoke to them in their dreams, giving them instruction and guidance through some combination of what sounded like post-hypnotic suggestion and induced schizophrenia.

  Alpha proposed knocking Silver out and, similar to how they had originally interfaced with the Center, interface with these things. Knock her out? How? It made Smoke’s skin itch just thinking about it.

  The thread she’d found Silver in sounded Occulted Preindustrial. He’d had her describe it in depth, as the beach lacked the Center’s sim chamber and visualization aids. A Cradle-based civilization, with the place sounding like a cross between Ancient Rome and Las Vegas. She was in a port city, with wide avenues and spacious temple courts and plazas. It was on an island in the Mediterranean, a large island that didn’t sound familiar to Smoke. Thera?

  “You’ll need to get your hand near her forehead for at least five seconds for me to open the channel,” Alpha said. How was he supposed to touch the woman’s head if she didn’t allow it, let alone keep it there for five long seconds?

  “She’s going to break my arm, you know,” he said drily. Get the medical supplies in advance, maybe? He shook his head. “Do they speak Latin there?”

  “No,” he said. “They don’t. It’s related to Greek, but it’s not the Greek you know,” Alpha said sadly. “I can translate for you, but you’ll be mute.”

  “That’s going to be a problem,” he said. Mute Tarl did not exactly make women relax. Touch her head for five seconds? He’d be lucky if he got his hand within a yard of her.

  “This isn’t going to work, you know,” he said, wading into the waves up to his knees. Tiny silver fish darted through the shallow waters near his feet. He watched them, going about their fishy lives, oblivious to him. Did fish even think? He didn’t know. He looked out at the horizon, gray with clouds. So much water, so many fish out there. He thought about sharks and shuddered.

  “Why do you say so?” Alpha asked.

  “She’s dangerous,” Smoke said. “I can’t talk to her in this place. Can we find her in another thread? Somewhere she’ll speak Latin or Spanish or even German?”

  “This place scores highest on the criteria we used,” Alpha explained. They’d been over this, too. The thread had to be deep enough in the Tangle, to be entangled with the others. He had to be able to find her. Alpha searched for her using the template they’d compiled from the previous encounters he’d had with her. Sometimes she came up blank, which they had no good explanation for, except a vague theory Alpha had about how her personality shifted, so maybe the template didn’t match in those cases.

  Smoke had been hoping for the Earth he’d spent the longest with her in. She’d spoken perfectly good English there, and he’d actually had a decent rapport with her then. This woman would not know him, and would likely view him as a threat. That thought filled his belly with ice.

  “Fine,” he said, knowing he’d stalled long enough. Alpha was right, his side was just sore. He’d had worse. “What is she doing in this city? Let me guess,” he said, turning his back on the waves and trudging up the dunes towards the hut. “She’s the Queen here? Has a golden throne surrounded by a hundred bodyguards with bronze spears?”

  “Even better,” Alpha said, and Smoke heard a grin in her voice. “No guards. She lives near the port. She’s got two kids and a fat husband who drinks a lot. She’s a housewife.”

  Chapter Twelve

  He arrived in Thera in the early evening, on another beach. The air was warm, warmer than his beach on the African coast had been. He wore a pair of short, loose trousers and a shawl-like affair looped over one shoulder. Both were of a dirty white linen weight cloth, surprisingly soft to his fingers. He shaded his eyes and oriented himself.

  He stood on a north-south strand. The sun dipped toward the horizon to his left, and the slope of the island rose towards his right. The city was carved in terraces that looked roughly circular as they bent away from him to the north and south. The palace and temples were in the top-most circle. There were canals on each terrace, connected with a series of clever waterfalls to each other. The water came from a vigorous spring higher on the hill, now capped by the palace/temple complex.

  “The looks a lot like Plato’s Atlantis,” Alpha said. “The temple must have been built over the spring, probably a sacred spring. It’s obviously fed by the volcano.”

  “Obviously,” Smoke muttered. Nobody was nearby but he didn’t want anybody hearing him regardless. Mute Smoke needed to stay mute. He wasn’t going up to the temple in any case. Silver was the wife of a wine merchant, who, according to Alpha, sampled his wares a bit too much. He scanned the beach, looking for an entrance to the city.

  Get this over with, he thought to himself. Find her, smile like an idiot, and try to get close enough for Alpha to open his interface through him. He hoped it wouldn’t be painful. The last time he’d done it had been. Really painful, but also had given him a feeling of almost limitless, godlike power. He was filled with a sick curiosity about this again. Alpha was adamant, they needed to open a channel to the one party they hadn’t directly talked with yet. Silver and Gold called themselves tools. Something guided them.

  Silver called them gods. She had described a dream of an ocean, an ocean of song, with things that moved in it and sang to her with colors. It drove her to act in the world, as a tool, she said, a tool of their will. Gold, who
m he’d known under another name, Garcia, from his time in that Earth’s CIA, had described her gods differently.

  For Silver, her dreams were a comfort and escape, benevolent song-whales that guided and protected her. Gold, on the other hand, had raged against hers. For her, the gods didn’t come with gentle songs. They came on like a sudden storm, with seizures and sudden fits of madness. They don’t seduce, she’d confessed to him on a night long ago, her breath hot on his neck as she told her story. They rape.

  The end result was the same, though. Silver and Gold were tools of some hidden intelligence. The Center called them the First, though they were only distantly related to that ancient civilization. They were life, of a sort. Mechanical life. Simple, in isolation, but when ensconced deep under the crust of a suitable world, they grew vastly complex. Smoke pictured them, vast colonies of cells spread through deep aquifers in the crust, and wanted to vomit. The thought of those seething trillions of cells cogitating, thinking like a brain, a planet-sized superintelligence, made him feel ill.

  And yet, Alpha had pointed out, every human thread had these. They observed, dispassionately, intelligence on these worlds. They evaluated life, and if they didn’t think an evolutionary path was leading to a mature civilization, they aborted it. Center doctrine said that they were guiding life towards creating Minds like the Center.

  He’d asked Alpha about the First, there on the beach, as they talked over his little fire. He’d had pizza again. This one from a place called Pietro’s. The Super Special, with peppers, onions, and fat chunks of Italian sausage. “That,” Smoke had said, “is the best pizza in the Tapestry.”

  “It does look good,” Alpha said. “I had a piece, in my little sim here. Pretty good.” She could do that, he realized. Experience things as a person would, but she was fundamentally different. He didn’t pry. He needed her. “The First, though…” she trailed off. “They’re an enigma.”