Century Next Door - Candle Part 8

"Yeah, I think so."

"Good enough." He raised his gla.s.s. "My story's not as dramatic, so we're going to need more wine."

<> Dave's tale didn't take long. He was a foundling in Denver Dome, a few years after I was dropped off at Spokane Domea-we both thought it was pretty funny (with help from the wine) that we theoretically could be brothers. He'd been in a couple of mercenary units before being hired as part of the bodyguard for a Freecyber cell in upstate New York, within fifty miles of where I was stalking Murphy's Comsat Avengers.

He'd liked working for the Freecybersa-he said they were pleasant employers, met their bills, didn't ask for the impossible, treated you like peoplea-but it came to an abrupt end when Murphy's unit overran them and butchered the people they were guarding. "No call for it, either," he said. "They could have just turned them. It was pretty close to the end of the war. Could've just put One True into them, and I bet that's what One True would have preferred. Murphy's was the only mercenary company I ever heard of that regularly killed just for fun; it was like a whole outfit of serial killers."

I nodded and took a big slurp of the wine, which was absolutely delicious. "Yeah. You know where Murphy came from? He was nothing more than an old vag at the time the war broke out. There probably weren't two thousand vags left on the planet in 2049, but unfortunately, he happened to be one of them."

Dave shrugged. "I knew a couple of former vags, myself. One of them and I went sniping a few times, because he was so crazy he'd go show himself on the skyline to draw firea-he lasted about a week, I think. All the old vags I knew were crazy. Most of them were people who just never got over losing something, and spent their lives in the woods, robbing and looting, trying to get it back, pathetic crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who were dangerous to anyone they ran into, but otherwise not anything much to worry about. Murphy was something else again entirely, a lot more than just crazy. He was about as evil and sick a b.a.s.t.a.r.d as the poor old world has ever seen and it's a good thing his delusions made him too incompetent to get anywhere."

"Amen," I said, and extended my gla.s.s in a toast; we clinked them together, and I said, "I saw him die. You could call it a mixed pleasure. I had always hoped to get the f.u.c.ker myself, and the first time I was about to get a good shot at him, two of his own men did it. The three of them were out in front of his tent, talking about what to do now that peace was here, and he was going on in some crazy riff about putting the comsats back upa-like anyone needs them with the supras there. Then he grabbed one of them by the shirt, and the other one shot him. I was so startled that I m.u.f.fed my first shot at one of them, so they both got away."

Dave nodded firmly. "You at least got in a good try at them. Me, once Freecyber was gone, I didn't have any side in the war, so I just went into the bush. Here's a strange thought. I didn't have nearly as much grudge against One True as you did, and if One True had made me the offer to become a cowboy huntera-even without being memed, just hunting cowboys in exchange for my keepa-I might have taken it. And from what you tell me, if you hadn't run into Mary on that road, you might have drifted into cowboying, or whatever it was called up the Northeast. We could've been on switched sides. Funny how life cuts."

"Yeah," I said. The warm water and the wine were getting a dead solid grip on me, and I was fading fast. "I'm starting to think of bed," I admitted.

"Me too, Currie. Let's drink up. There's not much left of these bottles."

There wasn't much left of his; there was about a quarter of mine, but I pounded it right down like a dumba.s.s teenager anyway. He took my gla.s.s, reached to an overhead shelf, and handed me a bar of soap. "Oatmeal soap, for rich ladies to scrub their dingy skin with," he said cheerfully. "Don't worry about it making you pretty, it didn't make them pretty." He guffawed at his own joke and I did too; we were pritnear as drunk as I've ever been. When he got out to soap up, he nearly fell, and I got out very slowly; it's not easy when you're holding a bar of soap in one hand, and you really wish you had both hands to hang onto the floor with.

We both soaped up all over, working up thick lather in our hair and beards. A couple of knotted, crusty scars were on the back of my head, which probably meant that whatever Dave had done to the back of my head with his club should have had st.i.tches but hadn't gotten them. Oh, well, I was alive, and not memed, and thinking as myself.

When we had finished lathering, Dave carefully put our pieces of soap back on the shelf, and said, "Just be sure you don't stay with your head under too long. I can't think that would be real good for a guy with a recent brain trauma."

We climbed back in, the hot water feeling good after the cool of soaping up, and swished around in the water, getting the soap off and the last kinks out. I let myself slip down and put my head under. In water that's warmer than body temperature, with a skinful of wine, putting your head under hits like a sledgehammer, and you can easily pa.s.s out, but I let myself hang for a moment in that blissful almost-not-there state, so relaxed that my muscles seemed to just blend into the surrounding water. If Dave had wanted to kill me, that moment then would have been a good time; I'd probably have slipped over to the other side without caring.

But clearly he didn't. I suppose decades without a friend do things to a man; the thing that seemed strangest to me was that he was still fairly good at getting along with people, after all that loneliness.

I let the warmth fill my whole body, then sat back up, splashing and wiping the water from my face. "I don't suppose you've gota-"

"But of course," he said. "I built my towel closet with racks that carry hot water. All towels are always dry, fluffy, and hot."

"d.a.m.n, you know how to live." I got out and he tossed me a towel; I dried myself thoroughly. It felt good to be alive. "Dave, if you don't want to be turned, I am not going to turn you. And since you can't trust me if I'm turned, I guess I'm out in the woods for good, myself. You'll have to teach me most of the mechanics of living out here, and I'll have to depend on you for a while, but I'll construct a place of my own, if you prefer, just as fast as I can. And I guess we both have to move, anyway, because there's bound to be some of them looking for me in a couple-few weeks, once some of the spring melt has happened, plus of course they had enough uploads from my copy of Resuna, the last few days before you caught me, to have you pritnear dead solid located."

Dave sighed. "Well, we're both in a sloppy sentimental mood. Been a long time since I've had a partner, and living out in the woods without anybody else is lim, lim hard. But you gotta think about things like the fact that you wouldn't see Mary again, ever, probably, and I got to think about whether I'm letting my feelings blind me. So let's sleep on it, get up late, talk it over a you know, the usual kind of thing you do when you know what you want to do, but you want to be sure you want to. You know?"

"If I had a few more brain cells running I'm sure that would be perfectly clear," I said. "Sure, see you in the morning."

He didn't even lock my door; I had the funny thought, as I fell asleep, that I might be about to become a cowboy, but I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't ever going to put any dumba.s.s-looking Stetson on.

<> Next morning the menu was jerked venison, canned beans, pickled grouse eggs, strong coffee, and plenty of aspirin. We didn't say much till we got enough of all that stowed in our guts so that we felt sort of human, and then we took a vote and it was unanimous that we ought to go take a nap. It must've been another three hours before we staggered out, guts stabilized, heads only oppressively fuzzy instead of overwhelmingly thick, and had some more coffee, plus some jackrabbit stew he'd canned the summer before. "Well," Dave said at last, "that was one h.e.l.l of an evening. Haven't had a blowout like that in decades, literally."

"Me either," I said. "Felt pretty good, even if I wouldn't want to do it more than four or five times in a year. To let you know, I still think I'd rather throw in with you. I'd rather be your friend than not, and this is the only way to be your friend. As for Mary, yeah, I miss her, and she has some good qualities and so forth, but you know, there's a whole lot of energy that has gone into taking care of her, and much as I hate to admit it, I'd have decided she wasn't worth it, probably within a few weeks, if Resuna hadn't been steering my thoughts. So I'm about twenty-five years overdue for an awakening from the romance, and though I wish her all the best, and though I would gladly take care of her just out of duty, and enjoy her company a well, Resuna will take very good care of her, and she'll be just fine. I'm leaving her in a situation much safer and more comfortable than I ever left Tammy in. So if you'll take me on, and teach me enough of what you know, I'd be happy to be your neighbor out here, or your partner if you don't mind sharing quarters. I'll do more than my share of the work to make up for not supplying my share of the knowledge."

Dave sat back in his chair, put two more aspirin in his mouth, took another gulp of coffee to wash them down, and said, "You worry way too much about what's fair, and about my privacy, Currie. I'd dearly love to have a partner. With two of us working we can make our new place big enough to have rooms for both of us. I know you'll pull your freight. And if you are just going to turn me in, well, that idea is so discouraging that I'd just as soon not think or worry about it at all, so I'm not." He stuck his hand out, we shook, and we were partners.

That afternoon we got going on the subject of where to move and when. Over his years of wandering around in the mountains, Dave had picked out several other places with easy-to-tap geothermal heat, none with as abundant a flow as this one. "Two of them have a sizable surface pool nearby, so if the temperature on that was to start to drop, it's just possible a satellite would spot the difference between how hot the pool used to be and how hot it was now. If they've found this place by then, well, then they'd know my basic way of surviving, they'd be looking for changes around hot springs, and we'd be in deep s.h.i.t. Out of all the hot springs sites I've found, there's only one that drains back into the ground without breaking the surface and flowing down to some creek. It's on the leeward side of Ute Ridge, a little ways up, in a cave that's probably an earthquake crack that got weathered out bigger and then had some runoff flowing through it at one timea-there's a slide up above that I figure must have turned off the flow. There's some room in there and plenty of stuff solid enough to dig out for more as we need ita-though it's not going to be the pleasant easy digging that this old mine gave me. And so far, anyway, checking that spring for years, it hasn't gone dry or surged up. Problem is, it's reliable but it ain't plentifula-there's maybe half a gallon per minute or so, enough to give us heat and some hot water, but nothing like the four and a quarter gallons per minute I got here."

"We could put in a tank of some kind, couldn't we?" I pointed out. "The longer we keep the hot water hanging around, the more heat we can extract. We couldn't have an ever-running hot tub-laundromat-dishwasher like you've got here, but we could just do all the washing in shifts; wash and rinse with water from the hot tank, drain it into a warm tank that keeps the place comfortable, put it through the toilet and then discharge it room temperature if you've got a safe hole to put it down."

I had to draw a couple of sketches of the idea for hima-I was mildly surprised at the way the idea didn't seem natural to a man who had built a place as ingenious as this onea-but once he got it, he nodded vigorously and added, "I think you've already paid for yourself, Curran. That's a great idea. Far as I know, after it pa.s.ses through that little cave, the stream runs underground for miles, tooa-no surface pool anywhere neara-so even if we take all the heat from that water, and discharge at room temperature, betcha we still don't show up to the satellites."

"I guess that's what we are betting on," I agreed.

<> Two days later I saw daylight for the first time in what I discovered had been nineteen days. Dave's camouflage for the entrance was simplicity itselfa-it was under an overhang and led onto a long sloping shelf of south-facing dark rock, which must have stayed pretty free of snow most of the time. We walked straight out during one of the no-satellite times, got under the trees, and put on skisa-his were old Fibergla.s.s models; I just used my flexis. After a moment or two to check equipment, we were on our way.

I was a hair rocky on my skis, at first, and we took it slow, going the long way round because it was much more nearly level. It was another beautiful, cloudless, deep blue sky above pure white snow. By the third kilometer or so, I was back in the swing of things, annoyingly short of muscle after all the bed rest, but fundamentally fine.

You had to be practically falling into the little cave before you even saw the wisps of steam, or the donut of ice like a giant's a.n.u.s, among the scrubby firs. The opening was an irregular oval, perhaps four feet long by two across. "Getting in's not as hard as getting out," Dave said. "The floor's not far down, and it opens up beyond this point. Just follow me." He set his skis down under the tree, and I did the same; then he braced a hand on either side of the gla.s.sy ice of the opening, and more or less swung down into the s.p.a.ce, coming to a rest when he was in about up to the bottom of his ribcage. "Tricky spot. This part of the floor is covered with ice," he said. "Have to figure out a faster entrance eventually. Now squat, hope not to fall down, turn real slowly left, stick your legs out, and slide down a slope on your b.u.t.t. You'll skid down maybe seven-eight foot and land on a pile of scree. I'll be down there with a light."

He squatted and I heard a sc.r.a.ping sound, a louder and different scrabbling noise, and then finally a crash of spraying gravel, followed by the rattle of him climbing off the scree pile. "Okay, I'm down. Just come to the light."

If possible, the ice around the opening was slicker than it looked, and wetter. My head seemed to ache as if waiting to be slammed. Gingerly, I put my feet down and found the slick, icy floor; I could see a trace of glare from his flashlight on my boots, coming from my left.

"Doing fine," he said.

Very slowly, keeping my weight right over my feet, I crouched and turned. I was in a s.p.a.ce less than a meter high and not much wider than the hole on the surface; beside me Dave's light came up from a crack that was about a meter wide and not more than two feet high, into which the floor sloped. I put my feet down the opening and pushed off, hoping that Dave hadn't worked out some incredibly complicated way to cause a cowboy hunter to die where he'd never be found.

The freezing-cold rock and ice chewed at my a.s.s for an instant. With a momentary lurch, I gained speed. My boots grabbed the scree pile and I finished up squatting on that. Dave was standing there, adjusting his flashlight for use as a lantern. I climbed down carefully and stood beside him.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that we were in a big crack in the native granite. It was surprisingly free of dirt, and almost unpleasantly warm. I opened up my suit as Dave took off his jacket. "Well, here it is," he said. "Prospective home."

In the dim light I could clearly see the basic s.p.a.cea-about seven meters that I could see, ending in a bend at one end, varying from two to three meters wide, all high enough so you could walk without b.u.mping your head. A thin trickle of warm water dribbled across the muddy floor, steam rising from it. "It's also hotter than what I've got in the home place now," Dave said, "which I think means your idea will work even better."

I walked forward and looked to see that the trickle of water emerged from an opening that I could probably have put my arm into, if I'd wanted it scalded. "We could widen and break this out," I said, "or just stick a pipe into it. Probably start with just the pipe and then expand toward the heat, eh?"

"Sounds logical to me," Dave said. "There's a chamber around the bend, where the hole that drains this is."

Gingerly, I made my way through that main gallery, following Dave, watching where I put my feet, not caring to dip my boots in the near-boiling trickle. Around the corner, in the short leg of the L-shaped cave, where Dave's lantern shone, we moved into a chamber about two meters square and some inches deeper than the gallery we'd left; the ceiling was higher too, and the hot trickle bit deep into the clay soil floor, vanishing toward the end of the room in a gurgling hiss of steam. "I've probed down that hole, and about a meter below, it seems to widen," Dave said. "We might could try a video camera and monitor, and a light, and see if there's a usable chamber down there to dig to, or even just a good place for one of your storage tanks."

"Seems promising," I said. "You ever done anything to find out how deep the clay is anywhere in here?"

"Naw. Wasn't high enough priority till now. For all I know when we dig it out we'll turn up ten more foot of headroom and entrances to six more chambers. Anyway, that's about all there is to it right now. What do you think?"

I looked at it and thought about how hard I was going to have to work; then about Mary and the cabin; then about what it was like to be awake, in my own skull, without Resuna watching every thought, and I said, "This is gonna sound stupid but I can hardly wait to get started. I guess we bring up the shovels tomorrow, and we start mucking out."

"Makes sense, if you're ready."

"Oh, I'm ready," I said. "And here's another thought. We don't have to haul the dirt out and dribble it from a pack. All this clay was carried here by the spring, right? So if we just build a box with a screen on the bottom, that the stream runs through on its way out, and drop the dirt in there, it will be carried downstream underground, where n.o.body's going to see it. We might see about mucking out the drain first thing, just to see if we can do it that waya-because if we can, that makes the whole job simpler. We can be here digging more of the time and we won't be limited by how much dirt we can hide."

"What happens if we put so much down there that we plug something up, and it starts to back up into the cave?" Dave asked.

"Then we poke down there with poles and rods, and see if we can smash something to let the water outa-and if that doesn't work, we see how far it fillsa-and if it fills to the top, well, we tunnel in from the side and let it out. Which admittedly kills the advantage of the subterranean drain. But anyway, we've got so much to gain if we can move a few tons a day, instead of a few packloads. We could have a whole new place here inside a year or two if we can wash most of the clay down, instead of carrying it. Wouldn't you say?"

He shrugged. "Partner, I never thought of that either. I'm just not much of a planner or engineer; purely an improviser and an improver. It's probably a good thing I was the cowboy and you were the hunter, because you d.a.m.n near caught me, and I don't think I'd've stood a prayer of catching you."

"Different approaches," I said. "If you and me were hunting a cowboy together, I'd be amazed at how many things were obvious to you, I bet, that I never saw."

"Might could be," Dave said. "Might could be."

<> There might be something heavier and more uncomfortable than a pack full of canned goods, but I don't want to find out what. The first job, once we realized that we needed to get Dave's place moved, right away, was to get all the really indispensable stuff cached at some distance from it. Canned stuff with Vitamin C was number one on the list; if we had that, we wouldn't get scurvy. If we didn't have that, not only would we be facing scurvy, but we'd have to pick a lot of berries the next summer, and come up with some way to can or dry many pounds of them, and do a great deal of work we wouldn't really want to make the time for.

After the indispensables for staying alive, dealing with emergencies, and not getting sick, we would move all the nice small things, appliances of one kind or another, that shave so much effort off a day and free up so much time. After that, if we still weren't interrupted, we would gradually move the million and ten small luxuries that could help to make life way out in the woods bearablea-books, wine, audio recordingsa-and finally, if One True left us alone long enough, anything else that we could take before we dropped a load of rocks across the entrance and left forever.

Caching the portable stuff meant taking it out, a packload at a time, to about twenty different hiding places, since we wanted to make sure we had some of everything in each cache, so that if one of them got found, we wouldn't lose all of any item. What shall it profit a man to keep his dialytic water-purifier membranes, if he lose his canned tomatoes? I was glad that I hadn't been doing this decades before, when Dave and his band had been hiding out here, since there must have been many times this much stuff to carry. Of course, then there had been eleven men doing it.

It was late afternoon, and I was crossing a high saddle down into Kearney Park, enjoying the colors, smells, and sounds in their near-outlined clarity. I'd made seven trips that day and was looking forward to finishing this one and having an evening soak in the tub. Another week and we should have all the food cached, and then it would only be a matter of a few days to get all the other irreplaceables moved before we could at last begin our excavations in the new cave. If I was right that they wouldn't try to send hunters out again until a thaw was well underway, we'd be doing our excavation comfortably in the shelter of the cave, possibly for weeks or months, while the pursuit grew frustrated, and the scent got cold.

With luck it might be several years before we were spotted again, and though sooner or later one of these spottings would lead to our capture, at the moment it looked like we had some years of freedom left. And, as I'd explained to Dave, life with Resuna wasn't unpleasanta-if Dave hadn't been there and determined to stay out of One True's grip, I'd probably have just gone back to Resuna because it was easier.

Aside from getting caches sited and filled, we'd made enough time to explore the cave around the new hot spring, probing with some six-foot star drills that had been in the back of an old general store. The water drained into at least one more big chamber below, and we'd also tapped into some openings under the clay that we were optimistic about.

Meanwhile, though, we had to move the canned stuff. I had a packful of cans of tomatoes, peaches, and sweet potatoes to get into the cache in Kearney Park, before going home. I pushed off to make a slow glide, down through the trees, avoiding any open s.p.a.ce too easily watched from orbit. It was harder than usual to safely descend the hard, icy, steep patch in front of me. I had to work at it, turning tight and constantly so that I didn't build up any speed. The extra weight on my back made it much tougher.

I hurtled back among the trees, still going faster than I really wanted to, and followed a deer trail I knew well through a thick patch of growth. Then a b.u.mp turned out to be a log, the ski sc.r.a.ped and jammed, and I flipped forward and landed in a hard face plant.

I sat up, face stinging from the snow, head aching where forty pounds of tomatoes, peaches, and sweet potatoes had slammed right into the place on the back of my head where I had all the scars. I was all by myself, and feeling half crazy with anger the way you do when you do something stupid and hurt yourself entirely through your own stupidity. I plain old bokked all over the place, forgot that I had to hide, forgot everything I'd been thinking of, and just gave myself over to my rage. I released the skis, pushed up, wiped the nasty mix of snow, mud, and pine needles from my face, angrily hurled the pack to the snow, and screamed "f.u.c.k!" several times, jumping up and down in a rage, not caring if anyone heard me, or if I was visible to an overhead satellite, or much of anything except about the way my whole body was clenched like a fist and my back and head hurt. I hadn't done anything like that in twenty-five years or more.

Long practice will have its way; in the middle of it all, I said, out loud, very calmly, "Let overwrite, let override." Instantly I felt better.

With all the canned goods in the cache, even having gotten the job done a little early, I had plenty of time to take the long scenic route home, but I just knew I had forgotten something, so after a few hundred yards I turned around and went back to take a look and see if I could figure out what was bothering me.

Everything was right where it should be, so it wasn't that I had forgotten any physical objects. Had I forgotten some part of the careful system we used to keep everything hidden? I looked around the cache to see if anything was wrong with the concealment, but everything was fine there. Then I looked to see if I'd left any track or trace I should cover.

Two thick ruler-straight tracks ran across the meadow through the deep fresh powder from the place where I had fallen to where I stood. I had come in a straight line, instead of circling around among the trees. No wonder I'd gotten here so quickly.

That big straight track might as well be a gigantic arrow pointing straight at where I stood. Worse still, it was pointing at a sizable part of the vital stocks we would need to live through the next year.

I stared at that for a long moment, wondering first what had possessed me to do something so astonishingly bokked up. Then I wondered why I couldn't remember it. Then my blood froze, and I remembered falling down, losing my tempera-and invoking Resuna. Which had, as far as I could tell, popped up, taken care of the task for me, and put me on my way home, but which also had a strong interest in seeing me get caught.

If the jack in my head was still operating, One True now knew everything. I couldn't imagine why it hadn't just kept control once it got Resuna back into my head, but for some reason it hadn't. Why had it turned me loose again?

The silence, the clarity of the colors and outlines, the chill of the air in my nostrils, were all sinister to me now. I had betrayed a good friend in a moment of sheer involuntary idiocy, I had put myself back in reach of Resuna and thus under the control of One True, and I would be giving up the whole dream of living up here and letting the world just slide bya-back into the dull world of forced retirement, of Resuna holding Mary and me together, of drifting from one predictable, unimportant activity to another.

I felt like crying; I felt like taking my knife and just opening a vein right there. It would be so good to just cease to be. It was very likely that there was no longer anything I could do for Dave; I was miles away with no way to communicate with him. Chances were that fifty hunters were zooming in toward him in disksters, and he'd be captured any minute and turned within a day. Probably I'd even see him againa-after he was turned, we could pal around together and our copies of Resuna could have a nice chat. Probably One True would find him a nice wife, or even put him back together with Nancy and Kelly. Probably when I did see him, he'd thank me. Probably he'd be having to say "Let overwrite, let override" every ten minutes for the next few years; probably his life would seem as if he were suffering seizures every few minutes.

I was disgusted to realize that once Resuna had me again, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I'd be able to look the man right in the eye and think I'd done him a favor.

I wasn't sure I wanted to live to see that, but I wasn't sure I wanted to just kill myself now, either. Mostly I just wanted to not feel what I was feeling. I have to admit that the real reason for doing what I did next was not shame, nor acceptance. It was pure absolute dead solid cowardice. I just didn't want to face that situation any further, and since I couldn't get out of the situation, I tried instead to get out of facing it.

I looked around that meadow, up the saddle, toward Columbia Peak, and saw it for what I figured would have to be the very last time with eyes that were completely my own. Tears stung my eyes, and I said, "Let overwrite, let override."

Nothing happened.

I said it again, and once again, nothing happened. There wasn't a trace of Resuna.

I said it again, several times. I started to lose my temper and shouted it several times, but no Resuna camea-only distant, distorted echoes from cliff walls.

I was all by myself, no idea where to go or what to do.

<> I think I stood there for quite a while, because the blue-edged deep shadows were longer by the time that I finally sighed, wiped my eyes, and decided that absolutely n.o.body would be benefited if I just stood here and froze to death.

I had three choices. I could try to get away on my owna-in the winter, with no supplies since Resuna would know where all the caches were and I wouldn't dare go there.

I could ski downhill till I found a road, and follow the road downhill till I found an emergency station, and then call up the system and turn myself in. Somebody would come out pretty quickly in a diskster, take me home, and get a new copy of Resuna installed.

Or I could gamble. I could proceed as if I knew that I had only been running part of Resuna, with its communications section not working. It was even possible, I supposed, that the blows to my head had smashed my cellular jacka-it was possible, since it was only an inch or so from where the biggest scar wasa-or that it had all happened during a gap in satellite coverage, or any number of other things had prevented the betrayal.

That last option was the only one that had any chance of working out and didn't make me feel like a skunk.

If I was right, and One True had not been contacted, or not contacted reliably, then all we had lost was one cache. In that case, if Dave and I moved fast, we could go to our drop-everything crisis plana-hurry over to the new place, camp there, move in a couple of caches, start digging, live rough for a while until we had a chance to scavenge enough supplies to start building it up.

It was just possible that all was not losta-if we moved fast enough.

I pushed off hard and took the fastest concealed route I knew to make it home, skating the whole way, throwing myself upslope, rocketing downslope just barely in control, half-blind with sweat and tears and terror, not caring about the way my muscles screamed at it. I was over that high saddle in no time, down into the Dead Mule drainage, and racing for home like a madmana-still skiing as carefully as I could, because I knew I was frustrated and angry, and I thought that if I face-planted again, or kissed a tree, or just took a bad fall, the rage and fear and frustration might overwhelm me. I might automatically say "Let overwrite, let override," and be back with Resuna again.

I hit a long run down a ridgeline into a bowl, and put on even more speed; any faster and my stopping distance would be greater than my seeing distance. It was likely I was already too late, but it would be certain if one more thing went wrong.

<> The sun was still up, but close to the ridge, when I finally glided up to the rock shelf, popped the skis off, and ran inside. Dave wasn't home. Probably he was off hunting elka-we'd been needing fresh meat to replenish the larder. He might well be out till after dark, which might could work out better.

We'd figured out a procedure for just such occasions, so I got going on it. Each of us had a "jump bag" ready to go, packed with personal essentials for surviving a night in the woods if we had to, plus a little package of sentimental stuff and some dry rations. The two jump bags sat side by side on the floor near the entrance; if one of us discovered that it was time to run, and the other one was out, then if we were to meet up at the new hot spring, the signal would be both jump bags being gone.

If just your partner's jump bag was gone, that would signal that neither this cave nor the new one was safe, and that we were to meet up whenever we could at a specific ruined house two drainages away; whoever got there first, unpursued, would wait a week for the other.

We had agreed that the one-bag-gone signal would only count if a specific red blanket had been left on top of the laundry hamper. That way your partner doing routine repacking or rearranging wouldn't send you running off into the woods for two weeks.

We had never a.s.signed any meaning to the situation that I discovered: my jump bag was there, Dave's jump bag wasn't, Dave wasn't there eithera-and no blanket on the hamper. I needed to leave him a signal to run for the new hot spring, which I thought made the most sense in the circ.u.mstances. I was figuring that if One True had gotten everything from my memory, we were too screwed to recover from it and would be captured whether we stayed here, went there, or went to the ruined house. On the other hand, if One True hadn't gotten enough information to find us, the new spring was the best place to hidea-it already had the necessities for us to stay in it for a few weeks and let our trail get cold, it was comfortable and safe, and it had lim less trace of Dave or me around it than this place did.

I had no signal from Dave, and I had no way of leaving him the message that I wanted to leavea-writing a note of any kind would risk its being read by the hunters, if they found the cave before Dave got home. The question was, how long should I stay here? Dave might be very close at hand, in which case I could just let him know when he came in the door. Or he might have carelessly left his pack elsewhere while repacking or cleaning, or he might be far off. Given his occasional carelessness (I often wondered how he had survived so long without detection), he might even have run for it and forgotten to put the blanket on the hamper.

I decided I could spare him five minutes for a quick look through the rooms; if his pack was on the kitchen table or by the hot tub, as I'd found it before, I'd tease him later but take it with me. Otherwise, I'd take my jump bag and leave a circle-and-dot, which means "I have gone home"a-it was one of those very old trail signs from G.o.d knew where in the past. I hoped he would interpret that to mean "Go to the new hot spring," and that it would be sufficiently cryptic if anyone else found it.

I walked through all the rooms quickly, not seeing his pack. One of the three doors that I had always a.s.sumed were closet doors in his sleeping room was standing open, light coming out of it. When I took a step forward, I saw, through the open door, beyond what I had thought was a closet, a big room. A finished ceiling and wall were visible through the mock closet. Not yet thinking clearlya-it had been a day with too many surprisesa-and still looking for Dave, I walked through the closet and into the big room.

My first thought was not especially profound; it was only that Dave couldn't have made this s.p.a.ce with a shovel and pick. The walls, floor, and ceiling, now that I could see the whole room, were finished with tile, the overhead lights were running off real power fixtures and didn't seem to be just long-life lanterns, and the whole place seemed more like a lab or a workroom. At first I thought the object in the center of the big room was a large worktable, then that it was a raised bathtub. I got closer to it, and said, softly, "Dave? Dave, are you back here? We got big trouble."

I took another step, and now I realized what that big object was: a suspended animation tank.

Stuff clicked. Dave had been able to disappear for so long because he'd been sleeping under this hill. No wonder n.o.body could find him. Probably his story about the packloads of dirt was a convenient lie. Most of the "scavenged" stuff had probably been stored down here for him. When he did wake up, with common germs having diverged for many years from what he had gone to sleep with, he got a whopping cold as soon as he went where any other human being had been, and if hea-or whoever he worked fora-hadn't planned for it, he'd had to steal medicine.

It seemed ominous that this hideout had always been intended as a one-person place; whatever he was doing with his band of cowboys, he hadn't ever intended to take them along. He couldn't, with just one tank available.

No wonder, when we were planning the new cave, so many ordinary technical and engineering things had seemed to be mysteries to him. He hadn't designed this placea-all he knew was how to operate it. The place had been set up by whoever he worked for.

"Currie, that better be you in there," he said. His voice came from a doorway in the corner.

I froze for a second. "Yeah, it is. I didn't mean to nose around, Dave, but we've got a situation. I had a relapse of Resuna this afternoon and I don't know how much it uploaded to One True. I think we have to run for the new hot spring."