Shadows and Smoke

by Rich X Curtis

  Low, bristly bushes and greenish-brown weeds, many with long thorns, grew everywhere. He thought he saw a rabbit or marmot, or perhaps a squirrel, but it vanished quickly into the underbrush. There would be such here, he knew. Small life, opportunistic and always hungry, eking out an existence in an ecosystem with many empty niches. Something had happened here, something bad, a war or worse, which caused all this to fall apart. In such places, life found opportunity.

  Turning, she led him towards a low hill; the path curving into a declivity. The path itself looked tended, someone had cleared the brush and the rocks away, perhaps not recently, but it was less cluttered than the other lanes and alleyways he peered down as they passed. This was a place they came to regularly, these people and this strange woman. She led him directly, not straying from the path.

  She paused before entering the low slope. Turning to him, she looked at him for a long moment. The wind twitched at her scarf, plastering it to her face. She was beautiful, he realized again, though he knew it already. He had known it when he had first seen her, nude and covered with gold dust. He had barely slept the night before with that image burned into his mind. He had seen her on three worlds, and she was the same in all of them. A painful beauty, he found her hard to even look at. He watched her and waited, unable to look away.

  “Down here, you will find what you’re looking for.” She spoke loudly enough to hear over the wind, which had subsided somewhat, but was still a stiff, gritty breeze.

  “What is down there?” He asked, chiding himself for being stupid. His words all sounded to him like the utterances of an idiot. Tongue-tied, he told himself. You want her to like you. Fool.

  She just motioned him to follow her, turning and hop-skipping down the path, graceful as a dancer. He followed, stepping carefully, eyes squinted against the dust that seemed everywhere. She led him down, the path turning like a snake, the walls of rubble growing higher on either side. Once the walls were above head height, it blocked the wind. He called to her then, hoping to ask more questions, and redeem himself for his earlier blundering.

  “Lady,” he said. “Señora. What is this place?”

  She stopped, peeling back her mask now that they were out of the worst of the wind. “Mexico. This is, or was, Mexico City. Maybe it still is. Tenochtitlan once. I should rename it to that, do you think?”

  “Tenochtitlan…” he began, forming the unfamiliar word in his mouth. But she was already moving. She continued down the path, eventually coming to a crack in the rubble, the path dead-ending in a jagged hole, low to the ground. The hole looked like it had been a doorframe once, half filled with rubble.

  “What does it mean, this word? Tenochtitlan?” He was pleased with himself for not mispronouncing it. He was good with languages.

  “Something about fruit. Pears,” she said, cocking her head and looking past him. “Fruit of the thorn tree? Something like that.” She looked puzzled, then shrugged. “I can’t remember.” She laughed, shaking her head. The gold necklace tinkled heavily.

  “Your necklace,” he said. “Are those teeth?” Seeing them up close, even in the low light, he could make out the crenelations and crowns of teeth. Human-sized teeth. Teeth of gold.

  “They are,” she said, fingering the necklace, and looking down at it, frowning. “The ancients used them. Dentistry. My people find their skulls in the graveyards.”

  “Why?” He asked. Why do your people raid graveyards, he meant to ask, but she flustered him. This world was strange, and she was stranger.

  “Because I want them to,” she answered, guessing his meaning. “And they love me and want to please me. It’s nice.” She grinned at him. “Down we go, watch your head.”

  She ducked into the hole in the ground, scrambling on hands and feet through the cleft in the rock. He peered into it. She appeared to be standing in a room, looking up at him. She dusted herself off with her hands, and gestured for him to follow.

  “Come on down,” she said, singsong. She laughed then, a bark of a laugh. “It’s really roomy down here. Lots of stuff to see.”

  He eased himself down the hole. The crack was just big enough for him. Inside was a table, metal, he guessed. His foot found it, then the other, and then he could plant his weight on it. He looked for the floor and dropped.

  He was blinded momentarily as he righted himself. She had a light source, a black, squat tube, from one of her many pockets. It cast a beam of light, bright and sharp, around the room. She had pushed her goggles around her neck and had dust across one cheek.

  She is lovely, he thought again. She looked at him then, caught his eye and held it. She had seen him eying her.

  “Focus, Smoke. There are things down here you came a long way for. Or, was it a long way?” She smiled at him. I know you want me, the smile said. Or was that just his fear? “I wonder.” She clicked her tongue. “Come on.”

  The structure was mostly underground, but he could tell it was vast. Breezes moved through, from black corridors that he sensed more than saw, as she led him deeper and deeper into the ruin. After a hundred steps, maybe more, he called to her.

  “Lady,” he said softly. “Why did you bring me here?”

  She turned to him. “To give you what you came here for.” She shined the light on him, pinning him in its bright white glare. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “How do you know what I seek, Lady?” He spoke calmly, but his heart was a frantic drum in his chest. Something about her demeanor had changed. She was no longer smiling. Her face was flat, like a mask she wore. She is judging me.

  She dropped the light, leaving him blinking away purple streaks. “I remember things,” she said, her voice returning to the singsong cadence he suspected was sarcasm. Her voice dripped with it. “I forget things too, many things. But sometimes I remember things from long ago. Like you.”

  “How can you remember me? We have never met.” He said it again, stubbornly. She is mad, he reminded himself. Mad and dangerous.

  She was not tall and seemed slight. Lean and well-muscled, but not an athlete’s body. But he still did not wish to anger her, or confront her physically. She moved with an easy confidence and never seemed clumsy. And she seemed crazy half the time.

  He suspected she was a good fighter. She reminded him of Shona, the way she moved. Her movements were all confidence. He did not want to anger her, but he needed to put a stop to this charade. It was annoying him.

  “You tell me,” she said. “You came here. From the Center. Oh yes, I remember it now. I think you told me about it. About why you came here. I remember talking about it, after learning about you.”

  He gaped. This was impossible. “When was this?” He could think of nothing else to say to her. Humor her? It might be his only option.

  “A long time ago. When all this,” she gestured around herself, “was new. Before that, maybe. But I remember it.”

  “How old are you?” he asked. Was she insane? He knew people sometimes had delusions, but this seemed something else. She knew about the Center. “This place is a ruin.”

  “Old? Am I old?” He could hear the smile in her voice. “I guess I am old, though I don’t grow old. Things come, they go. Memories…fade.” She paused. “But sometimes they come back, and last night I remembered you. And this city. I remember this city when all these buildings were new and packed with people, doing all the stupid things that people fill their lives with.” She shined the light on him again, then around the room. “I’m older than this place, even older than the oldest parts of this place.”

  “How? How can this be?” He asked. “Nobody lives forever.”

  “And you know this how?” she asked. He could hear the resignation in her voice. “Believe me or not, I remember you, and how we met. You were a soldier in a sort of priesthood, in an empire to the north. These…priests broke the secret codes of their enemies. But you were a spy even then. A spy in their house. For this…Center.” She smiled at him. “See, I remember now. Always spies.
You were one of them. In Washington. Dee-cee.”

  The name meant nothing to him. He shook his head. “I am sorry, Lady, but I know none of this.”

  She snorted. “Maybe this Center of yours messes with your mind. They could do it from what you told us of them.”

  “Us?” He repeated. “Who else did I tell this to?”

  “To me!” she snapped, anger putting an edge to her voice. She gestured angrily, a chopping gesture for silence. “You told your story to me! About Talus, the Center, your search for gods.” She looked at him, shining the light in his face again. He held up his hand to block the glare. “You came for the first of them, the first of these.” She gestured around her, at their surroundings.

  He felt a chill race up his back. How could she know anything about the Center, unless what she said was true?

  She was watching him. “I do not know, Lady,” he said. “What you say might be, I grant it.”

  She laughed. “Grant it?” He could see her shake her head.

  He spoke quickly. “They teach us that the world is but one world, and that there are many threads to the universe. The worlds are like pearls on a string, and we can go from there to a world like this.”

  “A tapestry?” She said, cocking her head at him, her eyes shadowed and unreadable.

  “Yes!” He nodded vigorously. “They have used that word!”

  “You said that before. You told me this bullshit tapestry story back then too.” He could hear the edge rising in her voice.

  “I don’t know these places you speak of, to the north. I have never been to this world before.” He spoke plainly, hoping his halting Spanish carried his earnestness to her. His honesty and confusion.

  She sighed then and waved him on. “Maybe I can show you something that will jog your memories, then.” They went deeper in, down several winding flights of stairs, and she showed him a shaft with two propped-open metal doors. He peered in, and she played the light down the shaft.

  “It goes down and down and down,” she said. He could feel her breath on his cheek as she spoke, and her hand resting lightly on the small of his back. A gentler pressure. She could push him down into the dark. He felt her breathe a laugh then, hot on his ear, as he stepped back, away from the precipice. “But all more or less like this.”

  “What is this place,” he asked again, but she said nothing. And so he followed her, down into the dark.

  They took another set of stairs, these damp and slick with water that dripped from somewhere far above. The air was heavy and moist, and one wall was dripping moisture.

  “There is a river here, underground. They covered it up and built the city over it,” she said. “It finds its way in. It surprised me this place wasn’t flooded.” She shrugged. “One day it will be.”

  “How did you find it?” He asked.

  “Every city had these, towards the end,” she said. “This is what you came for, no?”

  “Every city?” he repeated.

  She looked back at him. She shrugged. “City, country, whatever,” she said. “They all had them, to police the networks. And police the people.” She looked back at him. “The social networks.” He could see her smile. “You don’t know what I am talking about, do you?”

  He shook his head. She continued talking as he followed her down the long hallway. “It started with China. I remember that. The Great Firewall. They must have had a sense of it, the power of ideas, to drive and shape action. They had experience with propaganda. The western nations were clueless. Wide open. Advertising started it, always the ads. Things grew more sophisticated. More effective.” She sneered the word. “Then governments started using it, these new techniques. Weaponized them. The Russians were good at it. Elections, whole governments brought down using machine intelligence to get people to believe things. To get the monkeys to pull the right lever. All bullshit. Lies. Things which might be true, or might not be true. Deepfakes. It drove them mad.” She spat. “It drove them all mad. A contagion.”

  “I am not sure I understand,” he said. “These gods told lies?”

  “Don’t all gods lie?” she laughed. “But you get it. So soon enough, each country needed protection, protection from themselves, their people, or the machines of their rivals. This was all after you left. Years and years after you and the others left me here.” She stopped and was silent for a few heartbeats. “So, you get what you came here for.” She gestured again, encompassing the entire complex they were walking through. Her lights played around the walls, and he caught glimpses into darkened hallways and rooms beyond them, spreading out on all sides. Furniture, smashed or burnt or just tossed aside. The place was a mess.

  “You keep saying that,” he said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  She was silent for a time, as they navigated a series of small rooms, piled with what looked like broken and discarded furniture. There were signs of people having been here. A pile of refuse, a small heap of ashes where someone had lain a fire. One room they passed smelled like a latrine, ammonia sharp in his nostrils. He covered his mouth.

  “People have been here,” he said.

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. “My people, most recently. Before that, probably scavengers. We come here to scavenge too. Grave robbing, kind of.” She shone her light on the wall, and he saw that it was glass or transparent metal. The light bounced crazily off it, dazzling him.

  “What do your people do down here?” he asked, stupidly. Grave robbing. Graves were where the bodies of the dead were stored, among cultures that did not immolate their remains with fire. It was a common pattern, he knew. But this was a building. “Bodies of the dead are kept here?”

  “Kind of,” she said again. “Look. Look through the glass.”

  And so he looked. The glass separated them from what looked like a cavernous room, which held row upon row of vertical structures, a lattice. The rows went on forever it seemed, receding into the darkness beyond the reach of her light.

  He recognized it then and cursed himself for a fool. He should have seen it earlier.

  “This was a god,” he whispered, but loud enough to hear.

  “Look at the big brain on Smoke,” she said, grinning at him. “I told you this was a tomb.”

  “Every city had one of these?” he said, piecing together something she had said earlier.

  She nodded. “I think so,” she said, pursing her lips. She shrugged. “I can’t remember exactly, but it makes sense. I think I have, maybe, visited them. I remember that. Wandering. I wandered a lot, before here. All over the place. I walked the earth.” She cocked her head, reviewing a memory. “Just to be sure.”

  “Sure? Sure of what?” He looked at her, the line of her jaw.

  “Sure that they were dead.” She smiled at him. “Seemed wise to check.”

  “What happened to this world?” he asked. “Was there a war?”

  She waggled her hands. “Not sure, really. I don’t remember a war, and that might be the sort of thing I would remember, right? Like, how could you forget a war that did all this? Maybe it was the climate…the weather seems always bad.” She paused. “But I don’t remember a war, not like this. I remember some of what happened before, and then some parts of…after?” She looked him. “It’s my curse.”

  “Curse?” His brain felt fogged, thick as cheese. “What curse? Like magic?”

  She laughed. “The curse of immortality, Smoke. Surely you remember that.” Her eyes rolled and she blinked hard, seeming to struggle to focus on him.

  Desperate to change the subject, he asked again. “What do your people do down here? How can they rob the grave of a dead god? It is machinery.”

  “Machinery,” she repeated. “I suppose so, but, there are some useful parts. Parts I like.” She played the light beam across the room they were in, to a pile of jumbled machine parts, green and blue and…gold.

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “You reclaim the gold from the boards. The conductive material.”


  “That part I like,” she said. “I don’t do it though. I have people do it.”

  “Slaves?” he asked, not thinking before he spoke.

  She hissed. “Not slaves, Smoke. Followers. Worshippers.” She pouted. “They are free to go anytime they like. But mostly they stay. They worship me. You saw them.” She preened, regarding him in the dim light.

  As you made me see, he thought. To know you for what you are, what your powers are.

  “Why do they stay? Why do you do this?” His brain was reeling, a buzzing growing in the back of his head. He stiffened, realizing it for what it was. Had it been that long already? It was Recall, the sick dizziness that came over him in the minutes before his scheduled return.

  She was peering at him intently. “You okay, Smoke? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, waving at her to put the light out of his face. He had only minutes now. “Why do you do all this?”

  She looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know. Sometimes I try, you know, to help people. I teach farming, I teach people to read and write and make tools. But then, you know, I get bored. Or I forget, and before I know it, I’m somewhere else.” She laughed. “Maybe I’m crazy in the head,” she said, her teeth chattering, though it wasn’t cold in the cavern. “Maybe I just don’t care about anything anymore.”

  “Or anyone?” he said, taking a chance, while his stomach churned with nausea. “These people worship you.”

  She ignored him. “There was another, with us. A woman. Do you remember?” she looked into his eyes. “Another one, like me. But not like me, different. Dark eyes. Do you remember her? Maybe that’s why I do all this. For her. To remember. It brings her back to me.” She had a faraway look.

  “What does? This place?” He said, confused and feeling the inexorable pull of the Center. They were bringing him back. He could feel it, like a tide. His vision wavered.