Shadows and Smoke

by Rich X Curtis

  Tarl looked at Jin. He seemed a bit disoriented still. He had leaned forward onto his knees and was breathing heavily. Tarl could see sweat beading on his face and neck. Sool was grinning, but he too looked a little gray. Jorna seemed most relaxed and smiled at him when she noticed him looking at her. She stretched, raising her arms above her head and arching her back.

  “You’d done that before,” Tarl said, his voice feeling thick and strange to him in the room's closeness, quite different than the prairie they had been on just moments before.

  She cocked her head at him, smiled, and seemed about to speak, but then the door opened, recessing back into the wall and then opening outward. They all looked expectantly, Jin straightening and wiping his face with his hands. Arwal stepped in, having to bend his head to clear the doorway. He straightened up as he came inside. He looked them over, smiling.

  “So?” he said, looking pleased. “Back in one piece. What did you think?”

  Jorna spoke first. “I had that sim before,” she said, glancing at Tarl as she said it. “I knew what to expect.” She looked a little sheepish.

  “Good!” Arwal said, nodding enthusiastically. “You will, all of you, do many such exercises. These are records of your comrades and their missions to these places. Some of them, like this one, are quite old.” He clapped his hands together once. “You should study them closely, sometimes several times.” He looked at Jin, clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s sometimes, for some of us, a bit of a physical shock, the experience. Buck up, you’ll feel all right soon enough.”

  He looked at Tarl. “What did you think? We tasked you with observing something interesting. So,” he said, “report.” He regarded Tarl cooly.

  Tarl blinked, unsure of what to say. It had all been interesting, but he seized on the most recent thing he’d thought of right near the end. “She looked ill, there, right before we came back. Right before she disappeared,” he ventured.

  Arwal’s mouth twitched. “And?” he prompted, not betraying anything. He was watching Tarl.

  Tarl licked his lips. He tried to plan his words. Seekers were supposed to be composed, in control of themselves at all times. He steadied himself and tried to force his words to come. Still, he stammered nervously as he spoke. “Sh-sh-she was being recorded,” he said. “Right there, at the end. That’s why she was sick.”

  Arwal didn’t react, but his eyes were flat and cool as he looked at Tarl. “She was being recorded,” he said. “Yes, this is how this all works.” He gestured at the surrounding room, and Tarl heard Sool snort quietly to himself. He thinks I am being stupid, Tarl thought.

  He continued. “You took a last record of her, right then, didn’t you?” He heard the words come out of his mouth, but didn’t quite believe they had. “She was disoriented, sick like Jin was. You read her…mind right then. That’s why she…” he wracked his brain for the right word, “…vanished after that. Why they all did. You have no more records of her mission after that.”

  Arwal inclined his head. “Just so,” he said, satisfied. “You are correct, Tarlannan, that is the way of it, the way of all the missions in the archive. We have complete records only of the successful ones. The others end…prematurely.” He shrugged. “But,” he continued, “I had nothing to do with this. Before my time.” He smiled. “I’m old, but not quite that old.” They nodded, smiling at his joke. “Also, the process is not quite so uncomfortable now for the Seeker. Less nausea.”

  “Who was she?” Jin spoke up. He seemed more composed, though his lank hair looked a bit damp to Tarl. “The Seeker,” he said. “Does she have a name?”

  Arwal nodded. “She does,” he said. “But I will leave it as an exercise to the learner to seek that information. It is available.” He smiled again. “She is quite interesting as I remember. Many successful missions before this one.”

  “What happened to her?” Sool said. “Do we know?”

  Arwal turned to him. “How could we know this, Soolonninin?” He spread his hands. “No other missions to this thread exist in the archives. Apparently the Center decided, in the way that it does, that such follow-ups were not warranted. She did not return, her Recall was unsuccessful.”

  Tarl considered this. He pictured the woman being ridden down by the lancers. Pierced with arrows as she fled across the wide prairie. There would be no way to escape. Or captured and brought back to their camp for questioning. Questioning under torture. They had killed her. He knew that much about how it worked. The Center sent you, and they brought you back. Apparently they could take a record, somehow.

  “Weren’t they watching her?” He blurted, following his train of thought. Arwal had been speaking, he realized, and he had not been listening. Arwal looked at him, surprised.

  Tarl swallowed. “The Center,” he said lamely. “They were watching her. They knew, didn’t they? What was happening to her, I mean?”

  “What do you mean?” Jorna said, confused. “She died, clearly.” She smirked.

  “I mean,” Tarl said, glancing askance at her, “that the Center had a record of what she was in the middle of. Didn’t they know she was in danger? Why not recall her immediately?”

  “Ah,” Arwal said. “I see.” He pressed his hands together. “We assemble these records post-hoc, after the fact. As I understand it, the portion of the Center that gathers the record must…review it, and this process takes time. Quite a bit of time, actually. I’ve heard the Archivists involved describe it as a meditation or a kind of dreaming. Sometimes it takes years to assemble these experiences, to where they accurately model the experience of the Seeker that generates them.” He smiled indulgently at Tarl. “So no, there was no way to know what was about to happen to her. No way to save her.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Good!” he smiled again at them. “This has been be a good first lesson for you, I think. Or second.” He paused, considering. “One more thought, which young Tarl’s observation highlights.” He waited on their attention. “As a Seeker, you are alone. There is no help the Center can offer you. You must remember your training and survive until we can recall you. This is your overriding duty. The people you meet in these threads, on actual missions, are real. As real as you and I. But if they oppose you, and they often will, you need to be ready for that. Ready to do what is needed.”

  “To kill?” Tarl asked. “Like she did?” He was surprised, again, at what was coming out of his mouth. He needed to learn to curb his tongue. His mother had often told him it would draw him trouble.

  Arwal turned his eyes on him. They were pale as milk mixed with water. He nodded. “We train you to fight,” he said. “I’m sure you have noticed.” A smile touched his lips as they chuckled. “We train you to observe. To see things most normal people will miss. Later, as you mature, you will learn other skills. Deception. Persuasion. Languages. Technical concepts. Theories of Mind and of the Worlds. You will learn seduction.” He grinned. “All of this so you can do this work. Killing may be part of it, or seduction might. Usually not with the same people.”

  They chuckled, at this, and he smiled. He paused, raising a finger. “These are tools. And useful in your work. But one rule rises above all, and you must internalize it into your very core.”

  “Survival,” Tarl said before he could stop himself. He winced inside. What causes these outbursts? He resolved to master himself. He felt a part of him watching from a distance, and that part basked in this newfound confidence.

  “Exactly this,” Arwal said, nodding emphatically. “You must survive until Recall. What you learn is secondary if you cannot report it. Even missions Seekers have felt were failures have been, after analysis, celebrated as victories. We have a mission, and that mission must be central to all our actions.”

  The others were looking down soberly. Missions were dangerous, they knew. Seekers sometimes, often even, did not return. Sometimes they were killed by people who carried stone knives and lived in ruined cities. Sometimes they just vanished, and the Center never
learned why.

  All to serve the Center, and the great project. They gave their lives for it, quite literally. Tarl wondered what they thought of that, or would have thought of it. He wondered at what the blonde woman’s last moments were like. Was she resigned to it? Proud? Or terrified?

  He thrust the images that formed out of his mind and looked up at Arwal. “Why?” he said.

  Arwal inclined his head at him. “This is the question you must answer for yourself, of course.” He looked at each of them. “All those, in every thread of the Tapestry who serve a cause must, for themselves, answer this question. Why do this? Why risk my life for this idea?” He shrugged. “You will learn more as you mature. Of the stakes in our struggle. I will leave you with this, to consider. There are stakes, and they are very real. No threat of war, or invasion, or oppression from tyrants that the people in these threads we visit face, and they are very real mind you, can eclipse this.” He smiled sadly. “No threat is more real, than that which we seek to stop. This is the Great Work.”

  “Good lesson,” Arwal repeated with finality. “We will convene again tomorrow for another session. In the meantime, you must compile your reports on what you observed. Was the Center’s classification correct, why or why not?”

  The Center, Tarl remembered, has classed this thread as Filtered or Failed. This meant that their civilization had destroyed itself before it could achieve Maturity. Each of these classifications, he knew, had technical definitions. They were drilling them into their heads, this Theory of Worlds, but he was hazy still on many of these concepts. He could not keep them straight and forgot many of their key elements hours or days after learning them.

  But he knew he would not forget this lesson, the woman on the wide prairie below the gray and purple mountains. He could see her face lifting, as she wiped her mouth of spittle, lifting to face the charge of the wild-eyed, wild-haired lancer. Her eyes were not, he thought, full of fear. They were full of something else. He thought of Arwal's words. The Great Work. Her eyes were sad, he thought, realizing what he'd seen in them. It was acceptance.

  Chapter Five

  The Center, Training Grounds

  Two Years Later

  “Again,” Shona called out. Tarl wiped his mouth as he climbed to his feet. He glanced down at his hand and saw a red smear on the back of his wrist. Jin had drawn blood with his backhand knife-strike. He was getting good with that attack. Tarl shook his head to clear it and came to his attack stance again.

  Turn sideways to your opponent. This minimized your available attack surface and allowed your arms and legs their maximal reach. It was, Shona taught them, universal across all the worlds the Center had studied. She claimed she had delved into these records, and studied them all. At one point, the Center had made a survey of the fighting styles of a double dozen worlds. Shona knew them all.

  And she was liberal with her instruction, sharing tricks and techniques she’d gleaned from her countless hours of simulation study. Sims from missions thousands of years old, compiled by Seekers long dead, from missions to threads the Center may have classified as Failed, or Improbable, but still containing useful data, useful information.

  How to fight was all Shona cared about. How to fight and how to teach fighting. It obsessed her. Tarl found this both strangely attractive and repellent about her.

  “You will not,” she called out, “have weapons with you when you go out. You will be as your mothers created you, naked as the dawn.” Tarl knew this was an exaggeration. The Center could render images with their probes or, as the Archivists called them, their dreaming. From these images, the Artisans would fashion clothing. If it touched your skin and did not contain much metal or mass, you could take it with you. Metallic objects, they said, did not translate, so you could bear no knives worth the name. Larger objects, like guns or other such machines, were likewise unavailable.

  So they drilled. Tarl had, over time, gotten passable at the basics. Shona had seen to that, and he had borne the bruises of her instruction. It had become a point of pride for him. He would not give up, no matter how badly she would beat him. She shook her head at his mulishness, but he would haul himself to his feet despite the pain, and make another effort.

  Today, they paired him with Jin. They were roommates, so it was rare that they sparred together. Most of the time they were in separate rotations, as the barracks split along upper and lower bunks into groups. Tarl had the lower bunk, Jin the upper. Tarl meant for him to feel today’s session when he climbed into bed.

  He and Jin were close, this past year. Jin was quick, smart, and apt to master the more physical aspects of their strange schooling. On the obstacle courses he was always faster, in physical training he was stronger. Running, he outpaced Tarl easily. Tarl was always puffing and blowing into the finish line, only to find Jin waiting, a smirk on his face. In hand-to-hand combat training, Jin was faster, more precise, more apt to master a new technique than Tarl was, who needed to, apparently, have it beaten into him a few times before he learned it.

  They sparred on the Hill, as they called it, a low rise in the wide lawn fronting the six Trainee barracks. Several months ago a new group of wide-eyed boys had arrived, and displaced Jin and Tarl into the blue barracks, so-called for the pale blue stones over the windows. Each of the barracks had such subtle pastel color codes. They were otherwise identical. Each morning, the Trainee cadres would assemble for their morning exercises.

  Running. Jumping. Push-ups. A round of calisthenics to get them huffing and puffing, then a short run round the track. A break for breakfast and then specialized instruction in something physical. From Arwal, to their surprise, they learned to climb. For such an old man, as Tarl thought of him, he had gaped with the others as Arwal shed his gray robe and, with his smile never leaving his face, scale the climbing tower like a monkey.

  Other instructors drilled them in concealment and camouflage. Sneaking and tracking. These were usually new Seekers back from their first missions, rotating through their training duties before going back out, as they called it. They were serious and grim, these Seekers, and Tarl felt them judging him silently as he listened intently to their instructions.

  There was Aleck, who taught them traps. It amazed Tarl at what you could fashion with a bit of wire and a few sharp sticks. His efforts were clumsy and, he thought, less than useful. But he tried. He even succeeded once in tripping Jin with a particularly well-disguised ankle-high wire.

  From Miral, a slip of a woman with long white hair, they learned what she called seeing.

  In an instruction hall, they assembled for a lecture on insertion techniques in a new world, how to get to ground and orient oneself. It was a dry subject full of abstract theory. A recently retired Seeker taught it, a wispy-bearded man by the name of Rolla.

  After about ten minutes of Rolla droning on, a man ran in shouting and brandishing a weapon, an angular black pistol clutched in his fist. He fired the weapon several times at the instructor and then crashed out the rear door. The class scattered in panic, tablets flying, trainees tripping over each other to escape this chaos or reach Rolla, who lay on the floor. Panic reigned.

  The doors crashed open and Miral and the shooter entered through the rear door. They both wore broad smiles.

  “You,” Miral said, pointing at a student still sprawled on the floor. “What was he shouting? Tell me now, precisely.”

  The student gibbered at her. He had no idea. “You,” Miral said, dismissing him. “You with the black hair, there in the back. How many shots fired?” She quizzed several of the Trainees. Some said two shots, others three. Tarl himself felt he had heard four shots, but Miral thankfully spared him her quiz. Likewise, who the shooter’s target was. Nobody could agree. Was it the instructor Rolla? Had Rolla had been shot accidentally? Had the shooter said his name? What language had he spoken in?

  “None of you,” Miral had said, “can agree on anything. Why is this?” She peered at them through her pale brown eyes. Like tea, with
milk, Tarl thought when he first saw her. She glared at them, then smiled. “None of you ever can.” She shook her head. "Can anyone tell me why?"

  None of the students, having taken their seats again, would venture a guess. “Come now,” Miral chided them. “Surely you all saw the same thing. A man enters, running in, shouting some words, and fires a weapon in your class. The weapon is loud. There is smoke and flame. Who was the target? How many shots? What did he say?” She shook her head again, in rueful sorrow.

  Tarl stood. “Four shots,” he said, as loudly as he could. “Aimed at the roof. “He was shouting nonsense, but I heard the word sik, and sempor,” he stated as matter-of-factly as he could. “I think.”

  Miral regarded him, her pale brown eyes wide with surprise. “Just so,” she said. “There were four shots.” She frowned. “And aimed high,” she continued. “Even blanks can wound, if they catch an eye.” She nodded to herself. “As for his words, you have a good ear, young Tarl.” She smiled at him. “He cried words in a common tongue among the thousand worlds. Latin. You will soon begin your study of it, and its many known variations.”

  She glanced at him. “Sit down, Tarl.” He sat. “None of you have had Latin yet, have you?” A few hands went up, from the Yellow Barracks, the next building up of the six Trainee groupings.

  “Excellent,” she smiled maliciously. “What words did you worthies hear?” The Yellows grinned sheepishly, they had made out nothing, apparently. She tutted in mock disapproval.

  “What this exercise teaches, and we do a variation of it periodically”—she grinned at them—“is seeing.” She swiveled her gaze at them all. “Not looking, or observing, but seeing. Gathering information. Your eyes were all exposed to the same thing, but only Tarl noticed key elements of what was happening. Why is this?” She stuck her fists on her skinny hips and glared at them. No answer came from the students. Frightened, Tarl thought. Instructors were apt to dole out punishments for wrong answers, so the students stayed quiet, hoping to escape notice.