Century Next Door - Candle Part 6

"Three questions, sir. Is there any age limit? What do you do for dependents? And can you perform marriages for anyone in your command?"

"No age limit, but I do interview, and if I think you're not mature enough to understand what you're getting into or to behave yourself and follow orders, I won't sign you. I have no brig, so the only penalties I have available are the whipping post and hanging; UCEMC limits me to thirty lashes within a month, which, believe me, is plenty more than I want to give, though I will if I have to. I don't want to have to whip or hang a kida-or, anybody else if I can help ita-so I don't enlist anybody if I think that issue might come up.

"For dependents, I send whatever part of your pay you request to them, but if you want them to move around and follow BTJ, that's all at your expense. I do pay a bonus if you're killed while following an order or during enemy attack, but that's usually not how your dependents want to get money from you, and it's my opinion that the bonus I offer just isn't worth dying for." From the slight twitch of his mouth, I realized that that was probably a joke.

He continued. "And if you were planning to enlist and get married, well, son, I'll be happy to perform a ceremony for anybody, in my unit or not. It's legally binding if I'm outside any superseding jurisdiction, which is a fancy way of saying that if you and your girlfriend want to get married, we can just go outside the Dome and I'll do it for youa-you don't have to enlist. Though I'd rather you did."

Mr. Farrell said, "You do know that these two are fourteen?"

Burton shrugged. "I've married a thirteen-year-old boy to a twelve-year-old girl, because he wanted to enlist and he looked like soldier material to me. So far he's made corporal and their marriage looks happy. Life is short, these days, sir, especially for the young. A couple in love doesn't have much time to wait. Not to dwell on morbid things, but chances are that a soldier and his bride won't both live to regret being married, but one of them may well live to regret not having married. That's how I see it, anyway. And if they're fourteen, I believe you have to throw them out of the orphanage soon, anyway, since Spokane Dome won't let them stay here past their fifteenth birthdays."

Farrell shrugged. "I won't try to stop them; I tend to agree with you, for what that's worth, much as I regret it. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew the whole story." He turned to us and said, "Knowing Currie, he probably didn't bother to propose formally, did he?"

"This is the first I've heard of it," Tammy said.

"Well, I think you've heard everything you need to know about Mr. Burton's organization. So would you two like to go up to one of the bunk rooms and talk about it a bit? I think Mr. Burton will be here for at least an hour longera-"

"And you can call mea-I have a secure com for thata-if you need to," Burton added. "So you have up to three days. But it would be great if you can decide more quickly."

"We'll go up and talk," I said, and Tammy and I, still holding hands, left the room. As I went, I could hear another kid asking, "Is there any officer program?" and Burton explaining that he wanted every officer to have spent at least a year as a noncom. That was rea.s.suring too.

When we got up to the dorm room, Tammy said, "If I say yes, will you try not to be smug about it? And will you at least ask me why I'm saying yes?"

"Okay, I won't be smug, but I sure am happy," I said, "and I guess I probably should ask why you're saying yes."

She sat down on the bed, her thick ma.s.s of orange-red hair surrounding her face and hiding her expression. She counted it off on her fingers, as if she had prepared the list of reasons in advancea-maybe she did. "One, I have to go somewhere, Spokane Dome isn't taking any new Doleworkers, and I don't want to starve or beg, so living off what you send me doesn't sound so bad. Two, I do like you a lot and maybe that's a good enough reason all by itself. Three, as of what the medical AI told me after doing some tests this morning, I'm three weeks pregnant." She looked up at me from under the untidy shrubbery of her hair and gave me a shy, tentative little grin; I guess she wasn't completely unhappy about it. She always liked babies and little kids.

My stomach rolled over. I knew that Tammy was more religious than I'd ever been, and she wasn't going to have an abortion; and anyway I didn't want to never know my own child. I couldn't decide whether I was happy or miserable, but I hugged and kissed her before spending any time thinking about that; either way I would want to be with her. "Well, then I guess getting married would be the right thing, and since the only jobs on the whole wide earth right now are for soldiers, and I need a job, that pretty much answers all the questions, doesn't it?"

"It wouldn't be the best start a family ever got, but it won't be the worst, either," Tammy agreed, and we had a deal.

Early the next morning Burton met us, and the whole rest of the orphanage, out in a field outside the Dome (inside, marrying age was sixteen), and we were married in about ten minutes. Mr. Farrell was my best man, and Tammy's buddy Linda was her maid of honor; the bouquet, freshly picked daisies from the field where we were performing the ceremony, went to pieces when Tammy threw it, so either no one caught it or four girls did, depending on how you counted.

After the ceremony, we had a picnic lunch, and at the end of that, Burton swore me in, advanced me a loan so that Tammy could rent an apartment in the Dome, and gave me a forty-eight-hour leave to find the place, move our few possessions over from the orphanage, buy some furniture and dishes, and "Do whatever consummating you have time and energy for, son, keeping in mind that this two days might be your whole marriage. Don't waste a d.a.m.n minute on rest. You can sleep in the diskster on the way out to Silver Bow."

Burton, as I was beginning to suspect and would confirm a thousand times in the next few years, was a very decent guy, probably too decent for what was coming. Burton and Mr. Farrell, between them, were pritnear as close as I ever got to having a father. Lots of men have done worse.

<> When I enlisted with Burton, it was still the War of Papal Succession; most of the sides were either supporters of some candidate for pope, or groups trying to avoid the war and forced to fight to keep armies off their territory. By the time Carrie, our daughter, was walking and talking, Burton's Thugs for Jesus had moved far to the west, to the opposite frontier, where we guarded Snoqualmie Pa.s.s, and we no longer worked for a person or an organization. Our whole region had shifted over to the meme called Real America, which had bought out Burton's contract.

Even then, though people weren't yet calling it the War of the Memes, pritnear half of the four hundred or so sides on Earth were memes. Real America wasn't especially greedy or aggressive, but it did insist that everyone in any government post within its reach had to run Real America, as did the more important businesspeople. This wasn't altogether a bad thing; Real America tended to give people a cheerful, sentimental optimism and at least a veneer of generous tolerance. It was so psychologically effective that doctors who didn't run Real America would suggest it for depressed or psychotic patients (abundant in wartime).

Burton, like most mercenaries, didn't trust the meme, since it was often necessary to change sides and the meme could get in the way, so he forbade all of us to acquire Real Americaa-and better still, Real America respected that.

Even in places where memes were not so tolerant, enrolled members of mercenary companies were immune from the requirement of being memed, because they'd fight to the death to prevent it. You'd have to be crazy to be a trained, experienced soldier and run a memea-memes, finally, existed only to propagate themselves into as many brains as possible, and in the current struggle for power, they useda-and used upa-every resource they could acquire. We all knew what kinds of things an experienced soldier would get used for.

Tammy was still in Spokane, in the apartment I'd found for her, with Carrie. When BTJ switched sides and I got rea.s.signed, since it was faster by the diskster from Snoqualmie than it had been from Silver Bow, this was a pure gain. So far, for us, the war was an employment opportunity and a way out of the orphanage and out of poverty. In the abstract I knew that for others it was differenta-we'd beaten back several a.s.saults at Homestake, I'd been on many patrols out of Snoqualmie, and we'd run into firefights where I'd lost a few friendsa-but still, so far everything had gone better for me than I could have imagined, and although I was now a combat veteran, I was also just eighteen.

By the time we moved into the Snoqualmie fortifications, the One True and Only Ecucatholic Church was more commonly known as One True Church, and its forces had been thrown most of the way back to Renoa-it was a thoroughly totalitarian meme that most people were afraid of, because it did such a thorough overwrite of the existing personality, and any remaining doubts anyone might have had about the way One True Church operated had been settled by the way the way the Bishop of Reno behaved after it got hold of him.

The biggest worry for Real America, and for BTJ, we thought, was that Seattle Dome and the Puget Sound area around it had been seized by the Neocommunist meme, which was extremely aggressive militarily. We had an uneasy truce with One True Church, south of us, a peace agreement with the various Native groups north of us, and a de facto alliance with the Unreconstructed Catholics who held much of the old American Midwest and Ontario on our eastern boundary. Real America's frontiers were as secure as anybody's (not very), and our population was more prosperous than most (which didn't take much doing).

Aside from the Neocommies, we also had to worry about our hanging flank to the southeast. The plains and desert country beyond the mountains had been a sort of unclaimed no-man's-land ever since Denver Dome was nuked in *54. There were enough people in that big central stretch of the Rocky Mountain Front so that any government that tried to move in got into all kinds of trouble with resistances and liberation movements and so on, but it was empty enough so that an army could move through, and we had to figure that sooner or later we would have to wheel around, run southeast as fast as we could, and defend the whole Bighorn country until the citizen army could be mobilized. Fear that something big might suddenly come up the Bighorn or the Missouri kept a lot of our forces tied up around Billings Dome, which was frustrating for everyone, but that was the way it went.

Over my three years so far in Burton's Thugs for Jesus, Tammy and I had settled into an existence that might not have been the ideal way for kids to grow up, but worked pretty well for us. During my weeks on the line or in the reserve camp, she stayed in the apartment in Spokane, took care of Carrie, and got whatever schooling she could, either on-line or live, against the day when there might be regular jobs again. Whenever I got a leave, I'd hop a diskster back to Spokanea-four hours from Homestake, at first, and later only two from Snoqualmiea-and zip home to get reacquainted with my daughter and to spend as much time as possible with Tammy. I suppose, except for our ages, there wasn't much about the life that a soldier in any long war of the past wouldn't have recognized.

At the time I didn't know, either, how fortunate we were that most of the rules of war were still being adhered to. As far as anyone could tell, no one had unleashed bioweapons, most domes were not bombed or sh.e.l.led, and geosync cableheads remained demilitarized neutral zones. n.o.body was fighting to the last ditch; it was understood that the moment you knew you couldn't win, you surrendered or retreated. War, so far, was purely a matter between the mercenary companies.

On the other hand, there were some drawbacks to being a mercenary, even in a very humane war. Attrition was taking its toll, and hyperaccurate modern smart weapons meant that a much smaller number of men was needed for the same firepower. Though Burton's Thugs for Jesus had begun the war at battalion strength, and our effective firepower had increased, in numbers we were no longer more than a reinforced company.

By that time I was a corporal, leading a fire team, and the only way I was ever making sergeant was if my best friend Rodney, the squad sergeant, got killed. (Two squad sergeants stood ahead of Rodney for platoon sergeant, so I stood very little chance of a domino promotion.) The chance of advancementa-or the lack of chancea-didn't bother me at all. I could keep doing what I was doing indefinitely, and if the job was unpleasant, dangerous, sometimes terrifying, occasionally nauseating, well, it was a war, when you came right down to it. And my leaves were practically heaven on Earth; Tammy and I never saw enough of each other to have much to fight about.

I turned twenty, Carrie turned five, and life turned to dead solid s.h.i.t, all in April 2058. By then Real America had taken a hammering and was just trying to hold on. One True Church had become One True, and had successfully seized several of the older memes. Our old Unreconstructed Catholic allies were suddenly a branch of One Truea-so suddenly that we lost Madison in four hours of a savage attack out of nowhere. A week later we had to abandon the Twin Cities Domes after a bitter fight, and we were thrown back to Fargo-Morehead Dome, where we finally made a successful stand.

We held through a bitter winter of fightinga-I made platoon sergeant, having buried all my predecessors. We got things squared away, got the Natives north of us to come in as allies, and seemed to be making more of a real fight of it. After beating back two a.s.saults in the summer, we felt much more confident, and when we retook the Twin Cities Dome in September, it looked like the worst of it was over. BTJ held the Twin Cities Dome against another winter a.s.sault, and that spring Burton told us that if we wanted to, we could move dependents up into Fargo-Morehead, so that they'd be easier to visit on the weekend.

I figured we had the front stabilized, and I'd rather have Tammy and Carrie near. There were good reasons. I'd missed them, while there had been so few leaves; Spokane had been attacked a couple times by One True's. .h.i.t-and-run raids out of Salt Lake and Boise; in the married-soldier barracks at Fargo, they could live under armed guard. It seemed like a rational decision.

To this day I think I should have been able to see that it was completely stupid to bring them up to Fargo, considering what we were fighting. When we retook it, the inside of the downtown Minneapolis Dome had been piled high with corpsesa-noncombatants all. One True had had no way to evacuate that group of women, children, and old men. Rather than let them be captured, and turned by any other meme, it had made them all walk off the roofs of high buildings.

It was One True that had broken all the truces and mercenary rules of engagement, and One True that had begun to aggressively infiltrate computer systems and weapons-control systems, seizing control of mercenaries wherever it could in order to copy what they knew. Then it loaded those aggregate mercenary memories into the brains of any kids it had, and sent them out with their badly working minds and their imperfectly a.s.similated training, to fight and die in the first wave of every attack. A regular mercenary company might kill eight or nine of those poor teenage zombies for every death it took itselfa-but a regular mercenary outfit, by then, wasn't much bigger than a hundred men, and One True could send three or five thousand of those enslaved kids against it. Every advance by One True made the war, and the world, uglier and dirtier; it seemed to be the one meme that didn't care what the Earth ended up looking like, as long as it got to rule.

The world tried to resist. Maddened by the fear of having their minds erased and replaced, countless people, crazy, paranoid, perhaps as dangerous as One True itself, devised memes, large and small, to subvert or attack One True, and to promote violence and disorder within One True's territory. One True hit back with the same kinds of memes aimed at the world at large, not caring who it hit. There were legends about a meme, or a counter-meme, called a Freecyber, a sort of meme-inoculation that could liberate you from One True or any other meme's control, but then there were legends about free pa.s.ses to the s.p.a.ce colonies, and hidden cities in Antarctica, and secret bases on the sea floor, where you could take your family and live peacefully forever. I didn't credit Freecybers any more than I did any of the others.

It was hard for anyone who had been in for as long as I had even to imagine the changes that were happening. One True was fighting to "win" in a sense that no one had seen since the Eurowar, now almost sixty years in the past. People with severe psychological trouble, particularly severe depression and stress disorders, were easier for a meme to self-install intoa-and so One True's troops were encouraged to traumatize the population wherever they went, and the all-but-forgotten custom of serbing captured women and children resumed in those last years of the war. As our electronic equipment became more and more vulnerable, we resorted to more and more primitive weapons and tactics, trying to avoid being hooked up to anything, even a phone, through which One True, or one of the rogue memes, or even the re-engineered (and much more aggressive) Real America might seize control of us. As memes increasingly were able to disguise their presence, and often to spread incrementally through conversation and ordinary daily interaction, we began to fight in pairs or trios, limiting our contact with anyone else. The almost civilized war I had joined was turning into the real Fourth World War, and it was rapidly catching up with the Eurowar and the two wars of the twentieth century for its savagery and lack of restrainta-and it would probably end like all of them, in the sheer collapsed exhaustion of the losing side.

It seems so obvious in hindsight. I should have known how the world was going. I should have resigned, or deserted if Burton wouldn't let me go, grabbed Tammy and Carrie, and run like h.e.l.l to somewhere; taken all my saved pay, maybe, or robbed some place, gotten enough money to pay our way onto a transfer ship, and emigrated to Mars. Sometimes I really did think about that, but at the same time I felt like I owed Burton a lot, and he was more and more shorthanded.

So I procrastinated and didn't resign, didn't desert, didn't look for a place where my family could move far away from the fighting, read the emigration information for Mars a hundred times and even realized I could probably make a living as an ecoprospector and might even like the work. I thought about it frequently, but I did nothing and just let it drift.

I had figured everything wrong. I found out just how wrong in the first week of August, 2059. I woke to the alarm in the middle of the night, rolled over, kissed Tammy, pulled on the fighting clothes, went into Carrie's room and gave her a quick hug, receiving a sleepy little kiss on the cheek, and pulled the gear out of my weapons locker. By then Tammy had come out in her bathrobe; she said, "Any ideaa-?"

"It's what they call an urgentest," I said, shouting to be heard over the alarm, which would keep ringing until I went out the front door. "Usually means we've got to jump on a diskster, go someplace, and fight. Get on-line and make sure all my insurance is paid up, will you, honey?"

"Is One True invading again?"

"Could be. Or maybe some ally switched sides." I checked; I had all the gear I was supposed to be picked up with. I desperately wanted another quick leak, a snack, anything for twenty more minutes with Tammy, but the alarm was whooping (I could hear most of the other alarms in the married-soldier barracks doing the same thing), and no matter how often I did this, I always wanted twenty minutes more. I could pee and eat on the diskster, going in; it was really just that I wanted time with Tammy. I contented myself with a long, awkward kiss, as she managed to fit against me despite all the hardware hanging from the suit. "I'll see you soon. Love you," I said, and left.

Two guys were already waiting at the pickup spot, and within five more minutes there were ten of us. My "headquarters" squad was a good onea-I'd handpicked a bunch of experienced types to put plenty of vets around me, and everybody in the squad had at least two years fighting experience under his belt. The squad sergeant, Mark Prizzi, had been among the first squad of soldiers I'd ever trained, back when I was a corporal.

My headset popped. "Dog Platoon, come in, Currie." It was Burton.

"I'm here, sir," I said. "Headquarters squad is all a.s.sembled, waiting for pickup."

"Check your other squads."

I did; all were at stations. I reported back to Burton.

"Good so far," he said. "But it looks like the enemy has managed to virus our pool of disksters. Figure a half-hour delay till pickup, while we reload memories into all of them. You can let men go back inside if they want to do anything for fifteen minutes."

I pa.s.sed the word along, but n.o.body went back in; once you've said your good-byes, that's just too hard. We stood around, not talking much, till the disksters showed up. I walked up the gentle slope of the gangplank and took my seat at the rear right, long-practiced hands strapping me in against the up-to-four-gee turns that these things could doa-or the up-to-ten-gee jumps if something went bang too close to you. When my three squads were all loaded and strapped in, I reported back to Burton. "All right," he said. "Just a minute or so more for the disksters to pick up Bravo, and then we'll be in motion, finally. Looking bad."

"Can you tell me what it is?"

"Wait till we're on the highway," Burton said. "Then I'll let all the platoons know. But it ain't good, and this is gonna be a rough night, and I don't think we're all gonna see the sun come up." In some strange ways, competent and compa.s.sionate as he was, my CO was still a kid who had read one too many adventure books.

About fifteen minutes later we were racing down the corridor formed by the old highway, making all the speed we could for the Twin Cities, and Burton was filling us in. No intelligence outfit had yet figured out howa-none of the intelligence companies from the area were even reporting, which suggested we had been hit even harder than we knew abouta-but somehow defenses around Twin Cities Domes had gone down, all at once, and before the garrison could mobilize, the barracks had been hit with narrow-beam ionizing radiation from overhead, cooking most of the defending troops in their beds or while they tried to pull on their uniforms, and all their families with them. The few on guard, and the few who had gotten mobilized fast enough, were now trying to hold a ragged, thin line south of the domes, with too few people, too ill-equipped, and no idea what was going to hit.

It hit before we got there, which is why we survived. At diskster emergency speeds with everyone strapped in, you could travel from Fargo-Morehead to Twin Cities in about an hour and a half. Within that time, the defenders at Twin Cities were overwhelmed by a force that was probably fifty times their size, plus more bursts from that d.a.m.ned irradiating satellite.

We kept going anyway, because the forces of One True zipped right around the Twin Cities Domes, dropping off a small garrison force, and fanned out toward the other important domes in the area. One big spearhead was coming our way. At least our disksters were fairly radiation-resistant, and should be proof against the ultrahard positrons they had used on their two bombardment pa.s.ses so far.

Bravo Platoon had the lead, and they never had a chance at all. With onboard radar, a self-driving maneuverable vehicle like a diskster could normally dodge an artillery sh.e.l.la-but Bravo's disksters had had to spend a critical few extra minutes in the shop, and that was when, so far as Burton and everyone else could figure out later, they had been sabotaged with a sleeper virus that woke up when the first sh.e.l.ls appeared above them, and they steered right under them. Bravo Platoon's three disksters flashed into smoke and debris, all of our disksters began to dodge and duck, and Burton did the only sensible thing and tried to have us pull back to form a fighting line somewhere where it might work. We swung east of the old highway in a tight, high-speed turn over the empty fields and meadows.

That was when all kinds of heavy fire poured onto us from the east; we had turned into their trap. The automated defense weapons on our disksters shot back, but we were up against something overwhelming, and we did the only thing that seemed to be an optiona-turned to run west and north, evading and dodging all the way, never having the spare minutes that would have been required for us to stop and deploy forces.

They pursued us for a solid hour, pushing us ever further west and further out of the battle, scattering our forces all over the landscape. Any time one of the disksters tried to turn and fight, it was chewed apart by heavy fire; we evaded in all directions, and we must have traveled more than a thousand miles in total by sunrise, while only being pushed a couple of hundred west, but we were getting beaten bad no matter how you figured it, and the most we were managing was to run away.

At sunrise, we were way to h.e.l.l and gone somewhere in South Dakota, they had just stopped shooting at us and broken off the pursuit, and Fargo was naked to the enemy.

We raced north as fast as we could, and we d.a.m.n near made it; Burton's Thugs for Jesus, or what was left of us, were running even faster than we had after the slamming-around we'd just taken. Most of us had families in Fargo, or at least girlfriends.

Not long before noon, we were making a final dash, moving along at almost 200 mph over the prairie and meadow country that had been wheatfields once, about forty miles west of Fargo. It might have been a nice day if we hadn't all been worried sick about getting there, but theoretically in just minutes we could be taking up positions to the east of town, and calling in all the pa.s.senger disksters available. We weren't going to try to stop them, just slow them long enough to make it possible to get the civilian population, especially our dependents, out of their way. Burton had pledged to use the whole unit treasury, if need be, to evacuate all the civilians in Fargo-Morehead Dome.

Now all we had to do was get there soon enough and hold long enough.

Burton and his four headquarters staff were in the diskster just over a roll of land from us, maybe a mile and a half awaya-we were staying spread out in case of attacka-and so I didn't see it directly, but there's no mistaking an atom bomb. A white flash over the ridgeline blinded us for a moment, and the diskster slewed sideways and bounced along for half a mile or more in just a few seconds, before the AI got it back under control and brought it around. By the time we were back near where we had been, the cla.s.sic mushroom cloud was already forming. Burton must have been right at ground zero when that went off.

While we all wondered what to doa-none of us had ever had any other CO and anybody else we might have turned to for leadership was on the diskster with hima-one of the disksters for my platoon flared with blue arcs as it sank into the tall gra.s.s, its balancing capacitors all discharging. Our diskster went in to see if we could help, and the surviving parts of BTJ went with us because they weren't sure what else to do, but as we arrived, our com crackled and an unfamiliar voice said, "Burton's Thugs for Jesus, this is Shultz's Rangers. We've got you. Every one of your disksters has a weapon locked on it, and we are preparing to shut down your propulsion by our control of your software, which we just demonstrated with one diskster. Please have your senior surviving sergeant surrender, so we won't have to fire again."

That was me, I realized. I grabbed the com. "Burton's Thugs for Jesus here. We'll surrender. Are you offering UCEMC terms?"

"Our employer does not permit that," the voice said, flatly, and I realized that the other unit was memed with One True, so there wasn't going to be any negotiating. "Do you still wish to surrender or shall we fire?"

I gave the order, and our surviving five disksters set down, grounded out their charges, and went inert.

An hour later, still the senior surviving sergeant, I was trying to explain the issue. "Look," I said, "we are not acting for Real America in this. It just happens that most of our family and friends live in Fargo. All we're asking is time to declare it an open city, and some respect for Hague and Geneva. And we're asking. We're certainly not in any position to tell you."

Shultz nodded agreeably, his eyes far off; probably his whole company had only recently been turned. It was said that One True would do that to you for anything that it considered to be a violation of your contract. He spoke on the com for a while, repeating our requests.

Then he stopped and said, "Fargo-Morehead has been promised to Murphy's Comsat Avengers as a reward for their services. We are not at liberty to make any other arrangements. We will hold your forces here for sixty hours and then release you."

My heart sank through the floor. Murphy's Comsat Avengers was one of the most brutal mercenary companies anyone had heard ofa-from a unit initiation that made me sick to my stomach just to hear about, to an earned reputation as the most enthusiastic serbers in the war, to the mutilated bodies that they left behind to make pursuers hesitate, they were the epitome of everything that the War of the Memes had turned into in the last few years. They were one of the very few not-yet-turned companies that One True had under contract. It was rumored that they hadn't been turned because One True didn't want to share in any of their memories. I believed it.

I tried to appeal to Shultz's honor as a soldier and his human feelings, and I tried begging, and I offered to sign over our whole unit treasury to ransom the city, or even just to ransom our dependents. But it was absolutely no use to argue; Shultz now thought whatever One True needed him to think, and One True wasn't going to change its mind for a few scruffy, defeated POWs, not when it had already promised to reward one of its most effective fighting units.

We sat out our sixty hours under guard, and when they let us go, we fifty-five survivorsa-all that were left of the 122 men who had started outa-began the long, unhappy walk toward Fargo. n.o.body in Shultz's company bothered to say good-bye, let alone good luck.

<> Four days after I'd seen Burton vanish under that mushroom cloud, I stood by two graves in the public park not far from the college.

Hardly anyone was alive in that miserable town. Looking for Tammy, I'd seen half a dozen things that I figured I would remember for the rest of my lifea-a pile of heads outside a hospital, a whole street with a body on every tree, a quartered baby on a park bench, a woman with all four limbs torn off floating face down in a fountain.

It took me most of the day to find Tammy and Carrie, and it was almost a relief: they'd just been running down the street, trying to get away, and been hit from behind by machine-gun fire, probably body-heat-seeking bullets, because they'd each been hit in the back and the bullet had gone out through their hearts. They had died instantly, without torture or serbing, as far as I could tell, and Murphy had not been able to use them for his legendary hobby of killing children in front of their parents. No, they had been very afraid, and perhaps hurt for just a second, and then they had fallen forward, dead, Carrie's forearm still clenched in Tammy's hand.

I dug the graves deep and was careful about it; when I finished, I rolled a matformer over from a hardware store, set it on vitrous, and started shoveling dirt into it, letting it fill its tank all the way before I dumped it into the graves, so that I wouldn't have to smell too much of what happened when the hot material hit the bodies.

When I had filled the graves with molten gla.s.s, I poured a big block of gla.s.s at the head of each, positioning it to weld onto the filled grave, and with an iron bracket from a shattered park bench I pressed their names and their birth and death dates onto the slowly solidifying gla.s.s. I figured if anyone, animal or human, wanted to defile a grave, there would be easier ones to defile.

For two full years afterwards I was a madman. There really wasn't any other word for it. I took to stalking Murphy's Comsat Avengers. Every few weeks I'd pick out a man asleep in his tent, a sentry, a messenger, or any living human target from Murphy's, as long as I was sure of my escape, and kill him with a knife or bare hands, partly to be less detectable, mostly because it was more messy and painful for the victim.

Besides, doing it that way sometimes gave me an instant, as they realized what I was about to do, to tell them why. And after they were dead, I would do some cutting and rearranging, to give their buddies a surprise when they found them.

When MCA went into battle, I would shadow a scout or flanker, and kill him in the uproar. I had a few noisy radio beacons with timers that I would sometimes stick onto a piece of their equipment, and now and then one would go off and a diskster or a heavy weapon would be hit.

I left no notes, told no one, talked to no one who wasn't already dying, gave them no clue about who was doing it. I moved from place to place, following them generally east across the Midwest.

Eventually they were based along the south sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario, not far from the southern tip of the still-growing Hudson Glacier. It was cold and dreary and the cover was less plentiful, but I stuck around and kept killing them, a few per year. I lived on one kind and another of scavenging; I was barely more than a predatory animal.

Once, when I had gone hungry for a while, and I had knifed two Comsat Avengers in their tent as they slept, I took away not only their rations, but their b.u.t.tocks, hamstrings, and quadriceps; that might have been the beginning of my return to sanity, because when I reached my camp, the thought of cooking and eating those was too much. I tossed them out into the snow for a cougar, wolf, or coyote. To my surprise, I could not quite descend as far as cannibalism. Still, the next night I shot one of their sentries at long range, so I hadn't exactly forgiven or forgotten. I just had some standards, I guess you'd say.

I doubt they even knew I was there. They were up to their necks in so much fighting, and so much of it was now stalk-and-ambush, that a few men more or less in a year was nothing much. If they thought about it, they must have thought that they were running into exceptionally bad luck, the way the rest of the human race had been for so long.

<> Dave leaned back and shuddered for a moment, more as if he were cold than afraid. "Up around Lake Ontario?" he asked.

"Yeah, not far from where the St. Lawrence ice dam used to form and break. Spent a long time freezing my b.u.t.t off up there. Not much left in the ruinsa-so many armies had gone through, you know. But I managed."

He stared into s.p.a.ce for a long time. "You and I have much more in common than either of us thought," he said. "I lived up there at the same time, so I guess you won't be surprised to hear that I also had one h.e.l.l of a grudge against Murphy's Comsat Avengers. I don't know who could live in that area and not feel that way, you know?"

I nodded. "Yeah, I know what you mean. The strangest thing to me, right now, is that I've spent decades during which the memories didn't hurt, or at least I didn't know that they hurta-losing my wife and child, the things I saw, the things I did a I spent ages without thinking about it, and now, here I am an old man, with a lot more present things to worry about, like whether or not you're going to kill mea-and I can't get it out of my head. I can't make it go away. I'm halfway to crying and halfway to screaming and if you told me that Murphy's was somewhere in the neighborhood and you wanted to go kill one, I'd beg you on my knees to let me come along and help. It's like none of that went away at all; more like I just had a complete lapse of memory for twenty-five years."

Dave nodded. "Well, you know, that's not an uncommon reaction in people who have been dememed. I've seen people our age crack up, or go into shock, when they're dememed, from just remembering too much. Anybody who lived through those years has a bunch of experiences he never wants to talk about, and feelings he can't get rid of, and so forth. I'm no big fan of One True, but I can understand why some people would let it turn them, or even go out and find it and ask it to turn them. My memories are bad enough, and if someone told me I could just forget them forever, at a bad moment on a bad day, I guess I just might wish to be turned."

"It's not that you forget them," I said, "it's just that you don't think about them. Ever. For a real long time." A thought was beginning to bother me, more and morea-memories and thoughts flooding back, different remembered pains striking me from all sides, throwing me off balance. I realized, too, that I was no longer reaching for Resuna to get them fixed, but I wasn't sure whether that was because I had gotten used to Resuna not fixing them, or because I didn't want Resuna to do that. I wished I could make the thought come clear in the front of my mind where I could know it for whatever it might be.

"Being able to not think about it might be good enough," Dave said, "when the times are bad enough." We both leaned back into the hot water, stretching and shaking ourselves out. "Two old farts that spent too much of their lives working hard outside sure appreciate a hot bath, don't they?"

I arched my back and let myself float upward. "Yeah. You know how farts like to float to the top in a tub."

It was a dumb joke, but he stretched his own back and laughed. "You want to switch from coffee to something stronger? I've got cases and cases of wine around and I never drink it because I hate to drink alone."

"That would be real fine."

"And I ain't gonna kill you tonight, either. I'm way too soft for this job, you know."

"We're none of us what we used to be," I said. "Jeez, I don't even need the wine to make me say stupid things."

"It's like parabolic skis," he said, grinning, shaking the water drops from his beard as he got out. "You don't have to have them to turn, but they make it so much easier. You don't need wine to say stupid thingsa" He shrugged.

I gave him a thumbs-up. "Bottle for each of us?" he asked, pausing at the door.