Smoketown Read online

  Two days into his trip, rain fell in thick, sweeping sheets. The weather reports showed a map of where Eugenio traveled; a red cone of storm activity dominated the space. The boat tried to compensate for the rough water, but despite its efforts, Eugenio still felt the lift and lull of the water worrying his stomach. He tried to concentrate on the work before him. He sat at a small desk below deck, scribbling notes on a pad while he played back yesterday’s interviews. He had visited with three households and gotten a few hours of recording. Unfortunately Eugenio seemed to have done a great deal of the talking. His questions were too long and leading; he’d quashed some opportunities to elaborate, but overall the information would be usable. On the next stop he—

  The boat tilted to the extreme right and Eugenio’s stomach lurched. Before he could fully recover, another wave knocked the recordings onto the floor. As Eugenio tried to stand and make his way over to the instrument console a third hit knocked him to his knees.

  The ceiling alarm of the cabin flashed yellow, then quickly to orange. He crawled the meter to the console, turned on the deck lights, and looked at the monitors that showed the small deck of the ship. Caps of white water churned in the floodlights. There shouldn’t be any rapids on this route. He looked over at the navigation monitor to check his location. The screen was black. Cursing, he stumbled up on deck to get an idea how far from shore he might be and how far off course the boat may have been pushed. As he reached the top of the stairs, Eugenio felt the bow of the ship slowly lift.

  For a second he could see nothing but blackness, then utter stillness in front of the boat. He realized with horror it was open air. The boat hung for a second in stillness. Then, it crashed down, over a waterfall, pulling Eugenio violently forward. He cracked his forehead against the railing, and then blackness as he slammed into the water.

  Sputtering and coughing, he fought to stay on the surface, pulling his body through the violent waters toward the shore. His chest burned with the effort of closing the short distance. A strong swimmer, Eugenio felt he barely moved. His right leg was useless; the muscles in his shoulders and arms ached beyond pain. Pieces of the ship and his belongings rushed past him in the water, scraping along the length of him, and beating at his legs. Finally, he felt rocks beneath his left foot and he scrambled forward. Trying to put weight on his right foot, he nearly screamed from a flash of agony and fell into the silt. He crawled up to shore. Even before he pulled himself completely out of the water, he collapsed.

  Eugenio looked down at the wreck of his knee, and wanted to cry for what he saw as much as for the searing pain that shot up through his thigh and into his groin. A patch of exposed bone was clearly visible through his shredded pant leg. Torn skin and ligament surrounded his exposed kneecap with one flap of flesh seeping a steady pulse of thick blood. Wisps of it swirled and bled into the water. Rain soaked him as he lay on his side, jaw exhausted from clenching against the pain. He had heard that people passed out in such straits, but much as Eugenio wanted that, he remained conscious, feeling the cold rain beating down on his face. Nausea came in a wave right after the misery from his knee, pinning him between pains in his stomach and those in the rest of his body as he lay gasping on the shore. He turned his head to retch and caught a glimpse of the wreck of the river winder being dragged downstream.

  His food and water, recordings, and camping gear had been washed away in the storm that capsized the boat. He’d been the only thing to make it out of the boat. At that moment he felt every molecule a thing, cold and alone in the jungle, the thoughts of conquest and knowledge that had brought him so far from home gone from his mind. A woodpecker peeped out from a nearby treehole and regarded him coolly.

  His misery, at least, overcame his fear of birds for the moment. He took no solace, but a grim satisfaction at that. The overwhelming din of rain beating into the water drowned out the sound of approaching footsteps. He didn’t hear them until someone squelched in the mud a meter from him. Eugenio turned towards the sound and saw a striking olive-skinned woman standing nearly over him. She wore simple cotton slacks tucked into black boots and a worn slicker; a battered wide-brimmed hat sat atop her head. Rain ran along the brim of the hat she wore and dripped down onto his leg. Eugenio tried to remember how to greet someone in one of the dialects of the river bank, but his mind wouldn’t work.

  The woman knelt down near his leg, took a cursory look at the wound clearly visible through the shreds of his pants leg.

  “Where’s your GPS?” she asked just as clearly as one of his fellow students.

  Eugenio peered up at her, afraid he might vomit if he opened his mouth. He took a deep breath and answered. “In the river. With everything else.”

  “So help won’t be coming. Or at least not too soon. You won’t be able to walk on that,” she said, gesturing to his knee. She stood and glanced over her shoulder at the trees behind her. “We’ll need a stretcher.”

  “You don’t have a GPS?” Eugenio asked. Everyone in Leiodare had a GPS; a few even had it discreetly hardwired into them.

  “I don’t need one. I know where I am.” She met his gaze. “I know where I’m going.”

  There was no contempt or irritation in her tone. She spoke with such certainty, Eugenio’s head cleared for a moment.

  “I’m Eugenio.”

  She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a small plastic pouch. She unzipped it and removed two red pills. She held the tablets out to him.

  “My name is Lucine. This will help the pain.” She knelt down near his head.

  Eugenio hesitated, then took the pills.

  “Sick of this rain yet, Eugenio?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “Let’s get to work on that stretcher then.” Lucine hooked her hands into his armpits and drug him towards the trees, leaving a deep swath in the mud.

  Under the partial cover of trees, she assembled a travois stretcher from three macheted branches. Eugenio watched as she padded it sparsely with a long, bulky shirt she removed from under her slicker. When the stretcher was complete, Eugenio rolled on and they started the trek into town.

  Eugenio expected her to take him to a quaint settlement that looked like it belonged in another age. Bare-chested children would be running around a group of houses that resembled the images he’d found in the library, with thatched solar scrap roofs and round foundations. Elders would be seated on covered porches casting charms and smoking from long wooden pipes fashioned from the surrounding trees.

  When she drug his stretcher the last few meters he couldn’t have been more wrong. Lucine took him to a small township on the outskirts of the jungle. If it resembled anything, it was a Leiodaran neighborhood, and not one in The Dire or near The Dumps—not even Smoketown, but one of the middle-class enclaves that had a view of The Spires. The stuccoed homes were lined up along a long wide lane, paved and smooth as asphalt. At the head of the lane, a sculpture of a large circle had been constructed from light boxes.

  “What’s the sculpture?” Eugenio asked.

  “It’s a symbol. The central symbol of the Mendejano.”

  From this angle Eugenio hadn’t been able to tell there were inner circles, but the realization that it was Mendejano excited him. Despite his pain, Eugenio’s mind sparked at the idea of it.

  “Is this a Mendejano village?”

  Lucine stopped pulling and turned her attention to him.

  “Does this look like a village?” As she finished posing the question, a stunning young woman with a jagged scar on her jaw walked past fiddling with the blacked goggles of a top-of-the-line virtu rig.

  He realized he had offended her. It was the last thing he wanted to do, considering all she had already done for him and certainly no way to start an interview. Plus just gazing into her dark eyes, he felt a keen desire to please this woman and he’d done just the opposite.

  “No, it reminds me of home.”

  “Leiodare, must be; closest city with men who are no good with boats. Yes,
I’ve been there, but everything here is built a bit lower to the ground, no skyscrapers here. We’re going there.” She pointed at a large building with a veranda in front. “The doctor should be in.”

  The doctor did not have good news.

  The damage done on the ship and the apparent drubbing as he made his way to the shore had severely damaged his knee. He would need surgery and though the doctor could perform a rudimentary fix it wouldn’t compare to the care available back in the city. The doctor stabilized him and suggested that he return to Leiodare immediately. They could transport him to a heliport and have him back there that same day. Eugenio lay on the examining table staring at the soft yellow light beaming down on him. He had listened quietly and now appeared to be considering.

  “Are you Mendejano?” he asked Lucine.

  “I have that honor, yes,” Lucine replied. “But it’s not what you think—not what you’ve heard.”

  “Why don’t you tell me then?” Eugenio said. Quietly he was pleased with himself.

  “Do I look like a storyteller to you? Are we in the middle of some extravagant tour? A total immersion vacation?”

  Eugenio’s pleasure fizzled away.

  “I only meant—”

  “You only meant.” She turned and eyed Eugenio with the same still stare she’d shown earlier. He’d offended her again and was running out of hope that he could salvage the situation. He tried not appear as tired and defeated as he felt.

  After a moment she exhaled, paused briefly and began to speak. He could hear the tension drain from her voice in the first few sentences. “You and Jose are alike. He too was trapped by the whim of the water. Though in his case you could also imply it was man—those who watched the waters rise and did nothing as well as himself. Jose Mendejano lived on Isla de la Juventud. He intended to be the last man to leave it, and as the waters rose, he became the last person there. Each night he looked toward Havana in the north, and bid it and the seagulls good night. Never being sure if he would drown before morning, he prayed that the gulls would ferry his soul beyond should the need arise.

  “Records have made it apparent that the danger of drowning may have been a poetic turn more than an actual possibility. But eventually the day came that he woke to water just outside his door. The water had carried his boat away and swimming to Havana one hundred kilometers north was just as possible as swimming to the moon. At that time, Jose had more passion than practicality, so only then did he realize how incomplete his plan had been. He pulled out his handheld to call for help—but just then something occurred to him.

  “For one thing, if he called for help now, he’d be calling for help all his life, and for another, he had no great desire to be told he had been foolish to think he could accomplish anything more than a hollow victory by sitting and watching the island sink. He could not hold back the ocean, they would say, as they had said before. Of course this was correct; Jose was many things but none of them a fool. Holding back the ocean had never been the point. Also, he was tired of no one ever understanding the point. So he sat down and sorted out a way to get himself off that island so that he could have what he had wanted and go on to the next.

  “In the sixteen months it took him to build not only a raft, but a boat, and more than that, a vessel packed with smoked fish, crab, and clothes, Jose was overcome with desire. He wanted to share what he had learned. Also, he was probably terribly lonely, but they tend to trim these bits from such tales. Anyway, he broadcast his message on a pirate satellite program and beamed it in short regular bursts. He’d originally acquired the software because he planned on sending the birth and death date of Isla de la Juventud, as suggested by an online friend. But this seemed a better use.

  “By the time he sailed around the eastern edge of the island and reached Havana, Jose had begun to broadcast regularly. He started out simply: Anything can be fixed. Every object is a tool. We know what’s broken and we need only find how.

  “He included instruction on planing pine with a stone wedge, programming a stealth security site, and the best way to catch snook with a line—but he always came back to these central points. Anything can be fixed; every object is a tool; we know what’s broken; we need only find how. Soon he began to receive messages from others. They had worked together and found him by tracing back his own satellite signal. With a powered GPS web and pinged handheld messages they could speak to him directly during his journey.

  “Devising a way to overcome the distance made his listeners feel strong, empowered. They had found their guru. Here was something they could do, something they had done! In this world, where so much lay beyond their control. Prairies slowly turned to deserts, individual people began to outlive whole species, and international borders shifted. But now they had some power in the world. Anything can be fixed; the only question was how. It was better than optimism. It was certainty.

  “After spending days and nights speaking to his listeners, Jose charted a new course to Florida, the southernmost tip. There, in Naples, he found people waiting for him on the shore. When he arrived they took him to a bungalow they’d rented for the occasion and told stories of what they had fixed while he was en route. Some of the people stayed there and began a commune that became the first settlement. They started to call themselves Mendejano because Jose had told them on his arrival, ‘Bienvenidos, familia. It’s wonderful to be home.’

  “Jose sailed around the world in that dugout canoe. It took him a decade, and in those years he stopped countless times along the way, teaching and learning, but mostly visiting with us all.”

  Eugenio lay on the cot, more interested in Lucine’s tale than he’d anticipated. Professional curiosity aside, Jose Mendejano’s story stuck with him for the rest of the afternoon. When the medivac came, he refused to leave. He asked the doctor if she would tell him how to fix the torn ligaments in his knee.

  “With surgery in Leiodare,” she answered, exasperated.

  After several hours of talking and two missed cycles of painkillers, he still hadn’t convinced Lucine or the doctor he shouldn’t immediately go back to Leiodare for surgery.

  “Definitely crazy. Perhaps brave, but certainly stupid, Eugenio. You should go now and have the surgery,” Lucine said.

  “Will you help me, if I have the surgery?” he asked.

  “Help you with what?”

  “To fix myself.”

  “And what will do that?”

  “Becoming Mendejano.”

  Lucine turned to him, bemused, but perhaps, Eugenio thought, with a glimmer of respect.

  Even after the surgery, his knee had never been quite right, but Eugenio had his compensations.

  He and Lucine became twins just before Eugenio’s thirty-third birthday. He’d graduated with his PhD/MSc and made his way down the river in a dugout canoe he’d built with his two hands and a chainsaw. Lucine laughed at him, making fun of his literal nature, and they loaded up her truck for the trip back into the city, she on her mission and he on his.

  Eugenio hadn’t been back since that day, but he found Meta largely unchanged. He hopped out of the trans, and looking warily up for birds, hurried to Kizzy’s doctor office. When he slammed the door shut behind him, out of breath, she shook her head and smiled at him.

  “Oh, Eugenio, always such a dramatic entrance,” Kizzy said.

  “I do my best. Is your sat link up?”

  “Yes, I was just logging off—finished a seminar,” she answered.

  “Don’t bother. If it’s all right with you I’d like to use it for some research.”

  “More on the Crumble, I expect,” Kizzy said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  She stood up. “It’s all yours,” she said.

  “Thank you, Kizzy.”

  “Good luck.” She squeezed his shoulder. “It’s good to see you. Next time, bring your sister!”

  Eugenio got to work. Though it took a few hours of searching primary and secondary files he found it, on an obscure subdrive
and directory he’d stumbled on almost by accident. The subdrive included a list of personal effects recovered from Peter Warrel’s hotel room. The fifth item on the list caught Eugenio’s attention: an ID badge from the conference Peter Warrel had been in town attending. The badge listed his name—under a trademarked icon that Eugenio had seen for years around town, and most recently stamped into the pavers of McClaren Street.

  Eugenio took a screen shot of the file and sent it to his boss, as well as the head of the Emergency Management Division, and the one person associated with McClaren Industries who might be more invested in the truth than the company’s image.

  They’d all be interested to know that Patient Zero had been attending a McClaren Industries conference; it couldn’t be a coincidence. Rory McClaren had been wrong. It wasn’t all done, not at all.

  10

  Rory lit a candle for Katherine’s birthday, as was his custom. He stood in the flickering shadows with the shades drawn, staring at the flame as images of his sister and the rest of his family floated past on holo. He tried to absorb the three-dimensional slideshow with which he always celebrated her birthday, but it seemed even more hollow than it had last year and the year before. Over the years, Rory had found thousands of images of his family online and downloaded dozens of them, but they were press images: PR photo ops with rehearsed smiles and product placements. They made him feel much the same way he expected they must make any other stranger feel: my, what nice looking people, they look very well-to-do, wonder what they’re hiding.

  In his mother’s photos one could tell. She had a gift for capturing not just a certain expression of personal reverie, but choosing the perfect one. He had once watched her review over two hundred photos in an afternoon to find one of his Pop Pop that she thought showed him clearly: his funeral photo. They had given him his Last Word, but his mother had wanted the photo to sit on the easel next to the sleek metal case that contained his ashes. In the photo, Pop Pop held the black lab puppy his sister had bought for his eighty-second birthday. Pop Pop and the dog had matching hair and the same laughing eyes. For this reason, he had named the dog Jack, short for jackass.