Candle

by John Barnes

  As always, the mission was the Four Ts': track him, trank him, and truss him. One True would take care of the fourth T—turning him. I was also supposed to look for any evidence that he'd had any contact with the extraterrestrials, particularly anything that violated the Treaty of Supra Berlin. Probably there would not be any such evidence—his radio would have given him away long before this if there had been—but it was important to make sure that the wild individuals still living on Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter remembered their obligations not to meddle in our affairs.

  In broad outline, the productive parts of my job could have been accomplished in a couple of hours, leaving the rest to be mere details. Details, however, could often be a bitch. In my years as a cowboy hunter, I had been shot four times, broken one arm and both legs, gotten nipped by frostbite on one cheek, three toes, and a thumb, and had to have one eye and four teeth regenerated after stopping Lobo's cleated boot with my face in that last grim fight before he had supposedly died. A guy as tough as Lobo, and as smart, was bound to generate a few violent, dangerous details.

  I could hardly wait.

  <> Lobo had led a small band of cowboys operating out of the little ghost town of Manly, Colorado, a former three-street tin-mining town up toward Frisco on old Colorado 9. Lobo and his cowboys had set up military shelters inside the crumbling 1920's-vintage buildings, thus concealing themselves from easy orbital observation. We'd all had a good chuckle—even One True had seemed to laugh—at the fact that we were tracking down the Manly Cowboys. But it had gotten a lot less funny after three of us had been killed and five more, including me, severely injured.

  As I put together my kit that afternoon, I kept turning that pursuit over and over in my head. The Manly Cowboys had seemed at first to be the usual story—mercenaries who had served one of the losing causes in the War of the Memes and now would not accept Resuna, people who thought that for some reason the rest of us owed them the right to wander around loose and dangerous without the restraint and guidance that only Resuna could give. That gang of cowboys, in other words, was a small sample of the pure evil and sheer bad attitude that had made the mid-twenty-first such a terrible time.

  Luckily our side had One True, or rather our side was One True. Transferable experience and telepathy help immensely when you're fighting a guerrilla war, whether against cowboys in the Rockies, bedouin in Arabia, or renegados in the Cordillera. Anything the enemy could do to coordinate with other groups, or to recruit individuals, tended to give them away; they had to function in isolation, so that they only got smarter by their own individual experience, a method as slow and painful as it had been in the Stone Age. By contrast, the newest hunter among us—Sandy "Mulekick" Arthur, at that time—didn't have everything perfectly in her muscles yet, and might be slightly slow in using reflexes that were still more in Resuna than in her own muscle memories, but still, in principle, from the day she joined she could immediately track like Abbot, climb like Kibberly, ski like me, and shoot like Pinpoint Sue. And not long after she joined us, we all started to have her martial arts abilities.

  We lost Johnson and Kibberly to pure carelessness—after driving the cowboys out of Manly, we'd thought we had them boxed into a coulee below Swadge Ridge. Johnson, a big rangy guy who didn't talk much and never acquired a nickname that stuck despite all our ingenuity, had gone up there with Kristi Kibberly, who could climb a rock face like a goosed monkey and who we sometimes called "King Kong" on account of that, her initials, and her build.

  It was as simple as you can imagine: Lobo figured there'd be a couple of us there to hold the upper end of the draw that his cowboys would try to escape through. Being strong and fast himself, he ran on ahead, got around behind Johnson and Kibberly, and belly-wriggled into a position above them. Meanwhile all of us hunters were down there in a big, thin line, working our way along in parallel, staying in constant touch through One True, our Resunas all chattering constantly about every step and rock.

  We were just closing the trap. Abbot and me were in the middle. We had just told the flanks to advance and start working inward.

  Two nasty little spats, almost on top of each other, a noise like paddap!, just as we felt Johnson and Kibberly vanish from the telepathic web, told us we were screwed. Afterwards, from the way we found the bodies, we figured Lobo had taken the time to program his rifle, an old military make, so that it automatically re-aimed the second shot. Johnson was hit square in the back of the head, Kristi Kibberly just behind her right ear, and they were dead before they knew what had happened.

  Meanwhile the shots were the cue for the Manly Cowboys to run for it, which they did, fast and hard, shaking us off their trail almost at once. Pinpoint Sue D'Alessandro got the only capture of the day, a straggler that she nailed at extreme range; we loaded him onto the diskster to be taken away and turned, and did our best to get back into the chase, but by nightfall the Manly Cowboys had gotten clean away.

  We took a day to attend funerals—it wasn't that long after the War of the Memes, and One True understood that people still needed funerals.

  The day after, emotionally supported by our Resunas and thus feeling no worse than mildly depressed, we were back on the track.

  It was ten days of the hardest pursuit we ever had, and at the end of it the whole hunting group had to be reconstructed, both as a group and individually. Abbot stopped a sniper's shot with his kidney and died before the diskster arrived. Sue D'Alessandro took a bullet through the thigh and was out for months. Mulekick Arthur knocked down two of them and I was able to tranquilize them, in a vicious little ambush she and I walked into on the south side of Fossil Ridge; in the process she was badly cut up and was out too. Feeney got splashed with homemade napalm during the night attack when they set her tent on fire, which put her in the burn unit for a couple of months. Replenovich gave half his foot to a land mine and was in regeneration for a year. In those ten days we took more casualties than we had in the previous three years.

  Looking back, if we hadn't had One True, and our individual copies of Resuna, to hold us all in the correct perspective, we'd have thought we were losing, though we were gradually capturing all the Manly Cowboys. The unmemed human mind can't really perceive success when the losses are too high.

  But because we did have Resuna and One True to get us through, in those ten days we captured all the Manly Cowboys except Lobo himself. Within three months each of them was running Resuna and on his way to being someone useful—two of them later became cowboy hunters.

  By the time my team was down to just me, Brock Peters, and Moonchild Swann, and the Manly Cowboys were down to Lobo, he was trying to lose us by going through the old Black Canyon wilderness. We were completely exhausted, sloppy and careless, and so was he.

  Moonchild was a good tracker—she was almost as good as Abbot had been—but she missed one of Lobo's double-backs, the only one she had missed in a day and a half, but it only takes one. Peters was a young kid who normally ran like a rocket everywhere, just because he couldn't stop himself—his nickname in the unit was "Scamper"—but he was much too far away downhill, and much too tired, to get there and give me some backup when Lobo popped up out of nowhere, coming at us from behind, just where the trail skirted the north edge of the canyon.

  Black Canyon is a unique place; in its narrowest few miles the sides are so steep and the canyon so narrow that it's dark down there for most of the day, even in summer. In the old days it was pretty nearly impossible for anyone to traverse it on foot, and floating it was experts-with-good-luck-only.

  For the long years since, when I had thought about it at all, I had thought that Lobo had just gotten careless, and gone charging into a fight in the open with nowhere to go but over the cliff and down. Now I wondered if that had been part of a plan.

  <> I had been running through the checklists absentmindedly, trusting Resuna, which didn't wander like my own mind did. Everything was identical to the equipment I had been familiar with eleven yea
rs ago—not much hunting in this part of the world since then, so no technical improvements, so they just faxbricated new copies from designs on file.

  Mary came in, and I could feel our Resunas generate deep empathy, connecting me to her anxiety and tension. "Will it be a long hunt?" she asked. "Your last few weren't very long. I'd like it if this one wasn't."

  "That's real unknowable," I pointed out. "Personally I hope he walks in front of me five minutes after I first arm my tranquilizer gun, falls right over, and I'm back for lunch. But I don't think it's gonna be that way. I got so many short hunts, my last year, because most loners had gone real low-tech. They were hard to spot, but once you did find them, they were so exhausted from living off the land, cold and overworked and half starved all the time, that they didn't have much energy to run with. This guy Lobo is a whole different kinda situation, and I can't tell you how it's going to go because I've never tried to catch a guy like him before. I know he can disappear completely for ten years, but I don't know what else he can do."

  "Poop," she said, sitting on the couch with a thud. "I hate this. You don't know what you're getting into, One True doesn't know what you're getting into! It's like back during the war, when nobody knew what was going on and everyone always had to just wing things for themselves, and you couldn't trust anyone else to cooperate. What did we fight the whole War of the Memes for?"

  I could feel that Mary's copy of Resuna was having a hard time regulating her emotions. I told my Resuna to reassure it. Then I felt One True kick in; it knew just what to say, and suddenly I was talking a whole lot better than I usually can.

  "It's all part of one huge thing, Mary. We did win. The whole human race on Earth is pulling together to save ourselves and our planet. Someday we'll drive the glaciers back to where they belong in the Northern Hemisphere, and we'll restore the glaciers on Antarctica, and the Gulf Stream will flow again. We'll do it all. You know One True is breeding back thousands of animal and plant species from DNA specimens, too. By the time we celebrate our hundredth, Mary, it's going to be a beautiful world. But not if we let things like Lobo keep running loose in it.

  "You know the whole wreck of the Earth was probably brought on by no more than twenty thousand people, working for the old pre-memes like America and Communism and freedom and Islam. We can't let even one of them run loose anymore. Lobo has already hurt and frightened fifty-nine people since he popped back up. And I'm the one with the best chance of catching him. One True loves you, and it loves me, and we love One True, but sometimes something hard just has to be done."

  I waited, confidently, for One True to exert its control and help her appreciate just how right those words were. But though I felt One True trying, it didn't work at all. I could feel her tension and fear rising faster, all the same, despite her best efforts to control them, and despite her copy of Resuna's doing everything it could to calm her. It was strange, after all these years; this had never happened while I was a hunter before.

  Perhaps it was that Lobo was different from the others, perhaps that Mary and I were older and she was more emotionally dependent on our quiet life here than she had been, perhaps somehow the terror and anxiety of the war years were coming back to her in a way that they never had while I was hunting cowboys before. In the old days she would send me off with a kiss and a warm smile and tell me to bring back a Stetson to bronze for the mantelpiece.

  I got up and held her for a moment, looking at the thick gray hair that cascaded down her back, feeling her heavy but still strong body against mine, but she just froze and resisted. I whispered "I love you," and "It's okay," and squeezed her tight, but she was like a plank till I said, "Mary, love, it's all right, just remember, 'Let override, let overwrite.'"

  She relaxed her throat muscles, unclenched her fists, and started to sob. Then she let One True have her, and dropped into my arms in a slack faint. I set her down on the couch and kept listening through our copies of Resuna as One True healed and helped her, while I got on with my packing.

  It only took a few minutes of Resuna's complete control. Mary's irrational fears were dissolved and argued away, her courage was restored, her faith in One True and me strengthened, and a wonderful calm courage and love settled into her. One True overwrote her short-term memory, so that she would recall only sitting on the couch and watching me pack, pleased that I was working again.

  It's better for people to have their own memories, and their own ideas, but when those hurt One True, or cause behavior that could annoy other people, or make the person having the ideas feel unhappy—that's the time to "let override, let overwrite," and get on with the world as it should be. It was the first time I could recall Mary having to do that in a long time.

  Back in the early years, when we were first married, it had been two or three times a day. I smiled to myself, thinking, for all I know, I've been needing it, and getting it, every day all these years, and for all I know I have been overwritten a thousand times more often than she has. That's the beauty—you get the help you need but you never know.

  When she revived—all at once, and without any awareness that she had been unconscious—she chatted and laughed and it was like old times for the next hour, as I got all my kit together. When I'd run that last little paranoid check that you always run before going in harm's way, and Resuna and I agreed that I had everything, I slung up my pack, put my duffel on my shoulder, and walked down the road about seventy yards, being careful not to slip on the ice. Just before the window went out of sight, I turned and waved. Mary waved back and blew me a kiss.

  I took the last few steps down to the road. It was three-forty in the afternoon. A moment later the diskster glided silently up the road beside me and settled onto its feet with a soft crackling of static discharge. I tossed my bags into the cargo hold and climbed into the passenger compartment. It was hard to believe that in the old days, I got so used to this that I used to blank the windows and just catch a nap on the way out to the job. Now, as we raced along the old highway and up the frozen river, then through a succession of mountain meadows, I couldn't have made myself look away from the jagged, snowy mountains, still months from spring thaw, or from the brilliant blue sky and the dark swarm of pines on every hillside. It was so good to be back.

  <> I had about an hour of daylight left when the diskster dropped me off, far up in the high country. One True and I had selected a spot, a few kilometers from where we thought Lobo's hideout might be, where the diskster could turn off the creek, up a bank, and into a little meadow close enough to walk to my campsite from, but far enough away from Lobo's main operating area in the Dead Mule drainage so that I probably wouldn't be spotted right away. With luck, in the next few days there would be a good-sized snowstorm to efface the broad scooped-out track of the diskster.

  With a bumpy lift and rise, the diskster climbed the twenty feet onto the bank and drove into the meadow. I looked around to make sure there weren't any immediate problems, like sinkholes, grizzly, or perhaps Lobo himself, and since there weren't, I said, "All right, disembarking," and fastened the hood of my coverall. The outside suit we wear in the winter in the high country, most of the time, looks like an old-fashioned space suit—or "like a baggy pair of footy jammies with a built-in Spiderman mask," as poor Abbot used to say. It's not very attractive or flattering, but it works real well, and I've lived enough of my life in them not to care a whole lot about what they look like.

  It took me just a moment to swing my two bags down from the compartment and sling up, and now I stood knee-deep in the snow with all that weight piled on me. I knew I was going to hate this.

  After trudging all of about ten steps, I decided that it was pointless to be miserable while walking, just to save some unpacking and repacking. I set the duffel down, got into the side attachment of my pack, and pulled out the flexis. I set the knobs for wide snowshoes, plugged the flexis into the power supply on my suit, and waited.

  In a few minutes the little squares of lightweight white plast
ic had spread out to form wide planks with stabilizer tails, a smooth tadpole shape that would let me walk mostly on—instead of plunged deep into—the snow. I took the straps from the pack pocket, attached them, put the flexis on, re-gathered pack and duffel, and was on my way, clumping and swinging along. It was awkward, but not nearly as bad as floundering in the deep snow had been, and pos-def it was faster—which I needed badly just then. I had two kilometers to make before dark if I possibly could, and the flexis had delayed me a few minutes.

  The late afternoon sky looked blue enough to burn you. To my left, faces of red volcanic rock, carved by wind and water into pipe organs, castle keeps, and giants' teeth, rose in wild defiance at the empty sky. The little black runnels down their sides indicated some thawing. It wasn't much, but the sun's northward invasion had a foothold, at least for the moment.

  Resuna reminded me that I had ground to cover, not scenery to examine. I reminded it that my satisfaction was to its benefit.

  Behind the pinnacles was a sheer gray cliff, brightly lighted wherever the pinnacles didn't shadow it. A distant crash like far-off thunder told me that some creek nearby, too, was starting to break the grip of winter.

  I rounded the first big grove of firs, into the wide upper meadow. I was breathing hard now. This was more work than I remembered, and I could feel the little generators on my back whirring away as they drew heat from my insulated suit and converted it to charge in the electrets; they were working hard just now, but I'd be glad enough for every bit of scavenged juice later.

  The swing-and-stomp rhythm of snowshoes requires pritnear nothing but pure patience. After that first 250 meters, my legs warmed up, the muscles stopped fighting each other and got into tune, and I began to enjoy it.

  Soon I was pushing up a shallow draw. The flexis were swinging up and reaching out as if of their own accord, my heart was thumping in the healthy, vigorous way that means you're really working, and the blood was singing through my body. My balance had come back and the duffel on my shoulder wasn't bothering me anymore.