Century Next Door - Candle Part 1

CANDLE.

JOHN BARNES.

For Paul Edwards.

"If you live in this country long enough, you get colorful."

CANDLE.

One thing you have to say for the Colorado Rockies, you sleep good, these days, now that there's nothing to worry about. I was dead solid asleep when I woke up to a voice saying, "Hey, Currie."

I didn't recognize the voice right away, but that wasn't so unusual; One True speaks in different voices. I sat up in bed, facing into the bright moonlight. Mary and me, we love to sleep with the curtains open so we can see the sky and wake up with the sunlight, and we can do it nowadays because n.o.body ever looks through a window anymore unless they're supposed to. Probably we could've done it in the old days anyway because Sursumcorda, Colorado, never had more than a thousand people anyway, and we live a ways outside and above it.

Our house up there is a nice old twentieth-century A-frame with lots of gla.s.s. With that southern exposure, on a full moon night, you wouldn't need electricity to read in there.

"Hey, Three-Cur."

n.o.body's called me that in a long time so I was wondering for just a second if I was having a waking dream, like I used to just after I retired. But Mary didn't even twitch, and since we always leave our link on while we're at home, when I have a bad dream, or she does, we both wake up. And my copy of Resuna seemed pretty calm tonighta-nothing out there but the usual traffic of a.s.surances and friendliness.

"You're wide awake, Currie, and we need to talk," the voice said. Now I knew it was One True. It had chosen to come to me through my auditory nerves, instead of as a voice entirely in my head. I reached to my copy of Resuna and it reached to Mary's; sure enough, One True had already put a block on her so that she'd sleep pleasantly through any noise and light we needed to make.

"Yes, it's One True," the voice agreed, responding to my thought. "Do whatever you need to get comfortable and I'll talk to you in eight minutes and thirty seconds."

"Eight and thirty," I said. In the back of my mind, my copy of Resuna started the countdown. I got out of bed.

I sleep ten hours or more every night in winter, especially late winter. Not that I don't enjoy skiing, snowshoeing, hunting, ice fishing, and all, but at forty-nine years old, a few hours of anything outside tires me pleasantly out, and then a decent dinner, with a small gla.s.s of wine, and a good book after, usually put me out by eight or nine at night, and I get up with the sun, not before it. So from the way the full moon hung in the southwest, I guessed it was about five in the morning.

Five eighteen a.m., Resuna said in my mind. Seven minutes forty-four seconds remaining.

I shook off the last drowsiness, climbed out of bed, and threw on a dressing robe and slippers, wincing at the way the cold hurts my bad toes these daysa-I had led a little too vigorous a life when I was younger, breaking most of my toes and getting a touch of frostbite a few times, so that between one thing and another, my toes are lim sensitive, and that cold floor just sets them off.

I went into the bathroom and peed into the recycler, stretched a couple more times, and finally said aloud, "Bob, coffee now, please, and warm rolls for one in twenty minutes?"

"Sweet or plain?" Bob asked. This was out of the household software's experiencea-Bob had been installed after I retireda-and it wouldn't necessarily trust the data files it had copied from its predecessor.

I took a moment to clarifya-"Sweet. If I get a call that gets me up before sunrise, pritnear always, I'll want sweet rolls."

I splashed some water on my face. Since I was up, Bob would already be warming my clothes for today, so I didn't bother with instructions about that.

As I was b.u.t.toning my shirt, I could hear the gurgle and gush of coffee into the carafe, and by the time I got my shoes ona-one minute forty-four seconds to go, Resuna a.s.sured mea-I felt pretty decent. Resuna was grumbling, where I could just feel it, about having to adjust my serotonin levels when I was going to throw caffeine at my brain as well, but I knew perfectly well it could do that without any trouble. Your copy of Resuna picks up your traits to some extent, and I'm afraid I've always been a griper.

I went to the kitchen to get my coffee. I didn't know why I was so sure this would have something to do with my old job. It could be something else. One True calls everyone a few times a yeara-always on your birthday, and on your region's Resuna Day, and then there's all the routine business stuff that everyone has to doa-but something about this call had made me think at once that it would turn out to be about the old job.

Three-Cur. He addressed me as Three-Cur. That was a nickname I hadn't heard since my days as a cowboy hunter. I got coffee from the kitchen, enjoyed the pleasant odor of sweet rolls under way in the foodmaker, and went downstairs to the big room. In the moonlight, there was no need to turn on a light. I sat down and took that first long slow sip of coffee that helps a lifetime caffeine addict see that the universe, on the average, is a pretty good place.

Aside from the moon and Orion, and a few scattered other stars, I could see no lights through the window. The dark rectangles and trapezoids of Sursumcorda lay far down the mountain from me, with no streetlightsa-no one was out, so they weren't turned on. Pritnear everyone in that little town sleeps like Mary and me in wintera-we're a community of old-timers.

I leaned way over sideways on the couch for an angle through the window. Just as always, I saw the bright tiny oval of Supra New York hanging in the sky. In all my eleven years on the job, I had seen SNY in the sky from camps in the wilderness just before I went to bed, and from canyons and mountaintops while I waited on stakeout, hundreds of times, and always taken comfort in the sight. Seven million people lived up there, nowadays, almost directly above Quito, Ecuador, all running Resuna, all part of One True like me.

The wilderness just didn't seem as lonely, as long as I could see good old SNY. I saluted seven million fellow citizens with my coffee cup. They didn't wave back, but I still knew they were there. I took another sip, sat and waited.

Three-Cur. Nice that One True still remembered. I didn't really know what had possessed the woman who abandoned me at the Munic.i.p.al Orphanage in Spokane Dome to name me Currie Curtis Curran, but at least it had furnished an endless source of amus.e.m.e.nt, first to my squad mates back during the War of the Memes, and later to my team of cowboy hunters.

"Bob, I'd like it a little warmer," I said, quietly, and felt the faint hum of the baseboard heaters an instant later. Was I more sensitive to temperature, or was it just unusually cold on the other side of the window? A moment later, Resuna told me that it was minus seventeen out there, quickly translating that to half a degree above zero, Fahrenheit, before I could ask. So it was cold for February, even up here. Year 26 was shaping up to be the coldest on record; supposedly that trend wouldn't begin to reverse till around Year 35.

The meters-deep snow in the moonlight was crisp, with hints of pale blue, and wind-sculpted into knife-edges, untouched by anything more solid than a shadow. It was nice to sit and look and wait for things to begin.

Just as Resuna counted off "zero," One True came back to me.

"Look at your wall," One True said.

I turned to look at the white wall. To download information to a copy of Resuna, and thus into the person running Resuna, One True must move so much information that polysensory ways are the only way of doing it in a reasonable time. It was like a vivid dream from which I would awaken knowing everything I needed to know, or like I would imagine a religious revelation would be, or like falling into some other life, or like being One True myself, for a few minutes. Once I woke up, I would have to talk, to One True and to my own copy of Resuna, to activate the knowledge. For the moment, though, it wasn't too different from being asleep, and for a cranky old guy like me, up too early on a February morning, that was pritnear perfect.

<> I was standing on Fossil Ridge, right along the Great Divide, looking east toward the Arkansas Valley. I had no body, but my point of view was its usual height off the ground. Something behind me was not righta-frightening, but nothing I wasn't willing to turn around and face. I knew the difference between the fear that comes with ordinary caution and the fear of annihilation or worse. This was somethinga-no, someonea-physically dangerous, not anything that might destroy who I was, just someone I might have to fight.

I turned and looked down toward where I could see the falls of the Taylor River, splashing over the old dam in Taylor Park, where there had once been a reservoir. It was many kilometers away and hundreds of meters below me; I couldn't see much more than the sparkle and splash of the falls, and the thin snaking blue curves of the river winding through the park and then plunging into the dense forest below.

Then, in the intense illusion, I could see that far. My eyes were like telescopes or like an eagle's. A man was running as swiftly as he could, but with precision and care, on the old dam, as if he feared some accident. My view swung overhead. I was hanging on a surveillance satellite like a nosy angel. I dove at the man on the dam, and his image expanded.

He was fit and healthy, but looked like he had missed plenty of meals over the years; his belt was fastened a third of the way around his back. Through my satellite eyes and One True's databases I perceived him as six foot two, 145 pounds. I descended to the crumbling top of the dam, directly in his path.

He kept coming my way. His clothes were handmade, doubtless from cloth he'd looted from some abandoned store. He wore a simple blue pullover shirt with several pockets; black trousers, slightly dirty with much wear at the knees, fastened by a drawstring with a two-b.u.t.ton fly; an ancient belt with a dozen hand-cut notches; deerskin moccasins with old-radial-tire soles; and of course the hat, the thing they could never resist. He'd camo-painted it pretty well, but it was a Stetson.

Here in the Rockies, we called people who lived outside One True "cowboys" because for some d.a.m.ned reason they all wore those stupid creepy-looking hats. One True had decided that no one else on the Earth would have a taste for thosea-just as no one wanted to wear the burnoose that marked the bedouin in Arabia, or bush hats in New Guineaa-in part to make the cowboys stick out more. Just the sight of it in this recorded vision was making my flesh crawl, back in my comfortable living room.

His face was bearded but he kept the beard close-cropped and it looked like he shaved out his corners. The last few cowboys I had caught had been extraordinarily neat in their personal grooming, come to think of it. One True explained that personal neatness went with being meticulous, and more meticulous cowboys lasted longer.

I looked closely at his face. I wanted my tranquilizer gun at hand, even though I knew this was all recorded and hallucinatory.

His face had not aged in eleven years. He was even wearing clothes almost identical to the ones he had worn on the day I thought I killed him. Well, perhaps he had thought he'd killed me. Maybe that made us even.

The man I was looking at called himself "Lobo." Or had called himself Lobo, eleven years ago when he was last hunted. I had been one of the leaders of the hunt for him, and the gang he led, and we had thought that he had died after taking a hard, long fall in the Black Canyon. I didn't remember ever hearing that they found his body, but cowboy hunters deal only with the living, so it hadn't seemed so odd then. Now, I was thinking I should have taken more time for paperwork.

As I stood and watched him, in the vivid vision that One True was sending, Lobo slowly turned around, removed his hat to reveal thick, short, badly trimmed, still-dark hair, and bent, stretched, and showed himself off so that I could learn what he looked like from every angle. He walked and ran around me so that I got a sense of how he moved.

Even without One True's sending me the pictures, I would have recognized Lobo any place, any time, for the rest of my life. The hunt for Lobo had been the longest and hardest I'd ever had. Lobo'd killed three of my hunters, and badly hurt five more so that it took years for them to recover, and just before his departure over the cliff and into the canyon, had left my face a gory wreck that required months of hospital time to put right. If he was still out there, we still had a score to settle.

Resuna usually doesn't approve of revenge as a motivation, and will shut down those feelings if it detects them, but my copy of Resuna was being strangely silent as I felt the rage rising in me against Lobo. In this case, One True told me silently, we have someone who seems to be cunninga-and therefore dangerousa-beyond any of the old cowboys that you hunters hunted to extinction. Therefore any extra motivation that One True could find for mea-revenge for Abbot, Johnson, and Kibberly, desire for a good hunt, whatever feeling it could finda-would be amplified by my copy of Resuna until the mission was accomplished.

<> In an old-fashioned reading library with heavy thick carpets, a big polished table, and walls lined with reference texts, a librarian who was One True leaned over my shoulder and set a pile of doc.u.ments down in front of me. I pulled them toward me and began to read.

It looked as if Lobo had managed to dropline all of civilization, all at once, as soon as he got away from the Black Canyon, because for years there hadn't been the slightest evidence that he was still alive. He hadn't raided, he hadn't tried to contact anyone, he hadn't stolen a watt of power or a slice of bread from the civilized world for nine and a half years after his purported death. Furthermore, he had been able to unplug more completely, and vanish more thoroughly, than any other cowboy ever had, just as soon as he had given us good reason to believe him dead, which argued that he'd planned a difficult, complex procedure in considerable depth for some time before he had elected to use it. Presumably he was now eleven years more experienced and paranoid.

He'd been the toughest opponent I had ever faced. Now he was back from the dead. It gave me a shudder, especially since, perhaps due to the final exhaustion of his stored supplies, he was now raiding again, and he seemed to take a peculiar s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure in some of what he did, almost as if he were trying, impossibly, to bait or frighten One True.

I opened a file folder. A hole in it grew out to the size of the table; I fell through into someone's memory. It took me half a second or so to realize that my name was Kelly and I was a twelve-year-old girl, living with my mom in a big cabin, high up on a mountain.

One True had decided that Mom's nerves would be better if she were living in a quiet cabin in the woods, and that I needed a calm mother. Resuna patiently reminded me, now and then, that we had to live way out here because in past generations Mom might have been abusive, alcoholic, or both; she'd led a hard life before she turned, and I had a few ugly memories myselfa-we'd been living as wild squatters in Vegas Ruin until I was three, when the team found us and turned us, and the world suddenly got all better.

I was sitting on the floor, in our house up in the mountains, playing Parcheesi with Mom. We both thought that game was a pleasant way to kill time while you watch snow fall among the aspens early in an October evening. We were discussing whether we wanted popcorn, hot chocolate, or both, tonight, when we were startled by a terrible crash.

A man in an outside suit, the kind that rescue workers wear out here in the mountains, came running up the stairs from where he had smashed down the door. He was holding something in his handa-I didn't recognize it, but Mom did and I got a vague sense that it could hurt us badly. The impression through our linked copies of Resuna was only in my mind for an instant before Mom screamed "My G.o.d, don't hurt us" and her strong surge of emotions shut the link down.

The man in the suit came a step forward, and said, "Shut up." Then he said something horrible to usa-something that I can't remember now, mercifully, because Resuna and One True have erased it from me, but once he said it, I couldn't receive Mom's thoughts or feelings, and Resuna was not there, and I had no way to call One True to help us, no comforting voice in my head to tell me I could get through this. I had no way of knowing what Mom needed from me, or of telling her what I needed.

The man in the suit slapped Mom, hard, twice. She fell away from him, barely catching her balance, staring dumbly at the hand that was raised to strike her again. Blood flowed out of her mouth.

It was like a nightmare, except that Resuna wasn't there to wake me up and tell me it was all right. I was frozen, not moving, unable to think, just endlessly screaming for Resuna in my mind.

The man slapped me too; I didn't know why. I hadn't been hit at least since Mom had turned, and the sensationsa-flesh crushed against skull on one side of the head, teeth stinging in suddenly swelling gums, one eye running with uncontrollable tearsa-were a thousand times worse because nothing explained them to me, and I had only my own body's natural shock response.

The man pulled back his hood and said, "Medicine synthesizer. I need your medicine synthesizer. I need you to put your hand in there and have it diagnose and prescribe for me."

"Will it do that?" Mom asked. Her voice was timid, shy, high-pitched, like a little girl's.

"Oh, it'll do it," the horrible man said. His hair was as long as mine, matted to his skull with sweat, and his rough thick black beard was wet, almost dripping. He reeked like spoiling meat or a dead animal under the house. His eyes were too bright and his lips reddish purple against his too-pale skin. "I'll show you how. All you have to do is do it. I want the medicine, I want a good meal, and maybe some other things. I just hurt you so you'd know I'm serious and you'd do what you're told. Now do what you're told and I won't have to hurt you any more."

I fell out of Kelly's mind for a second, and everything froze into a still picture. Below the image of the man, One True inscribed a positive identification of Lobo, from voiceprint and DNA. A moment later it added that according to information and samples recovered later, the disease he was suffering from seemed to be a strain of measles, aggravated by mutAIDS. Both diseases were supposed to be extinct, but Earth's a big planet and you never know what might yet be festering in its untended corners.

Thena-I had just an instant to wish this wasn't necessarya-One True commanded, and my Resuna dropped me back into Kelly's memories.

As Kelly, I watched Mom put her hand into the medical synthesizer, and the man stood close to her and pressed a bare shoulder against the sampler. Then he spoke some codes aloud; in the old days communication between people and machines hadn't been perfect, and whoever this man was, he still knew how to use the old accesses that had been there, for example, so that parents could get medicine for their babies.

The man winced briefly as it gave him a pressure injection, but when that was done he sighed with relief.

He ate practically all the ready food in the house, and reconst.i.tuted three meals, each of which was supposed to be for four people, and gobbled those down as well, along with more coffee than you'd have thought could go into a human being. He seemed fascinated with our reconst.i.tutor; with a faraway look, he calculated for a few seconds, and finally decided to take it with him, along with almost all the food in the house. "The rescue crews will bring you more," he a.s.sured us, but I didn't believe him. I still wanted Resuna worse than I had ever wanted anything.

When he had finished eating, he said, "There's one more thing I need. I'm very much from the old days, I spent a long time as a mercenary during the War of the Memes, and you know what that means. You and your daughter have cooperated just beautifully, and been very helpful, but there's something I want to do to both of you, which you are not going to like. I hope you'll do your best to cooperate so it isn't any more painful than it has to be."

Mom was starting to cry, and I was afraid about what was going to happen.

The man said, "Resuna is supposed to be able to erase everything, afterwards."

Mom shook her head. "It doesn't really work that way. I still have lim too many memories, from the old days, and they still hurt me every day."

The man nodded, several times, as if he were thinking carefully about that. "You know, part of me is very sorry to hear that. Another part of me is real happy to know that this is going to be in your head forever."

Mom was crying really hard now, and that was so frightening that I started to cry too. The man grabbed us both by our arms and took us down to Mom's bedroom; he told us to take our clothes off, and left the room. Mom said we had to do what he said, so we did. I was cold and felt really strange about being naked.

A moment later he came back, with a tube of skin lotion from Mom's bathroom. He undressed, and told us where to put the lotion; it felt weird and icky. He had me watch while he did things to Mom, and then made her watch while he did the same things to me.

Then he got dressed. We were both crying. Mom was throwing up. It looked like he was crying too.

He grabbed up his pack of looted food, and the reconst.i.tutor, and said, "Hey, I'm the last of my kind. I'm not going to ever come back. And it was nothing personal. Both of you were just here. Like getting hit by lightning, you know."

He went back through the shattered door, and out into the snow; when he turned and saw us staring at him, he yelled, "Get back upstairs out of the cold! And make sure the alarm is thrown!"

We did what he said. When we checked, the alarm was already going off. It was only maybe half an hour until the rescue crews got there in the disksters, and gave us new copies of Resuna, and took us to the hospital.

My new copy of Resuna is very kind and patient, like they're supposed to be, and supposedly I won't have big problems later, because all the bad things were dealt with so soon after they happened, and because Resuna is always there helping me. Sometimes One True itself checks in to see if I'm all right. Eventually, in a year or two, what happened will just make me sad, now and then, and maybe not very often if things go the way the doctors are hoping they will. I know it will work out, because Resuna says it will, and how can you do anything but trust Resuna?

All the same, the copy of Resuna that tells me things and comforts me is the new copy that the rescue crew put in, and I still miss my old Resuna. The new one doesn't know me as well as the one that had lived in my head since I was a little kid. I know that it will get better, but I miss my old one.

<> I fell backwards out of Kelly's mind. I was back in my comfortable chair at the table in the library; the hole in the table closed up, contracted into the folder, and became a dot no bigger than a period. I could go back there, if for some reason I ever wanted to.

I didn't want to. I could feel the picture of what he'd done to that mother and little girl building up inside me, a thing to be avenged and taken out on him, like the destruction of my crew a decade ago, like the deaths of Tammy and Carrie during the war, like all the good friends I had lost too young, like all the evil that the cowboys and their spiritual ancestors had worked in the world.

I had not felt such a pa.s.sion for a hunt in many years; maybe I had never felt it before at all. The anger hurt, physically, in my chest, but I knew Resuna needed me to be that angry, and I accepted the pain.

I opened another file folder, from the still-tall stack of them to my left. There was more, but there wasn't worse, and I was grateful for that, at least. I seemed to be there for hours reading all the accounts of what he'd done since his reappearance a few months previously. In those visions you have perfect concentration, and time pa.s.ses much faster than it does in the outside worlda-but it still takes a while to digest such a catalog of human evil, perverse cruelty, and solid constant nastiness. By the time I had finished my reading, I was feeling tired and sick, and felt like I'd used up a full day's energy right there in the "library," even though my copy of Resuna told me that I had only been in the vision for six minutes and fourteen seconds.

<> I sat back on my couch, talking to One True consciously now, no longer in the dream. "Sort of flattering," I said. "There're at least five other hunters you could've picked who could've done the job. You could even've sent a whole posse of us. Why me?"

I was surrounded by warm, friendly laughter. One True was playing my auditory nerves a quad sound system. "Why *why'?" it asked. "We don't understand your reason for wanting to know our reasons, and your copy of Resuna doesn't seem to understand either. Are you fishing for a compliment? Are you seeking clarification? Are youa-"

"It was the first thought that happened to pop into my head," I said. "You have five other reserve hunters for the Rockies. They're all very good too. I was just wondering why One True picked me."

"Because we had to pick somebody," One True said. "So we picked the best one. Or at least the one with the best record. Do you think someone else could do it better?"

I thought about that. Resuna helpfully pulled up the records of the other five, and I compared those with my memories of them. They were all very good, but I had to agree that if we were just sending one, it probably ought to be me. "No, I guess there's not."

"Well, then, we'll send you. And just youa-because our guess is that since one hunter will make less noise and attract less attention than six, we should just send the best one after him. This Lobo is apt to be crafty and easily spooked."

Outside, the very first hints of false dawn were starting to color the distant peaks on their east-facing sides; their west sides still shone brighter in the cold light of the full moon. It looked like a million degrees below zero out there, and I shivered despite the warmth in the room.

"Remember that excessive curiosity and doubt can damage your copy of Resuna," One True reminded me. "And because yours is such a veteran copy, it is to the benefit of all of us for it to stay in good shape. There's a lot of memory that the world needs in your head, Currie. Don't start arguing and questioning; all you'll do is hurt us all."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"We know," One True said. "Your copy of Resuna just relayed the feeling."

I felt better. The mind of the whole planet understood that my feelings were sincere and my intentions were good. We didn't need to talk about much elsea-all the arrangements had been there in the dreama-and so I took a last look at the cold landscape outside and asked aloud, "Bob, temperature of this room?"

"Seventy-three," it answered, defaulting to Fahrenheit. "Usually you feel warmer if I bring up lights. Would you like a warm glow, heavy on red and yellow, here and in the kitchen? Your sweet rolls will be ready in about two more minutes."

"Do it," I said. The room was suddenly bathed in yellows, reds, and oranges, flickering as if there were fireplaces on all the walls. "Looks like we'll be back on work schedule until further notice. Do you still have a copy of it?"

"Last time on work schedule was January 19, Year 14, or 2076 Old Dating," Bob responded, "and the copy appears to be undamaged. Per that work schedule, shall I put on a full breakfast in addition to the sweet rolls?"

"Do it, Bob." I went out to the kitchen, dumped my cold coffee, and poured myself some fresh. Strange to be having such a morninga-I had thought I'd never have another one.