Candle

by Barnes, John

  The basic trick was simple enough: there are a few fundamental patterns to ideas—different patterns for different classes of verbal, visual, emotional, mathematical, and so forth—and a way of learning that goes with each pattern. Furthermore, each of the couple of dozen fundamental patterns has a specific relation to every other fundamental pattern. Master the pattern through repetition, drill, re-experiencing it from a variety of different perspectives and contexts—just as children master words, grammatical structures, dramatic plots, moves in games, or moral notions, by working with them over and over in different situations—and eventually you have the ability to recognize it wherever you meet it, including in the process of learning all other subjects. Master the fundamental connections and now you are ready to relate and connect new ideas creatively, almost from the moment you understand them.

  Later, you learn the master pattern that explains how each pattern applies to each subject matter, and why each kind of learning works best for it; by the time you’re ten or so, you know how to learn anything, quickly and with no more effort than necessary. (It helps a great deal that your learning ability has been accelerating right along, so that you do have a deep acquaintance with all sorts of basic material; besides mastering how to learn, you also master a lot of plain old-fashioned learning, just as anybody who is studying the piano, in the process of perfecting technique, also plays the piano a lot, and develops a very big repertoire.)

  The CSL education plan allows most kids, by age fourteen, to reach about the intellectual level of a senior in an ordinary college, and to assume adult responsibilities, at least if they want to or society has any need for them to do so.

  “Most of the stupidity, hostility, and bad behavior of adolescence comes from being held in a state of enforced uselessness for anywhere from five to ten years,” Phil used to say, revealing how old he was, since neither Earth nor the space colonies had been able to afford that sort of adolescence for most people in the five decades since the Eurowar. Most of us born in this past century can’t believe that there was ever a time or place “when a seventeen-year-old’s main focus was his or her social life, jobs were for “spending money” rather than self-support, and schooling was deliberately paced so that the dumber students wouldn’t need to suffer discomfort or put forth extra effort. I wonder what people back then were thinking—or if.

  <> “Uh, what was this guy Comasus’s real name?” I asked Dave.

  He laughed for a second. “You know, we were all taught so thoroughly to never speak it, it just doesn’t come natural to say it out loud.” He shook his head and said, “But it can’t matter now. The man is dead, has been dead for more than thirty years.”

  Then he told me the name.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “It was.”

  “I thought he was one of the people assassinated in the early ’30s, back during that wave of random terror that just seemed to be taking out everyone known to have any brains or talent,” I said. “In fact I’m almost sure he was one of them.”

  “He was,” Dave said, “or rather that was the story that was given out. By the time I knew him, he was hiding behind something like ten different aliases and had an elaborate system for keeping himself from being found. He had the money to do it because he had many patents and copyrights under false names, signed over to dummy corporations, and I don’t know what all—one huge money-hiding machine, laced with dozens of dead ends and false continuers and telltales, that filtered goods down to him. When I knew him he’d already been hiding for more than fifteen years from something he called the ‘Organization.’ Never knew him to speak of it without a shudder. As far as I know, it never had any other name than that, either, just the Organization. I couldn’t make out if it was a gang of spies or crooks or mercenaries, or just kind of a group of evil people, but Phil Comasus was the sanest man I ever met, and he was scared to death of it.

  “What he said was that when the Organization tried to kill him, they broke into his house, killed his first wife—hacked her to pieces in front of him, to tell you the truth—gave him a massive psycholytic injection that should have left him a madman for the rest of his life, beat him hard enough to break a dozen bones, rupture a kidney, and puncture both lungs, poured gasoline on him, set a fire upstairs that killed his kids, left him for dead … and sometime between them leaving and the fire burning its slow way downstairs, he revived enough to crawl out onto the street. Somebody picked him up from there and admitted him to a hospital as a John Doe. With the fire and the mess, the cops couldn’t figure out how many people had died in that house, and came up one high.

  “After he came to, and figured out what was up, he realized that the Organization must think he was dead, and from then on he did his best to make sure they continued to think so. But when the cutting’s done and the pieces are laid, you know, nothing really stops people like the Organization. A long time after that, they found out who he was and where he was, and killed him and Monica. That’s later in the story.”

  “You’re sure it was this Organization and not just someone at random? I thought you said it was soldiers from Murphy’s.”

  “There might have been no connection,” Dave said, “except a long time later—well, maybe just a few years, it might have been around Year Three, when I was putting together my group of cowboys—I met up with this one cowboy, guy who called himself Gregor, who wanted to join. He said he’d been in Murphy’s Comsat Avengers. Gregor was a loner, and it didn’t take too long to figure out that his reason for hiding out was not a love of freedom or some principle. He’d have been hiding from any society, because, at least in my estimation, the guy was either a serial killer already, or he was going to be. I turned him down. Then a couple of months later, me and two of my cowboys came across Gregor in a deserted small town, where he’d found a family hiding out in an old grocery store, and was ‘using them up,’ which was his expression for spending a few days doing godawful things while he killed them off one at a time. He had just killed the father when we got there. Well, you know, justice is rough out here in the woods, so me and my cowboys gave him a real thorough beating to help him tell us the truth, because we wanted to know whether the man had any accomplices, and just what the hell he intended by committing the sort of crime that endangered every person who was still living free.

  “Somewhere in the course of the beating, just about the point where he was about to break, I guess, and grasping at anything to make himself hold on, Gregor told us that he belonged to the Organization, and that we had better let him go if he knew what was good for us, because the Organization always avenged its own.

  “After that, I just kept kicking him till he passed out, put a small demolition charge under his chin, taped his head down, and set off the charge. Made a hell of a mess but I was pretty pissed off and I guess I rationalized it by figuring it would make an example of him for any others there might be around, and if he really was with the Organization, it would get them after me—which was fine with me, I’d love to have more of them show up. More chances for revenge for Phil and Monica, you know,” he said. “Anyway, this guy Gregor was a monster. When I die I’m going to have two big regrets about life, and they’re both going to be about getting somewhere too late. One of them’s not coming across that cowboy before he’d killed the father and one of the children in that family; in a better world, I guess I’d have come across him during the war, and shot his damned head off before he ever got loose among the cowboys.”

  “And your other big regret?” I asked, keeping the story rolling, I hoped, giving us both an excuse to not dig more clay just immediately.

  “I’m getting to that one. Another sandwich?”

  “Yeah.” I accepted it gratefully, and he got on with that part of the story.

  <> For most of the 2050s, while the War of Papal Succession became the War of the Memes and became steadily nastier, Dave had the best years of his life. Those years while he was growing up were a busy, demanding,
challenging time, but a very happy one. The war went on and the glaciers grew; Antarctica lost its ice and Scotland disappeared under an ice sheet; memes were created, mutated, grew, got control of a large part of the human race; guys a few years older than Dave, like me, spent the decades fleeing or pursuing, ducking or shooting back. The world got uglier and nastier, the memes that had begun as weapons took over the war for their own purposes, and life in the Big House went on.

  Dave got his growth early, and was big for sixteen. The other kids had been quietly vanishing as they got to about that age, so it came as no surprise to Dave, Prester, and Joey when Phil called them in and told them what their part in things would be; by that time, the only time they saw the older ones was when one of them would come back for a brief few days to rest, recover, and get another outside mission from Phil and Monica.

  “My last disciples,” Phil said, grinning. “At least for a while, until we’re in whatever the next historical period turns out to be, and I figure out what else the world might need. Has anyone who’s gone on an outside mission ever told you what they do out there?”

  The three boys shook their heads, and Phil smiled. “Well, I guess it wasn’t really secret, but they probably get a habit of being very discreet out there, and it’s probably good that they have the habit. All right, here’s the story; here’s why I grabbed you out of those orphanages and put you through CSL education at a time when I’d rather have been spending my time sensibly hiding with Monica, waiting to get old and die.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Prester blurted out.

  “Oh, sooner or later,” Phil said, “but only on one day out of all of the billions of years of time. That should tell you how negligible the “whole business is. Sooner or later the Organization will find out that I’m alive and where I am, or I’ll get sick with something that requires DNA validation to treat, which I don’t dare do since it would be like publishing my fingerprints, or I’ll just fall downstairs and whack my head on the balustrade. Not today, probably, and I expect to be here when you all come back to visit. But I’m afraid the visits won’t be often, for a while, because these next few years we’re going to be very busy.”

  Phil explained a little of what the others were up to; all were in some covert role, some in very deep cover, which was why they hadn’t been seen since they’d left. “Who got what job depended mostly on my guess as to how well they’d handle the loneliness,” Phil said. Five of the former students were working their way up one hierarchy or another, becoming important in military, financial, or church positions; four were out making “adjustments.” That was what Cecile and Julie had departed to do, just a few months before, their youth carefully concealed by makeup and padding. “I wish we’d had more time to prep them,” Phil said, “and to let them have time to grow adult bodies, but adjustments kept getting more urgent, and they were the only ones left to send, since I had to reserve you three for a special mission.”

  “What do they adjust?” Dave asked, trying to avoid, for the moment, the awareness that there was a special mission for him.

  Phil sighed. “When possible, they just do things to cause good people to be promoted, and bad people discredited. They tinker here and there to try to help the war run out of gas, which it’s going to do in three to four years at most—and we need it to end in a stalemate, between at least five memes, not in a single-meme victory. They meddle in the affairs of different organizations, sending some of them down paths where they’ll do more good for humanity, helping the good ones along … every now and then seeing that a bad one breaks up or collapses. Just now, for example, Julie is working a staff job for the army of Real America, up north in Minot, helping them recover their balance and morale so that they can retake Minnesota and roll back One True; down south in Tennessee, Isaac is getting Free American through a minor palace putsch that ought to put an end to their concentration camps and secret police. Sometimes it’s a matter of infiltrating and making a few changes or helping someone who’s going to make the changes. A lot turns on small differences.”

  He sighed. “And I guess I really can’t conceal from you that every so often they’re killing some of the people that are most in the way of progress and success for humanity. Usually very discreetly—with so many mutant and tailored bugs around, sudden fatal infections just aren’t that unusual. Every so often they set up something more public, when that’s what will do us the most good, but that always makes me nervous, because you never know where an investigation might lead, and one intervention that just never works is to kill a smart cop or prosecutor who’s starting to think that things are more than they seem. So we do less of the messy stuff than you might imagine, and I’m glad of that.

  “But you three are in for something very different.” Phil looked out the window for a long moment, at the green hills and the forest that came most of the way up to the lawn of the Big House. “The good news is you’ll be able to come back here and visit more often than your fellow students. The bad news is that I’m giving you three the toughest job of all.”

  Dave sat quietly with the others and waited. He had guessed already that this was going to be something to do with the memes; Phil had admitted, several times, that although he’d been perfectly accurate in predicting the beginning of the War of Papal Succession and the deterioration of the Earth as the war wound down to approximating Hobbes’s “war of each against all,” he hadn’t foreseen anything like the memes at all.

  “Theoretically I only needed ten people,” he said, “to make all the requisite changes, and exert the force that would keep the world out of some of its worst possible tracks. But—well, here’s where you have to give Monica the credit. She said we needed to have a reserve against the unexpected. So I chose to have three more. And here you are, ready to go. There’s a job for you that I could never have guessed we’d need.”

  Joey spoke up; shy and modest, he rarely spoke, but he usually asked an important question. “So out of the ten, there are five working their way into positions of power, and four of your ‘adjusters.’ That’s nine. But you sent out ten.”

  Phil looked miserably sad; it seemed to put a decade onto him, right there. “It’s probably revealing that I told myself, three times, to be sure I told you what had happened to Martha. And I still haven’t yet. She was an exec assistant for the Pacific Rewildernization Corporation on the Big Island, in Hawaii, where they’re trying to get some kind of a normal ecology going again; it was a place where we had some hope of getting many really smart people, and their kids, away from the violence, out from between the contesting powers, in sort of an independent republic that would grow naturally out of the settlements of ecological reconstruction specialists. One of the things she was working on was getting them to adopt CSL education—we’ve never had much luck getting people to do that on Earth, because unless it’s really an emergency, people really do not want their children to be a great deal smarter, better adjusted, and more competent than they are—even with that carefully planned society in space, the parental generation totally flipped out when they realized just how obsolete they had made themselves, and if they hadn’t been so thoroughly trained and conditioned to accept it, we might have lost the ships to the power struggle between the generations. Down here, with uncontrolled populations, you might provoke massacres of the children, or god knows what else. So the idea was that on the island, we’d have a bunch of smart capable people that we could propagandize into accepting CSL education for their kids, who would let it go on, and we’d finally have at least one really functional society here on Earth.”

  “What happened to Martha?” Dave asked quietly. He was remembering her laugh, and the way she could run, and thinking of the pictures she had painted that now hung in the front hall; a tall, handsome black girl, with an amazing gift for languages, always willing to help the younger kids; her one visit home, when they’d all had a picnic on the lawn to celebrate and she’d looked completely grown up.

  “Raped
and shot dead,” Phil said. “Then mutilated in some grotesque ways we don’t need to talk about. Her body was left on her boss’s desk, and any hope of getting CSL education for Hawaii seems to have died with her. My best guess is that she came to the attention of the Organization. (I have long suspected that they’re doing what we’re doing, but in reverse.) She must have distinguished herself enough to be noticed—that’s why I keep telling people to be good only at the parts of their job that affect larger matters. A patina of ordinary incompetence is probably their best protection.” He was quiet for a long time, and so were the three boys.

  “Well,” Phil said, “it’s a bad idea to dwell on everything bad that can happen, as we all know. Let me tell you what I have in mind for the three of you. It will be dangerous and difficult enough; you needn’t fear that any of you will be getting a soft ride while others run risks and face difficulties.”

  It was only years later that Dave realized how odd it was that Phil assumed that neither he nor Joey nor Prester would have wanted a soft ride.

  Phil looked from one to the other and said, “In some ways, it may be I’m asking you to face the biggest fear anyone in the group might have to face. I’m going to ask you all to let me infect you with a meme.”